Reflection
The novel by Coetzee is concerned with the basis of morals, the need for people to copy each other, and humans’ desire for what others wish to have as these result in aggression and a great tendency to scapegoat animals. The author calls for an ethic of empathy, not astuteness, in humans’ treatment of animals, and praises poems and literature rather than philosophy. Costello, Coetzee’s alter ego, convinces her listeners that empathy is mainly associated with the subject and not with the object. The audience of the lectures at Princeton University perhaps anticipated that Coetzee, a South African novelist, would issue some formal essays akin to the ones on censorship as he had earlier delivered. On the contrary, he chose to give the audience fiction: a theoretical account regarding an imaginary feminist author, Elizabeth Costello.
Coetzee’s narrative was about the lecturers that Costello reads at an imaginary Appleton College on the topic of animal rights. The two lectures of Costello, “The Poets and the Animals” and “The Philosophers and the Animals,” have a platonic form and are calmly reserved in approach. They both reflect the sometimes discordant exchanges in scholarly debate. Though Coetzee strongly supports Costello, he is cautious not to make her flawless since she is not just rigid and at times impolite, but also a radical in her antirationalism and infrequently jumbled thinker. The Appleton lecturers gain intellectual points from Costello even as she tries to convince her audience to treat animals in the best possible way.
Personal Formal Opinion
The first lecture by Costello starts fascinatingly with a comparison between the mistreatment of animals and the Holocaust. He shrewdly affirms that similar to the way in which the inhabitants who stayed near the death camps were aware of the prior occurrences but decided to turn a blind eye; it is ordinary practice nowadays for the reputable members of the community to pretend not to notice industries that result in injury or death to animals. When Costello questions the presupposition that animals do not make sense of things, I am left wondering whether they really possess reason. However, she later makes it clear in her second lecture where she implies that human beings may come to comprehend or mull over their way into the nature of animals via poetical imagery.
In the third planned event, which occurs as a debate, Costello highlights that compassion to animals has been more extensive than Thomas O’Hearne, an Appleton philosophy professor, implied. To underscore an instance of kindness to animals, Costello calls attention to keeping of pets, which is done across the world. On the same note, I am convinced that animals possess feelings and require connecting with their parents or other animals of their kind. Failure to take this necessity seriously may result in psychological harm to an animal. There is a need to care for animals because they enrich people’s lives. Animals can be friends to human beings when shown kindness and may even inspire their imagination. Be it a house pet, for instance, a cat, a domesticated animal such as a donkey, or a wild animal, for example, an owl or a rhinoceros, all animals require kindness from humanity. There is mutual gain in taking care of both pets and domesticated animals and respecting wild animals.