The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India. Tristram Stuart

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       TEN Dieting with Dr Descartes

      René Descartes was born in La Haye in 1596, and when he was one his mother died of a lung disease which he inherited. He was a sickly baby and was not thought likely to survive, but survive he did, and in combating his own weak constitution he came to believe that he had found the secret to long life. His blend of solitary reflection and steadfast adherence to mathematical reasoning created a new climate in European philosophy which, by the end of the seventeenth century, had flourished into the Natural Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Rather than relying on second-hand religious doctrines, Descartes showed how to establish truth firmly on the principle of ‘Reason’. This breach with religious tradition created a need to reconstitute the mandate for man’s superiority over the rest of creation. But Descartes’ legacy was an enduring schism in European thought, the remnants of which can still be felt today.

      At the Jesuit school of La Flèche, he had been raised from the age of eight on the old school theories of Aristotelian philosophy and Augustinian theology according to which the world was divided into matter, immaterial spirit and an ‘intermediate substance’. When Descartes came to scrutinise his education with his rigorous method of sceptical reasoning, he agreed with the Aristotelians that humans had an immaterial rational soul: as he explained in his Meditations (1641), the fact that he could say ‘I think, therefore I am’ proved this beyond doubt. He also agreed with the Aristotelians that animals lacked the rational soul – their inability to speak languages was proof enough of that. But he thought that the Aristotelians’ claim that animals were animated by an intermediate sensitive soul was meaningless mumbo-jumbo. If animals had no soul, they had to be made purely of matter, and as Descartes believed that matter by itself could not think, he concluded that animals were just like soulless machines. All their actions were the result of automatic material cause and effect; they did not even have feelings or sensations as humans did. They were only alive in so far as the heat of their heart pumped blood around their bodies.¹ As Descartes’ chief disciple, the Jesuit Father Nicolas Malebranche, explained in his Search after Truth (1674–5), ‘The Cartesians do not think that Beasts feel Pain or Pleasure, or that they love or hate any thing; because they admit nothing but what is material in Beasts, and they do not believe that Sensations or Passions are Properties of Matter’; ‘the Principal of a Dog’s Life,’ wrote Malebranche provocatively, ‘differs very little, if at all, from that of the Motion of a Watch.’² This, rather than Scripture, was the rational justification for killing animals: they did not suffer; indeed, given the mechanical nature of their life, they hardly even ‘died’.

      Descartes’ ability to explain the operation of a body in mechanistic terms – as the great intricate clockwork of God – provided the foundation for a powerful school of physicians in the eighteenth century, and insofar as he showed how ‘life’ worked without the need for ‘soul’ he led the way to a modern scientific understanding of living things.³ But although he won many followers, his rigid dualism – dividing everything so starkly into matter and spirit – and particularly his relegation of animals to the status of insensible lumps of dirt, became the focus of widespread protest all over Europe, notably in England.

      People found it hard to accept his contention that animals had no sensation as it contradicted a common-sense view of animal behaviour and made a nonsense of their sentimental attachment to pet dogs. In the intellectual backlash, many philosophers preferred to think that animals had souls and reason rather than concede that they were mere machines.⁴

      The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes agreed with Descartes that animals lacked reason, but he suggested that mind was made of matter and therefore animals could think to some extent.⁵ Hobbes did not think this accrued to animals any sort of moral protection from humans, even though, like Descartes, he thought the scriptural permission to Noah an insufficient basis for eating them. For Hobbes, might made right: all beings had the right to kill for their own preservation, and humans – by forming alliances with the use of their reason and language – had become powerful enough to kill any animal they chose (while beasts, lacking reason and language, were incapable of entering into the contract of forbearance from conflict enjoyed by human beings).⁶

      The philosophical Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish (1624–74), sustained a lengthy correspondence about animals with Descartes and voiced her dissent in her striking poetry:

      As if that God made Creatures for Mans meat,

      To give them Life, and Sense, for Man to eat;… Making their Stomacks, Graves, which full they fill With murther’d Bodies, that in sport they kill … And that all Creatures for his sake alone, Was made for him, to Tyrannize upon.⁷

      Descartes’ new philosophical view of animals, it seemed to many, was still worse than the disdain fostered by Aristotle and Augustine. Most of the earlier seventeenth-century radical vegetarians, whose main inspiration was the Bible, ignored or remained ignorant of the debate Descartes had triggered.⁸ But the vegetarian-oriented deists – Blount, Gildon, the Turkish Spy and Simon Tyssot de Patot – identified Descartes as their common enemy, and embraced instead the more conducive animal-friendly philosophy of his rival, Pierre Gassendi.⁹ If Reason proved that humans had souls, declaimed Mahmut in the Turkish Spy, then the fact that animals were clearly intelligent showed ‘the Brute Animals to have Souls as well as We’; if it did not, he warned, then ‘ ‘tis as easie to defend, That Humane Nature it self is but Matter’.¹⁰ (As the traveller to India, John Ovington, had said, even the Pythagoreans and Indians knew that.)¹¹

      Descartes felt he had established man’s superiority on the firmest foundations, but because he based it on rational argument rather than Scripture, he opened the door to opposite deductions. Reversing both Descartes’ and Hobbes’ rationale for eating animals, the Turkish Spy concluded that ‘it is little less Injustice to Kill and Eat them, because they cannot speak and converse with us, than it would be for a Cannibal to murder and devour thee or me, because we understood not his Language nor he ours’.¹² It was precisely this sort of grotesque logical deduction from Hobbes’ theory of the ‘War of Nature’ that the German philosopher Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf sought to clear up with his monumental counter-vegetarian article in The Law of Nature and Nations (1672). Pufendorf gave the vegetarians a great deal of space; he was liberally uncritical of Brahmins and other vegetarian peoples and he even endorsed the vegetarians’ argument that meat made people vicious and that humans were better suited to a herbivorous diet. But he explained that men had an indissoluble right to kill because the hostility and competition between them and animals was (in contrast to the occasional conflicts between men) acute and irreparable. Nevertheless, he insisted that the vegetarians were right in so far as ‘foolish Cruelty and Barbarity’ to animals was indisputably reprehensible.¹³

      Members of the public were appalled to hear that Cartesians kicked and stabbed animals to make the point that their cries had no more significance than the squeak of a door. As one horrified witness testified, ‘They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they had felt СКАЧАТЬ