Mandeville on Pride and Animal Nature

Abstract

Mandeville’s first publication – the thesis Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus (1689) – advocated the Cartesian position that both denied feeling and sensation, let alone thought, to non-human animals and stressed the inherent distinctiveness of the conscious sensory and inferential capacities of human agents. Yet his later writings subscribed to a directly opposed Enlightenment position. His translation of La Fontaine’s Fables drew comparisons between humans and animals throughout, and by the time of the Fable of the Bees, Mandeville was clearly in the camp stressing the continuity of human and non-human animal nature, a tradition following Hobbes, Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, and later to include Helvetius, de la Mettrie and Hume. The function of pride in Mandeville’s ethics is examined in terms of this debate, framed by Bayle’s famous ‘Rorarius’ entry in his Dictionary. With this background in place, Mandeville’s claim regarding the psychological role of pride as the ‘other Recompense…[of] the vain Satisfaction of making our Species appear more exalted and remote from that of other Animals’ is then discussed. It is presented as a critique of Shaftesbury’s discussion in the Characteristics relating to the norm of fulfilling one’s human nature.