Silencing the Animals: Montaigne, Descartes, and the Hyperbole of Reason

Animal Bodies and Animal Spirits

The point that this paper addresses is a point—and I hope to show this in the following pages—that is of vast importance in certain narratives of the foundation of modernity. Although this foundation has accumulated more narratives than can be counted, it remains convenient and productive to return to Descartes' narrative of the ascension of human reason, particularly as expressed in the Discourse on the Method (1637). The point I would like to raise here has been considerably less recognized than the narrative itself—but it is, as I hope to demonstrate, utterly essential to the latter. It concerns the extensively glossed juxtaposition of Montaigne and Descartes as inaugural of modernity.¹ I wish to underscore the facts that in all his writings the rationalist makes but a single explicit reference to his predecessor, and that this reference has everything to do with Descartes' demarcation of the province of reason as belonging to humanity alone, although few commentaries have pointed that out.

Descartes makes the reference in a 1646 letter to the Marquess of Newcastle in which he states his disagreement with Montaigne's attribution of "understanding or thought to animals."² Descartes is alluding to a lengthy passage in "The Apology for Raymond Sebond," chapter 12 of book 2 of the Essays (1580, 1588, 1595), in which Montaigne provides example after example of perceptible behavior on the part of animals by which one might discern, at least by inference, that they have intelligence, that there is no clearly discernible border in this respect between beasts and ourselves (330-58). In Descartes' letter, the entire argument is a rephrasing and elaboration of a passage from part 5 of the Discourse on the Method, in which the author makes the case for the uniqueness of man in the world that stems from his possession of reason, which animals don't have, and which accords him dominion over them.³ In the Discourse this argument gives way to claims in part 6 that man may draw a clear and distinct border between himself and nature so as to claim governance over the latter—so that "we" may make ourselves "as masters and possessors of nature" (142-43).⁴

In the 1646 letter, Descartes takes up a number of Montaigne's examples (talking birds, and dogs, horses, and monkeys that do tricks) and states that these all indicate an expression of passion (a word in exchange for food, and so on) rather than reason. Descartes' focus here, as in the Discourse, is on language: the mock-speech of birds and the motions of the other animals in question, all signs that may be meaningful to human minds, are clearly the results of passion, he explains. These signs must be strictly distinguished from those of human language: "There has never been known an animal so perfect as to use a sign to make other animals understand something which bore no relation to its passions; and there is no human being so imperfect as not to do so, since even deaf-mutes invent special signs to express their thoughts." Animals have no speech for the reason that "they have no thoughts" (303).⁵

The argument hinges on the same point as that in the Discourse, namely that all human beings ("and this includes even madmen," says Descartes) are capable of "arranging various words together and forming a discourse from them in order to make their thoughts understood; whereas there is no other animal, however perfect and well-endowed it may be, that can do the like" (140). Descartes also cites here the example of the deaf, who are able to use signs to communicate with others who understand their language. So the use of signs—and these include spoken, written, and gestural forms of language—is for Descartes the definitive, unquestionable sign that reason is at work. It is...