The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

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 pain.’ Descartes himself was renowned for having cut open his own dog to show exactly how the animal machine operated. Cartesians became indelibly marked as the most inhumane of philosophers. Even Descartes’ contemporary Henry More the Platonist, who admired Descartes to the extent of keeping a portrait of him in his closet, could not accept the doctrine of the beast-machine: ‘my spirit,’ pleaded More to Descartes in a letter, ‘through sensitivity and tenderness, turns not with abhorrence from any of your opinions so much as from that deadly and murderous sentiment … the sharp and cruel blade which in one blow, so to speak, dared to despoil of life and sense practically the whole race of animals, metamorphosing them into marble statues and machines.’ It was better to be a Pythagorean and believe animals had immortal souls than to be so cruel to the creatures, he said.

Descartes, however, urged that far from being cruel, his philosophy was the only just system. If animals could feel pain then man and God were guilty of the most horrendous crimes. Humans (as Augustine explained) deserved to suffer because they had sinned, and had the promise of heaven to look forward to. But innocent animals had never sinned, so how could one justify allowing them to suffer? The only way of excusing mankind’s treatment of animals was to insist that animals were incapable of sensation. ‘And thus,’ announced Descartes, ‘my opinion is not so much cruel to wild beasts as favourable to men, whom it absolves, at least those not bound by the superstition of the Pythagoreans, of any suspicion of crime, however often they may eat or kill animals.’14 Descartes, in his own opinion, had come up with the only viable justification for eating meat. Deny what he said was true, he implied, and morally you would be obliged to take up vegetarianism. As one later vegetarian cynic commented, ‘One must either be a Cartesian, or allow that man is very vile.’15

The extraordinary irony is that Descartes was in any case free from the suspicion of committing crimes to animals because he was, by preference, a vegetarian. According to his friend and biographer Father Adrien Baillet, Descartes lived on an ‘anchoritic regime’ of home-grown vegetables. He did not manage to live like this consistently, but at his own table he served ‘vegetables and herbs all the time, such as turnips, coleworts, panado, salads from his garden, potatoes with wholemeal bread’. On this Lenten diet he shunned flesh, though he ‘did not absolutely forbid himself the use of eggs’. Baillet explained that this was because Descartes believed that roots and fruits were ‘much more proper to prolong human life, than the flesh of animals’.

It is often forgotten that Descartes conceived of himself as a physician as much as a rationalist philosopher. Descartes claimed that improving human health ‘has been at all times the principal goal of my studies’, and he vowed in the Discourse on the Method (1637) to dedicate himself to ‘no other occupation’ than freeing mankind from sickness ‘and perhaps also even from the debility of age’. Descartes conducted dietary experiments upon himself and concluded that meat was unsuited to the mechanism of the human body, whereas the vegetable diet could, in the words of his friend Sir Kenelm Digby, ‘lengthen out his life span to equal that of the Patriarchs’.

Like the mystical Rosicrucians he so admired, Descartes dispensed free medical advice throughout his career, and shared his secret about the efficacy of vegetables with other ‘friends of his character’. His companion the Abbé Claude Picot was so impressed that after spending three months at Descartes’ hermit-like retreat in Egmond, ‘he wanted to reduce himself to the institute of Mr Descartes, believing that this was the only way to make a success of the secret which he claimed our Philosopher had discovered, to make men live for four or five hundred years.’ When in 1650 Descartes died at the pitiful age of fifty-four, Picot – after all the claims he made for his diet – was understandably discomposed, and insisted that without a freak accident ‘it would have been impossible’; others even suspected that Descartes had been poisoned.16

Descartes’ mechanistic physiology convinced him both that it was morally acceptable to eat meat and, simultaneously, that it was healthier not to. This reasoning placed him at the crossroads of the vegetarian debate of the eighteenth century. Ethical vegetarianism was built on a refutation of Descartes’ ‘beast-machine’; medical vegetarians used his mechanistic system of the body to explain the benefits of the vegetable diet. The fact that Descartes himself saw no contradiction between refusing one and embracing the other could be viewed as demonstrating the absolute distinction between the medical and ethical motives for vegetarianism – but that is not how some eighteenth-century doctors saw it. When they argued that the body’s hydraulic mechanism was clogged and damaged by meat, they almost invariably acknowledged that this implied that God never intended humans to eat animals.

Descartes’ diet ostensibly had nothing to do with ethical objections to killing animals. Indeed, his Discourse on the Method directed a specific attack against the cult of loving animals inaugurated by Michel de Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond (1585). Descartes’ dualist theory of the beast-machine seems to have been devised partly in order to extinguish these feelings of compassion. This is borne out by Descartes’ early manuscripts which show that he first devised the idea of the animal automata in 1619–20 after his friend and superior brother at the Jesuit college, Father Molitor, presented him with the animal-friendly Treatise on Wisdom (1601) by Montaigne’s disciple Pierre Charron.17

Following Descartes’ lead, Malebranche also attacked the ‘dangerous’ Montaigne for being ‘angry with Men; because they separate themselves from … Beasts, which he calls our Fellow Brethren, and our Companions’.18 Malebranche explained that sympathy was just a mechanical process in the body – like blood circulation, an animal function as bestial as a sexual urge – and should therefore be subjugated like other carnal appetites to the superior power of reason: and reason indicated that animals were not really feeling pain in any case.19 This lesson was lost on ‘Persons of a fine and delicate Constitution, who have a lively Imagination, and very soft tender Flesh’, especially women and children who, he said, ‘are Mechanically dispos’d to be very Pitiful and Compassionate’.20 But Malebranche recognised that even being as convinced as he and Descartes were that animals did not feel pain was no protection against this corporal feeling of sympathy. For this inescapable automatic compassion, he said, ‘often prevents those Persons from Butchering Beasts, who are the most convincingly perswaded they are meer Machines’. He warned that failing to realise that the body was sending misleading signals was ‘a prejudice that is very dangerous in view of its consequences’.21

Though tantalisingly unverifiable, it would be most surprising if Descartes’ medical decision to abstain from meat also made him feel better because it avoided the irrepressible sensation of sympathy for animal suffering. But by the end of the eighteenth century at least, that is precisely what some commentators believed was the case. One author even implied that it was because of his humanity that, ‘in imitation of the good natured Plutarch, [Descartes] always preferred fruits and vegetables to the bleeding flesh of animals.’22

Regardless of Descartes’ own feelings, it is superlatively ironic that this Cartesian mechanistic explanation of sympathy was turned into an argument for ethical vegetarianism in the eighteenth century. The fact that sympathy was an innate function of human anatomy convinced many that it was an embodiment of natural or divine law – especially since most people believed God had personally designed the human body. This came to underwrite the argument that sympathy was an innate source of moral and social principles, formulated by the ‘moral sense’ philosophers from the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) to Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) and David Hume (1711–76), until it was finally revised by Immanuel Kant (1724– 1804).23 It became common to extrapolate the same argument onto sympathy for animals and for Jean-Jacques Rousseau this constituted a basis for animal rights. As the Dutch physician-philosopher Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) expressed it in 1714, because sympathy ‘proceeds from a real Passion inherent in our Nature, it is sufficient to demonstrate that we are born with a Repugnancy to the killing, and consequently the eating of Animals’.24 At a time when natural observations carried as much force as biblical strictures, this deduction of natural law became one of the most potent arguments for vegetarianism. Anti-vegetarians fiercely responded by adopting the neo-Cartesian argument that sympathy should be subjugated to reason and to the scriptural permission to kill animals.

Even if Descartes was not one of those described by Malebranche, who knew animals were machines but still could not bring themselves to kill them, his extraordinary legacy influenced both sides of the medical and ethical vegetarian debate which flourished throughout the eighteenth century.

ELEVEN Tooth and Nail: Pierre Gassendi and the Human Appendix