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

Erica Fudge is certainly the preeminent contemporary thinker about animals and animal-human relations in early modern England. This book, her third monograph on the subject, adds to the emerging field of early modern animal studies, a field of inquiry that Fudge argues should be significant to everyone who wants to understand how early modern people thought about their worlds. In this account of the period, animals were central to human self-definition.

In Brutal Reasoning, Fudge looks at how humans distinguished themselves from animals before Descartes declared that animals were essentially machines. In English thought before Descartes, Fudge shows, the only difference between humans and animals was that humans alone possessed a rational soul; she calls this theory "the discourse of reason" (4). However, since that rational soul was invisible, this understanding of the animal-human distinction presented essential difficulties. Humans could demonstrate their humanity through self-control in the realms of lust and laughter, through prudence that demonstrated their abstract understanding of time, through memory and self-knowledge, and through prophetic dreaming. But since humans did not always display those capacities, the distinction between animals and humans was continually "challenged by the very logic that proclaim[ed] it" (38).

In the central chapters, Fudge examines the challenges to that logic in detail. Using early modern philosophical, literary, and polemical texts, Fudge shows us that the rational soul was thought to have less power in women, children, young men, and uncivilized colonial others. Some humans required "education to become truly human" (58); and some, even with education, could only become lesser humans. Another challenge to an automatic assumption of both human difference and human superiority was that humans could and did behave worse than animals; that is, because humans possessed rational souls, they could make immoral choices that animals could not.

Fudge also describes challenges to the discourse of reason from the realms of ancient and early modern philosophy. In the book's third chapter, she examines Montaigne's famous ethical critique of cruelty toward animals. This chapter might be of particular interest to the readers of Shakespeare Quarterly, as it contains short readings of As You Like It's Jaques and King Lear's Gloucester. Fudge argues that Gloucester is symbolically made both animal and human in his interactions with Regan, Cornwall, and Goneril. In a slightly more extended reading of Jaques, Fudge suggests that when Jaques reacts with compassion to the hunted stag, Shakespeare parodies Montaigne's ethics. In addition to examining Montaigne's ethical challenge, Fudge explains how the ideas of Plutarch and Sextus Empiricus about the animal-human relation were revived in England in the early seventeenth century.

Finally, Fudge looks at all the English texts that refer to Morocco the Intelligent Horse, who was said to perform prodigious feats: dancing, singing, and distinguishing Spaniards from Englishmen and virgins from whores. Fudge suggests that the explanations for Morocco's feats show us that the discourse of reason was always being challenged by "the kinds of animal capacities that people were aware of in their personal experiences with animals" (145). She believes that "the orthodox philosophical debate sits at odds with what was apparently obvious in day-to-day living. Animals think" (145).

In Fudge's view, Descartes' beast-machine hypothesis offered a solution to two problems with the discourse of reason. If animals were automata and only humans had will, people no longer needed to worry about the transformation of some humans into beasts. In addition, Descartes argued that animals could not suffer; therefore, people need feel no compunction about animal pain. Fudge shows us that Descartes' ideas were not automatically accepted. The responses to Descartes "may reveal," she says, "the absolutely mundane nature of the belief in animal reason in the early modern period" (174).

Fudge concludes her book with an examination of animals' absence from recent discussions of "man" in the Renaissance. She contends that animals have...