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The Aesthetics of Animal Companions
Samantha Vice
Abstract
In the philosophical aesthetics literature, domestic animals, and in particular companion animals or pets, are notable for their absence. I examine the few available accounts of the aesthetics of animals, extend them to animal companions, and argue that they are lacking in important respects. An appropriate aesthetics of these animals should recognize their unique status as individual animals in human spaces, imbued with human meanings, and yet essentially other.
Key Words
bio art; companion animals; environmental aesthetics; functionalism; pedigree breeding; pets
Animals rarely appear in philosophical aesthetics, despite being an obvious and valued source of aesthetic pleasure. Even the growing literature on environmental aesthetics pays them little attention. The animals that are mentioned tend to be wild, and they are often treated as one kind of organic natural object amongst others. Domesticated animals are almost entirely absent, partly because of environmental aesthetic’s focus on wild nature, that is, land and objects that are as independent of human intervention and presence as possible. Animals that are welcome or tolerated in human spaces, and whose welfare is dependent on human intervention, are often considered inauthentic or diminished, barely animal at all. The unfortunate creatures bred for human consumption have a purely instrumental value and no chance to live an animal existence. Not simply animals, and yet not artifacts, domestic animals slip through the cracks.
I am interested in the uncertain status of domestic animals and its implications for a broader aesthetics of animals. My focus here is on our animal companions, those animals that live with us and with which we build relationships, as their status and lives are deeply tied to human life and meanings. Exploring them raises questions about the aesthetics of such hybrid objects, and of the presence of the nonhuman within human domestic space. I begin by considering the nature of our animal companions and their relation to humans, and in section 2 explore a variety of aesthetic approaches that could be applied to them. I argue that they all leave out something crucial, and in section 3 I offer a positive account of my own. My aim is to sketch a certain approach to the aesthetics of companion animals in the relative absence of existing theories, rather than to provide an exhaustive and detailed account.
1. Animals in the home
Many animals live alongside humans and in human spaces in more or less welcome and mutually beneficial relations. Those that are not welcome we call vermin. Others may be kept as pets, but could live independently in the wild, for example, cats, some species of fish, birds, and reptiles. Some, such as rodents, can be both pets and vermin. Animals such as cattle, goats and horses, reindeer and camels can live alongside humans, but are primarily kept for their usefulness, though some, such as horses, may become companions in a more substantial sense. These domesticated animals are important to the welfare and survival of humans, and their presence is deeply felt and celebrated.[1] In this paper, however, I concentrate on those paradigmatic examples of pets, cats and dogs, that are bred, acquired, and valued by humans in large part for their physical beauty. In developing an approach to the aesthetics of domesticate animals, it is appropriate to begin with them.
Two very different views of companion animals emerge from the literature. On the one hand, they are dismissed or treated with suspicion. Paul Shepard’s view, according to which they are “deficient animals,” is illustrative. They are, he says,
… monsters of the order invented by Frankenstein except that they are engineered to conform to our wishes, biological slaves who cringe and fawn or perform or whatever we wish. As embodiments of trust, dependence, companionship, esthetic [sic] beauty, vicarious power, innocence, or action by command, they are wholly unlike the wild world. In effect, they are organic machines conforming to our needs.[2]
Erica Fudge notes that according to this approach, pets are considered somehow “fraudulent because created by humans,” inferior imitations of their wild relations.[3] For John Berger, the life of a pet is demeaning and limited, and in the relation between animal and human the autonomy of both is lost: “the owner has become the-special-man-he-is-only-to-his-pet, and the animal has become dependent on its owner for every physical need.”[4] Yi-Fu Tuan’s influential discussion of pets as the recipient of human domination in the guise of affection is in the background of many such views.[5]
Complementing this picture of deficiency is a dismissive aesthetic view. The influential environmental philosopher, Holmes Rolston, argues that pets can never be “aesthetic substitutes” for wild animals.[6] The aesthetic value of wild animals lies in their unpredictable, “wild motion,” and a sighting is never guaranteed. In contrast, the motion of domestic or caged animals is tamed; the “surprise is gone.”[7] The assumption underlying these views is that only wild animals are truly animal. Pets are failed animals and have no positive substance of their own to compensate for their lack. They bring aesthetic disappointment, rather than delight.[8]
There is, however, another way of viewing companion animals, according to which their close relation with humans makes them animals of a different order, but no less authentically animal and no less valuable. It is noteworthy that they are the only animals kept and supported regardless of their usefulness, and invited into our homes, rather than tolerated or chased out. Taken further, we might consider that we adapt to them as much as they adapt to us. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka argue that they should have political rights of citizenship and be treated with the respect and care we offer to dependent and vulnerable human beings. They note that they are already residents in our world; “this is their home, they belong here.”[9] Despite their dependence on us, Keith Burgess-Jackson considers them to be “viable and contributing members of human culture,” again, as we consider dependent humans.[10] They are valuable in virtue of their unique position in human domestic spaces, not despite it. In this view, the humanization of these animals does not demean them, but gives them a unique status.
Many writers understand pets as “boundary breakers,” belonging both to nature and culture, participating in human practices as animals.[11] Edmund Leach calls pets “man-animals,” and Donna Haraway thinks of these “category deviants” as inhabiting “naturecultures.”[12] For David Redmalm, they are “liminal creatures,” both beast and human-like, leading a life “on the threshold between nature and culture,” which reminds us that the boundary is porous.[13] Redmalm is careful to remind us of the uncertain ethical status this liminality affords to pets —they are sometimes described as members of the family, are given names, and mourned when they die; they are also treated as replaceable commodities, routinely abused, and often killed at their humans’ whim.[14]
This appreciative literature is also careful to emphasize both the familiarity of these animals —that we can to some degree understand them in human terms—and their essential otherness—that they cannot be entirely encompassed by human meanings and remain animal. Their fundamental alterity should constrain our attitudes and practices and prevent demeaning and sentimental anthropomorphism, such as dressing them, feeding them inappropriate food, or infantilizing them. This sympathetic literature on companion animals does not, however, have much to say about aesthetics.
The discussion so far has moved between using the terms ‘pets’ and ‘animal companions.’ Celebratory analyses tend to prefer the latter term, which emphasizes mutuality and care. However, as Redmalm points out, in agreement with Yi-Fu Tuan, the term ‘pet’ also reminds us of their precarious ethical status: ‘pet’ connotes care, but also the domination of someone to whom the animal is subordinate and dependent.[15] In the rest of this paper, I will use ‘animal companion,’ as my concern is with our aesthetic appreciation of them (although, as we shall see, appreciation carries ethical significance). In the next section, I explore accounts of the aesthetics of animals and consider whether they are appropriate to our animal companions.
2. Aesthetic approaches to animals
Just as in the aesthetics of art, the aesthetics of natural objects makes use of the familiar distinction between formal and nonformal properties and appreciation. We may admire animals, as we may anything, in purely formal terms—that is, we may admire their shapes, lines, colors; the melodies of birdsong or the calls of animals; the way their parts contribute to a harmonious whole that is elegant, efficient, powerful, or striking. We need not have knowledge of their kind or breed, their functions or roles in ecosystems, or their history with humans; we can simply dwell on their surface perceptual properties. This is the kind of beauty that Kant called “free beauty,” and accounts for much of our aesthetic pleasure in animals, especially those we glimpse only fleetingly, like animals in the wild, birds, or fish.[16] I agree with Nick Zangwill, who argues that biological things can be beautiful in this way, independently of any knowledge or categorization of the kinds of (natural) things they are.[17] I grant that formal appreciation can be appropriate and rewarding and in the rest of the paper I explore further dimensions of our aesthetic engagement with animals.
The focus of much environmental aesthetics is, however, on nonformal appreciation, in which our assumptions, knowledge, and categorizations of animals affect our appreciation, for better or worse. We are, for instance, accustomed to seeing animals through moralizing and symbolic lenses, importing often human meanings to their surface properties, a process that takes us beyond a formalist approach. We admire animals for their cultural meanings: the eagle as a symbol of national pride; the dog of loyalty; the cat of independence.[18] We also perceive in them expressive qualities that are, properly, ours: the call of the wood dove is lovelorn or lonely, that of the owl spine-chilling.[19] The influential conservationist and ecologist, Aldo Leopold, situates animals both within a geological history and a metaphysical history shared with humans. He writes that cranes are “the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men. And so they live and have their being – these cranes – not in the constricted present, but in the wider reaches of evolutionary time.”[20] The animal poems of D.H. Lawrence and Douglas Livingstone similarly depict shared worlds of meaning. These examples suggest that not all imputations of meaning are problematically anthropocentric; as Ronald Hepburn pointed out, our engagement with nature can be more or less trivial or serious, depending on whether it “distorts, ignores, suppresses truth about its objects.”[21]
However, it is disturbingly easy to engage inappropriately with animals, on terms that are indeed distorting. According to John Ruskin, for instance, one aspect of animals’ beauty is the extent to which they express moral excellence or deficiency. He writes that we “esteem those most beautiful, whose functions are the most noble, whether as some, in mere energy, or as others, in moral honour: so that we look with hate on the foulness of the sloth, and the subtlety of the adder, and the rage of the hyaena; with the honour due to their earthly wisdom we invest the earnest ant and unwearied bee.”[22] G.W.F. Hegel, too, thinks we perceive human qualities in animals. However, their soul-life, “as what is inner and what gains expression in its outward shape, is poor, abstract, and worthless.”[23] While aspects of animal life are displayed to our perception, an animal’s soul is surmised rather than revealed; the inner “does not emerge into appearance as inner.”[24]
These examples show that much engagement with animals runs the risk of not treating them “on their own terms.”[25] Is there a better way of appreciating animals, which would avoid trivializing them and provide terms that are (closer to) their own? Ruskin and Hegel also explore another aspect of their beauty—their quick and energetic movement—that they call ‘vitality’ or ‘animation.’ However, this leads them to the counter-intuitive judgment that slow or sluggish animals are ugly. Hegel writes dismissively of the sloth that it “displeases because of its drowsy inactivity; it drags itself painfully along and its whole manner of life displays its incapacity for quick movement and activity.”[26] A more promising account is provided by Tom Greaves, who sees movement as the “perceptual basis of all aesthetic judgements of animals.”[27] Wild movement is “primarily open-ended, incomplete, lived or ‘wild’ sense-making in which the animal expressively responds to its environment.”[28] While he explores only wild animals, open-ended, expressive responsiveness to the environment is as apposite to our animal companions as to wild animals. Michael Lewis suggests another account that seems more faithful to animals. He argues that we respond with aesthetic pleasure to companion animals’ absolutely sincerity, which consists in their never concealing their desires, their dedication “to one thing, whether playful or serious, without the slightest distraction or doubt,” and their returning “to the object of… devotion again and again, without variation” or boredom.[29] In humans, we find such repetitive activities tedious or disgusting; in animals, they are charming.
Another approach to animal aesthetics promises a more objective and scientific account, receptive to the kinds of things that animals are. This requires us to appreciate natural objects under concepts that are independent of anthropocentric concerns. According to Malcolm Budd, attending to nature as nature is a minimal constraint for appropriate appreciation, and this requires identification of the aesthetically relevant features that an object has “in virtue of its being a natural item of a certain kind.”[30] At a minimum, we must perceive natural objects as natural (and artworks as artifacts). A more stringent approach is offered by Allen Carlson. Drawing on Kendall Walton’s influential work in the aesthetics of art, Carlson argues that appropriate aesthetic appreciation requires knowing something about the kind of object we are perceiving. In the case of nature, such knowledge is provided by the natural sciences, particularly biology and ecology. Without this, “we do not know how to appreciate [a natural object] appropriately and are likely to miss its aesthetic qualities and value,” he writes.[31] Science can therefore “both promote and enhance aesthetic appreciation of the natural world,” as it provides the criteria for assessing our aesthetic judgments as more or less appropriate.[32] For example, we must correctly categorize this animal as belonging to the Felidae family and as an apex predator. Natural aesthetics is, in Ronald Moore’s terms, “conceptualist,” and is concerned with what Kant called “dependent beauty.”[33]
In one of the few explicit conceptualist and scientifically grounded discussions of animal beauty in aesthetics, Carlson and Glenn Parsons reject formalist and symbolic accounts for not taking “the nature of animals to figure, in any significant way, in their aesthetic value.”[34] They then appeal to functional categories, arguing that the beauty of an animal “emerges” or “arises” from its fitness for function. They write of the cheetah that “virtually every visible feature or part” is “manifestly geared to” the end of moving swiftly: “its long legs bespeak a formidable stride, its non-retractable claws reveal its gripping and steering ability, its narrow body and small head bespeak an aerodynamic movement.”[35] Elsewhere, Parsons writes that “an animal is beautiful when its form appears suited to, or . . . displays a visible fitness for, its function.”[36] He notes that “it is not merely that the shape of the cheetah’s body is attractive, and also happens to be functional…. Rather, the shape of its body is attractive, in part, because it is functional.”[37] More strongly, Parsons and Carlson require that we also understand how a correctly categorized animal carries out its function, or how its parts contribute to its ability to do so.[38] Functionalism is usually presented as sufficient, but not necessary, for beauty, but it remains the standard approach to animals in environmental aesthetics.
The conceptualist literature concentrates on wild animals, however, and of the few explicit aesthetic accounts of companion animals I can find, most are concerned with the norms and processes of breeding, which combine functionalist approaches with an appreciation of formal beauty. Selective pedigree breeding produces and maintains distinctive sub-types of species, defined by appearance, ancestry, or behavior. Pedigree animals are bred to look a certain way, that is, to display particular formal features. For instance, according to the website of the American Kennel Club, the breed standard of the Irish setter includes the following features: “an active, aristocratic bird dog, rich red in color, substantial yet elegant in build,” with a gait that is “big, very lively, graceful and efficient.” The lines of this dog “so satisfy in overall balance that artists have termed it the most beautiful of all dogs,” and good specimens exhibit balance—each part “flows and fits smoothly into its neighboring parts without calling attention to itself.”[39] However, the formal standard is itself related to the original functional norms of the breed, so the features suitable to one breed may not be sought out in another. For example, the elegance of a greyhound is particular to its role as a hunter, as solidity and muscularity is to a mastiff’s role as a protector. In the world of pedigree breeding, therefore, what counts as a formally beautiful feature is dependent on categorizing an animal as a member of a distinctive breed, with distinctive functions that are specified in terms of their use to humans. Individuals are then evaluated as more of less good specimens of their kind.
This discussion of breed standards, however, reveals a problem for a functionalist account of animal companions. The worry is how to categorize domestic animals, for what counts as the correct categories is not clear.[40] Categorizing an Irish setter, poodle, or Chihuahua as belonging to the canidae family is obviously incomplete, as coyotes, wolves, and jackals belong there too. Scientific, taxonomic terms can place domestic animals in relation to their wild relatives and the details—for example, that dogs (canis lupus familiaris) are a distinct subspecies of the grey wolf (canis lupus) can provide helpful background about their evolutionary history and possibly their present behavior. However, is it essential to spaniels today that they were bred as gun dogs, or to poodles that they were bred to retrieve game from water? Is their proper function still to retrieve a hunter’s game? Most live in urban areas and will never hunt. It is therefore not clear what categories are appropriate for animal companions. This presents not just a difficulty for defining ‘function,’ about which there is disagreement in the philosophy of biology, but for thinking that functional categories are helpful here at all, apart from their vestigial presence in breed standards. Their original functions are no longer definitive of their nature nor their place in human lives; if we accept some kind of conceptualist constraint, functional categories are therefore not adequate for understanding their aesthetic appeal.
Conceptualism is useful in reminding us that the kind of object matters for aesthetic appreciation—I retain this commitment in what follows. As a particular version of conceptualism, functionalism urges us to appreciate animals in terms of their fitness, and independently of human meanings and interaction. I have doubts about the necessity and sufficiency of functionalist accounts of the beauty of animals, in general, but here I grant its plausibility as an account of wild animals.[41] However, it does not yet provide the resources to account for the kind of creatures our animal companions are. In some respects, they are our creations and are deeply embedded in the human world, and this needs to figure centrally in aesthetic accounts. One way of doing this attends to our interventions in their history.
If we focus on breeding, our animal companions seem in crucial respects to be products of our creation. Emily Anthes writes that we often treat animals “as raw material, mounds of clay that can be sculpted and shaped into whatever forms suited our own needs.”[42] The domestic dog is “our masterpiece,” and our breeding practices have made it “the most morphologically diverse species on Earth.”[43] Stephen Webb notes that the malleability of dogs is evidence of our intervention in the history of the animal. Dogs are more “amorphous” than cats, he writes, and they are largely “what we have made of them,” “the product of human attempts to exaggerate nature, to stretch it out of shape, to remold and reinvent.”[44] John Rossi concludes that the selection of companion animals is often predominately based on humans’ “aesthetic enjoyment.”[45] The welfare of pedigree animals is sacrificed for appearance, and they face a high risk of breed-associated diseases.
These human practices and needs can now be assisted by advances in biotechnology. Scientists have been genetically modifying mice for years in order to research and model human diseases and genes, but some of this research has also resulted in new kinds of living commodities. We can now buy genetically engineered ‘GloFish,’ zebrafish that have DNA from jellyfish, sea coral and sea anemones that causes them to glow in “electric shades of red, orange, green, blue, and purple.”[46] Less commercially, the practices of contemporary bio artists have resulted in works involving the manipulation of bacteria, proteins, genes, tissues cultures, and plants. One product is the transgenic rabbit, Alba, who glows with a green, fluorescent protein in UV light.[47] According to Alba’s co-creator, the bio artist Eduardo Kac, those who engage with new biotechnologies “openly defy premature obituaries of formal experimentation and innovation by literally working with living media – biomedia – and inventing ideas and forms impossible to produce until recently.”[48] To work with biomedia “is to manipulate life,” to transform living organisms or to create new kinds of life.[49] Perhaps bio art is merely an extension of the manipulation of living matter with which pedigree breeding has been concerned for hundreds of years. Humans are creative and will use whatever media is available; their living creations are yet more examples of the porous boundaries between nature and culture, artistic creation and natural object. According to this approach, we can think of animal companions as canvases for creativity in the way that bio artists think of biological materials. Here, “formal experimentation” and creative enjoyment are the motivations, rather than meeting the breed-specific norms of pedigree breeding. Both sets of practices assume that animals, and perhaps all of life, in the case of some bio artists, are appropriately the objects of human manipulation.
Assuming (optimistically) that their welfare is adequately considered, and therefore that the most immediate ethical concerns are dealt with, what is wrong with thinking of these animals as at least partly the creations of humans, or media for their creativity? The aesthetics of companion animals will then be akin to the aesthetics of artworks; they will be complex artifacts, the products of creative intentions and agency. Opposition to this approach could be dismissed as mere squeamishness, as some dismiss ethical concerns about the biotechnological manipulation of living entities for human needs, for instance, genetic engineering to enhance productivity and disease resistance, cloning, or transgenesis.[50] We have been manipulating animals through breeding for centuries; genetic engineering merely speeds up the process. We can explore this further by considering other aesthetic objects that seem to fall between categories, such as gardens, topiary, and land art.
Mateusz Salwa argues that gardens complicate the traditional dichotomy of aesthetics between “nature” and “artistic artifact.” They are neither simply our creation nor the result of the undirected processes of nature. Instead, he suggests that we think of humans and nature as “co-creators” of gardens, and of gardens as performances with human and natural participants.[51] Some of the aesthetically relevant characteristics that he notes of gardens may also characterize animals: For instance, they are “multisensorial”[52] and “dynamic objects,” that change “over the years, decades, seasons, according to the circular rhythm of biological processes regulating annual growth and decay, as well as according to the linear passage of time.”[53] Despite this, they are unpredictable, because nature “cannot be submitted to full control.”[54] Isis Brook and Emily Brady argue that topiary (the practice of shaping plants into ornamental shapes) shows “the synthesis of independent components, artificial and natural.”[55] Aesthetically good topiary allows us “to appreciate the tree and its own qualities” and works with nature’s forms; aesthetically bad instances trivialize it or impose inappropriate features.[56] In both these creative practices, humans are required to take the “good” of their natural, living materials into account, ensuring that their interests are met and their forms respected. Some interventions can be judged as trivial or inappropriate. In this, they resemble our relations with animals.
Environmental and land art also complicate the dichotomy of nature and art. These works are the result of both nature and a human creator; the site and natural materials are aspects of the works themselves, manipulated in more or less intrusive ways by the artist. One advantage of thinking of companion animals in these terms is that it allows us to consider whether certain human manipulations of nature are “aesthetic affronts” to their natural objects. Carlson explains that these offenses are aesthetic rather than moral, because they are “generated by the aesthetic qualities of the object” rather than by its moral, social, or ecological properties.[57] Exploring this, he argues that works that “assert their artifactuality over against nature” and are “impositions against nature” can be seen as affronts.[58]
These approaches are instructive in their openness to artworks that are the result of both natural processes and materials, and human intervention. Still, I remain dissatisfied with calling animals ‘artworks’ at all. Not all interventions in the appearance of animals will be affronts or would trivialize them—grooming that maintains an animal’s comfort and health is appropriate—but my exploration suggests that much selective pedigree breeding will be inappropriate and, more generally, that treating animals as sites of creative control will usually be an affront to nature and to the animal itself. There are two main reasons for this conclusion. First, people are not usually directly involved in the “creation” of their particular companion animal; most acquire these animals from breeders, shelters, or acquaintances. The humans with whom pets live are not generally their creators in the way gardeners are of their gardens. Second, and more fundamentally, we should recall the conceptualist commitment to engaging with natural objects as the kinds of things they are. Despite their historical relations to human beings, it is deeply counterintuitive to think of animals as artifacts, however central humans have been in their development. Animals are not objects; they are living creatures, with interests that are met but not set by humans. It is therefore aesthetically (and ethically) inappropriate to engage with animals as if they were objects, creative or not. While the particular morphology of an animal and its breed can be traced to human breeding practices, this does not make them our creative products—unless we want to say that our children, because they are a result of human breeding, are artifacts too. Artifacts are constructed or manipulated for the interests of humans, whether creative, prudential, or anything else, and would not exist except for the intervention and intentions of a particular person. Companion animals require the care of humans, but treating them as if they were artifacts, and therefore our possessions, is a distortion, not an expression, of the kinds of creatures they are and of appropriate relations to them. Perhaps some very basic forms of cellular life could be considered the artifacts of bio art, but not complex organisms, the growth and development of which escapes their origins, and which (in suitably nurturing environments) develop away from complete dependency relations with humans. It is no accident that ethical and aesthetic considerations are very close here; we should not aesthetically respond to animals as if they were artifacts, because that is not the “kind” of thing they are, and their “kind” grounds ethical consideration and treatment very different to that of artifacts.
Companion animals therefore present a further complication of aesthetic categories, already productively complicated by gardens, topiary, and land art. However, they complicate the dichotomy between “natural” and “human,” not between “natural” and “artifact.” While the role and presence of humans in the lives of many animals is aesthetically and ethically crucial, focussing on the history and success of human intervention in their lives risks treating them as tools to meet human interests, or as artifacts of human creation. Essential to our companion animals, ethically and aesthetically, are their autonomy, individuality, and particular subjectivity, as much as their relations to humans. In the final section, therefore, I sketch an account that attempts to take their distinctive status seriously.
3. Constructing an aesthetics of animal companions
An important first dimension of aesthetic appreciation of companion animals is in fact characteristic of many animals, in particular, mammals and birds, and perhaps some reptiles. We view them as individuals with a distinctive subjectivity and perspective on the world, not, as functionalism would say, as more or less fit specimens of their kind. Underlying these characteristics is that open-ended movement and responsiveness to the environment that Greaves explores. I call this complex aesthetic property ‘animation,’ which is expressed by their perceptual surfaces.[59] However, I have a less restrictive and moralized understanding of the term than Hegel and Ruskin do—sloths and reptiles may be experienced as animated as much as cats and dogs. While we perceive animation in most complex animals, our appreciation of companion animals’ distinctive subjectivity develops and deepens through our shared lives, and our proximity provide a good opportunity to appreciate their dynamic subjectivity and receptivity to our shared environment.
Our aesthetic appreciation of our animal companions in particular, however, includes further crucial and distinctive characteristics. First, as I have argued, while dependent on humans for their welfare or their distinctive morphology, they are not things in the way that intentionally created artworks or functional objects are. They are living, dynamic creatures, with interests that are defined both in relation to and independently of humans. Second, appreciating them appropriately requires the specification of their history and relations to humans, but they are neither exhausted nor demeaned by such terms. Haraway writes of dogs that they “are not a projection, nor the realization of an intention, nor the telos of anything. They are dogs; i.e., a species in obligatory, constitutive, historical, protean relationship with human beings.”[60] Wild animals have a beauty that arises partly from their independence from humans and from their offering a glimpse of a nonhuman world; the beauty of animal companions lies partly in their relation to humans. Beauty can be wild and domestic. A third crucial dimension of our aesthetic appreciation of these animals is that it is partial and personal. We admire the beauty of our particular animals; and our admiration is steeped in knowledge and affection. We notice particularities and subtle signs, and watch the animals change and mature, as we would the persons with whom we live. Our admiration is filtered through our mutual familiarity and history. They are far more than instantiations of their breed, even if we also admire them in this way; they are individuals, with a history we participate in. This aspect is missing from Lewis’s descriptions and analysis of animals’ charming sincerity.
Responding aesthetically to each animal as the creature it is requires appreciating it in virtue of these features. Functionalism requires us to admire particular individuals as instantiations of a type, whose beauty depends on the success of that instantiation. With companion animals, however, this is not adequate to them. If we accept a minimal conceptualism—that we must appreciate things aesthetically as the kinds of things they are—then companion animals must be appreciated as historical individuals, defined both in terms of and independently of the humans with whom they share a world. Appreciating their beauty will be similar to appreciating the beauty of particular persons we know and care for. We consider and admire both people and animals as embodied, historical subjectivities, the one a human, the other an animal, subjectivity.
Admiring them as the kinds of creatures they are requires a recognition of their familiarity and partial comprehensibility, but also of their ultimate otherness, as an individual and as an animal. To come to know and admire a companion animal is to know and admire an individual that is only partially comprehensible. And as with people, appreciation of beauty is a perceptual appreciation of familiarity and ultimate otherness; of their being more than we can fully comprehend. The individuality of people is partly constituted by this excess; in pets, the otherness of individuality is coupled with the otherness of another species. We can make sense of much of their behavior in the same psychological terms we use for ourselves. However, at some point, we meet up with their animality and our appreciation of them as individuals, both ethically and aesthetically, must always also be an appreciation of a nonhuman, animal subjectivity. This recognition seems to motivate Lewis’s account of animal beauty, according to which we respond with aesthetic pleasure to the sincerity of animals, so lacking in us.
There are many evocative descriptions of animal companions that capture both their otherness and their familiarity. Jacques Derrida’s description of his cat is well known: while a member of his household, there remains to her “a bottomlessness, at the same time innocent and cruel perhaps, perhaps sensitive and impassive, good and bad, uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal and secret.”[61] There is a similar recognition in Doris Lessing’s description of ‘black cat’: “When she sits straight, paws side by side, staring, or crouches, eyes half-masked, she is still, remote, withdrawn to some distant place inside herself.”[62] Even dogs, which can feel less alien than cats, retain an essential difference to us, “a difference that is both distant and intimate, drawing us out of ourselves and toward that which we can never fully know,” as Webb writes.[63] And moving beyond cats and dogs, Raimond Gaita, writing of his childhood pet cockatoo, reminds us of “the conditional closeness of a creature that spends only part of its time earthbound.”[64] On the one hand, he is a companion who accompanied him to school; on the other, “a being of a quite different and enviable kind, one who graced our lives with the gratuitous gift of his friendship.”[65]
In conclusion, I see an aesthetics of our animal companions as belonging in two camps. First, it is part of an environmental aesthetics that is receptive to mixed human/natural spaces and objects rather than only what is wild.[66] That is, it is receptive both to their being animals and their being embedded in human lives, and it unsettles obvious distinctions between “nature” and “culture” and “human” and “animal,” without reducing animals to being artifacts of our creation. More strongly, the exploration suggests that in living together, new forms of lives, meanings, and spaces are constructed together by different species. They are not simply the sum of the human and the animal, but of a qualitatively distinct kind. This has the implication, which I cannot explore here, that an aesthetics of companion animals is also a qualitatively unique kind of aesthetic experience, responsive to features that are constructed together.
Second, an aesthetics of companion animals belongs in an aesthetics of the everyday, as productively explored by Yuriko Saito and Thomas Leddy. Saito and Leddy differ in the emphasis they place on the “everydayness of the everyday.”[67] Leddy argues that aesthetic attention to everyday objects can take them “out of the ordinary,” allowing us to see them in new and revealing lights.[68] Saito argues that many everyday aesthetic experiences are noteworthy for their familiarity or unobtrusiveness.[69] Both kinds of experiences are possible and appropriate, but a position closer to Leddy’s is perhaps most appropriate for animal companions. My analysis has emphasized the irreducible individuality and otherness of these animals. Close aesthetic attention can reveal them to be aesthetically extraordinary or noteworthy in ways their familiarity often obscures. Aesthetic attention is therefore one way of defamiliarizing the mundane. An aesthetics of companion animals combines the familiar and the partial with a recognition of an extraordinary otherness, and insists that the humanized need not be an artifact of our creation.[70]
Samantha Vice
Samantha.Vice@wits.ac.za
Samantha Vice is a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and publishes widely in ethics and social philosophy, and more recently has been exploring environmental aesthetics. Her monograph on the aesthetics of animals, The Ethics of Animal Beauty, was published by Lexington Books in 2023.
Published on June 25, 2024.
Cite this article: Samantha Vice, “The Aesthetics of Animal Companions,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 22 (2024), accessed date.
End Notes
[1] See Samantha Vice, “Aesthetically Appreciating Animals: On The Abundant Herds,” Environmental Values, 32 (2023), 195-214, for a study of the aesthetic appreciation of the AmaZulu for their Nguni cattle in South Africa.
[2] Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996), p. 151.
[3] Erica Fudge, Pets (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), p. 24. She does not agree with this view.
[4] John Berger, About Looking (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 15. Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Becoming Animal,” in Animal Philosophy, eds. Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 89-90.
[5] Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984).
[6] Holmes Rolston, “Beauty and the Beast,” in Valuing Wildlife: Economic and Social Perspectives, ed. Daniel J. Decker and Gary R. Goff (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1987), p. 189.
[7] Ibid. Cf. Marta Tafalla, “The Aesthetic Appreciation of Animals in Zoological Parks,” Contemporary Aesthetics, 15 (2017).
[8] I borrow this phrase from Russell L. Quacchia, “Aesthetic Disappointment,” Contemporary Aesthetics, 18 (2020).
[9] Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 101.
[10] Keith Burgess-Jackson, “Doing Right by Our Animal Companions,” The Journal of Ethics, 2 (1998), 178.
[11] Fudge, Pets, p. 17.
[12] Edmund Leach, “Anthropological aspects of language: Animal categories and verbal abuse,” Anthrozoös, 2 (1989), 151-165; Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), pp. 4, 12.
[13] David Redmalm, “Pets as Holy Anomalies,” in Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, ed. Margo DeMello (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), p. 201.
[14] Ibid. Also see Redmalm, “To make pets live, and to let them die: The biopolitics of pet keeping,” in Death Matters: Cultural Sociology of Mortal Life, eds. T. Holmberg, A. Jonsson, and F. Palm (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 241-263; and essays in Animals in Person: Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Intimacies, John Knight, ed. (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005).
[15] Redmalm, “Pets as Holy Anomalies,” and Tuan, Dominance and Affection.
[16] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment [1790], trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), section 16.
[17] Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 116-8; and “Clouds of Illusion in the Aesthetics of Nature,” Philosophical Quarterly, 63 (2013), 576-96.
[18] Mark Sagoff, “On Preserving the Natural Environment,” The Yale Law Journal, 84 (1974), 205-67.
[19] Emily Brady, “Aesthetic Value and Wild Animals,” in Environmental Aesthetics: Crossing Divides and Breaking Ground, eds. M. Drenthen and J. Keulartz (Bronx, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 188-200.
[20] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, 1970), p. 103.
[21] Ronald Hepburn, “Trivial and Serious in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” in The Reach of the Aesthetic (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 69.
[22] John Ruskin, Modern Painters vol.2 [1883] (London: George Allen, 1906), p. 103.
[23] G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume 1 [1835], trans. T.M. Knox. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 132.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Yuriko Saito warns of this danger in our appreciation of nature generally: “Appreciating Nature on Its Own Terms,” in Nature, Aesthetics and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty, eds. Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
[26] Hegel, Aesthetics, pp. 130-1.
[27] Tom Greaves, “Movement, Wildness and Animal Aesthetics,” Environmental Values 28 (2019), 456.
[28] Ibid., 461.
[29] Michael Lewis, The Beautiful Animal: Sincerity, Charm, and the Fossilised Dialectic (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), p. 1.
[30] Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 17.
[31] Allen Carlson, “Nature and Positive Aesthetics,” in Nature, Aesthetics and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty, eds. Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott, p. 227. And see Patricia Matthews, “Scientific Knowledge and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature,” in the same collection. Carlson refers to Walton’s paper, “Categories of Art,” Philosophical Review 79 (1970), 334-67.
[32] Carlson, “Nature and Positive Aesthetics,” p. 227.
[33] Ronald Moore, Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008); Kant, Critique of Judgment, section 16.
[34] Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson, Functional Beauty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), p. 118.
[35] Ibid., p. 120.
[36] Parsons, “The Aesthetic Value of Animals,” Environmental Ethics, 29 (2007), 161.
[37] Ibid., 163-4; cf. Parsons and Carlson, Functional Beauty, pp. 120-1. And see Ned Hettinger, “Animal Beauty, Ethics, and Environmental Preservation,” Environmental Ethics 32 (2010), 115-134.
[38] Parsons and Carlson, Functional Beauty, pp. 93-4.
[39] https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/irish-setter/ (accessed 3/2/2024).
[40] Zangwill makes a similar point about the difficulty of categorizing animals, using the example of a leopard, in The Metaphysics of Beauty, p. 116, note 7.
[41] I develop a critique of functionalism in The Ethics of Animal Beauty (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023).
[42] Emily Anthes, “Beauteous Beasts,” Aeon, March 25, 2013, no page, https://aeon.co/essays/how-far-should-we-go-in-shaping-animals-for-aesthetic-pleasure (accessed 3/3/2024).
[43] Ibid.
[44] Stephen Webb, “Pet Theories: A Theology for the Dogs,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 78 (Summer 1995), 230.
[45] John Rossi, “Our Whimsy, Their Welfare: On the Ethics of Pedigree-Breeding,” in Pets and People: The Ethics of Our Relationships with Companion Animals, ed. Christine Overall (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 112.
[46] Anthes, “Beauteous Beasts.”
[47] See Eduardo Kac, “Life Transformation – Art Mutation,” in Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, ed. Eduardo Kac (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007); and Kac, “GPF Bunny,” first published in Eduardo Kac: Telepresence, Biotelematics, and Transgenic Art, eds Peter T. Dobrila, and Aleksandra Kostic (Maribor, Slovenia: Kibla, 2000). Available online, https://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny_essay.html (accessed 3/3/2024).
[48] Eduardo Kac, “Introduction: Art that Looks You in the Eye: Hybrids, Clones, Mutants, Synthetics, and Transgenics,” in Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, p. 3. Alba was created in collaboration with the French scientists, Louis-Marie Houdebine and Patrick Prunet, and the zoosystemician, Louis Bec.
[49] Ibid.
[50] See Michael Hauskeller, “Being Queasy about Reconstructing Animals,” Australasian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics, 7 (2005), 11- 21.
[51] Mateusz Salwa, “The Garden as Performance,” Estetika, 51 (2014), 42-61.
[52] Ibid., 47.
[53] Ibid., 51.
[54] Ibid., 47.
[55] Isis Brook and Emily Brady, “Topiary: Ethics and Aesthetics,” Ethics and the Environment, 8 (2003), 133.
[56] Ibid., 137.
[57] Allen Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 16 (1986), 637. Also see Emily Brady, “Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art,” Ethics, Place & Environment, 10 (2007), 287-300.
[58] Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?”, pp. 637-8.
[59] See Vice, The Ethics of Animal Beauty.
[60] Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, p. 12.
[61] Jacques Derrida (with David Wills), “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry, 28 (2002), 381.
[62] Doris Lessing, On Cats (London: Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 84.
[63] Webb, “Pet Theories,” p. 229. Webb speaks of animals generally here, but his focus in this paper is on dogs.
[64] Raimond Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 5.
[65] Ibid.
[66] See Emily Brady, “The Aesthetics of Agricultural Landscapes and the Relationship between Humans and Nature,” Ethics, Place and Environment, 9 (2006), 1-19.
[67] Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 50.
[68] Thomas Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Ontario and New York: Broadview Press, 2012), p. 112ff.
[69] Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, pp. 50-52.
[70] I am grateful for extremely helpful comments and suggestions from two reviewers for this journal.