525
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_56
Chapter 56
A Situational Animal Rights Ethic
56.1 Between Haiti and Socotra
Albert Camus’ conception of Kafka’s body of work scrupulously avoids committing the ultimate folly—certainty, when he writes of Kafka’s “secret,” namely, “perpetual oscillations between the natural and the extraordinary, the individual and the
universal, the tragic and the everyday, the absurd and the logical.”
1
There is, in this
evasive play on language, underscoring an enormous difficulty with which Camus’
short life grappled, that flippant side of Giorgio Vasari describing Leonardo as a
man—“omo senza lettere”—who “set himself to learn many things, only to abandon them almost immediately.”
2
A faint echo of Kurt Vonnegut concluding his A
Man Without a Country by conveying a friend’s recommendation—“Look at a million pictures [so as to] never be mistaken” to Vonnegut’s own daughter, a painter,
who imagines aloud that she “could rollerskate through the Louvre, saying, ‘Yes,
no, no, yes, no, yes’ and so on.”
3
All of these conjurations—Camus, Kafka,
Leonardo, Vonnegut, the Louvre—coexist in parallel, within a powerful meditation
by Rebecca Solnit on what we know, what other animals know, what we don’t know,
and what it means to be lost, to disappear forever
4
(Fig. 56.1).
In these equations of compulsion and restlessness, knowledge conceding its
emptiness, we posit two specific individuals, our universal situation: the hermits of
Socotra and Haiti, approximately half-way around the world from one another, each
condemned to a state of affairs in which all ethics are situational; every form of
1 From Camus’ The Myth Of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Translated from the French by Justin
O’Brien, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1955, p. 126.
2 See Leonardo And The Mona Lisa Story – The History Of A Painting Told In Pictures, by Donald
Sassoon, An Overlook Duckworth/Madison Press Book, New York and Woodstock, NY, 2006,
p. 27.
3 A Man without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut Edited by Daniel Simon, Seven Stories Press, New York,
2005, p. 145.
4 A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit, Viking Publishing, New York, 2005, p. 187.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_56
Chapter 56
A Situational Animal Rights Ethic
56.1 Between Haiti and Socotra
Albert Camus’ conception of Kafka’s body of work scrupulously avoids committing the ultimate folly—certainty, when he writes of Kafka’s “secret,” namely, “perpetual oscillations between the natural and the extraordinary, the individual and the
universal, the tragic and the everyday, the absurd and the logical.”
1
There is, in this
evasive play on language, underscoring an enormous difficulty with which Camus’
short life grappled, that flippant side of Giorgio Vasari describing Leonardo as a
man—“omo senza lettere”—who “set himself to learn many things, only to abandon them almost immediately.”
2
A faint echo of Kurt Vonnegut concluding his A
Man Without a Country by conveying a friend’s recommendation—“Look at a million pictures [so as to] never be mistaken” to Vonnegut’s own daughter, a painter,
who imagines aloud that she “could rollerskate through the Louvre, saying, ‘Yes,
no, no, yes, no, yes’ and so on.”
3
All of these conjurations—Camus, Kafka,
Leonardo, Vonnegut, the Louvre—coexist in parallel, within a powerful meditation
by Rebecca Solnit on what we know, what other animals know, what we don’t know,
and what it means to be lost, to disappear forever
4
(Fig. 56.1).
In these equations of compulsion and restlessness, knowledge conceding its
emptiness, we posit two specific individuals, our universal situation: the hermits of
Socotra and Haiti, approximately half-way around the world from one another, each
condemned to a state of affairs in which all ethics are situational; every form of
1 From Camus’ The Myth Of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Translated from the French by Justin
O’Brien, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1955, p. 126.
2 See Leonardo And The Mona Lisa Story – The History Of A Painting Told In Pictures, by Donald
Sassoon, An Overlook Duckworth/Madison Press Book, New York and Woodstock, NY, 2006,
p. 27.
3 A Man without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut Edited by Daniel Simon, Seven Stories Press, New York,
2005, p. 145.
4 A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit, Viking Publishing, New York, 2005, p. 187.