Vegetarian Philosophers Quotes

The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?

As per the law of karma, that which is your meat today, this dear beloved animal will make mincemeat of you tomorrow. In another birth.

Avital Ronell – a committed vegetarian – relates that one day, at a dinner with Chantal and René Major, she let one dish go by without taking a helping, which caused a certain embarrassment. When she said she had perfectly decent philosophical reasons for not eating meat, Derrida turned to ask her what they were. So Avital told him what it meant to her to incorporate the body of the other. Shortly afterwards, Derrida, who was extraordinarily receptive to this kind of thing, started to speak of carnophallogocentrism rather than phallogocentrism. Later on, with me and in front of me, he said he was a vegetarian. But one day, someone told me he had eaten a steak tartare, as carnivorous a kind of food as you can get. For me, it was as if he had betrayed me. When I spoke to him about it, he initially said I was behaving like a cop. Then he said, neatly: ‘I’m a vegetarian who sometimes eats meat.

The plea for ethical veganism, which rejects the treatment of birds and other animals as a food source or other commodity, is sometimes mistaken as a plea for dietary purity and elitism, as if formalistic food exercises and barren piety were the point of the desire to get the slaughterhouse out of one’s kitchen and one’s system. Abstractions such as 'vegetarianism' and 'veganism' mask the experiential and philosophical roots of a plant-based diet. They make the realities of 'food' animal production and consumption seem abstract and trivial, mere matters of ideological preference and consequence, or of individual taste, like selecting a shirt, or hair color. However, the decision that has led millions of people to stop eating other animals is not rooted in arid adherence to diet or dogma, but in the desire to eliminate the kinds of experiences that using animals for food confers upon beings with feelings. The philosophic vegetarian believes with Isaac Bashevis Singer that even if God or Nature sides with the killers, one is obliged to protest. The human commitment to harmony, justice, peace, and love is ironic as long as we continue to support the suffering and shame of the slaughterhouse and its satellite operations. Vegetarians do not eat animals, but, according to the traditional use of the term, they may choose to consume dairy products and eggs, in which case they are called lacto-ovo (milk and egg) vegetarians. In reality, the distinction between meat on the one hand and dairy products and eggs on the other is moot, as the production of milk and eggs involves as much cruelty and killing as meat production does: surplus cockerels and calves, as well as spent hens and cows, have been slaughtered, bludgeoned, drowned, ditched, and buried alive through the ages. Spent commercial dairy cows and laying hens endure agonizing days of pre-slaughter starvation and long trips to the slaughterhouse because of their low market value.

Heresy, in these remote days, always springs from a Jewish or Mosaic root. The false teachers are always teachers of the Law, advocating the Sabbath, circumcision, and other rites. But they do not teach only the Law, and are not to be confounded with the good scribes of Jerusalem, and their Pharisee disciples, absorbed in the canonical Law and its commentaries. They are real theologians, who taking advantage of the comparative indifference of their co-religionists to all but the worship of the Law, devote themselves to doctrinal speculation. And they did not stop there. To the already sufficiently minute observances of the Mosaic Law they added a very definite asceticism, celibacy, vegetarianism, and abstinence from wine. Those amongst them who accepted Christianity, combined with the new doctrines of the Gospel their "Jewish fables," and tried to impose them, together with their austere rule of life, upon new converts. They were, in fact, Judaizing gnostics, who in the primitive churches heralded the inroads of philosophic Gnosticism.

Killing or eating animals is an act of beasts. Stirs within the devil. Sorry. It spurs evil. Thus is truth - at least the metaphysical.

If carnivory was indeed the catalyst for the evolution of sharing, it is hard to escape the conclusion that human morality is steeped in animal blood. When we give money to begging strangers, ship food to starving people, or vote for measures that benefit the poor, we follow impulses shaped since the time our ancestors began to cluster around meat possessors. At the center of the original circle we find aprize hard to get but desired by many, a situation that remains essentially unchanged. In the course of human evolution and history, this small, sympathetic circle grew steadily to encompass all of humanity— if not in practice then at least in principle. Some philosophers, such as Peter Singer in The Expanding Circle, even feel that all creatures under the sun deserve to be included, and that animals should therefore never be used for research, entertainment, or human consumption. Given the circle's proposed origin, it is profoundly ironic that its expansion should culminate in a plea for vegetarianism.

We are learning to get rid of these 'anthropocentric' delusions, which, as has been pointed out by Mr E. P. Evans, 'treat man as being essentially different and inseparably apart from all other sentient creatures, to which he is bound by no ties of mental affinity or moral obligation'; whereas, in fact, 'man is as truly a part and product of Nature as any other animal, and this attempt to set him up as an isolated point outside of it is philosophically false and morally pernicious'.

Like the Pythagoreans, Empedocles was a vegetarian. The sage was as much concerned for the welfare of animals as he was for that of his fellow human beings. He wrote of a time “when all animals were tame and the flame of friendship between us and all other creatures burned brightly.” He spoke of eating flesh as “pure cruelty,” a crime tantamount to cannibalism because animals are our kin. He ardently denounced animal sacrifices, writing of an idyllic time “when people didn’t worship Ares or Zeus or Poseidon, but instead honored the Great Goddess. They propitiated her with beautiful paintings and figurines, fragrant oils and incense, and libations of liquid honey. In those days altars weren’t drenched with the blood of murdered animals!

2008 interview with Labor Party member and political philosopher Yuli Tamir, the Minister of Education in the Kadima-Labor government and founder of Peace Now, was fairly typical. Asked her opinion on the wall and on Jewish-only roads in the West Bank, Tamir replied: “There are processes which have been institutionalized, like road 443 [for Jews only].34 And I have always supported a wall. When our citizens are killed in terror operations, I am not a vegetarian. This is not the role of the Left. It [the left] should be activist in regards to the comprehensive solution and the unnecessary attacks on innocent civilians.”35