Flesh in the Age of Reason (6 page)

has written a book to prove that there is no such thing as matter, and that nothing exists but in idea: that you and I only fancy ourselves eating, drinking, and sleeping; you at Leipsig, and I at London; that we think we have flesh and blood, legs, arms, etc., but that we are only spirit. His arguments are, strictly speaking, unanswerable; but yet I am so far from being convinced by them, that I am determined to go on to eat and drink, and walk and ride, in order to keep that
matter
, which I so mistakenly imagine my body at present to consist of, in as good plight as possible.

Yet the flesh proved deeply problematic, and, as Chesterfield’s letters show, if it was a source of pleasure, it was also a thorough nuisance, in constant need of care, attention and apology.

To a degree that is hard to imagine nowadays, visible, tangible flesh was all too often experienced as ugly, nasty and decaying, bitten by bugs and beset by sores; it was rank, foul and dysfunctional; for all of medicine’s best efforts, it was frequently racked with pain, disability and disease; and death might well be nigh. Letters and diaries – to say nothing of Swift’s satires or the cartoons of Hogarth and Gillray – document at length and with passion the intense repugnance people so frequently felt towards their own noisome flesh and that of others. That in part explains why, as Norbert Elias has argued, the period brought such an earnest raising of the thresholds of embarrassment and shame, so as to hide, deodorize, cleanse, purge, exclude and expel those multitudinous aspects of the flesh and of bodily functions experienced as psychosocially threatening, disgusting and dangerous.

The eighteenth century inevitably brought a host of new disciplines of the flesh. Some were personal – like dieting, deportment, exercise, hygiene and the avoidance of ‘self-pollution’. Others were public, finding expression in such corrective and sanitizing institutions as schools, hospitals, workhouses and prisons, culminating, on the drawing-board at least, in Jeremy Bentham’s visionary penitentiary,
the Panopticon, in which all bodies were permanently under comprehensive all-seeing scrutiny. Meanwhile, élite drives for the reformation of popular culture equated the flesh and the plebs, and hence made the bodily connote all that was vulgar, disorderly, contagious and threatening. Although occasions remained for licensed carnivalesque release, educated opinion reinforced doubts about and revulsion against the flesh.

With the Christian soul problematized but the flesh an object of intensified disquiet and discipline, élite identities associated themselves with the elevation of the mind, that is, with a consciousness which, while distinct from the theological soul of the Churches, was equally distanced from gross corporeality. To speak rather schematically, in crudely reductionist and functionalist terms, opinion-leaders wished to escape the thumb of the beneficed clergy – and hence had to redefine the inherited Christian soul; while they also aimed to lord it over the plebs, which meant that they had to be wary of any uncouth embracing of the body as such. Parading a new mental and cultural authority, progressive thinkers invented a stalking-horse and shibboleth of their own: mind, and eventually the idea of the march of mind. For them, progress became the true, the secular, meaning of salvation, and the doctrine of mind over matter stood for power over the plebs.

After introductory chapters which offer broad surveys of Christian theology, the philosophical heritage and the doctrines about the body advanced by early science and medicine, this book will proceed, through a series of studies of people and problems, to explore the various innovations, trends and tangents produced by post-Restoration thinking. In coverage it makes no pretence to be definitive or even representative. In an age which brought a striking fragmentation of opinion, what was ‘representative’ was kaleidoscopic variety, and assurance of adamantine absolute truths was waning, much to the vexation of men like Edmund Burke who saw corrosive questionings as the precondition of the French Revolution, and of Evangelicals insistent that the new self-indulgent narcissism
of the age of sensibility flew in the face of Divine Truth. ‘The great and high’, declared Isaac Milner in 1794, ‘have forgotten that they have souls’.

This book explores how, in a manner of speaking, that demise of the soul came about. It investigates how, against the backcloth of the Enlightenment’s watchword,
sapere aude
(‘dare to know’), individuals reformulated the problems of existence and made sense of the self, with a changing, and waning, reference to the soul. It is a story of the disenchantment of the world, a move from a time when everything was ensouled (animism) towards a present day in which the soul is no longer an object of scientific inquiry, though mind may still just be.

How my soul, which I look upon to be an immortal Being in me, that is the Principle of thinking, should extinguish with my Body I cannot in any reasonable way of thinking conceive.

THOMAS SYDENHAM

Thy body, when the soule is gone, will be a horrour to all that behold it, a most loothsome and abhorred spectacle.

ROBERT BOLTON

Western thinking about the human condition long hinged on the union of two contrasting elements, body and soul. At least from the time of Plato (
c
.428–
c
.348
BC
), models of their relationship – complementary but conflictual – promoted a dualism which, once given the blessing of Christianity, proved durable, persuasive and dominant. A grasp of the emergence of those ideas is essential for understanding later developments.

The earliest Greek-speaking philosophers, before 500
BC
, hoped to explain the world in terms of a
single
causal entity – water, air and so on. Their successors and rivals conceptualized it in terms of
multiple
principles. But with Pythagoras (sixth century
BC
) and his followers, and in particular with Plato in fourth-century Athens, these options (‘monism’, ‘pluralism’) were challenged by a
dualism
, applied to the cosmos and man alike, which was to prove astonishingly influential – indeed, arguably it still rules, or skews, Western outlooks. The notion that man is a compound of two distinct entities, body and
soul, carried with it massive implications, philosophical, moral, scientific and theological. Philosophically, the soul–body pairing presupposed two independent sorts of reality. In natural philosophy, it came to mean the split between an animating principle (First Mover) and a thing moved (matter), while within Christian theology, it would become the hierarchy of Creator and created, Holy Spirit and terrestrial clay.

If the earliest Greek thinkers were primarily interested in ‘science’ – how the world came to be and how it worked – it was Pythagoras who turned attention to a ‘moral’ universe, governed by a principle of Truth. For the Pythagoreans, humans were composed of a good (divine) soul and a mutinous body requiring to be mastered. This good–bad split pervaded other domains: in the cosmos, for instance, form, order and light were good; chaos, disorder and darkness, evil. Such macrocosmic–microcosmic correspondences exerted a tenacious hold over later philosophers. The Neoplatonist Plotinus, for instance, described a continuum which extended down from Divine Intellect to brute matter, via angels, man, lower animals, the vegetable kingdom and inanimate matter. As we shall see later, this model of the superiority of the soul in man and the universe alike was still being proclaimed by the Cambridge Platonists as late as the mid-seventeenth century.

The Greeks of the age of Homer (eighth century
BC
) had thought of
psyche
(breath, or soul; later,
anima
in Latin) not as a moral agent but simply as the breath necessary for life. Filled with
psyche
, the Homeric warrior was all action, defined by deeds more than deliberations, worlds apart from the sophisticated orators and contemplative intellectuals recorded in Plato’s dialogues a few hundred years later.

Indeed, the
Iliad
even lacks an abstraction which we could translate as ‘person’ or ‘oneself’. Rather, Homer portrays life and conduct as driven by external, supernatural forces, and his protagonists are puppet-like, often in the grip of terrible powers beyond their control – gods, demons and Furies – which decree their fates and punish, avenge and destroy. The inner life, with its agonizing dilemmas of will, conscience and choice, has not yet become decisive.

A new mental landscape had emerged, however, by Athens’s golden age (fifth and fourth centuries
BC
). The thinking on the psyche that then developed set the mould for mainstream Western reasoning about the mind, as was in effect acknowledged by Freud when he named infantile psycho-sexual conflicts the ‘Oedipus Complex’, paying tribute to the play by Sophocles. What makes Greek drama so powerful is its combination of elements both of traditional and of newer casts of mind.

The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides dramatize titanic conflicts – the hero or heroine as a plaything of the gods or crushed under destiny, the rival demands of love and honour, of duty and desire, of individual, kin and state. The ineluctable outcome of such conflict is madness and death. Unlike Homer’s heroes, the tragedians’ protagonists are the
conscious
subjects of reflection, responsibility and guilt, racked by inner conflict, and the agonies of minds divided against themselves are echoed in the contrapuntal utterances of the Chorus. The destructive powers in the tragedies are no longer solely those of external fate, imperious gods and malevolent furies. For ruin is also self-inflicted – their heroes are consumed by
hubris
, by ambition or pride, followed by shame, grief and guilt; they tear themselves apart and heap retribution upon themselves (
nemesis
). The psychic civil war staged by Greek tragedy was then rationalized in the philosophy of Socrates and Plato.

Systematically reasoning about nature, society and mind, the philosophers of Periclean Athens cast the rational individual – that is to say, the well-born and educated male citizen, like themselves – as their ethical and political standard. In thus championing reason, they did not deny the irrational. On the contrary, the credit they granted to the mind affirms the dangerous power they saw in the passions and in the blind destructive force of fate: only the calm pursuit of reason could save humans from catastrophe.

Plato, in particular, condemned appetite as the arch-enemy of freedom and dignity; and the Platonic polarization of the rational and the irrational, enshrining as it did the superiority of mind over matter, became definitive of such later and complementary philo
sophies as Stoicism, with its celebration of transcendent Order and universal Mind. Through self-knowledge – ‘know thyself’ – reason could fathom human nature and thereby master the appetites that enslaved man. Terrified by the primordial forces assailing the mind, Platonism, Stoicism and kindred philosophies exposed unreason as a danger and disgrace which mind or soul must combat.

In particular, the soul cast as an immortal intellectual and moral principle was central to Socrates, who memorably deemed the unexamined life not worth living. While indebted to Pythagoras, he did not precisely echo his simple body–soul dualism. For experience showed that wrong was not simply a beast in the body but rather the pursuit of a supposed but mistaken good, due not to evil but to ignorance.

In their struggles to represent the human condition and the good life, Socrates and his pupil Plato tried out various formulations. In Plato’s
Phaedo
, for instance, the soul was presented as an elementary entity; but it was not unitary in the
Republic
, the
Phaedrus
or the
Timaeus
. This last work, widely endorsed in medieval and Renaissance psychologies, posited a threefold partition of the soul, each part being mapped onto a specific bodily zone: the rational element in the head, the spirit in the breast and the appetites in the belly. Dividing the rational faculty from the rest, the neck was an isthmus insulating the intellect from contamination.

The same three faculties reappear in a different guise in the
Phaedrus
, in the myth (also popular later) of the charioteer and his pair of horses. This gives a different account of the soul’s fate as yoked to the body. The charioteer stands for the rational faculty of the soul, a white horse its spirited element or will (reason’s natural ally), and a dark horse its appetites. When the dark horse stumbles, it brings down with it the white horse and the charioteer. In this Platonic allegory of the ‘fall’, it is thus a principle
within
the soul itself which is responsible for its fate, harnessed as it is to the body.

Socrates and Plato were clearly torn between rival conceptualizations of the driving forces (or ruling classes) within. In the
Timaeus
and the
Phaedrus
, for example, the appetites are envisaged as integral
to the soul, and hence it is from the soul that desires emerge. In the
Phaedo
, by contrast, appetites are grossly corporeal and at odds with the soul. When Plato’s complex speculations were selectively Christianized, however, what was absorbed was a simplified dualism which pitted fallible flesh against a god-like soul.

Whereas Plato devoted himself to elucidating moral truth, his pupil Aristotle principally sought to explain man and the universe in a naturalistic or scientific way. Furthermore, while Plato maintained that the senses could never deliver certain knowledge of anything – intellect alone could grasp truth – Aristotle looked to them as man’s chief source of knowledge, being highly critical of Plato’s fanciful postulation of independent, transcendental Forms. Form could not exist apart from matter, pronounced Aristotle, the consummate biological observer – though matter for its part, without form, was simply ‘potential’; it was form which provided the immutable principle.