Bambi 2: Message

These changes made possible or necessary by the change in medium already have the ability to transform the story. Disney studios also made other alterations that make Satlen’s Bambi and Disney’s Bambi into different, even competing, stories.

Salten’s story, written in the aftermath of the Great War, takes death as its central theme. Nature is “red in tooth and claw.” Predators kill and eat, prey are killed and eaten. The animals, the plants, and even the leaves of trees anxiously anticipate their own deaths, and they talk about their impending demise. While humans, called “Him,” seem to be either a god or devil, He too dies, as Bambi sees at the end. Bambi voices the theological moral of the story: “There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him [Man].” Man and the Forest are reconciled within the circle of life and death beneath the care of One who is above it.

Disney’s Bambi, produced during the preparations for and beginning of the Second World War, presents Nature as a calm and peaceful harmony (except for the scene in the winter where Bambi’s mother feeds him bark off of the trees.) All of the animals are friends; the crotchety owl looks down from his perch with grandfatherly affection on the gathering of rabbits and mice. As the story editor Perce Pearce says in a planning meeting: “There’s nobody swooping down and eating someone else….” In the realm of nature, there is no death, only birth and life. Disney isolates and focuses Death onto one character, Man. Pearce, again: “their one common enemy is Man. That’s the conflict there—and keep it simple.” Simple, indeed. Death disappears from Nature. What had been a death scene in Salten, the two falling leaves, becomes the beautiful passing of autumn into winter. All dialogue about anxiety in the face of death disappears, and in its place … music. And Man is always the devil, never a god. In contrast with Salten, Disney offers no resolution of the conflict between Man and Nature, Death and Life. “It is about surviving in the forest.” This is part of the reason Roger Ebert describes Disney’s Bambi as “a parable of … nihilism, and despair”; it paints reality as a “world of death and violence.”

My five-year-old reaction was appropriate after all.

Bambi 1: The Medium

For my fifth Christmas, this would be Christmas of 1968, my parents gave me and my older sister an LP of the sound-track of Bambi. A few days later, my Mom put the record in the player so we could listen. The album came with a large picture book, and we kids flipped through the pages, wide-eyed, as we followed the sound. We heard the opening chorus of “Love is a song that never ends” and later the “Drip, drip, drop, little April showers…” We heard the stags charging through the meadow and followed along flipping through the pictures. And then we heard the shotgun fire, and young Bambi calling out “Mother!” “Mother!” My sister and I wailed. We stopped only to catch our breath, and then we wailed some more. We shut off the record player and tried to comfort ourselves. Dad returned from a long hard day at work a short-time later. He was disgusted that a Christmas gift could send his children into such despair and his home into such chaos. Too late did he learn that Bambi, of all things, was not appropriate for children. Or rather, as children, maybe especially as children, we knew exactly what Bambi was saying.

Now, as an adult, I want to look at how the animators at the Walt Disney Studios constructed the movie to see (1) what they intended to say, (2) what the movie actually says, (3) whether I (still) consider it persuasive, and finally (4) what criticisms or alternatives I might offer.

Disney loosely based Bambi and the Great Prince of the Forest on a book by Fritz Salten, Bambi: A Forest Life. The different mediums both required and allowed the film-makers to tell the story in a different way. The message is more than the medium, however. Disney did not shy away from a creative reworking of the material, such that the two Bambies tell different stories.

The change in mediums does partially determine Disney’s message. Salten’s book, literally composed of words, carries the story through descriptions and through dialogue. Disney’s film, by contrast, “is an essentially silent movie: a wordless, rhythmical ballet performed to an orchestral accompaniment.”

The Silver Anniversary edition of Bambi gives viewers access to comments made in the planning meetings for the film. Those comments show Disney animators keen to push the envelope of their current understanding of an animated motion picture.

The animators applied lessons learned from previous Disney projects. Prior to Disney cartoons could be only cute and funny. Their aesthetic required that they be short, unrealistic comedies. Extreme forms of violence become funny when animated as a cartoon. (Itchy and Scratchy illustrate this principle on The Simpsons.) Snow White (1937) and Pinocchio (1940) had already enabled viewers to experience real beauty in a cartoon. Likewise, Disney found that a strong villain on a big screen with a good script, animation, and music allowed a cartoon to portend even tragedy. With Fantasia (1940) the studio tried to match the depth and power of Bach, Tchaikovsky, Dukas, Stravinsky, Beethoven, and Shubert with animation on the big screen. They learned the power of music as a tool different from either dialogue or animation.

They learned the difference between “what is felt” and “what is seen.” They dropped as much dialogue as possible out of the film. Likewise, they made judicious choices on what they would communicate through music rather than animation. In Bambi, two “characters” and one event directly benefit from these previous projects.

Bambi opens with a pan of a dark, sometimes out of focus, multi-plane shot of the forest. The animators understand that the forest is itself a character in this story, and they want it to be “mysterious,” merely hinted at; they want it to be felt rather than seen.

The second character to be felt but not seen is Man. The Disney editors took every image of individual people out of the final version. (Only a shot of a distant hunting camp remains.) Instead of showing some individual, the film indicates the presence of Man “by ominous, lurching music.”

The death of Bambi’s mother is the event that happens entirely off-screen. We know she died because we heard the music, we heard the shot, and we hear Bambi’s cries of “Mother!” The old stag’s “Your mother cannot be with you anymore” merely confirms what we already know. The animators knew they were making the scene more powerful by not showing Bambi’s mother falling. They knew they were “really gonna hit them [the viewers] hard.”

"This is a species of the sublime for which the sight of the boundless prairies of the interior of North America is renowned." Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Section 39, p. 204.

Midwestern Sublime 2

The non-native criticizes the central Illinois landscape not on ethical grounds – “This land is bad” – nor pragmatic grounds – “This land is useless”; the critique is aesthetic: “This land is boring.” To understand how the land places the burden of boredom on the traveler it helps to place ourselves in the position of the traveler. The traveler has been shaped by other landscapes, and she has expectations when she arrives in Illinois. She has seen Ansel Adams photographs and Hudson Bay paintings – now those are landscapes! It would seem that Illinois has nothing comparable.

To what, then, shall we compare the land of central Illinois? Many years ago I went on my first extended backpacking trip in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The trip lasted three weeks. We never entered a building by day, and we slept under tarps at night. And this Illinois boy felt nearly claustrophobic. I found it confusing to feel so hemmed in on every side when we were out of doors. Then we reached the shores of Lake Superior. I could see the horizon, and I relaxed. Illinois is not like the Rocky Mountains or the Adirondacks. It is like the sea.

The picture posted is by Larry Kanfer and is entitled, appropriately, “Tall Ships.”

Midwestern Sublime

Those of us raised on the flat plains of Illinois have heard the story too many times. Travelers from other parts of the country have seen all they need to see of the state. They have seen it through the windows of their cars travelling at seventy miles an hour on our interstate system. Those flat plains bore those passing through; they provoke dread in those coming to stay. A landscape without hills is like a sky without stars, an endless nothingness as far as the eye can see. “The towns feel like they just dropped out of the sky; there is no reason why they should be one place rather than another.” “I couldn’t live here,” says the passers-through, head wagging. “We may have made a mistake” cough the second-guessing stayers.


I usually nod in agreement, taking a kind of pride in the personal virtues which my lamenting friend must attribute to me, virtues which give me an unimaginable strength to live in this nowhere land. But my nod is a lie. I disagree. My traveling friends are blind. They travel the country, and they hope along the way to see the beauty of the earth. They find it in New England and New Mexico, in Michigan and Missisippi, and they think they should find it in central Illinois. When they do not find it, their eyes fail them. So, for my traveling friends, I will offer a few meditations on how to see central Illinois.

Richard Nelson, Reflections I

Nelson, Richard. The Island Within. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Nelson, Richard. Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Richard Nelson expresses in the form of a nature memoir the aesthetic sense of hunting. In the field of aesthetics, we call this “the sublime,” and it finds its classic definitions in Kant and Schopenhauer. Before the philosophers, though, let us allow this anthropologist-gone-native to speak.

In the first chapter of The Island Within, “The Face in a Raindrop,” Nelson has goes to the island to hunt, but he finds himself stranded by a storm. For three days, the merciless wind, the buckets of rain, the swelling sea, the enormous trees, the everyday exchange of life and death, and the intricate interconnections of all things on the island work on him. They dwarf him, they contain him, and they uphold him.

Here is the paragraph from which he draws the title of the chapter:

At this moment there must be more raindrops falling on the surface of the island that they are humans on earth, perhaps more than all the humans who ever lived. I’ve thought of raindrops as tiny and insignificant things, but against the scale of the earth itself, they’re scarcely smaller than I am. On what basis, then, can I consider myself more important? Koyukon elders say that each kind of weather, including rain, has its own spirit and consciousness. If this is true, there must be a spirit within every raindrop, as in all else that inhabits the earth. In this sense, we are two equal forms of being who stand in mutual regard. I bend down to look at a crystal droplet hanging from a hemlock needle and know my own image is trapped inside. It’s humbling to think of myself in this way. In the broader perspective of earth, I am nothing more than a face in a raindrop. p. 17

Ishmael, Book Review II

I will offer only a few observations on the book. First, a point of clarification: Ishmael paints a powerful and accessible picture, but, we ought not confuse this picture with others. Though Western, white, patriarchy provides a clear example of the taker mode of operation, takers are not identical with the West, with whites, with men, or any combination of those. Beijing, Robert Mugabe, and Margaret Thatcher do not offer an alternative to the taker mythology. Takers have made nearly the entire planet into a prison, and we humans are its occupants … all of us. Getting out of the prison is more important than redistributing privileges within the prison. The ecological revolution trumps all others.

Second, a call for elaboration: Quinn’s meditations on the first chapters of Genesis are provocative, and they could be usefully read alongside Hugh Brody’s considerations in The Other Side of Eden. Likewise, his alternative account of the history of the world contrasts nicely with the account in Hegel, Marx, Fukuyama, and Sayyid Qutb. It could be filled out by reading it alongside the works of Paul Shepherd. (I am planning to review some of Paul Shepherd’s books next.)

Third, a few critical comments: The “either / or” dichotomy (either takers or leavers) that forms the basis of the book supports its thesis as well as a bicycle at full stop supports its rider. Still, I can concede its usefulness for making the book accessible. However, our rider definitely falls over when Quinn provides only one of the two wheels; that is, he gives us the “either” without the “or.” Quinn develops the taker mythology but never gives as much attention to the leaver mythology. His leaver mythology doesn’t speak much about the gods and doesn’t really take the form of a story. This is a damning criticism in the terms the book set for itself. Instead, he frames leaver mythology in terms of biological and evolutionary laws. It is highly doubtful that this is the way leavers of various stripes would formulate their mythology.

Further, Quinn’s leaver mythology embraces the values of romanticism and democracy; species and forms of life are valued for their own sake, possess their own rights, and no group imposes its form of life on the others. This stands in tension with his evolutionary-based claim that the universe is moving toward intelligence and self-awareness, that such qualities are more complex and are presumably better or a genuine “advance.” Humans were the first to make this break-through, that other forms of life will follow and they will hail us for helping keep their futures open. Leaver mythology begins to look like a mishmash of ideas from the political left of the sixties, not from as yet unassimilated tribes in Brazil. Surely an intelligent, self-aware gorilla could offer a more significant paradigm shift than this.

Ishmael, Book Review I

Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. A Bantam / Turner Book, 1992. ISBN: 0553375407

Ishmael shares a genre with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; both alternate between 1) a symbolic narrative and 2) a series of straight-forward but allegedly mind-blowing lectures. I don’t know if this genre has a name.

The narrative: In Ishmael a teacher is looking for a student who wants to save the world. The narrator, Alan Lomax, is the student; the teacher, Ishmael, is a gorilla who communicates telepathically. (Yes, you read that right.) Ishmael lives in an office building, where he also conducts his classes with Mr. Lomax. Four-fifths of the way through the book he is evicted from the office building and sold to a carnival.

The lectures: Ishmael helps his student unearth the mythology / worldview / ideology of the civilized world, those he designates “takers,” and of those civilizations that “history left behind,” whom he calls “leavers.” For the takers, the gods made the world for man to rule, but man first must conquer it. When he finally conquers and rules, the world will be paradise. However, man has a tragic flaw that keeps him from fulfilling this mission. For the leavers, on the other hand, man belongs to the world. The world tends toward complexity, self-awareness, and intelligence. Man is first to achieve self-awareness, and his job is to keep the future open for other species to also advance in complexity, intelligence, and self-awareness. (Remember, this is a gorilla talking.) All can now see that human culture will crash within a few generations. From the leaver view, this is not the result of a tragic human flaw; it follows from acting out the taker mythology. Takers have not really transcended nature, but they have acted as though nature’s laws no longer apply to them. The result is a reduction in complexity and diversity of species, but also of actual and potential intelligence and self-awareness. Natural law will bring the taker experiment to a close, not, however, before the takers themselves have nearly destroyed the planet.

Ishmael, the gorilla, having taught the human all he has to teach, offering to be now his friend rather than his teacher, dies due to lack of good care in the carnival.

Cartmill, Review IV

Cartmill’s final account of the immorality of hunting fails to convince. First, his claim to have found “consensus” among “the industrialized West” is as persuasive as asserting “we the people…” It leaves out not only non-Westerners, but also the non-industrialized in the West, particularly the rural poor, including those living on reservations. I suspect that the asserted consensus, even within the industrialized West, is a lie. Our way of life could not exist without considerable suffering from many animals. We need them to test medicines and medical procedures, and to provide foods of choice to people living in large cities. We are vaguely aware of their suffering, and most of us do not object.

Second, Cartmill himself notes that many contest the claim that a utilitarian ethic can and should be the fundamental principle by which we judge our treatment of animals. The objection is that utilitarians consider only pleasure and pain, and pleasure and pain can be felt only by individuals, not by species. By treating everything as an individual, the utilitarian cannot make important ethical distinctions; that is, utilitarian principle is blind to certain realities. For example, if an invasive species threatens to throw an entire ecosystem out of whack, and if biologists set out to eradicate the invasive species, utilitarians will protest on behalf of the individuals that will suffer under the eradication program. The utilitarian fails to recognize that individuals can exist only in certain ecosystems, alongside other specific species, and this is because an individual is not only an individual, but a member of a species. Cartmill notes that hunters share this view with environmentalists and biologists, but he makes no reply (236). (I will save other objections to utilitarian ethics for another day.)

Finally, Cartmill’s argument is that if we erase the distinction between humans and animals as morally irrelevant, then we can see that hunting is wrong. This conclusion follows only if we put on the utilitarian blinders. Attention to American Indians, such as the Lakota Sioux, would have shown the hidden assumptions. According to the Lakota, the bison is their brother. That is why they hunt the bison. To understand this view requires more than learning how to employ a single abstract principle (pain is bad) in a detailed, ledger-book calculation. It requires understanding an entire history of a people and a way of life carved out for centuries in symbiotic relationship with the bison.

Cartmill, Review III

To his credit, Cartmill does not limit his book to cultural histories of the morality of hunting and of the hunting hypothesis. In the final chapter, he weighs in on morality: “We need to ask whether hunting is wrong” (240). Cartmill lays out the variety of worldviews and motives the give sense to the actions of both anti-hunters and hunters. But finally, he too cuts to the chase and settles on utilitarian ethics, Peter Singer style. “There is a consensus today, at any rate in the industrialized West, that the suffering of sentient animals is something that is intrinsically undesirable….” (240). We can spot the conclusion from a single premise: hunting is wrong.

But it is not a single premise. The entire book has lead to this conclusion. The hunting hypothesis and the immorality hypothesis are themselves framed by the more general claim that hunting and morality conflict. By showing the associations of hunting with war and by arguing for hunting’s associations with rape, Cartmill underlines his point with a big, thick, red marker. Within this framework, the hunter can position himself only by brushing aside morality in the style of Nietzsche. Cartmill, however, tries to smoke him out of this amoral stance. If the hunter flees from morality, he cannot position himself in “nature” via the hunting hypothesis because science does not and cannot prove that hunting is “natural.”

What conclusion follows from this? Hunting is as human as morality; morality is as natural as hunting. The conflict between hunting and morality is not a conflict between the human and nature but between different ways of living life. What principles could we extract from the life lived best? Cartmill offers one: pain is undesirable. Since there is no qualitative difference between the pain of a non-human animal and a human animal, and since hunting causes “excruciating” pain, we cannot justify a way of life that includes hunting.

Cartmill, Book Review II

The immorality hypothesis, that esteem for hunting and morality are inversely related, also receives extended treatment, showing that Europeans, in fits and starts, have viewed hunting with increasing moral suspicion throughout Western history. The importance and meaning of hunting does not depend on the amount of food it makes available. Rather, [it] is intelligible only as symbolic behavior, like a game or a religious ceremony, and the emotions that the hunt arouses can be understood only in symbolic terms” (29). The framework most crucial to the meaning of hunting has been the distinction, sometimes separation, of humans from nature. As he points out in his well-known essay, “The Bambi Syndrome,” both hunters and anti-hunters share this symbolic framework. They disagree only on how to value the different sides of the line. For many hunters, hunting is natural and morality is merely human sentimentality; for many anti-hunters, morality is natural and hunting is a human perversion.

Cartmill’s work moves quickly, as any survey must, over the cultural images of hunting throughout Europe and western history. He provides both the panoramic vision and focused snap-shots of particular episodes. It might seem unfair, then, to complain that he has not included enough, that his view is Eurocentric. But, on behalf of the hunter, I must raise this objection. The bow hunter from Wisconsin does not locate himself in a tradition that began with Apollo or Artemis. He thinks rather of Fred Bear, and Howard Hill, of Pope and Young. And Ishi. In the tradition of hunting, prior to Pope and Young there are only the native peoples who hunted this same land. This alternative genealogy raises a hornets’ nest of other issues, but these do not find a place in Cartmill’s account even though the Wisconsin bowhunter needs precisely this alternative genealogy.

Cartmill, Book Review I

Cartmill, Matt. A View to A Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Cartmill challenges the use of “the hunting hypothesis” to support the claim that humans are naturally hunters.

The hunting hypothesis, an anthropological thesis, claims that humans differentiated themselves from the ape, and so from nature itself, through hunting. Our distinctive tools, weapons, physiology, and social structure all developed because we hunted and in order to hunt. Associated with this hypothesis is the additional claim that humans have a natural bloodlust and so are not naturally moral; we are “lunatic apes.” Let’s call this second claim “the immorality hypothesis.”

Cartmill debunks the hunting hypothesis on two grounds. First, he offers a fascinating history of the development and adaptation of the hypothesis itself which shows that it was adopted for cultural reasons.

Second, he demonstrates that the hypothesis cannot be scientific. Science explains by subsuming instances under general laws; entirely unique events cannot have a scientific explanation; the differentiation of humanity from nature has no parallel cases; ergo.... The hunting hypothesis is a myth. This does not mean that it is false or useless, but the hypothesis is not a candidate for the status of scientific explanation. So far, so good.

Science of Pleasure IV

Epicureans offer a corrective to the utilitarian account of pleasure in a second aspect also. The epicurean recognizes the ways in which our beliefs affect our happiness. For example, they encourage us to develop a disposition toward gratitude. If we give thanks for the good things in our lives, if we don’t believe we deserve them as our right but can welcome them as a gift, we will be happier. (Epicureans also claim that belief an judgmental gods and belief in an afterlife in which one suffers under the judgment of those gods leads to unhappiness. In the pursuit of happiness, we should jettison such beliefs.)

Science of Pleasure III

That other well-known hedonist, the epicurean, offers a helpful corrective to the utilitarian. While the epicurean agrees that everyone desires pleasure, she operates with a different conception of pleasure than the utilitarian.

First, the epicurean does not hesitate to distinguish higher and lower pleasures as correlated with different kinds of desire. Some desires are necessary and natural (desire for food and drink); some desires are natural but not necessary (desire for sex). The examples of desires I have given are all classified as bodily desires. According to the epicurean (and in conflict with the popular image of epicureans) people who chase bodily desires will never be satisfied. They find certain kinds of passing pleasures, but they do not find happiness. In fact, trying to satisfy bodily desire is like pouring water into a leaking bucket. In order to be happy, one ought to learn to limit bodily desires. Do not pursue excessive desires; rather confine one’s desires only to what is necessary and natural. With work, one may even overcome the natural but unnecessary desires. This, it turns out, will actually cultivate one’s ability to enjoy, to feel pleasure; a simple meal is a feast for a hungry woman. One may discover in this the pleasure of existing.

Science of Pleasure II

The practice of undergraduates betrays their theoretical relativism. They do judge within themselves between things they like better than others. When they aren’t held captive by political politeness, they can even recognize that they believe their judgments have validity that others should recognize. They feel free to mock musical genres. They detest bad songs within a particular genre – this on matters presumably limited to “taste.”

Bentham, and even Mill, would agree that we must attend to and make judgments about our ends. Bentham asserted that all human aims could be gathered up under one word: pleasure. However, pleasure had many dimensions; every pleasure has a definite intensity and duration, purity and fecundity, and we anticipate it with more or less certainty in the proximate or remote future. Rarely does a contemporary utilitarian calculus work out the varying dimensions of pleasure, which is to say, it has stopped taking pleasure seriously. We say that pleasure is relative; but in reality it is too complex for our vocabularies and calculations. The difference is important for our future happiness.

Science of Pleasure I

Popular understanding too easily equates utilitarianism with instrumental rationality, a relentless logic of efficiency incapable of evaluating the ends it pursues.

On the other hand, an introductory course in ethics will insist that the concept of the end, pleasure, plays a central role in the evolution of utilitarian thought. Whereas Jeremy Bentham insisted that Halo is as good as Heidegger, Bentham’s successor John Stuart Mill retorted, “Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” On this story, Bentham thought all pleasures could be quantified and so compared, but Mill claimed that pleasures may be qualitatively different and so incomparable. For Mill, only one who has tasted the pleasures of port and the pleasures of beer can judge between them.

Still, what moral does the introductory ethics student draw from this story? I suspect that they may go further than Mill. Perhaps they conclude that there is no judging, not even within oneself, not between even comparable pleasures of beer and port. Perhaps they make every pleasure a potentially absolute pleasure relative to some potential hedonist for whom “man is the measure of all things.” And so we are delivered back into the hands of instrumental rationality, where we can no longer reason about ends, but only about means.

What would it mean to take utilitarianism seriously? That is, can we imagine paying closer attention to pleasure, to its natures? Does utilitarianism have some insight to offer us in thinking about ends?

Aesthetics of Cute II

Cartoons are funny; death is not. So cartoons face into their limits when they picture death. Either they make death funny, in which case death never appears, or they push the limits of being cute cartoons, and they are no longer funny.

The Coyote and Road Runner series, and Warner Brothers generally, treat death as funny. Warner Brothers even applies this aesthetic directly to hunting in the character of Elmer Fudd and his intended prey, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Warner Brothers does not criticize hunting; hunting just provides a setting in which human and animals can have comic interactions. Death is funny only because no one ever dies.

There is little aesthetic difference between Warner Brothers cartoons and the early Walt Disney shorts. However, with Fantasia (1940) and Bambi (1942), Disney began to produce feature length films which introduced a different aesthetic. Cute remained: Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, Thumper, Flower, and Bambi in Bambi. But Disney introduces a new aesthetic alongside cute. The new aesthetic allowed for death, even tragedy, in the form of a cartoon.

In response to Fantasia, Warner Brothers laughed. They produced "What's Opera Doc" to lighten up the dark wizards at Disney. But to Bambi the response could only be Elmer Fudd.

to be continued

Aesthetics of Cute

Cute defines the aesthetic genre of Precious Moments figurines and the heroines of Walt Disney feature length cartoons. The eyes dominate the face; the balloon of a head sits precariously on a small body. Absolutely any example will validate the claim. Adults are simply larger children; and children are exaggerated infants. The aesthetic of the cute is aimed at children and those who want to hold on to the child’s vision of the world.

There are realities, realities many adults will affirm as good, which the aesthetic of cute cannot present. Imagine first a Precious Moments version of a crucifix. We immediately know something has gone terribly wrong. The crucifixion is not cute; those who think of it as cute have warped sensibilities. They are the avowed enemies of those who would worship the crucified one. But we may respond to a cute crucifix in two ways. First we may claim that “cute” presents a true vision of the world; we may modify Paul and insist “whatever is cute, whatever is sweet, think on these things.” That is, we might say, since a crucifix and what it represents cannot be cute, we should not have crucifixes and we should not think about crucifixions. Alternatively, we might conclude that if cute cannot present a crucifix, so much the worse for cute.

Imagine – unfortunately, in the internet age, one need not imagine – Disney characters engaged in the act of sex. Again, we know immediately that something has gone wrong. Sex is not cute; those who present it as such have warped desires. Confronted with Disney characters engaged in sex, we suspect that the real aim is, again, children. Pedophilias may prey on children by introducing them to sex in a child-friendly aesthetic. If we reject pedophilia, however, we still must choose between the adequacy of the cute and the goodness of good sex. If cuteness is adequate to reality, then we may reject sex because it is unpresentable and as boring in Disney films. On the other hand, if the cute cannot present sex as good, then the cute does not define the good.

Tomorrow: the cute critique of hunting.

Aesthetics of the Hunt

The challenge of "looking at death" leads me to the next topic. The topic of the pleasures and pains produced on the senses we call "aesthetics." Beauty has dominated, perhaps rightly, the topic. But there are other forms of aesthetics: the ugly, of course, but also, the sublime, the trivial, the silly, the disgusting, the delicious.

For the next several posts, I will argue that there are aesthetic modes that are inappropriate to death -- they make it impossible to see death and so we recoil.

Next post: Death and the Cute.

Ortega and Utilitarians

Initially, we may identify what might appear as common ground: the utilitarian, like Ortega’s hunter, aims at “happiness.” Clearly, however, the same word refers to different experiences.

For the utilitarian, happiness means pleasure. To claim that all sentient creatures strive for happiness is to say that they strive for pleasure. If one animal hunts another, it is for the “pleasure” of eating it. Further, the aim of all human action is pleasure or happiness.

For Ortega, this analysis does not go very far. Insofar as humans have broken with Nature and have entered History, their goal is freedom, not happiness. Even if they were to return to Nature as a hunter in search of happiness, it is not for the sake of “the pleasant.” Pleasure is not so much a goal as that which accompanies achievement in action. It is compatible with, perhaps even enhanced by, much pain and effort. Finally, it is a mistake to claim that animals, human or non-human, eat just for pleasure. They hunt and eat to survive (at least) and this brings with it pleasure. The way they hunt and the way they eat actually constitutes them as members of the species that they are.

Ortega y Gasset VI The Ethics of Hunting

Some writers criticize the practice of hunting on utilitarian grounds. The claims here are that pleasure is good and pain is bad, that right actions maximize the balance of pleasure over pain (that is the utilitarian part), and that hunting can be shown to not maximize pleasure over pain (and the anti-hunting part). This critique calls those who resist applying the utilitarian framework and only that framework to non-human species “speciesists.”

Part of the disagreement with the hunting concerns the definition of what is meant by hunting. Ortega y Gasset defines “hunting” as “what an animal does to take possession, dead or alive, of some other being that belongs to a species basically inferior to its own.” For the utilitarian, this definition misses the ethically relevant dimensions. That the hunter and the hunted belong to different species is beside the point. That the species have mutually adapted to each other such that, qua species, each depends on the other introduces extraneous data.

The utilitarian decrees that only pleasure and pain have an ethical weight, and not only humans but other animals too can feel pleasure and pain. For the utilitarian, hunting would be “what one sentient animal does to inflict death on another sentient animal, perhaps for the pleasure of eating it or displaying it.” From a utilitarian point of view, the only question is the extent to which the hunter can inflict death with minimal pain, as compared with the pain induced and the pleasure forfeited should the animal not die at the hunter’s hands.

Two features of Ortega’s account of hunting drop out of the utilitarian account. First, the difference of species disappears as irrelevant. As a basis for an ethic of hunting, this has troubling implications. Whether one hunts and eats or displays one’s own species is relevant only to the extent that it might increase the pleasure and pain involved. The utilitarian cannot oppose cannibalism on the grounds that it is cannibalism, only on the grounds that under certain circumstances it creates less than optimal balance of pleasure over pain. Further, though in principle it would not differentiate between species, in practice it values the species suffering pain over the species that inflicts the pain. The result is that animal rights advocates may feel pleasure at news of hunter accidents (and express such pleasure on internet forums) because at least there are fewer hunters to inflict pain on animals. Sometimes those who advocate animal rights must consciously remind themselves that "people are animals too" -- and this statement elevates humans to a moral status the activist can too easily lose sight of. (reference)

Second, the ecosystem drops out of the utilitarian calculus. Institutions, organizations, and systems, even ecological systems cannot feel pleasure or pain. Only individuals within those systems can; only individuals are real. Consequently, the only way to take account of an ecological system is through the pain felt by individuals; the collapse of an ecosystem and the extinction of species concerns the utilitarian only insofar as the individual sentient animals feel pain during the collapse. The utilitarian can have no objection to the extinction of a species, for an extinct species can no longer feel pleasure or pain. The utilitarian is pained only by the pain felt by the members of the species so long as they happen to exist. But “happening to exist” is itself neither good nor bad.

At this point I cannot but wonder if the utilitarian metaphysic is simply too truncated, if its inability to recognize certain realities does not doom those realities in its drive to efficiently maximize pleasure. Michael Pollan roots this metaphysic in a form of life. He notes “how parochial , and urban, an ideology animals rights really is. It could only thrive in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose any threat to us (a fairly recent development) , and our mastery of nature seems unchallenged. ‘In our normal life,’ Singer writes, ‘there is no serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.’ Such a statement assumes a decidedly citified version of ‘normal life,’ certainly one no farmer – indeed, no gardener – would recognize.” (pp. 325-6).

According to animal rights advocates those who reject the utilitarian account are “speciesists.” This term of criticism may be accepted if we define it. To be a speciesist is to claim, minimally, that species and ecological systems ought to count directly in our ethical considerations. It is to claim that the continued existence of a species is a good that we should value, that an ecosystem is worth preserving even if more pleasure and less pain would seem to be the result of developing it. It is to claim that while the pains and pleasures of individuals are important, there are also goods and evils other than the pain and pleasures of sentient individuals. There is more in the world than is dreamed of....

Ortega y Gasset V, Happiness and Freedom

Ortega has followed two trails. The success of his argument depends on his ability to make them coincide. We can define each trail by its endpoints. One trail leads from Nature to History; the other trail leads from the laborious chores and jobs to the pleasing. On Ortega’s telling Nature and the pleasing coincide with one another. [actually, I don't think this is quite right, but I've got to go back to re-read to get the right nuance.] Likewise, history and the laborious designate the same destination.

This is a surprising move. Philosophers working in the wake of Hegel see humans moving from forced labor toward freedom, and this is a steady move forward. In hunting Ortega sees humans moving from forced labor to happiness, and this move is a reversal back to Nature. He makes this move in the following paragraph:

“All this indicates that man, painfully submerged in his work or obligatory occupations, projects beyond them, imagines another kind of life consisting of very different occupations, in the execution of which he would not feel as if he were losing time, but, on the contrary, gaining it, filling it satisfactorily and as it should be filled. Opposite a life which annihilates itself and fails – a life of work – he erects the plan of a life successful in itself – a life of delight and happiness” (p. 37).

This last phrase, “a life of delight and happiness,” marks the precise place where we would have expected to read “a life of freedom and liberty.” But Ortega is convinced the hunter is looking back and not forward, that he is looking for happiness and not going deeper into history and toward freedom.

Ortega y Gasset IV, Internal goods, attention

In his analysis of hunting, Ortega picks up on this distinction between actions done for their own sake (“the pleasing”) and those which lead us to external goods (“the laborious”). The dichotomy defines human life: “So here is the human being suspended between two conflicting repertories of occupations: the laborious and the pleasing.” (p. 37). This distinction, and not the distinction between “difficult and easy,” leads the philosopher to the heart of the human action: “Happy occupations, it is clear, are not merely pleasures; they are efforts, and real sports are effort. It is not possible, then, to distinguish work from sport by a plus or minus in fatigue. The difference is that sport is an effort made completely freely, for the pure enjoyment of it, while work is an obligatory effort made with an eye to the profit” (p. 42).

Now we can hunt either as work or sport. We do not violate the act of hunting if we do it for one or the other of these purposes. However, after the Paleolithic era, once humans developed agriculture and no longer had to hunt, humans continued to hunt. Aristocrats hunt, and the working masses fight for the privilege of hunting. Dick Cheney hunts, and Tred Barta hunts. We hunt in pursuit of happiness. We hunt in order to hunt.

Like Pieper’s description of festivity, the activity of hunting itself can transform our usual habits of attention. Usually, “[o]ur attention, which is what aims our vision, seizes on that spot on the horizon because we are persuaded that what interests us will appear there. This attention to the preconceived is equivalent to being absorbed in one point of the visible area and not paying attention to the other points.” However, “[t]he hunter’s look and attention are completely opposite to this. … Thus, he needs to prepare an attention of a different and superior style – an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a ‘universal’ attention, which does not inscribe itself on any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert man” (p. 138).

Ortega y Gasset III, Action, External and Internal Good

I want to make another approach to the nature of hunting and its relation to diversion in Ortega y Gasset’s work. To do this I must introduce some background, so hang with me.

Philosophers often make a distinction between two kinds of activities. We engage in some activities for the sake of their outcome or their product. These activities we would not take up without the reward promised at the end. Most people find exercise odious, but will pay money for the space and equipment in order to claim the reward: chiseled abs or at least lower blood pressure. Some rewards get artificially attached to activities in order to entice us into them. Most of us would not seek employment were it not gainful.

On the other hand, we sometimes do things just for the sake of doing them, sometimes even in spite of the consequences. Children play for the sake of playing, even if their parents have called them to dinner “for the last time.” We eat for the sake of tasting, though we will have to run an extra mile tomorrow. And though some may worry that dancing may lead to sex, we do both for their own sake, and not for their outcome. Likewise, we worship for the sake of worship, and not for the benefits that might accrue to the worshiper.

The examples betray themselves, however. Some people love to exercise and would do it for its own sake; professional athletes play for a paycheck; worshipers sometimes try to manipulate God. All activities have outcomes; all activities have their own inner integrity which we can learn to enjoy. There are not two types of activities; there are two dimensions of all activities – or, rather, the domination of one dimension over the other determines the type. The dimensions define the activity; the activity does not define the dimension. The line between the two types of activities not only blurs … it moves. We may initially learn to cook out of an obligation to our family, grow to love the act of cooking for its own internal goods, and then become a professional chef cooking, most of the time, for the sake of a paycheck.

Josef Pieper, writing on the nature of “festivity,” which we do for its own sake, suggests the difference between the two types of activity lies in the quality of attention with which we accomplish the act: “the field of vision widens, concern for success or failure of an act falls away, and the soul turns to its infinite object; it becomes aware of the illimitable horizon of reality as a whole.” Festivity “is a kind of expectant alertness.”[1] Allowing the concern for success or failure to fall away is, simply, to move out of a perspective in which we act for the sake of results. From that perspective, this move may feel like a loss of focus. It may feel like “giving-up.” If I run the race only to win, then why should I keep running once it is clear that I will not win? (Coaches, take note.) However, if we no longer evaluate an activity by its results, if we allow our “field of vision” to widen, it keeps us from giving up on the activity itself. It allows us to take in the nature of the activity, to appreciate its intricacy as we perform it, and so develop an “expectant alertness,” a consciousness of the act guided by the act.

Ortega y Gasset draws on this framework for his analysis of hunting.

[1] Josef Pieper, In Tune With The World: A Theory of Festivity. St. Augustine’s Press, 1999, p. 17.

Ortega y Gasset II, Bad Faith

Few philosophers develop an interest in the nature of hunting. Most come to hunting with an already formed view of human nature. Hunting can be used to illustrate or provide evidence for that view. But of course any independently developed philosophy of human nature may remain ambivalent with regard to hunting.

By way of example, one obvious criticism of Ortega y Gasset comes from those who share his philosophy of human nature: Hunting is the very definition of “bad faith.” To flee History is to deny ourselves the freedom and the responsibility to make ourselves what we are; to fall back into Nature, worse, to deliberately set out to become nature, is to identify with “things.” It is to use freedom to deny freedom. This vacation from the human condition is the height of irresponsibility.

Once the same view of human nature supports opposite positions, we can't help but wonder if the dualisms don’t obscure more than they reveal.

Ortega y Gasset I -- History, Nature, Human Nature

Aldo Leopold agrees with Pascal in characterizing outdoor activities as a diversion. Fleeing to the out of doors is a fleeing from something. However, for Leopold, the diversion is not from unhappiness per se, nor from ourselves or our “condition.” Rather, we seek a contrast with mechanization and the factory (“Wildlife in American Culture,” p. 181), with crowding, polluted air, and the same old scenes (“Conservation Esthetic,” p. 171 -2). Outdoor recreation generally, and hunting in particular, offers freedom from modernity.

Jose Ortega y Gasset sounds a similar note. “This is the reason men hunt. When you are fed up with the trouble-some present, with being ‘very twentieth-century,’ you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being “Paleolithic” (p. 125).

As with Pascal, hunting reveals something of the human condition. But here hunting is not simply diversion because “diversion, usually indicates only comfortable situations, to the extent that, used carelessly, it connotes ways of life completely free of hardship, free of risk, not requiring great physical effort nor a great deal of concentration. But the occupation of hunting, as carried on by a good hunter, involves precisely all of those things…. Now this is a more serious matter. Diversion loses its passive character, its frivolous side, and becomes the height of activity.” (p. 30).

On the other hand, Ortega y Gasset appeals to a structurally similar account of human nature as revealed by this “active diversion.” According to Pascal, humans are a contradiction, hamstrung between their greatness and their misery; according to Ortega y Gasset, humans embody a sublimation, rising out of Nature into History.

In the realm of nature, there is no freedom. Everything is determined, if not by causal laws, then by the form of life. “The animal is given not only life, but also an invariable repertory of conduct. Without his own intervention, his instincts have already decided what he is going to do and what he is going to avoid. Therefore, it cannot be said that the animal occupies himself with one thing or another. His life has never been empty, undetermined.” The human too is an animal and so belongs to nature, and this is crucial to Ortega’s account.

However, the human is unique in that he “has lost his system of instincts or – which is the same thing – retains only instinctual stumps with residual elements incapable of imposing on him a plan of behavior” (p. 35). In one respect, this is freedom, and the human can “invent his own tasks or occupations.” It is the possibility of History, where new things might happen and where the human might remake himself or herself into something new. “Man is a fugitive from Nature. He escaped from it and began to make history, which is trying to realize the imaginary, the improbable, perhaps the impossible. History is always made against the grain of Nature” (p. 129).

Given this dichotomy between History and Nature, Ortega can situate the activity of hunting. Hunting is natural: “Hunting is not an exclusively human occupation, but occurs throughout almost the entire zoological scale…. The cat hunts rats. The lion hunts antelopes. The sphex and other wasps hunt caterpillars and grubs. The spider hunts flies. The shark hunts smaller fish. The bird of prey hunts rabbits and doves. Thus, hunting goes on throughout almost all of the animal kingdom. There is hardly a class or phylum in which groups of hunting animals do not appear. Hunting is, therefore, not even peculiar to animals” (p. 60).

That is, Nature itself contains differences of nature … differences of species or form. The cat and the rat; the falcon and the dove, the wasp and the caterpillar all differ in nature. But they also interlock with one another in an ecological system.

The hunt belongs to Nature because it is one of the primary ways that the different forms relate to one another. Ortega defines “Hunting” as “what an animal [though not only an animal] does to take possession, dead or alive, of some other being that belongs to a species basically inferior to its own” (p. 62). The hunt, then, acknowledges the difference of nature and the interrelations of nature established by Nature.

For humans to hunt, then, amounts to rebounding out of History and back into Nature. “The hunter is, at one and the same time, a man of today and one of ten thousand years ago. In hunting, the long process of universal history coils up and bites its own tail” (p. 127). Hunting is the diversion from History with Nature. “Man, projected by his inevitable progress away from his ancestral proximity to animals, vegetables, and minerals – in sum, to Nature – takes pleasure in the artificial return to it… (121). “It has always been at man’s disposal to escape from the present to that pristine form of being a man, which because it is the first form, has no historical suppositions. History begins with that form. Before it, there is only that which never changes: that which is permanent: Nature. ‘Natural’ man is always there, under the changeable historical man” (p. 125).

Pascal, Hunting over Poetry III

Pascal’s use of hunting in his argument will not convince those who still hunt. Few would confuse today's hunter with royalty. And while some hunters do run beagles after rabbits or retrieve birds with birddogs, many others do not. Those who hunt deer and turkey often sit in an enclosed ground-blind, or perhaps a tree-stand, for hours on end. That is, the hunter is now perhaps the only person in the modern world who will gladly "sit alone in their room." Hunters now pass Pascal’s test better than anyone else in our society. Who else sits for an entire day in one place just watching? Sitting on an uncomfortable platform with few comforts, without working on a computer, talking on a cell-phone, or -- name any of numerous technological wonders that truly do illistrate Pascal's analysis of diversion? Today's hunters may, by Pascal's own analysis, be happy, and not just be diverting themselves from unhappiness.

Two questions emerge: If hunting is not diversion from ourselves and our unhappiness, what is it? What might this revised account of hunting reveal about the human condition?

Pascal, Hunting over Poetry II

So why are ordinary people correct to prefer hunting to poetry? (324) First, Pascal says, poets are at least as confused as hunters: hunters do not know why hunting makes them happy and poets do not know why some poetry is good and other poetry bad.

“We do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry. We do not know the natural model which we ought to imitate; and through lack of this knowledge, we have coined fantastic terms, "The golden age," "The wonder of our times," "Fatal," etc., and call this jargon poetical beauty. But whoever imagines a woman after this model, which consists in saying little things in big words, will see a pretty girl adorned with mirrors and chains, at whom he will smile; because we know better wherein consists the charm of woman than the charm of verse” (33).

But, though hunters may be as confused as poets, the amusement of hunting successfully distracts us from our unhappiness, and so produces at least a relief from our condition. Poetry initially distracts us from ourselves, but then it presents us with bad models, and when we seek to imitate those models, we plunge even more deeply into unhappiness. After a hunt, we may at least be well-fed.

Pascal, Hunting over Poetry I

One hundred and forty years before Jeremy Bentham declared that “push-pin is as good as poetry,” Blaise Pascal was intrigued by those who preferred hunting to poetry (324). For both, the question concerned “what will make us happy?” Tetris and Halo have supplanted push-pin. But hunting and poetry still survive to pledge and promise.

When Pascal writes of hunting, he refers to boars and hares as the game with dogs and horses included among the means and royalty playing the part of the hunters. Hunting, as with Plato, is a group activity chasing quick, elusive game; the location, the means, and the actors have all changed.

Pascal claims that hunting and philosophy (and perhaps poetry too) share the same goal – happiness – but they differ radically in the means employed.

Hunting pursues happiness through diversion. Humans suffer from boredom and from the fright of facing into their own condition. “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber” (139). Of course, the inability also arises from the unhappiness. So, the hunter leaves his room and goes out to hunt. It gets him out of his room, and it will make him happy.

But what, exactly about the hunt makes the hunter happy? Here, Pascal believes, both the hunters and anti-hunters make a mistake. The hunter thinks that getting possession of a hare will make him happy. The anti-hunter (“those who philosophize on the matter”) cannot see why the scrawny, mangy hare, which the hunter “would not take as a gift” could possibly be worth spending a day hunting. Neither know that “it is the chase, and not the quarry, which they seek.” The chase has the capacity to distract us from ourselves.

“Whence comes it that this man, who lost his only son a few months ago, or who this morning was in such trouble through being distressed by lawsuits and quarrels, now no longer thinks of them? Do not wonder; he is quite taken up in looking out for the boar which his dogs have been hunting so hotly for the last six hours. He requires nothing more…. Without amusement there is no joy; with amusement there is no sadness.”

Plato on Hunting II

Does the analogy still hold between hunting and philosophy?

Plato's image of hunting strikes us as strange today. Our methods have changed. And natural selection would work against hunters who tote guns and form a tight ring around a thicket. So, we don’t run deer off cliffs or into an ambush; we sit in tree-stands drinking coffee and hope for one to walk by. We don’t shoot at moving targets; we devise ways to get deer to stop so that we can get our gadgets set and line up our sights. And for all intents and purposes, we hunt, or rather, each one hunts alone.

Our practices are determined more by our technologies than by the nature and habitat of our quarry or by our own skills. Those with means can even purchase a “hunt,” that is, pay to have themselves inserted in a locale where they have spent no time, to harvest game whose patterns they have not studied, with equipment built and adjusted by people they do not know.

By many measures our practices appear to be progress. Have you ever tried to chase a deer through a thicket while carrying a bow in one hand and a quiver full or arrows strapped to your back? But perhaps the activities have become so dissimilar that the change marks not progress but an equivocation in the word “hunt.”

This image of hunting, so dissimilar from the one employed by Socrates, may, nevertheless, still provide an analogue for the activity of philosophizing. For most of us in modern universities it is all we have ever known. We sit alone in offices drinking coffee and hope for a concept to float by.

Plato on Hunting I

Philosophers are hunters after true concepts. Socrates employs this image of himself and Glaucon while tracking the concept of justice in The Politea.[1]

S: Now then Gaucon, we must post ourselves like a ring of hunters around a thicket, with very alert minds, so that justice does not escape us by evaporating before us. It is evident that it must be there somewhere. Look out then and do your best to get a glimpse of it before me and drive it toward me.
G: I only wish I could! It will be enough if I can see what you point out as you guide me.
S: Come on, then, I’ll encourage you!
G: That I will, provided that you lead me.
S: Very well, but, by heaven! Look how obstructed and overgrown the woods are. What a dark and hard-to-see place! But there’s nothing to do but go forward.
G: Let’s go then!
S: By the devil! I think we have a track, and I don’t think it will escape us now.

Here we have hunting as a communal activity in search of quick, elusive game probably with the use of nets. And so the analogy to philosophy works -- if philosophy is a communal activity among friends chasing close-by concepts.

[1] Politea, 432 b. Translation from Jose Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting. Wilderness Adventures Press, 2007, p. 139.

Getting Started

Do a series of small steps eventually get you to the top of a mountain?
Do a series of small breaths add up so that you could go for a whole day without breathing?
Will a series of incoherent thoughts add up to something that appears coherent as a whole?
When does an argument from composition become a fallacy -- in this case, wishful thinking?
That is my experiment.
To write a paragraph or two...
with some regularity.

My topic: Hunting. Hunting is currently out of season. Not only in that I write in the month of March rather than October. Hunting is always out of season in Chicago and in urban modernity.