Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England.

Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England

Erica Fudge

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006

Ruminating on the totemic use of animals, Levi-Strauss somewhat benignly conceded that it is less a case of animals being good to eat (bon a manger) than good to "think" (bon a penser). (1) But it is also the case that a genealogy of Western culture's ongoing discourse on the animal, from Aristotle to Descartes to Heidegger, reveals the unsettling extent to which the animal has persisted as not "good to think" but rather as the bearer of absolute alterity, the traumatic limit of Western thought. Heidegger's 1929-30 Freiburg lectures on "theoretical" biology, as chilling as they are sophisticated, qualify as perhaps Western philosophy's worst offender against the animal. In these lectures, Heidegger asserts that the animal has no access to being as such; that animals have no relationship to consciousness or selfhood; and that animals, suffering what he terms "poverty-in-the-world," can perish but they cannot accede to (a human) death.

Erica Fudge's Brutal Reasoning, an admirable sequel to her Perceiving Animals: Human and Beasts in Early Modern English (2000), can enable us to comprehend the (often depressing) extent to which early modern discourses of reason anticipate Heidegger's contention that animals have no access to being as such. Perhaps the most notorious early modern example was the "beast-machine" hypothesis of Descartes' 1637 Discourse on the Method. In Fudge's paraphrase,

   Descartes seems to be arguing that animals can experience the world
   but that their experience is not a full one.... This incompleteness
   is because animals lack thought and, crucially, the self-awareness
   that allows humans to fully experience their experiences....
   Descartes's theory [his analogy between a clock and an animal],
   however, offered his readers something new. A clock does not "know"
   the time, it merely records it, and likewise, an animal did not
   "know" it lived, rather it merely lived. (157)

Descartes' hypothesis serves as an eerie early modern anticipation of Heidegger's modernist contention that only humans are capable of moving beyond the material world, capable of living beyond the present and possessing self-knowledge.

One haunting implication of Fudge's study is that had animals never existed, Western philosophy from antiquity to early modernity would have had to invent them. Drawing on a variety of texts, ranging from "high" philosophy to pragmatic training manuals, Fudge authoritatively demonstrates how the discourse of reason in early modern England virtually required the animal--that is, animal otherness--in order to define the human. This numbingly persistent early modern English turn to the animal to define the human (one might as well identify it as a topos) included such well-known names as Juan Luis Vives, George Gascoigne, Walter Raleigh, John Davies, Lodowick Bryskett, Joseph Hall, Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, and many others. But a paradox lurked within all these attempts to define human reason: the more they attempted to define the human, the more they inevitably relied upon the animal.

Among the many strengths of Fudge's study is its careful tracing of the paths through which early modern discourses of reason inherited an earlier philosophy's felt need to separate the animal and the human. She turns, for example, to Aristotle's foundational argument, in his De anima, that animals, dominated by the sensitive soul, lack reason, as well as to Seneca's philosophical assertion that although animals know what is good to eat, they do not know what constitutes a moral good. Fudge discusses how the early modern English discourse on reason also inherited medieval Christian philosophy's "othering" of the animal, such as Aquinas's disturbing argument that he who kills another's ox does indeed commit a sin--not, however, the sin of killing an ox, but rather the sin of inflicting loss of property on another human. Another major undercurrent of early modern English discourses of reason, according to Fudge, was the medieval bestiary tradition and its deployment of animals as mere symbols of human behavior (the sly fox, the valiant lion, etc.). These early modern discourses of reason inherited the bestiary tradition's parade of anthropomorphized animals that signified not the animal but rather the category of the human as its central focus. Fudge argues that early modern English theologians often stressed the moral responsibilities of humans toward animals. But, as was the case with Aquinas, the category of the human remained the primary object of interest. For these theologians, exhibiting kindness toward animals had less to do with the animal than with the twin virtues of serving both oneself and God.

But in early modern Europe, as Fudge patiently details, the more writers argued for the separation of the human and the animal, the more the two categories threatened to converge. In 1605, Pierre Le Loyer, to cite just one among her many examples, argued that dreaming is one of the defining aspects of human reason. But in 1607, Edward Topsell, early modern England's best known protozoologist, reported that dogs do, in fact, dream. Though perhaps merely dreaming of the hares they chased that day, sleeping dogs could nevertheless make use of the faculty of memory. In such a scheme, the argument for absolute animal difference (the need for the binary "reason/brute nature") began to erode the foundations of early modernity's long-standing conviction that only humans possess cognitive abilities.

As Fudge unfolds in intriguing detail, early modern England's simultaneous fascination with and dread of the potential for animal intelligence is no better evidenced than in the strange case of Morocco, the Intelligent Horse, documented anecdotally from 1590 to well into the seventeenth century. The most notorious "reasonable" animal in early modern England, a syllogizing Morocco was reportedly able, at his master Bankes's bidding, to pick out individual members of an audience, and to differentiate an honest woman from a whore. A voluble Morocco even reportedly discoursed with his owner about the hypocrisy of landlords. Though Morocco largely appealed to popular tastes hungry for public comic entertainment, the horse was disconcerting for those philosophically committed to the sovereignty of human intelligence. Ben Jonson sought to "solve" the problem of a thinking Morocco by arguing for the possibility that a human soul had entered the horse's body. Raleigh was far more pragmatic, claiming that Morocco was a product of mere training, thus restoring the comforting boundary between the animal and the human. As Fudge points out, such widely read horse-training manuals as Gervase Markham's 1607 The English Horsemen also had the effect of allaying anxieties about Morocco's intelligence. Though not a philosophical document, Markham's manual is thoroughly immersed in the discourse of reason as it explains how to use the whip and the rod--that is, how to inflict pain--to train a horse to count. Viewed through the lens of early modern training manuals, Morocco was not a "thinking" animal at all but rather the perfect picture of animal obedience, rightly restoring human dominion over the animal.

But certain strands of early modern discourses of reason did not rest so comfortably within the human/animal binary. As Fudge argues, to fully understand this unease, we must turn to the skepticism dominating certain schools of early modern philosophy. Revisiting antiquity, she focuses on the skepticism of the second century CE Sextus Empiricus whose Outline of Skepticism, published in Latin translation in 1562, exerted a major influence not only on the early modern transition from metaphysics (what we know) to epistemology (how we know what we know, and don't know), but also on the early modern need for a deeper understanding of animal being. Sextus, arguing that we cannot be sure that truth exists, called for "suspension of judgment" (118), a state of neither believing nor disbelieving. As Fudge summarizes, for Sextus reason, far from being the true marker of humanity, was merely a creation of humans for humans. In such a scheme, as she points out, pivotal for Sextus's skepticism was the category of the animal as the boundary, the limit case, of the human. Breaking ranks with prior discourses of reason, while at the same time countering critiques of a nonspeaking--hence, irrational--animal, Sextus claimed that it is not a case of animals failing to express themselves: rather, it is the human failure to comprehend them.

A knowledge of Sextus, Fudge argues, is perhaps the most useful background for understanding Plutarch's landmark thinking of animal being. Diverging widely from Aristotle, Plutarch's Moralia (translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1603) was an ambitious intervention into the discourse of reason, positing the notion of an ethical animal. Fudge closely reads the Moralia, particularly is emphasis on the animal soul and the potential for no longer excluding the animal from moral categories. As part of his attack on human reason, Plutarch argued that animals are not only reasonable but also, in fact, more virtuous than humans. Offering numerous anecdotes of animal wisdom, Plutarch asserted that animals are taught by nature: what they know, they have come to know naturally. And it is this natural reason, this status as self-taught and self-sufficient, that makes animals superior to humans. Fudge traces the influence of Plutarchanism in early modern England in such works as Thomas Wright's 1601 The Passions of the Minde and its claim that animals naturally know how to rear their young, unlike humans who must resort to domestic manuals on child rearing.

Montaigne's affective engagement with the animal is well documented in George Boas's 1933 The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century, focusing on Montaigne's "Of Cruelty" and its author's distress over animal suffering as marking a key turning point in the genealogy of animal discourse since antiquity. Fudge, however, goes beyond Boas who, she argues, failed to perceive the importance of skepticism in Montaigne's animal discourse. As Fudge emphasizes, Montaigne actually turns away from the self to the real animal, offering the animal--or, more specifically, the mutual obligation between animal and human--as a new category for ethics. She also pushes beyond the borders of Boas's France to England to stress the influence of a skeptical Plutarchanism in early modern English discourse on the animal. She points to, for example, John Maplet's 1567 A Greene Forest, or a naturall Historie, which, echoing Montaigne's pondering of ethics as a shared sentience between human and animal, argued that animals do, in fact, suffer grief and pain.

Fudge's genealogy of discourse on reason makes for a powerfully charged turn to Descartes' 1637 Discourse on the Method, whose aforementioned "beast-machine" hypothesis offered a new--and sinister--clarification of the difference between the human and the animal. For Descartes, animals, neither reasonable, unreasonable, nor potentially reasonable, are limited by an a priori lack of reason and self-consciousness. More like an automaton--a clock, even--Descartes' animal is a mechanical entity, locked in a dialectic of mere stimulus-response. In early modern England, as Fudge discloses, Descartes' hypothesis had its detractors--most notably, William Cavendish and Robert Boyle, who argued, like Maplet many decades earlier, that animals do experience pain and are sentient. But as Fudge also notes, William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood via animal vivisection serves as a landmark reminder of how persistently early modernity made use of cruelty to animals to produce "human" knowledge.

Fudge's Brutal Reasoning joins forces with, among other studies, Bruce Boehrer's 2002 Shakespeare Among the Animals and Gail Kern Paster's 2004 Humoring the Body as key efforts to foreground early modernity's "thinking" of animal being. The relevance of these studies for early modern scholars extends well beyond a narrowly specialized interest in animals. And Brutal Reasoning, in particular, deserves a place on the reading list of anyone working in the broader areas of early modern philosophy and theology, early modern discourses of the body, and histories of early modern science. Some fifteen years ago, Jacques Derrida, musing on what separates the animal from the human, confessed that "the discourse of animality remains for me a very old anxiety, a still lively suspicion." (2) The same wise, welcome reluctance to foreclose on the complexities of animal-human difference--and a concomitant insistence on savoring the discourse of animality as "a very old anxiety"--is likewise reflected in Fudge's Brutal Reasoning.

Notes

(1.) Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 21.

(2.) Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 11.