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Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England.

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

Erica Fudge

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006

Ruminating on the totemic use of animals, Levi-Strauss somewhat benignly conceded that it is less a case of animals being good to eat (bon a manger) than good to "think" (bon a penser). (1) But it is also the case that a genealogy of Western culture's ongoing discourse on the animal, from Aristotle to Descartes to Heidegger, reveals the unsettling extent to which the animal has persisted as not "good to think" but rather as the bearer of absolute alterity, the traumatic limit of Western thought. Heidegger's 1929-30 Freiburg lectures on "theoretical" biology, as chilling as they are sophisticated, qualify as perhaps Western philosophy's worst offender against the animal. In these lectures, Heidegger asserts that the animal has no access to being as such; that animals have no relationship to consciousness or selfhood; and that animals, suffering what he terms "poverty-in-the-world," can perish but they cannot accede to (a human) death.

Erica Fudge's Brutal Reasoning, an admirable sequel to her Perceiving Animals: Human and Beasts in Early Modern English (2000), can enable us to comprehend the (often depressing) extent to which early modern discourses of reason anticipate Heidegger's contention that animals have no access to being as such. Perhaps the most notorious early modern example was the "beast-machine" hypothesis of Descartes' 1637 Discourse on the Method. In Fudge's paraphrase,

Descartes seems to be arguing that animals can experience the world but that their experience is not a full one.... This incompleteness is because animals lack thought and, crucially, the self-awareness that allows humans to fully experience their experiences.... Descartes's theory [his analogy between a clock and an animal], however, offered his readers something new. A clock does not "know" the time, it merely records it, and likewise, an animal did not...

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