Erica Fudge - Brutal Reasoning

A book can only get written if there is time enough for writing, and my first acknowledgment must be to the various institutions that have allowed me the opportunity to begin, continue, and complete this project. I received a small grant from the British Academy in 1999 to get this book under way. I was granted teaching relief and a sabbatical from the School of Arts at Middlesex University, which enabled me to continue with my research. Finally a one-year research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust gave me the much-needed time to finish. I am extremely grateful to all of these institutions for their support.

In addition to time, a writer needs colleagues and accomplices, and I have been extremely lucky to have many of these. I thank (as ever) Sue Wiseman and Lawrence Normand for reading drafts of bits of the book and for making helpful comments. My friends in the Animal Studies GroupSteve Baker, Jonathan Burt, Diana Donald, Garry Marvin, Robert McKay, Clare Palmer, and Chris Wilberthave always been full of good ideas. Mary Baine Campbell, Brian Cummings, Peter Harrison, James Knowles, Chris Mounsey, Patricia Parker, Stella Sandford, Jonathan Sawday, and Alan Stewart have lent ears and brains in the course of the research and writing of this book.

Versions of parts of this book were given at conferences at Princeton University, University College Dublin, Aberdeen University, and the Oxford Renaissance Seminar; my thanks go to the respective organizers: Andrea Immel and Michael Whitmore, Jerome de Groot, Andrew Gordon, and Michelle OCallaghan.

Staff at Cornell University Press have been a pleasure to work with, and I thank in particular Nancy Ferguson, Teresa Jesionowski, Alison Kalett, and Bernhard Kendler. The manuscript greatly benefited from the sensitive copy-editing of David Schur. I am grateful to him for his exceptional work. Of course, any errors are mine alone.

I am grateful to the publishers for the right to reproduce the following:

Parts of chapters 2 and 3 appeared in Learning to Laugh: Children and Being Human in Early Modern Thought, Textual Practice17, no. 2 (2003): 27794: www.tandf.co.uk .

Part of chapter 3 appeared in Two Ethics: Killing Animals in the Past and the Present, in Killing Animals, ed. The Animal Studies Group (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 99119

E.F.

C HAPTER 1

Put simply, early modern anatomists knew that the human body and the animal body were almost identical in the structure and overall workings of many of their organs. Even Ren Descartes advised his reader to have the heart of some large animal with lungs dissected before him (for such a heart is in all respects sufficiently like that of a man). This, along with the moral strictures against using humans, was the reason why vivisectors used animals as their models on the slab. How else but through his vivisection of animals could William Harvey have discovered the circulation of the blood, when to see blood circulating required a live subject?

The body, then, was not a central source of difference, and even when the human physique was invoked to reiterate distinction this physical difference was always merely a sign of the other, more significant, mental division. For example, Platos argument that, as Stephen Bateman put it in the late sixteenth century, other beasts looke downeward to the earth. And God gaue to man an high mouth, and commaunded him to looke vp and beholde heauen might seem to make the difference one of anatomy, but the implication of this anatomical dissimilarity is, to Bateman, clear: & he gaue to men visages looking vpwarde towarde the starres. And also a mann shoulde seeke heauen, and not put his thought in the earth, and be obedient to the wombe as a beast. used to make an intellectual, and moral, point. And that pointthe humans capacity to contemplate the divinerelied on a difference that could not be found in the material worlds of anatomy and vivisection. It focused on the human possession of an inorganic essence, otherwise known as the rational soul.

This assertion of a physically invisible difference between humans and animals has a classical pedigree. The conventional early modern assumption about the soul comes, by way of the Christianizing of the Middle Ages, from Aristotles De anima, and what is taken up by early modern thinkers is a distinction between different kinds of souls, and different kinds of beings. Aristotles focus is on the living: what has soul in it differs, he writes, from what has not, in that the former displays life. The living are plants, animals, and humans, and the nature of the ensoulment of these different groups explains where the properties that are particular to humanity find their source.

There are in the Aristotelian model three different kinds of soulvegetative, sensitive, and rationala trinity that is also discussed in terms of the binary of the organic (vegetative and sensitive) and the inorganic (the rational). The vegetative soul is shared by plants, animals, and humans and is the cause of nutrition, growth, and reproduction: all naturalunthoughtactions. The sensitive soul is possessed by animals and humans alone (plants have only the vegetative soul) and is the source of perception and movement.