14 - The Philosophical Essay

Summary

Introduction

In her contribution to the 2018 collection Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture, Sara Salih recounts the challenges of teaching animal studies in a literature department. She began a class with a work of philosophy and, in her chapter, asks:

What was a bunch of literature and creative writing students supposed to make of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, the first book on our reading list? Instead of engaging with the book’s uncompromising moral message, the students focused on Singer’s rhetorical strategies, which some of them dismissed as polemic. I now understood I had unconsciously wished to shock, perhaps even convert the students taking my course, and I felt disappointed and stupid when I saw how they responded to the text as any other text – a literary artefact to be analysed and assessed. (Salih 63)

The vegan students had heard it all before, recounts Salih, while the non-vegans became instantly defensive (63). Salih “thought of withdrawing from” her own class, and drafted an email to Singer – but this was never sent. “[T]he class,” she reports, “quietened down when we got onto the more familiar territory of literary texts” (64).

Philosophical exploration of the ethics of human–animal relationships – what we can call animal ethics – forms part of the prehistory of vegan (literary) studies (see Wright, “Doing” xv; Vegan 11), and remains an important touchstone for scholars of veganism in literature (Quinn and Westwood 16; Milburn). It is thus not surprising that Salih included animal ethics in her course. But the response of her students, and her consequent frustration, is understandable, too. To what extent does it make sense to group philosophical essays within or alongside more conventional literary texts? Should scholars of vegan literature respond to philosophical essays “as any other text” (Salih 63)? This chapter interrogates – without necessarily answering – these questions.

It is first worth saying that there are multiple traditions of philosophy that may be of interest to vegan literary scholars. We can first distinguish between the so-called “continental” and “analytic” traditions of philosophy. Continental philosophy has its origins in French and German thought, and is at the foundation of much contemporary literary theory. The philosopher Jacques Derrida is a recognizably continental philosopher who is a frequent source of engagement for vegan literary scholars (see, for example, Schuster).