You never know where thoughts will go. This post started with the image of a moose running through a clothes line…
These two related sets of facts, those concerning our vulnerabilities and afflictions and those concerning the extent of our dependence on particular others are so evidently of singular importance that it might seem that no account of the human condition whose authors hoped to achieve credibility could avoid giving them a central place. … Some of the facts of human limitation and of our consequent need of cooperation with others are more generally acknowl-edged, but for the most part only then to be put on one side. And when the ill, the injured and the otherwise disabled are presented in the pages of moral philosophy books, it is almost always exclusively as possible subjects of benevolence by moral agents who are themselves presented as though they were continuously rational, healthy and untroubled. So we are invited, when we do think of disability, to think of “the disabled” as “them,” as other than “us,” as a separate class, not as ourselves as we have been, sometimes are now and may well be in the future.
I’ll keep spelunking around from time to time in the shadows and bowels of what we call “philosophy,” but there’s good reason why most people — most people who love wisdom — never need to go there.
Here are two poems from just this morning.
“Clerks” by Edwin Arlington Robinson:
I did not think that I should find them there
When I came back again; but there they stood,
As in the days they dreamed of when young blood
Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.
Be sure, they met me with an ancient air,—
And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhood
About them; but the men were just as good,
And just as human as they ever were.And you that ache so much to be sublime,
And you that feed yourselves with your descent,
What comes of all your visions and your fears?
Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.
Those three utterly human lines especially: “And you that ache so much to be sublime, / And you that feed yourselves with your descent, / What comes of all your visions and your fears?”
“Spooked Moose” by Douglas Woody Woodsum:
Like a real bull in a bullfight, the full-grown moose
Lowered his head and ripped through my neighbor’s laundry, pinned
To the line from the house corner to the apple tree.And like a bride with a twenty-foot train, it dragged the line
And the clothes across my neighbor’s lawn, leaving a wake
Of clothespins, jeans, tee shirts, and boxer shorts every few yards.Then, like a moose in a panic because it has rope
And clothing tangled about its horns and more rope and clothes flapping
About its torso and rear legs, very like such a moose,It lowered its head again and charged through the old barbed wire
Pasture fence, snapping the rotten fenceposts off at ground level,
Dragging and, finally, snapping, the rusty wires of a forgotten farm.And then like a fearful beast learning fear for the first time,
It picked up speed as a bedsheet flopped onto its face
and three or four dragging fenceposts barked its rear ankles and shins.It tripped and fell breaking through the fence again on the far
Side of the field, but struggled up once more to crash
Into the undergrowth and disappear amid the trees.Lastly, like stunned townspeople in the wake of a twister,
My neighbor and I picked up the strewn pieces of clothing
As we followed tracks, like post-holes, into the dented woods.
That poem manages to be utterly human-in-the-world, funny if read in a certain way, and, if read another way, one of the saddest poems I have ever read.
Keep in mind that MacIntyre in Dependent Rational Animals is addressing two questions: Why is it important for us to attend to and to understand what human beings have in common with members of other intelligent animals species? And, What makes attention to human vulnerability and disability important for moral philosophers?
And this is as good a place as any for another thought, one that risks condescension and could certainly be overstated, but is nonetheless generally true. I know and have known many people who spend a lot of time, even most of their time, taking care of people with disabilities, and doing so largely unnoticed. Most of them care not a lick for philosophy or for poetry. Often, they like books I think should never have been written and TV shows I think should never have aired. I rarely agree with their politics or religion or “philosophy.” But I like their stories and admire what they do and who they are.
This is just an observation, one that keeps the world simultaneously bigger and more inclusive. There is no them, only us.
Speaking of philosophers who treat our rationality as “somehow independent of our animality,” MacIntyre says, “We become in consequence forgetful of our bodies and how our thinking is the thinking of one species of animal.” But more importantly, as St. Paul wrote long ago, we become forgetful of those members of our human body who have been doing this neglected work all along.
Not that the question about how to get philosophers to self-correct is unimportant, but the people on the ground rarely suffer from the delusions of “rational” philosophers. The more important, and perennial, question is about how we can get more of us to recognize and remember the people we pass on the street — or used to pass on the street, that is — every day.
It’s possible, even likely, that these are not separate questions. But that philosophers owe something to these folks and to those they take care of — these members of the body — this cannot be overstated.