Roy Porter - Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul

FLESH IN THE AGE OF REASON

ROY PORTER

FOREWORD BY SIMON SCHAMA

ALLEN LANE

an imprint of

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First published 2003

Copyright the Estate of Roy Porter, 2003

Foreword copyright Simon Schama, 2003

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

EISBN: 9780141912257

To Natsu, the love of my life

For, what was ever understood

By human Kind, but Flesh and Blood?

JONATHAN SWIFT,

A Receipt to Restore Stellas Youth

The Corruption of the Senses is the Generation of the Spirit.

JONATHAN SWIFT,

A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of
the Spirit in a Letter To a Friend. A Fragment

I said, we were not stocks and stones tis very well. I should have added, nor are we angels, I wish we were, but men cloathed with bodies, and governed by our imaginations.

LAURENCE STERNE,

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Will this be good for your worships eyes?

LAURENCE STERNE,

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

PART IV. THE SCIENCE OF MAN
FOR A NEW SOCIETY

About half way through Roy Porters intellectual epic, he has his hero Laurence Sterne rail against the dirty planet in which strange fatalities rain down body blows against the delicate and finespun web of life, all stage-managed, it seems, by a malignant spirit. And for those of us who knew, admired and loved Roy Porter, reading Flesh in the Age of Reason is necessarily an acutely painful pleasure. For it is mercilessly clear that Roy died at the height of his powers. The book is great Porter, which is to say the best history anyone could ever want to read. Never was the presence of the author so strongly present: deeply serious in the depth of his philosophical inquiry, yet wearing his massive erudition lightly. As always in his work, exacting arguments of intellectual history are made accessible as narrative; the ideas themselves not suspended in some realm of disembodied play, but fleshed out as the title of the work implies and embedded in the lived historical experience of thinkers both mighty and paltry.

The unmistakeably eighteenth-century irony, that the subject of Roys posthumous masterpiece is itself the long, vexed relationship between the body and the rest of us (soul or mind), would have drawn from the author one of his famously expansive full-body chuckles. But for those of us who bitterly miss his personal as well as his intellectual presence, the exhilaration of reading this shockingly vital and exuberant book is punctuated by the mournfulness of realizing that there will not be another like it. It is, I suppose, some sort of scant consolation that Flesh in the Age of Reason actually enacts, in the enduring imprint it leaves on the reader, some of the more optimistic beliefs of its eighteenth-century protagonists, who imagined the mind as the place where identity was built; where consciousness, sentiment and memory dwelled; the lodging-house, in fact, of humanity. But it is, nonetheless, hard for his friends to read Porters revisitings of the likes of Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, Sterne and Coleridge, all of whose beliefs in the supremacy of vigorous reason were deeply threatened by the fragility of the flesh and not feel a sharp pang.

For Porter aficionados there are some familiar faces in this volume whom Roy has written about elsewhere Thomas Beddoes, George Cheyne; Thomas Day; David Hartley; Erasmus Darwin yet the accounts of what each had to offer to the long debate about the relationship between mind and body never feel stale. (Erasmus Darwin, for example, the founder of the Lunar Society, is made more clearly than ever the progenitor of the theory of evolution consummated by his grandson.) And this is because, in this last work, Porter brought the huge weight of his encyclopedic knowledge to bear on the most demanding questions which have exercised restless minds since Plato: What can we know of ourselves and how would such knowledge be conditioned or compromised by the physical apparatus of its cognition? And, most ambitiously and for the reader most thrillingly Porter tackles, through the first hundred or so pages of his book, the history of the idea of the soul. This takes him to places where most eighteenth-century social and cultural historians shrink from trespassing: to the Greeks and the classical Christian philosophers and theologians, and eventually on to Ren Descartess dualism. One of the many reasons to be wistful as well as grateful for Flesh in the Age of Reason is that one realizes that Porter was warming up to grapple with the torments of the Christian seventeenth century with much the same critical shrewdness and historical sympathy as he had shown for the Enlightenment rationalists of the eighteenth. The readings of Descartes, Milton and Hobbes are as thoughtful and penetrating as those of Hume and Millar for the eighteenth.

As vast as the scale of the undertaking is, the book is never heavy going. It is lightened, not by any relaxation in the sharpness of argument, but by Porters brief to himself to register the imprint of ideas in social action; and to see, in turn, how such social action might affect the onward discourse of debates about body and mind. So there are, as usual in his work, passages of dazzling description which conjure up whole worlds of freshly agitated self-consciousness. The dawning of the idea that hysteria or hypochondria were physical maladies (rather than purely moral disorders), and were thus susceptible of some sort of corrective regimen, gets vintage Porter analysis, the witty asides always softened by compassionate empathy. And alongside the major figures in the canon Porter makes room for more eccentric figures who nonetheless play their own part in the long, tortured relationship between soul or mind and the body in which it was taken to be imprisoned: Luigi Cornaro, for example, the prophet of a temperate life whose dining habits were so perfectly balanced that he could write I feel when I leave the table that I must sing. Cornaro, Porter tells us, wrote his first book of counsel at 83, his fourth at 95 but then passed away prematurely at the disappointing age of 98. Or at the other end of the scales, George Cheyne, who ballooned to a massive 450 pounds before subjecting himself to the brutal regime of vomits, purges and fasts which entitled the (relatively) skinnier Cheyne to lecture his contemporaries on the perils of gluttony and idleness.

Flesh in the Age of Reason manages, over and again, to spot the moments where a familiar modern preoccupation gets born and circulated in the wider culture, whithout any kind of anachronistic projection. Thus, Porter sees the change in the second half of the eighteenth century, from a culture which celebrated embonpoint and fleshiness as a sign of vitality to Byrons narcissistic regime of diet and exercise, as a genuinely fateful moment: the beginnings of the obsession with youthfulness (especially svelte youth) as a paradigm of beauty. Similarly, he is marvellously illuminating on the first writers, like William Alexander, a whole generation before Mary Wollstonecraft, able to argue that gender was a social construction.