An Ecocritical Inquiry Into the Kantian Aspects of John Maxwell Coetzee's Animal Ethics
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An Ecocritical Inquiry into the Kantian Aspects of John Maxwell Coetzee's Animal Ethics Kamil Michta Doctoral dissertation written under the supervision of Professor Bożenna Chylińska Institute of English Studies University of Warsaw Warsaw 2017 Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter I Major Ecocritical Approaches to Literature ........................................................... 10 1.1. The Origins of Ecocriticism as a Critical Study of Literature .............................. 11 1.2. Cornucopia ............................................................................................................ 22 1.3. Shallow Environmentalism ................................................................................... 24 1.4. Deep Ecology ........................................................................................................ 25 1.5. Ecofeminism ......................................................................................................... 27 1.6. Social Ecology ....................................................................................................... 28 1.7. Postcolonial Eco-Theories .................................................................................... 29 1.8. Heideggerian Eco-Philosophy ............................................................................... 30 1.9. The Culture-Nature Dichotomy ............................................................................. 32 1.10. The Metaphors of Nature Writing ........................................................................ 34 1.10.1. Pollution ............................................................................................................ 36 1.10.2. The Pastoral ...................................................................................................... 37 1.10.3. Wilderness ......................................................................................................... 38 1.10.4. Apocalypse ........................................................................................................ 41 1.10.5. Dwelling ............................................................................................................ 42 1.10.6. Animals ............................................................................................................. 45 Chapter II Environmental Philosophy, Animal Ethics, and Kant's Transcendental Illusion .. 53 2.1. The Twentieth-Century Environment Philosophy ................................................. 54 2.2. The Logic of Kantian Transcendental Illusion ...................................................... 78 2.3. Kant's Philosophy in Relation to the Contemporary Environmental Issues .......... 90 2.4. Philosophy and Animal Ethics ............................................................................... 100 Chapter III John Maxwell Coetzee's Critique of Rationalism: A Dialectical Perspective ...... 111 3.1. Coetzee's Critique of Thought-Experiments .......................................................... 112 3.2. Coetzee's Critique of Thought-Experiments as Presented in The Lives of Animals 120 3.3. Dialectics in Light of Richard E. Nisbett's Research ............................................. 138 3.4. The Origins of the Schemas of Behavior ............................................................... 144 3.5. Formal Logic and Eastern Dialectics ..................................................................... 146 3.6. Kant and Eastern Dialectics ................................................................................... 149 3.7. Coetzee's Harmony of Opposites ........................................................................... 156 Chapter IV Critique of Rationalism in the Novels of John Maxwell Coetzee ........................... 166 4.1. Coetzee's “Fictionalized Memoir” ......................................................................... 166 4.2. Dusklands ............................................................................................................... 168 4.3. In the Heart of the Country .................................................................................... 170 4.4. Waiting for the Barbarians .................................................................................... 174 4.5. Life and Times of Michael K .................................................................................. 190 4.6. Foe ......................................................................................................................... 201 4.7. Age of Iron ............................................................................................................. 208 4.8. The Master of Petersburg ...................................................................................... 214 4.9. Elizabeth Costello .................................................................................................. 221 4.10. Disgrace ............................................................................................................... 230 4.11. Slow Man .............................................................................................................. 241 4.12. Diary of a Bad Year and The Childhood of Jesus ................................................ 245 Chapter V The Sympathetic Imagination and Coetzee’s Wider Conception of Rationality ... 250 5.1. Coetzee’s Wider Conception of Rationality …...................................................... 251 5.2. Coetzee and the Keatsian Understanding of the Sympathetic Imagination ........... 260 5.3. Development of the Sympathetic imagination in Coetzee's Work ........................ 274 5.4. The Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination .......................................................... 296 5.5. Slow Man: The Sympathetic Imagination and the Limits of Reciprocity ............. 302 5.6. Coetzee’s Further Critique of the Sympathetic Imagination ................................. 309 5.7. Imagination and the Ethical Role of Literature ..................................................... 312 Chapter VI John Maxwell Coetzee's Animal Ethics and the Possibilities of the Sympathetic Imagination .................................................................................................................. 321 6.1. The Possibilities of the Sympathetic Imagination...............…............................... 322 6.2. Coetzee’s Animal Ethics ..............................…...................................................... 345 6.3. The Ethics of Animal Death ...............…................................................................ 372 6.4. The Ethics of Animal Undeath ...............…........................................................... 378 Conclusion …..................................................….......................................................... 392 Bibliography …..................................................…....................................................... 405 Appendix …..................................................…............................................................ 425 1 Introduction In his three novels, The Lives of Animals (1999), Disgrace (1999), and Elizabeth Costello (2003), John Maxwell Coetzee (b. 1940), a South African novelist and literary critic, explores the relation between people and animals, challenging the idea of human supremacy over nature. His analysis inscribes in the debate concerning the moral status of animals and the possibilities of limiting their suffering despite an increasing demand for animal products. The main focus of Coetzee's investigations are literature and the faculty of imaginative insight into the perspectives of other beings. His efforts have been recognized by the Nobel committee of the Swedish Academy who, upon awarding him a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, praised his work for portraying “the surprising involvement of the outsider,”1 referring both to people and to animals. Coetzee can be considered an important voice in the discussions concerning the human-animal interdependency and man’s duties to the natural world. The debate regarding the ethical status of animals originates in Antiquity when it was first theorized by Plato (c. 472-348 BC), a founder of Western philosophy. Advocating the immortality of human soul, Plato argued that people could reincarnate into other beings, including animals. He also claimed that animals could reincarnate into people. Therefore, he condemned harming animals and eating meat because, given the reincarnation argument, human carnivorousness could turn out a cannibalistic practice. Moreover, Plato 1 “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003 to John Maxwell Coetzee,” Nobel Media 2014, accessed September 20, 2016, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/. 2 praised nature as a holistic and orderly system whose stability should be the purpose of all people. He applied an equal status to both people and animals.2 Plato's ideas were challenged by his disciple Aristotle (384-322) who contested equalizing humans with animals, grading the whole of creation into a hierarchy. He called the hierarchy “the scale of nature” and put man at its top, arguing that people deserved a privileged position because they possessed rational souls responsible for thought and reflection. Animals were lower in the scale because they were equipped only with sensitive