Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (review)

Erica Fudge describes Brutal Reasoning as an exploration of "how humans were constructed . . . what being human meant, and . . . how humans could lose their humanity" in early modern England (2). In addressing these matters, Fudge aims, more broadly, "to challenge the silent effacement of the animal" in early modern studies (5), an effacement she presents as endemic to contemporary scholarship: "Part of our sense making is to maintain a notion of natural order . . . and we often do this by ignoring, or making figurative, the animals present in early modern texts. Even in 'posthumanist' readings . . . animals rarely appear" (3).

The six central chapters of Fudge's study aim to recuperate the role of animals in the construction of early modern humanity by addressing a series of questions and problems relative to the category of the human itself. Chapter 1 examines the Aristotelian tradition, which distinguishes between nonhuman animals and human beings by attributing to the latter a rational soul — despite such inconvenient details as the fact that infants display none of the indicia of rationality. Chapter 2 considers how early modern educational and colonial discourses contradict the basic Aristotelian distinction between people and beasts, offering us "a sense not of development but of metamorphosis," whereby the properly educated child or colonial subject becomes, in effect, "a new species" (49). In chapter 3, on the other hand, Fudge concentrates on the ethical discourse that paradoxically bestializes both the agents and the victims of vicious behavior, thus demonstrating the human being's own status as "simultaneously human and animal" (60).

Fudge's fourth chapter then considers an alternative classical theory of the distinction between human beings and animals, a theory developed inself-conscious opposition to the dominant model provided by Aristotle. This second theory, deriving primarily from Plutarch, maintains that "[a]nimals are not . . . slaves to instinct; rather, it is humans who are slaves . . . of their customs, of their civilization" (91), and it leaves its mark on early modern writers like Montaigne and Charron at roughly the same time that "empirical observation begins to undercut assertions of animal irrationality" (85). Turning in chapter 5 to early modern English popular culture, Fudge examines the phenomenon of Morocco, the intelligent horse whose apparent abilities to count coins and distinguish between virgins and whores captivated audiences in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe. Morocco's story leads Fudge to conclude that "the complications of humans' everyday existences alongside animals" comprised their own challenge to Aristotelian orthodoxy (145), a challenge that developed parallel to but independently of the similar challenges offered by a resurgent Plutarch and an emergent empiricism.

Fudge then concludes her work by examining a third theory of the human-animal divide, the one that finally supplanted Aristotle in the seventeenth century and beyond: the "beast-machine hypothesis" (169) originating in Descartes's Discourse on Method. For Fudge, the popularity of Cartesian theory derived from its ability to resolve various challenges to the Aristotelian paradigm by simply short-circuiting them; Descartes's "unwavering assertion that all humans possess reason" (151) rendered the demonstration of their rational capacities — and the concomitant demonstration of other animals' lack of reason — simply "irrelevant" (151). Drawing on the anti-Aristotelian skeptical tradition, but for very different ends than did the followers of Montaigne and Charron, Descartes posited that "animals were automata" (148) and in the process provided moral license for the Enlightenment fascination with animal experimentation and vivisection, "as if . . . merely changing the philosophical construction of animals — altering the ways in which humans think about them — could act as an anaesthetic" (160). Yet for all its enduring prestige, Cartesianism never manages to suppress completely the "belief in animal sentience" derived from skeptical philosophy and "empirical observation" (169).

Carefully researched and closely argued, Brutal Reasoning offers the best account to date of the competing theories of animal and human nature that jostled for position in the early modern marketplace of ideas. This is not to...