Absorbing and revising Bernard Mandeville and David Hume’s observations, Rousseau pointed out that animals had the same neural mechanism for sympathy as humans.12 Sometimes the human instinct of self-preservation (amour de soi-même) would drive humans to kill animals (or humans). But if you adhered to nature, Rousseau insisted, the instinctive power of sympathy would normally restrain you from destroying another sentient creature. This fact of human and animal nature in itself constituted a natural right. By basing animal rights simply on the sentience they shared with humans, Rousseau swept aside the millennia-old assumption, which Hobbes had cleverly adjusted and which Hugo Grotius had expressed in his Rights of War and Peace (1625), that ‘no beings, except those that can form general maxims [i.e. that can ‘‘reason’’], are capable of possessing a right.’13 Rousseau’s account of how human and animal feelings were a basis for animal rights was the most significant renegotiation of man’s relationship with animals in the period:
so long as [a man] does not resist the internal impulse of compassion, he will never hurt another man, nor even any sentient being, except on those legitimate occasions on which his own preservation [conservation] is concerned and he is obliged to give himself the preference. By this means also we put an end to the time-honoured disputes concerning the participation of animals in natural law: for it is clear that, being destitute of intelligence and liberty, they cannot recognise that law; but since they in some measure partake in our nature through the sentience with which they are endowed, they must partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of obligation even toward the brutes. It appears, in fact, that if I am bound to do no injury to my fellow-creatures, this is less because they are rational than because they are sentient beings: and this quality, being common both to men and beasts, must at least give the beast the right not to be needlessly [inutilement] maltreated by man.14
Unlike Hobbes, who rigorously defined his terms, Rousseau referred only vaguely to conditions in which it was permissible for a human to kill animals: ‘those legitimate occasions on which his own preservation is concerned’. Rousseau may have had in mind the ancient allowance – widely accepted by vegetarians – that humans were entitled to kill animals such as wolves which endangered human life, a view expressed in Ovid’s Pythagorean speech: ‘To kill Man-killers, Man has lawful Pow’r,/ But not th’ extended Licence, to devour.’15 But Rousseau’s ‘conservation’ which answers Hobbes’ ‘preservation’ (Latin, conservatio) could also allow for meat-eating on the grounds that one ate animals to preserve oneself.16 However, Rousseau elsewhere stressed that eating meat was unnecessary for self-preservation because nature provided enough vegetable food for human nourishment.17 Furthermore, his point that ‘needless’ ill-treatment was the least that animals were exempted from implies that he considered it possible that even useful ill-treatment (such as meat-eating) might be unlawful (especially if one thought that meat-eating was a useless superfluity in any case). Rousseau was not vegetarian and he never stuck his neck out as far as to argue explicitly that meat-eating was a violation of animal rights. Indeed, it is difficult to see – in his ‘mitigated Hobbesian’ allowance that self-preservation could still be a basis for killing animals – where exactly Rousseau thought people’s compassion ought to outweigh their self-interest. But Rousseau had provided a foundation for others to argue that his idea of being obliged ‘to do no injury to my fellow-creatures’ was a rights-based defence of vegetarianism.
Despite Rousseau’s caveats and discreet relegation of the argument about bosoms to his footnotes, its centrality to his argument is demonstrated by the fact that much of the backlash against the Discourse on Inequality was directed at his ideas about the herbivorous anatomy of man, especially its mammary manifestations. Not the least of these counter-attacks came from Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88), the greatest naturalist in eighteenth-century France. When Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality came out, Buffon was mid-flow in his mind-bogglingly massive Histoire Naturelle, the definitive study of natural history which he pursued for twelve hours each day over a period of fifty years. With such a broad topic, Buffon necessarily barged into everyone’s intellectual territory. Friends with the clandestine encyclopaedists Diderot and d’Alembert, Buffon enjoyed irritating theologians with his geological theories, but there was no one whose toes he liked treading on more than Rousseau’s – and it was a double-whammy if he could simultaneously repudiate the nipple-centric classification system of his major rival in natural history, the pro-vegetarian Carl Linnaeus. (Buffon thought it was stupid to name mammals after an organ that some members of the group – stallions, for example – did not possess, and he strongly objected to Linnaeus’ blasphemous taxonomical decision to herd humans into the same zoo as sloths.)18
In 1753, just before the Discourse on Inequality, Buffon had published his fourth volume in which he argued that by bringing domestic animals into existence man ‘seems to have acquired a right to sacrifice them’.19 But Buffon felt that people overreached their right to kill animals by hunting wild animals and by eating unsustainable quantities of meat: ‘Man alone consumes and engulfs more flesh than all other animals put together,’ exclaimed Buffon. ‘He is, then, the greatest destroyer, and he is so more by abuse than by necessity.’ Abusing this right was even more appalling, he said, because people could survive on vegetables alone – as proved by the vegetarian Hindus. However, Buffon insisted that this did not mean that humans were naturally herbivorous: with their comparatively small stomachs, people were best designed to eat the concentrated nourishment found only in meat and suffered malnourishment when confined to peasant foods. The Pythagoreans and vegetarian doctors, he concluded, were totally incorrect to claim that giving up flesh was beneficial.20
Buffon was riled by Rousseau’s idealism, his biased presentation of the anatomical facts, and his cheeky ignoring of the Histoire Naturelle’s authoritative conclusions. He began his counter-attack by apparently contributing to the refutation posted to Rousseau by Charles-Georges Le Roy (1723–89), Master of the King’s Hunt, which argued that Rousseau had based his arguments on a false generalisation about female breasts. Contrary to Rousseau’s claims, it was in fact the case that many herbivores, like rabbits, had several nipples and large litters; and some carnivores had few, like weasels. It was equally fallacious, they said, to claim that herbivores took longer to gather food, since carnivores often spent the whole night without catching anything. In any case, humans could never have survived on vegetables alone because they would have starved during winter.
Rousseau’s scientific opponents thought that he sustained his idea about harmonious laws in nature only by ignoring the facts. But in his response to the letter – which survives in manuscript form – Rousseau stuck to his vegetarian arguments, countering that carnivores only had difficulty finding their prey because man had destroyed their hunting grounds, and that the point about harsh winters only applied to a few corners of the earth like Paris and London, which were irrelevant to the origins of humanity.21
In another footnote to the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau had used female breasts to explicate the non-committal sexual relations in the state of nature. John Locke had claimed that human males, like carnivores, remain in conjugal union with their mates to help raise the offspring, whereas among herbivores ‘the Conjunction between Male and Female lasts no longer than the very Act of Copulation; because the Teat of the Dam [is] sufficient to nourish the Young.’ Rousseau retorted that Locke had got his facts mixed up and that the opposite was more like the case: in the state of nature humans copulate and then return to their natural solitary existence. This provides an interesting perspective to Rousseau’s notoriety for polygamous affairs and abandoning his five illegitimate children to orphanages, and it opened him up to Le Roy and Buffon’s lacerating parodic quip that the only true correlation between humans and herbivores was that deer, like humans, ‘are the biggest whores on earth, which might lead one to believe
that we indeed are frugivorous’.22
At the next opportunity – the seventh volume of his Histoire Naturelle (1758) – Buffon launched his campaign against Rousseau into print and turned against vegetarianism with greater vehemence than before. In his article on ‘Carnivorous Animals’, Buffon declared ‘that man, in the state of nature, was never destined to live upon herbs, grain, or fruits’. ‘Certain austere and savage philosophers,’ said Buffon, alluding to Rousseau and the vegetarians, had invented the idea of vegetarian harmony as an attack on human civilisation solely for ‘the humiliation of the whole species’.
Buffon acknowledged that ‘the motives which have raised doubts concerning this matter [of killing animals], do honour to humanity … To sacrifice unnecessarily those animals … who, like man, exhibit symptoms of pain when injured, indicates a cruel insensibility’. But it was precisely by conceding that ‘the sentiment of pity belongs more to the body than to the mind’ that Buffon turned the point against Rousseau. By defining sympathy as a corporal phenomenon, shared even by the animals, Buffon implied (as had Malebranche the Cartesian) that succumbing to it was a sub-human subjugation of reason to animal instincts. Contrary to the vegetarians’ usual claim, it was sentimentality that was bestial, not meat-eating.
Reason indicated that killing animals was only superficially destructive; in fact, explained Buffon, life was renewed as fast as it could be destroyed, permitting both carnivorous and lower species to exist, thus producing the greatest number and the greatest variety of life possible. ‘Hence the killing of animals is both a lawful and an innocent practice,’ Buffon concluded, ‘because it is founded in nature, and they hold their existence under that seemingly hard condition.’23 Eating meat fulfilled the human niche in the ecological system, whereas vegetarianism was anti-ecological in its attempt to set humans apart by making them forgo their natural power over the animals.
Buffon knew perfectly well that he was kicking out a keystone of Rousseau’s anatomisation of the noble savage. The battle lines were drawn between the Rousseauists who believed humans were fundamentally gentle, and the anti-Rousseauists who believed they were born aggressive hunters.
Le Roy’s childhood friend and fellow philosophe Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–71) joined the attack against Rousseau by arguing that humans had teeth designed for cutting meat and were clearly supposed to be omnivorous. He thought that although Bernard Mandeville was right that people unused to killing felt pity, their ability to overcome pity through habit was just as natural as pity itself. Delisle de Sales backed Rousseau against Helvétius by repeating that human teeth were herbivorous and that Asian vegetarians proved the healthiness of the vegetarian diet.24 Linnaeus’ disciple, the traveller Sparrman, likewise joined the vegetarians by insisting that Buffon’s men had totally misunderstood human anatomy.25 The ancient question of man’s nature came to be predicated on the equally ancient question of man’s natural food. In an attempt to find an explanation for human behaviour, eighteenth-century philosophers looked to human origins, much as we in the twenty-first century still search for evolutionary traits that make us behave the way we do. These strong echoes of the prelapsarian myth and the scriptural mandate for human dominion illustrate the inescapable continuities in the West’s cultural heritage.
Such arguments dominated the intellectual scene, but Rousseau knew that they would only ever affect a tiny proportion of society. In order to engineer a widespread cultural movement he had to appeal to people’s sentiment as much as to their reason. Turning his back on Parisian society, Rousseau went back to nature and took up residence in a solitary cottage close to the country estate of his friend Madame d’Épinay near Montmorency. There he produced his works of sentimental fiction, the epistolary novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and the educational treatise Émile, ou de l’Éducation (1762) – and it was these as much as his philosophical treatises that shaped the course of European history in the ensuing tumultuous decades. The radically unorthodox religious agenda of Émile ensured that Catholics in Paris called for the incineration of the book and the incarceration of the author; Julie guaranteed that Rousseau attained celebrity status, especially among the women of the reading classes whom he personally idolised in his passionate admiration for the noblewoman Sophie d’Houdetot. Thanks to his sympathetic connections, Rousseau was provided with a carriage and, immediately after the publication of Émile escaped from France to remain forever a fugitive cause célèbre, dodging his way through Switzerland before eventually landing in the lap of the Scottish philosopher David Hume.
Rousseau had read Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, vastly popular in France, and felt that their championing of emotion in intimate personal letters provided the perfect literary form for inspiring European society en masse with a new zeal for the pure principles of nature. Rousseau’s heroine Julie’s passionate love affair with her tutor, Saint-Preux, and her eventual death at the mercy of her own acute sensibility pushed Richardson’s principles of sensibility to a Romantic extreme.26 Rousseau also admired Richardson’s dietary didacticism; he made Julie a model of abstinent virtue; and in a deliberate allusion to Clarissa, Julie refuses a chicken breast offered to her by a man as she wastes away on her deathbed.27 But where Richardson merely hinted at Clarissa’s abstemiousness, Rousseau radicalised the topos by turning his own heroine into a (piscatarian) vegetarian:
she likes neither meat, nor stews, nor salt, and has never tasted wine straight. Excellent vegetables, eggs, cream, fruit; those are her daily fare, and were it not for fish of which she also is very fond, she would be a true Pythagorean.28
The profusion of milk-based sweets that Julie concocts bears testimony to the bounty of her maternal benevolence, becoming in turn a symbol of ‘egalitarian hierarchy’ as she shares them equally with the peasants on her estate. It is a theme that draws on the milky innocence in Richardson’s Pamela where Mr B.’s illegitimate daughter is treated with cream and butter on visits to a dairy. In Émile, Rousseau’s heroine, Sophie, conforms to the same feminine model: ‘She loves dairy products and sugared things. She loves pastry and sweets but has very little taste for meat. She has never tasted either wine or hard liquor.’29 These symbolic connections between milk-food, breasts and the natural impulses of vegetarianism are the narrative equivalents of Rousseau’s footnotes to the Origins of Inequality. Where in his academic work Rousseau had to couch his principles in sceptical empiricism, in his novels his characters imbibe the principles of innocent morality at the provident bosom of nature.
Julie’s lover, Saint-Preux, explains that ‘Milk products and sugar are one of the sex’s natural tastes and as it were the symbol of innocence and sweetness that constitute its most endearing ornament.’ Saint-Preux’s attempt to confine these impulses to femininity conforms to the traditional association of meat with masculinity – a mould that Cheyne and others tried to break but which was widely endorsed by the likes of Philippe Hecquet, who thought that women ‘prefer to eat patisseries, milk-foods, fruits and similar meagre foods rather than meat’.30 But Saint-Preux learns that there is more to Julie’s diet than feminine sweetness: it is a product of her radical adherence to sympathy.
Rousseau recognised that the power of sympathy relied on the proximity of the sympathiser and the sympathised. Creating a distance between these two agents – a distance that had been introduced into human society by the invention and division of labour and other innovations of ‘cultivation’ – was the origin of inequality. It was the chasm that disconnected man from his own nature, the Fall that tumbled him into modern depravity. To a more extreme degree than Richardson or Cheyne, it was Rousseau’s mission to close up this gap.
Nearly everything Julie eats is home-grown on her Alpine estate, keeping her in direct contact with all the people and processes involved in their production. Even the meat that comes to table for the household’s male carnivores is locally hunted game (which, in contrast to Buffon, Rousseau considered a more natural source of food than agri
culture).31
In the philosophical mode of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau did not state where compassion for animals should outweigh the self-interested desire to kill them; but in his literary works it seems that in the ideal woman, at least, the balance fell towards vegetarianism. In the letter that immediately follows the description of Julie’s diet, Saint-Preux reveals the radical extent of her attribution of rights to nature. Whereas Richardson’s Clarissa kept captive birds in her aviary and chicken house, Julie and her husband, M. Wolmar, maintain a sanctuary for wild birds and animals which have become so trusting of humans that they gather to eat scattered corn ‘like hens’. When Saint-Preux remarks with admiration that Julie keeps her birds as ‘guests’ rather than ‘prisoners’, Julie is quick to point out that he has not understood the extent of her restitution of natural order: ‘ ‘‘Who are you calling guests …?’’ answered Julie. ‘‘It is we who are theirs. They are the masters here, and we pay them tribute so they will put up with us occasionally.’’’32
By giving priority to animals, Julie’s sanctuary went beyond the stock notion of prelapsarian harmony. Such a reversal of man’s dominion was as radical as Thomas Tryon’s ‘Complaint of the Birds’; its closest relatives were the idealised sacred groves of ancient Greece and the Indian sanctuaries or animal hospitals, like those described by the Turkish Spy.33 It was a motif that became a staple of the sentimental novel.
Saint-Preux’s re-education continues on a fishing trip with Julie: ‘I had brought along a rifle to shoot sea-swallows,’ writes Saint-Preux, ‘but she shamed me for killing birds wantonly and for the sole pleasure of doing harm’ (which, as Rousseau had shown in the Discourse on Inequality, was an unambiguous infringement of their natural rights). The lesson is not over: ‘The fishing was good;’ writes Saint-Preux, ‘but except for a trout that had been struck by an oar, Julie had them all thrown back into the water. These are, she said, suffering animals, let us set them free; let us enjoy their pleasure at having escaped the danger.’ Julie uses the situation – reminiscent of tales about Pythagoras and the Hindus saving doomed animals as well as Pamela’s release of the carp – to demonstrate how compassion can outweigh self-interest.34
The Bloodless Revolution Page 26
