Anthropos 55 (2): 275–280 | issn0587-5161 | e-issn2630-4082 Review Josephine Donovan, Animals, Mind and Matter: The Inside Story Aljaž Krivec Independent Researcher andkidAnimot, Slovenia akrivec88@gmail.com ©2023 Aljaž Krivec It is relatively easy to situate the latest book by the literary theorist and ecofeminist in the continuity of her work. After her initial research on feminism and local colour literature, and her subsequent adoption of ecofeminist principles along with the animal liberation movement and veganism, she began to develop a so-called aesthetics of care (derived from the ethics of care), which she thoroughly defined and elaborated inher2016 work The Aestheticsof Care: AnimalEthics, Ecosympathy, and Literary Criticism, about which I wrote for the literary portalludLiter­atura in an attempt to migrate her theory into the Slovenian space of literary studies (Krivec 2016). In the mid-1990s, together with Carol J. Adams, she began exploring alternative approaches to the animal ques­tion beyond the mere notion of rights. The latter have been debated for some time, but the basic conundrum, with which Donovan would prob-ablyagree,wasoncearticulatedinaverysimpleandclearwaybyanother ecofeminist and vegan, pattrice jones: ‘The property-based legal system that currently divides the world into countries, with borders policed by armed guards and internal laws enforced by armed police, is inherently violent. Withinthisreality, “rights” canbeanimportanttacticforachiev­ing real relief from the suffering of people and animals. But true peace and freedomwillrequireustorebuild our communitiesfromthe ground up’ (Radaljac 2019). There is, of course, an artificial divide that stands in the way of the ac­tual implementation of care towards fellow beings – and this seems to be the crux of her critique in the book under review. And this is why the author looks more closely at the possibilities of human-animal commu­nication, animal subjectivity, critiquing Cartesianism and its Enlighten­ment, scientism, new materialism, etc. She introduces everything from the findings of quantum physics to the notion of animal dignity, partic­ https://doi.org/10.26493/2630-4082.55.275-280 Aljaž Krivec ipatory epistemology, cosmic sympathy, panpsychism, ethical mimesis, emergence aesthetics, etc. in order to propose the possibility of a new way of looking at the problem. In short, Donovan is not content with simply expanding the moral communitytoincludenon-humans,butratherdefendsandarguesforthe possibilityofatotaltransformationofourrelationshipwithotheranimals by questioning the place they are assigned in our society. It is important to note that the need to transform our attitudes is independent of partic­ular cases, which can be understood as sometimes more and sometimes less ethical. First of all, she introduces the possibility of real communication be­tween humans and other animals, criticising above all the idea of sci-entism that has repeatedly made this dialogue impossible. It starts with Descartes and his understanding of non-humans as a kind of machines, but there is also a scientistic view that excludes the possibility of subjec­tivityinanimals.Althoughwearerepeatedlyconfrontedwiththerelativi­sation of what animals communicate to us, she argues that it is nothing short of necessary to introduce the notion of subjectivity into our rela­tionship with them.Itisnot difficult tounderstand whenananimalis sad,happy,angry ... unless,ofcourse,oneistalkingaboutspecieswhose world is difficult to grasp because of their biological distance from us. A scientistic approach that constantly questions such observations could justaswellstudyrelationshipsbetweenpeopleinasimilarway,butitusu-ally does not do so, which is already an indication of the internalisation of speciesism. At this point I need to draw attention on two notions. First, of course, there will always be a kind of barrier between me and the other, which will make it impossible for me to know ‘what it means to be that person.’ This is an insight that the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his 1974 essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,’ has argued most prominently in recent decades. But this is not to say that there is not a wide range of possibilities for dialogue. Andsecond,whenItalkaboutscientism,Iactuallydo meanscientism, not science. What I have in mind is kind of a culturalised approach to these questions, which at best paints a clichéd picture of a mathematised science rather than an actualscience that can easilytake subjectivityinto account by introducing a method suited to it. I myself more or less agree with the definition of scientism in The New Fontana Dictionary of Mod­ern Thought: ‘the view that the inductive methods characteristic of the 276 Review natural sciences are the only source of genuine factual knowledge and, in particular,thattheyalonecanprovidetrueknowledgeaboutmanandso­ciety’(Quinton1999,775).Thedistinctionbetweenscientismandscience does not seem to be emphasised enough in Donovan’s book. In the end, however, Donovan is not interested in centring a critique around approaches that explicitly view the world and its inhabitants as entities of primarily instrumental value. As a result, she directs her cri­tiqueatapproachesthatareperhapsevenmoreperfidious,suchastheso-called new materialism and its two main proponents: Karen Barad and, above all, Donna Haraway. Although both root their thought in the phi-losophyofBrunoLatour,inwhichDonovanatleastrecognisesthepoten­tialfortheemergenceofcompassionandethicaltreatmentofanimals,the newmaterialism,despiteitsdeclarativeposthumaniststance,turnsoutto be a thought thatonlydeepens anthropocentrism.Thelatterisexpressed aboveallinthestrangeconclusionsthatfollowfromthis ‘renewed’ world view.For example, Harawaycalls forakind of trans-species solidarity, emphasisesourinterconnectedness withotherlivingbeingsandtheneed tosurpassanthropocentrismandspeciesism,butintheendnotonlydoes she not practise veganism, she regards it as ‘meaningless’ and advocates animal experimentation and (industrial) animal husbandry, which, for example in her book When Species Meet, shesaysis‘entangled labour [with] humans and animals together in science and in many other fields, including animal husbandry up to the table’ (Haraway 2008, 80). What Haraway, according to Donovan, misses here is the introduction of an explicitly anti-fascist standpoint theory, a notion based on Hegel’s studyofthemaster-slavedialecticandlaterdevelopedbyGyörgyLukács, butwhichbecameparticularlyprominentduringthesecondwaveoffem­inism.ForLukács,inshort,thisnotionexplainsthespecificpointofview of the oppressed proletariat, who can actually see the class struggle from itspointofview. IfweintroducethiskindofanimalperspectiveintoHar­away’s theory, the possibility that vivisection is some kind of ‘a common struggle between man and animal’ simply becomes impossible, since it is not reasonable to assume that this is an animal perspective of what is going on. Of course,thisisacase of the use of animals, which is in itself inad­missible and (if weinstrumentalise animals for the sake of argument) ul­timately largely unnecessary, but another concept may come in handy: (animal) dignity, perhaps particularly applicable to the use of animals in circuses and similar environments where they are forced to imitate typi­ 277 Aljaž Krivec cal human activities. But even a genetically modified mouse that is more likelytogetcancer(e.g.theso-calledOncoMouse,alsoknownasthe Har­vard mouse, the pride and goldmine of this American university) is in these cases not in line with their core identity of a (more or less) healthy mouse,andsincetheyarethusreducedto ‘athing,’they arealsodeprived of dignity. To put it another way, the human being imposes their telos on another animal in order to increase mice’s instrumental value for their own purposes, thereby erasing mice’s own telos (this Aristotelian notion is also important for Donovan) and turning it into a human artefact. This is a case of a very much direct opposition to a speciesist theory, butDonovaninfactdefends more-than-rights ofanimalsbyintroducing a new conception of their place in the world. Here Donovan turns to an­imism and panpsychism. I have mentioned these two approaches in the same sentence because they share many similarities, or rather, modern panpsychism advocates aspects that are very similar to animistic beliefs, since it is about attributing a spiritual component to all beings as well as toallobjects.Inthisrespect,bothpracticesarealsoclosetodeepecology, and all three, despite their many positive aspects, deserve to be critically challenged(Donovan’scritiqueisdirectedinparticularattherepresenta­tiveofdeepecology,AldoLeopold).Thisisbecause,inpractice,theirlim-its canbesimilarto those of the aforementioned new materialismand, in the final consequence, maintain the status quo, since they lead to a para­dox: they replace the current notion, in which each entity has at most an instrumental value, with one in which each entity has an intrinsic value, thus replacing everything, while the relative ‘values’ remain the same, as well as our actions in the world. This is why Donovan separates mere understanding of the world on the one hand and ethics on the other. The complete equivalence of stone, chimpanzee, toaster, doormat, pepper, human being, etc. is ethically un­tenable, which is why Donovan at one point proposes the ethical consid­eration of entities with which it is possible to establish communication, and at another point introduces the static/mobile binary. The very mo­bility of an animal presupposes their desire to avoid pain, whereas this cannot be said of a static plant. From my point of view there are some issues with this kind of reason­ing. First of all, I am not quite sure why Donovan introduces animism, panpsychismand deep ecologyat all,when inthe end all three concepts areratherrelativisedwithanaddendumthatbringsthe wholepointquite close to the ethics of care. The main objection to my reservation may be 278 Review a need for implementing a kind of partial respect for the rights of non-animals whenever possible, which Donovan, for example, advocates and which I myself would solve with a simple formula: a notion of rights for animals and notion of welfare for plants and other beings. On the other hand, the idea of putting notions of communication and mobility at the centre of ethics also seems somehow too narrow and at the same time ... toobroad.Atleast, thisis soifweconsider that we know of animals that do notmovebythemselves(e.g. sponges and many other sea creatures), and that on the other hand there are moving plants, not only those that move some of their parts, but also those that ‘move’ in their entirety (e.g. the so-calledglaciermiceor jökla-mýs, asthey arecalledinIceland). The possibility of communicating with other animals also seems too subjec­tive and limited to species close to us, since we are familiar for example, with more than a million species of insects, with which our communica­tion is very limited, but should be ethically considered too. Much more interesting, although also rather abstract, is the introduc­tion of the concepts of non-locality and cosmic sympathy. The first con­cept, derived from quantum physics, refers to a specific relationship be­tween two objects that have no visible physical connection but influence eachother(similarlyexcitingistheconceptofsuperposition,whichstates thatthesameparticlecanbeinseveralplacesatthesametime).Thecon­cept of cosmic sympathy assumes that care is an integral part of the cos­mos, which is reflected in the term itself. These two examples are crucial mainly because they show (with very real physical/mathematical problems!) that the scientistic view of the world and the whole universe is flawed, but they also presuppose the va­lidityofateleologicalworldview(Donovan’sdefenceofthelatterisbased on Kant’s philosophy), whereas they do not really play a direct role in the ethics of care itself – the only exception being the consideration of teleology. This is also why Donovan proposes (especially as an alternative to the new materialism) a so-called participatory epistemology, which would replace the relation ‘subject : object’ with a relation ‘subject : subject,’ re­ferring to Nagel, who advocates a scientific revolution of the Einsteinian gravity,onethat willtake the mindinto account. In the context ofart, the so-called ethicalmimesis (a concept derived fromAdorno’s philosophy), whichtransformsthedualismof‘subject:object’intoadialogue,canhelp ustodothis. Anotherparallel processistheso-calledemergenceaesthet­ics, in which the spiritual dimension of nature comes to light through 279 Aljaž Krivec the process of emergence – this happens when all the smallest particles of matter connect (in the right way), symbolising another dimension of compassion. Donovan tells the story of the transition from the legacy of the En­lightenment to a state that seeks to introduce more-than-rights. Even if she sometimes falls into an oversimplified understanding of some areas that are not part of her core interests (such as quantum physics, which has recently become popular in the (post)humanities), and even if she proposes an understanding of the world that may not really need to be implemented for goals she advocates, it is a work that manages to intro­duce some controversial topics in a convincing way,withoutabandoning itsstartingpoints,whichseemtobeamixtureofmaterialismandanethic of care. The fact that the author manages to bring the above into the field of literary studies, thereby making a significant shift in that area, is an added bonus. Notes This review is a revised and extended version of the review that was first pub­lished in Slovene on Animot; see Krivec (2023). References Donovan, Josephine. 2022. Animals, Mind, and Matter: The Inside Story. East Lansing,mi: Michigan State University Press. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis,mn: University of Minnesota Press. Krivec, Aljaž. 2016. ‘Literarna teorija iz klavnice.’ludLiteratura, 25 October. https://www.ludliteratura.si/esej-kolumna/literarna-teorija-iz-klavnice/. ———. 2023. ‘Rešitev: participatorna epistemologija.’ Animot, 21 December. https://www.animot-vegan.com/resitev-participatorna-epistemologija/. Nagel,Thomas.1974. ‘WhatIsItLiketoBeaBat?’ The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450. Radaljac, Anja. 2019. ‘Find Points of Agreement and Start There: Interview with PattriceJones,EcofeministWriter.’ Versopolis, 14March. https://www .versopolis.com/people/conversation/746/find-points-of-agreement-and -start-there. Quinton,Anthony.1999.‘Scientism.’InTheNewFontanaDictionaryofModern Thought, 3rd ed., edited by Alan Bullock, Alf Lawrie, and Stephen Tromb­ley, 775. London: HarperCollins. 280