Brutal reasoning: animals, rationality, and humanity in early modern England

Abstract

Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2006, pp. 224, hb. $45.00, ISBN: 9780801444548.In her new book, Erica Fudge, one of the most important historians of early modern attitudes toward animals, demonstrates how the history of this topic touches on some of the key cultural and intellectual issues of human history. The book's main theme is the construction of the modern notion of the human. This emerged in the early modern era from the consideration of animals within the discourse of the nature of reason, and subsequently from the Cartesian exclusion of animals from this discourse. Throughout, Fudge brilliantly demonstrates how the seemingly simple differentiation between human and animal rational abilities in fact resulted in 'messy' categorization, which ultimately forced early modern people to face the possibility of animal sentience and rationality.As she notes in the Introduction, the chapters of the book follow the lead of her early modern sources in moving from the definition of the human to a discussion of animals, with an emphasis on the combination of these two issues within early modern thought. The first chapter surveys the early modern categories defining human reason, such as speech, laughter, virtue, and prudence; the very lack of reason in animals, according to this perspective, is part of the definition of reason.The second chapter highlights the complexity of the early modern notion of humanity, which unsurprisingly excluded women and New World natives from full human status. Early modern humanity was a concept in need of construction, achieved through education, and the learning of self-control. The third chapter depicts the early modern notion of the loss of humanity, of how human beings by the very fact of being uniquely rational, could also forsake their rationality and become 'beastly' in a way no beast could be. By having the capacity for virtue, human beings inevitably also had the capacity for vice, both seemingly non-existent in animals. In the latter part of this chapter Fudge turns to the early modern ethical consideration of animals, highlighting Montaigne's innovative importance in shifting the arguments for a kind treatment of animals from the anthropocentric benefits this might contain, to the emphasis of the animals' sentience, irrespective of their lack of reason.Beginning with the fourth chapter Fudge centres more on the discussion of animals per se. This chapter surveys ancient discussions of animals, emphasizing the theriophily ('love of animals') of Plutarch, and its influence on early modern thought. The chapter culminates in one of the most original contributions of the book (pp. 114-22), a discussion of the influence of scepticism on the early modern discussion of reason; the definition of what is 'unreasonable' in animals, according to the sceptical viewpoint, is an expression of the limits of human perception, not an admission that animals do indeed lack reason. …