Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination: An Interview with the Author
Vienna Animal Studies- 23 hours ago
- 8 min read
Carlo Salzani, VAS member and animal ethicist, recently published Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination. We caught up with him to find out more about this open access book and his motivations for writing it.
What motivated you to write Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination?
The questions and ideas I analyze in the book have been with me for a long time, at least since I read J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals in the early 2000s. Although I have focused on many other things over the years, I kept returning to that text because the questions it raises – and the way it raises them – defy easy and conclusive answers, and keep coming back to unsettle our (or at least my) convictions and certainties in ethics, and especially animal ethics. I’ve been reading works on moral philosophy and animal ethics for a long time, but Coetzee’s book provided me, in a sense, with a critical framework that conditioned and shaped my readings and reflections – and thus also constitutes the “frame” of the book.
This “critical” framework is the conviction that imagination and emotions play a central and constitutive role in our ethical lives, which most moral theories dismiss or diminish, but which should instead be emphasized and analyzed.
The “material” conditions that led me to write the book, however, are absolutely contingent: when I moved to Vienna in 2018 and met Herwig Grimm, we started talking about Coetzee’s book (Herwig is also a big fan), and he spurred me on to organize my ideas into a research proposal, which was eventually funded by the Austrian Research Fund so that I could devote three years to developing it. The book is the material result of those three years of research, but also – and especially – of the long time I spent thinking about Coetzee's idiosyncratic and inspiring work.
What is the key message you hope readers will take with them after reading your book?
If there is a message in the book, it is that we must constantly push against what we – our culture, our society, our personal experience – perceive as the limits of the imaginable. What we can imagine depends on a number of factors and parameters, some of which can be revised and redefined, so imagination is a constant work of pushing against its own limits. This is particularly important in animal ethics, which seeks to redefine (to reimagine) the way we see, conceive, and treat nonhuman animals. For reasons I explain in the book, the role of imagination has been downplayed in traditional animal ethics, so the message of the book, if you will, is that we need to reassess, reevaluate, and redefine our imaginative power in our moral lives in general and in our treatment of nonhuman animals in particular.
The subtitle of your book talks about “the limits of imagination” what do you mean by that? And why is it important to consider?
The debate about imagination in ethics focuses on its limits, and can be exemplified (as I do in the book) by the two extremes of Thomas Nagel and Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals: whereas Nagel believes that imagination is extremely limited by its dependence on our experience, Costello believes that it is “unbound” and can encompass even lives and experiences extremely different and distant from our own. Both positions are extreme and exaggerated (deliberately so in Coetzee’s case), so the real question is what are the real limits of what we can imagine (which is, of course, an ongoing and never-ending work).
In this sense, I understand “limits” not negatively, as mere limitations and inadequacies, but positively, as conditions of possibility. The book therefore explores (some of) these limits in various philosophical and moral theories.
Incidentally, “The Limits of Imagination” was the original title of the book (as it was of the research project), but the publisher wanted a clearer reference to the main themes and keywords in the title, so “The Limits of Imagination” was moved to the subtitle. It remains, however, the overarching focus of the book.
A bat is on the cover of your book and the introduction is filled with references to literary and philosophical uses of bats. Why do you think bats capture the imagination so? And is this just a matter that bats are “good to think with” or do you think their lifeworlds and experiences are taken seriously in literature and philosophy?
The bat is the paradigmatic (or perhaps even totemic?) animal in the book because of Thomas Nagel’s famous 1974 essay “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” and Elizabeth Costello’s scathing critique of Nagel's position. The Nagel-Costello (imagined) debate provides the framework for the book, so I keep coming back to bats and the way we imagine them. The point of Nagel’s essay is that we will never be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat for a bat, because bats use echolocation (sonar) to move and hunt at night, and we don’t have that sensory apparatus, so we can’t understand them (or “what it is like” to be them). Bats, however, are seen and “framed” – that is, imagined – as extremely alien creatures for many other reasons that have little to do with scientific knowledge of their sensory apparatus and their difference from humans, but instead are conditioned by many other cultural, social, and personal factors. In this sense, the bat is the paradigmatic animal for an investigation into the limits of imagination and the imaginable, and in particular the way we imagine non-human animals.
For the cover of the book, I chose the image of a Mexican long-tongued bat (Choeronycteris mexicana) feeding on an agave flower precisely because it breaks with the traditional representation of bats. Bats are usually depicted (for example, on the cover of the fiftieth-anniversary reissue of Nagel’s essay in 2024) baring their fangs in a pose that we perceive as uncanny, alien, and threatening (it is instead merely the defensive posture of a frightened creature). Their extreme alienness, however, is more the result of the way we see and represent them than of any “objective” characteristics: dolphins also use echolocation to move and hunt, and also breathe air but leave it in the water, sleep with only half of their brain at a time, and must consciously control their breathing reflexes, so they’re even more distant from humans than bats, but we see and “frame” them as much less alien.
We love dolphins and dislike bats, and that’s how our imaginations work, with very important consequences for our ethical treatment of these creatures. This is why bats are so “good to think with,” as you say.
The work of many ethologists and bat conservationists in recent decades has tried to change the way we imagine bats (and especially the way we react to them), and has had some important results. However, our imaginations are still conditioned by centuries of misinterpretation and negative framing, so there’s still a long way to go.
Your book is broken into three sections. The first considers the limits if imagination, the next the limits of empathy, and the third the limits of anthropomorphism. Why is it important to discuss these three together? And what is the significance of thinking about limits?
The role of imagination in ethics is closely related to that of empathy and emotion (as opposed to a purely rational and rationalistic approach), and when we include nonhuman animals in the equation, this inevitably leads to a discussion of the role and meaning of anthropomorphism. From the beginning, I have seen these three issues as inextricably intertwined in animal ethics, and the division into three separate parts responds more to pragmatic needs than to real thematic distinctions. Of course, current debates about moral imagination, empathy, and anthropomorphism are extremely broad and articulate, so the book does not claim to provide a complete picture of any of these issues. That is why I have used Coetzee’s book as a framework: The Lives of Animals raises a number of questions that, for me, are fundamental to these debates, and has helped me to structure some possible explorations and responses – without claiming to be complete.
As I said earlier, the question of “limits” is the question of the conditions of possibility for the role of imagination, empathy, and anthropomorphism in our ethical treatment of nonhuman animals, which is what this book aims to explore. However, the term “limits” here is also a jibe at the (negative) limits of current debates on these issues. There are no stable and consensual definitions and theories of imagination, empathy, and anthropomorphism, and no consensual understanding of the role they play in animal ethics. Different theorists use these terms in different ways and with different meanings, so in the end it is very difficult (nay, impossible) to distill a positive theory and a positive and stable ethical position. In a sense, working on these issues has been very frustrating (but also very enriching), and the point for me has not been to choose one definition and one position and stick to it (as was suggested to me at one point), but rather to try to get a clearer picture of our moral life, especially in our relationship with the nonhuman world. As I said, the work of the imagination is an endless pushing against its own limits, including the limits of current debates.
What other books or journal articles should people interested in this topic read and why?
As I said, the debates on these issues are extremely broad, complex, and even convoluted, and the position one ultimately takes will depend on many more factors than just informed and rational analysis. It is therefore impossible to list the other works that people “should” read. In the book, however, I approach and analyze many different works pro and con imagination, empathy, and anthropomorphism in order to present a clear picture of these debates from which the reader should choose. I don’t choose a single and clear position (and that’s why the book has no conclusion, only an epilogue), but I obviously prefer some answers and conclusions over others (and I think you can clearly see my preferences), so if you want me to suggest some reading, I’d say “read the works that acknowledge and emphasize the complexity of our moral life by including discussions of imagination, empathy, and anthropomorphism.” I think imagination plays an important and constitutive role in ethics, so I’m definitely against the side of the pure and hardcore rationalists. As for empathy (and sympathy), I prefer the definition and understanding of the classical phenomenologists, which has been taken up in animal ethics in recent decades by some ecofeminists and care ethicists.
I don’t reject anthropomorphism, and I believe that some critical and conscious “uses” of it can even play a positive role in dismantling the fortress of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. But my goal with this book is not to prescribe solutions and draw definitive lines, but to suggest that we continue to search imaginatively for new solutions and to push critically against established boundaries.
On the 11th of June Carlo will be speaking in the final talk of our Summer Lecture Series. In this talk, Carlo analyzes the early development of the modern zoo using Foucault's models of power as a theoretical grid and the Schönbrunn Zoo as an example. You can register to attend here.
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