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Reason, nature and the human being in the West: Part 3

3.3 Animals from the 18th Century corpuscularian perspective

Sustained attempts were made in the 18th Century to carry the corpuscularian account of the physical universe over to the understanding of animals and plants. As an illustration, here are some notes on the effort to explain the development of the individual animal from conception to maturity. It involves setting out some distinctions between different types of forces.

Growth in sympathy towards animals

There was a significant growth in 'sympathy' towards animals over the 18th Century.

When it came to how it was proper to behave towards animals the question according to the 18th Century was not whether they were intelligent, nor whether they belonged to 'the moral sphere' but whether they had feelings. And it was thought that many of them, maybe all, did. Jeremy Bentham asserted that what mattered was not whether they had reason, or could talk, but whether they were capable of suffering.

By the nineteenth Century, this had changed. Animals came to be regarded in law as chattels, though towards the end of the 19th Century certain protections against ill-treatment of animals were introduced.

Ritvo interprets this change as follows:

She says that what it reflects is a change in the way in which the relationship between human being and animal was perceived over the period (18th and 19th Centuries), a change which she attributes this change in perception to:"the new methods of acquiring and applying knowledge associated with the Enlightenment". (Ritvo, The Animal Estate, above, p.3)

At the beginning of this period, people regarded themselves, she says, as dominated by natural forces; at the end, they thought of science and engineering as putting human beings in control.

Talk about animals is used as a way of talking about nature in general, according to Ritvo: and she says that when animals were spoken of as autonomous, a threat because outside human control, this was a way of saying that the whole of nature was like that. (Animals are part of nature, of course, so the judgement that animals were a threat was part of the judgement that the whole of nature was a threat) .

When people began to feel that nature was under control, they partly said this by saying that animals were not a threat but a chattel.

But you could also say that control specifically over animals had increased over the period. Scientific and technical advances enhanced the control people had over animals (in areas such as breeding, veterinary science, gun design), and this would have made people look at them less as a threat.

Ritvo looks forward of course beyond the 18th Century. In the 19th she sees :-

• sentimental attitudes to pets, and to the lower order of creation, increasing markedly, particularly over the first half of that century.
• wildness becoming increasingly attractive.
• this new sentiment echoed in art and literature, where a new value was put on "wildness" - if we gloss that as "irregularity and lack of restraint" - and the "highly ordered aesthetic" of the 18th C rejected (Ritvo, The Animal Estate, above, p.3).

She is speaking of course of the emergence of Romanticism.

What do you think? What do you think governs a culture's manner of treating animals? Discussion site

VP

Revised 04:05:04
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Reason, Nature and the Human Being in the West
Part of a module of the MA in Values and the Environment Lancaster University
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