Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman

4 The Monstrous Face of Curiosity

4 The Monstrous Face of Curiosity The historian Reinhart Koselleck has argued that the formation of groups depends on the use of what he calls asymmetric counterconcepts. Pairings such as Greek/barbarian, Christian/heathen, and human/non-human or inhuman provide the semantic underpinnings of various, differently structured , inclusions and exclusions. Although he hints at the paradoxical nature of the pairing human/inhuman when applied to what appear to be humans, Koselleck does not fully explore the manifest absurdity of the claim to universality embedded in these particular counterconcepts.1 In his discussion of this pairing, Koselleck also focuses on how the philosophes and French revolutionaries deployed the term “inhuman” against the monarchy . This focus downplays, however, the extent to which the asymmetric counterconcept of inhumanity was used not only in relation to the traditionally de¤ned realm of politics but also as a way of getting a semantic grasp on a society organized by functional rather than hierarchical differentiation . This was especially the case in eighteenth-century England, where the issue of monarchy was less pressing than that of how social order would be maintained without hierarchy. One way that ethical discourse sought to cope with this situation was by converting pity from one facet of human response into a deep value and the signi¤er of universal humanity . Consider the odd case of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, the primary thesis of which is that private vices are public virtues. A particularly infamous illustration of this thesis is that the burglar gives work to the lock- smith. The author’s positions on society and sociability were considered so suspect by his contemporaries that the moniker “Man-devil” was often applied to him. That he might also make a plea for compassion appears counterintuitive. And yet Mandeville’s theory of social organization is of a piece with his position on pity. If society is not organized by hierarchy but rather by the complex interlocking of different functions, then compassion alone can serve as a check on the system. Pity is not simply social cement. For Mandeville the affect has the precise function of a governor: it ensures that the self-organization of the social order does not spin into excess, cruelty, inhumanity, and dissolution. In Hogarth’s “Four Stages of Cruelty ” it is also hierarchical organization that is missing in its chaotic scenes. What the viewer does see is the suggestion that sympathy may provide some grounds for order in the face of inhumanity. It is sympathy that will protect society from the marauding and unsupervised poor, the indifferent minions of the law, and, ¤nally, from professional surgeons. The appearance of monstrosity in the series indicates that the asymmetric counterconcepts of human/inhuman are being deployed in the visual realm. In the previous chapter, I suggested that this deployment encourages entry into the discourse of sympathy by pointing out to the viewer which responses are correct and which incorrect. I now turn to examine how the logical problems involved with positing universal sympathy are dealt with in Hogarth’s engravings. In the end, monstrosity not only encourages the adoption of the correct affective position. It also provides a way in which the fundamental logical paradox of the series can be resolved, at least in appearance. One aspect of this paradox is simply the etiology of cruelty given the supposed universality of pity. In the “Four Stages,” the narrative highlights habituation as the driving force of malevolent behavior. The narrative is about Tom getting used to cruelty by starting with animals for victims and winding up with humans. While habituation has long been an explanation for why certain aspects of “human nature” are overcome, during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries this explanation must be seen in relation to the speci¤c con¤guration of the anthropology of benevolence.2 For instance, in Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), Locke brings the notion of inhumanity as mere appearance to bear on the question of our relation to animals: One thing I have frequently observed in children is that, when they have got possession of any poor creature, they are apt to use it ill; they often torment and treat very roughly young birds and butter®ies, and such The Monstrous Face of Curiosity 61 other poor creatures, which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure (my emphasis).3 Locke then goes on...