Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Erica Fudge . Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. ix+224.

Abstract

Authors like Montaigne, however, do not duck the implication of a disintegrating binary but embrace it as an alternative basis for ethical behavior: for them, aversion to cruelty was an entirely rational response to the common ability of humans and animals to suffer pain. Humans in this schema are not superior to animals but “fellow beings” (83). Indeed, some writers found that close observation of animal behavior led to the conclusion that animals had a degree of knowledge that humans could not claim, that in many ways animals were not inferior but superior to humans in senses and in natural virtue. Plutarch, reaching back to Plato, provided the philosophical basis for arguing this position: animals are not “slaves to instinct; rather it is humans who are slaves…of their customs, of their civilization” (91), while animals demonstrate prudence, pleasure, and reason unfettered by the chains of culture. One reaction to the deconstruction of human superiority by theriophilics was, in Fudge's reading, skepticism: “It is not going too far, perhaps, to argue that the reemergence of skepticism offers writers a way of thinking through the various logical breakdowns in the discourse of reason” (122). If such a claim is hard to prove, it nonetheless suggests the crucial role animals played in any and every attempt to define the human via the capacity to reason.