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

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.