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

by Erica Fudge

Early modern English thinkers were fascinated by the subject of animal rationality, even before the appearance of Descartes's Discourse on the Method (1637) and its famous declaration of the automatism of animals. But as Erica Fudge relates in Brutal Reasoning , the discussions were not as straightforward―or as reflexively anthropocentric―as has been assumed. Surveying a wide range of texts-religious, philosophical, literary, even comic-Fudge explains the crucial role that reason played in conceptualizations of the human and the animal, as well as the distinctions between the two. Brutal Reasoning looks at the ways in which humans were conceptualized, at what being "human" meant, and at how humans could lose their humanity. It also takes up the questions of what made an animal an animal, why animals were studied in the early modern period, and at how people understood, and misunderstood, what they saw when they did look. From the influence of classical thinking on the human-animal divide and debates surrounding the rationality of women, children, and Native Americans to the frequent references in popular and pedagogical texts to Morocco the Intelligent Horse, Fudge gives a new and vital context to the human perception of animals in this period. At the same time, she challenges overly simplistic notions about early modern attitudes to animals and about the impact of those attitudes on modern culture.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5, 2006

About the author

Erica Fudge is Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. She is also Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University, London. Fudge was Director of Research for English, Creative Writing and Journalism there from 2011 to 2014. Her academic research focusses on historical human animal relations, with particular interest in the early modern period, and has written on the place and representation of animals in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; on philosophical debates about animal reason and concepts of animal interiority in the period; on animal things; and, on human livestock relations. She has also published on the implications of bringing animals in to historical research. As well as this academic work, Erica has written about human animal relations in historical and contemporary culture for a wider public in her books Animal and Pets, and in the magazine History Today. She is the Director of the British Animal Studies Network, the leading network for those inside and beyond academia who are working on, and with, animals which meets twice a year and is based at the University of Strathclyde.

Reviews

[Savannah]

I just finished reading this for a research paper on the violence of human-to-animal metamorphosis, and found it to be quite an exciting and compelling piece of scholarship. Fudge explores the role of the animal in constructing and disrupting early modern discourses of reason. She is primarily interested in the period leading up to Descarte’s mechanic beast, tracing shifting conceptions of the human from Aristotelian to Plutarchan to Skeptical, where animals persistently break down any stable notion of the rational soul. Her main point of contention, and the driving force behind the book, is the unproductive anachronistic approach to historiography evident in many investigations of the early modern period, which project the values of liberal humanism onto a pre-Cartesian context. This, she argues, has led to the effacement of the very real presence of animals not only in philosophical thought, but also in the experiences of everyday life, where we might locate the greatest challenge to the idea of the unreasonable animal.

The one thing I will take away from this book, which I feel is particularly relevant to early modern visual culture and for rethinking the process of representation, is the interplay between animal as symbol and animal as animal, and the fundamental instability located there. I would be interested to see if there is any discernible shift in images of human-to-animal metamorphosis with the development of Cartesian thought. And as a Renaissance gal writing a dissertation on portraiture of all things, where it’s all about the self, Fudge’s statement that to think about the human is to think about the animal really hit home. Needless to say I will be taking another look at Della Porta’s physiognomic material quite soon.

But beyond academic pursuits, I am also deeply invested in contemporary ethical discussions surrounding animal welfare. In fact, I would say that my own relationship to animals is the one thing that has shaped my life most profoundly. So I was completely fascinated by the historical dimensions of our perception of animals, and how deeply early modern discourses continue to inform our values today, perpetuating the objectification of those beings that play such an important role in shaping our culture and producing meaning. The need to look critically at the place of animals in our own society is becoming increasingly imperative--I can't stress that enough--and I think interrogating our assumptions and legitimations through the lens of history would be immensely beneficial.

So I give Brutal Reasoning four stars, only because I wish she had at least touched on the animal in visual culture, and perhaps expanded on her discussion of gender.

[17CECO · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sturdy study that shades in how animals were understood in the early modern era. Perhaps most relevant to my work was the idea that "for most persons beasts were outside the terms of moral reference" (72). Within this paradigm, violence to animals was often thought of as wrong not because of the pain it inflicted to a sensate being but because it was violence to the property of another (even if that other is God). Accordingly, when employed in language the animal often does not refer to the animal as such but is used to symbolize the absence of the capacity for reason or mark the abdication or failure to achieve rationality. Within these frameworks, the human is a surprisingly precarious category. One must earn the status through education and may lose it by following desire over prudence. So that's my ho-hum synopsis. Might pluck parts of this for my chapter on the flood and representations of the drowned. The historicist in me would have like to compare this analysis of written texts with studies of early modern human-animal relations. Like what's up with the rats in your cottage? Do you give a shit?

[Karl Steel · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In a world without animals, humans woudl not only lose companions, workers, sources of food, clothing, and so on; they would lose themselves." (36)

This is one of the two best anti-anthropocentric cultural studies books I know (the other is Cary Wolfe's Animal Rites). Fudge argues that most Early Modern histories of the formation of the subject remain "in the shadow of Descartes" by not recognizing their own discursive situatedness in effacing animals from their consideration. Prior to Descartes, reason was, as it was afterwards, the chief determinant for the distinction between humans and nonhuman animals; yet this reason was embattled: humans could become beasts, or worse than beasts, whereas animals--such as the famous horse Morocco, or even more mundane beasts such as Chrysippus's syllogistic dog--might exhibit behavior indistinguishable from human reason. While Aristotle dematerialized reason by separating it from the vegetable and sensitive souls, other thinkers--Plato and Plutarch, chiefly--located reason in the body, which allowed for nonhuman reason, even if it was a lesser reason. Continuity rendered the sharp Aristotelian break untenable. When Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Skepticism took hold of Europe in the 16th century, certainty over animals had to give way. In short, in any number of traditions common in Early Modern England, the nature of the human would always be considered in relation to animals, but in all of them the animal confounded the human as much as it secured it. Thus any history of the human in this period must consider animals.

(thankfully Fudge doesn't cross the line into my own argument, so I'm doubly grateful to her....)