Kristine Kosgaard, at The Point, trying to get on a little negative capability with the animals:
John Stuart Mill famously claimed that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Mill believed this because he held that human beings have access to what he called “higher pleasures”—for instance, the pleasures of poetry. But for whom is it better? Would it be better for the pig if he were Socrates? Temple Grandin, in her book Animals Make Us Human, reports that there is nothing pigs love more than rooting around in straw. Poetry is not good for a pig, so it is not something valuable that is missing from the pig’s life, something he would get access to if he were changed into Socrates, any more than rooting around in straw is something valuable that is missing from your life, something you would get access to if you were changed into a pig. But isn’t poetry a higher pleasure than rooting around in straw? If what makes a pleasure “higher” is, as Kant and others have suggested, that it cultivates our capacity for even deeper and greater pleasures of the very same kind, then we must have that capacity before the pleasure can be judged a higher one for us. Since the pig lacks that capacity, poetry is not a higher pleasure for a pig. Of course, we might try the argument that, so far as we can tell, none of the pig’s pleasures are “higher” in this sense. But then perhaps it is only for us jaded human beings that the lower pleasures seem to grow stale. So long as the straw itself is fresh, pigs apparently never lose their enthusiasm for rooting around in straw.
The world would be a different place if poetry were considered a lower pleasure, which it is. Only those who don’t read poems would think that poems refine, as in finish, us, rather than undo us, as in preserve our becoming in the unfinished state of the world.