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

Immediately after dissecting the ape, Tyson released a series of articles ‘On Man’s feeding on Flesh’ in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. These were written in response to the enquiries of the ex-medical student, now Oxford Professor of Geometry and founder member of the Royal Society, John Wallis (1616–1703). As if the turn of the century demanded a new direction in thinking, Wallis and Tyson formally set out the new agenda: that man’s eating of meat was to be scrutinised on an empirical, rather than scriptural, basis. ‘Without disputing it as a Point of Divinity,’ declared Wallis, ‘I shall consider it (with Gassendus ) as a Question in Natural Philosophy, whether it be proper Food for Man.’ 2

As Wallis noted, the empirical vegetarian tradition had in fact been inaugurated seventy years earlier by the philosopher ‘Gassendus’, or as he is known today, Pierre Gassendi. Gassendi shared Descartes’ detestation of the fusty old Aristotelian scholasticism, but rejected Descartes’ excessively speculative rationalism, and emphasised instead that human knowledge is based on empirical sensory experience. Though less well known than his adversary today, Gassendi’s resuscitation of Epicurean atomism spawned one of the most important philosophical movements in Europe. He taught such writers as Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–55), the big-nosed libertin érudit , and influenced a whole school of eighteenth-century materialists, ultimately paving the way for modern atomic theories. 3

Given Epicurus’ reputation as an arch-atheist and hedonist, Gassendi was sailing close to the wind by espousing his materialist philosophy and he was constantly fending off accusations of being an atheist and drunken libertine himself. 4 But Gassendi insisted that Epicurus was misunderstood: his ethic of attaining pleasure meant avoiding pain by detaching oneself from fleshly appetites, and Epicurus proved this by living a heroically sober and temperate life. The Epicurean diet, said Gassendi, far from being a gluttonous feast, was more like that of peasants and Pythagoreans ‘who live on nothing but bread, fruit and water, and who maintain themselves to a marvel, without hardly ever having need of doctors’. 5 Epicurus took his temperance so far that he allegedly maintained ‘a total abstinence from Flesh’. 6

With regard to the allegations of atheism, Gassendi was a Catholic abbot and professed an implicit faith in man’s immortal soul; but in opposition to Descartes’ impassable line between spirit and matter, Gassendi thought of the soul as a rarefied substance like a flame which pervaded and animated the body. Descartes’ definition of animals as soulless, mindless and thoughtless machines was consequently fallacious, since they too had an animating soul even if it was not immortal.

Developing his objections to Descartes in unison with Hobbes, Gassendi suggested that as everything in the human mind came there only by the senses, and as animals had the same organs of sense as humans, it seemed clear that animals would think just like humans. Gassendi claimed that animal thoughts were not essentially different from ‘reason’ and differed only in the degree of their perfection: ‘though animals do not reason so perfectly and about so many things as man, they still do reason,’ Gassendi wrote to Descartes in 1641, ‘though they do not utter human expressions (as is natural seeing they are not man) yet they emit their own peculiar cries, and employ them just as we do our vocal sounds.’ 7

By this time Gassendi’s dispute with Descartes on behalf of the animals was more than a decade old. In 1629, soon after leaving the company of Descartes’ friends in Paris, Gassendi travelled to northern Europe where he met another of the greatest intellectuals of the period, the chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont (1579–1644), father of Franciscus Mercurius the kabbalist. Of all subjects they could have chosen, Helmont and Gassendi engaged in a debate about vegetarianism which they later pursued in letters to each other, and which Gassendi finally built into one of the most influential philosophical works of the seventeenth century, the Syntagma Philosophicum (posthumously published in 1658).

Like Tyson and Wallis decades later, Gassendi’s principal argument was based on comparative anatomy, a discipline as old as Aristotle. Gassendi adapted this part of his argument from Plutarch’s essay ‘On the Eating of Flesh’ (1st century AD). Man, Plutarch had argued, ‘has no hooked beak or sharp nails or jagged teeth, no strong stomach or warmth of vital fluids able to digest and assimilate a heavy diet of flesh.’ 8 For Plutarch, the corporal design of the human body indicated that nature intended humans to be herbivorous.

A millennium and a half later, Gassendi produced the mandate for philosophical vegetarianism, by proclaiming that ‘The entire purpose of philosophy ought to consist in leading men back to the paths of nature.’ He gave new precision to Plutarch’s anatomical argument by pointing out that carnivores had sharp, pointed, unevenly spaced teeth, whereas the teeth of herbivores were short, broad, blunt, and closely packed in jaws that joined perfectly for effective grinding. Human teeth, with their prominent molars and incisors, he said, were most like the herbivores. Gassendi concluded that ‘Nature intended [men] to follow, in the selection of their food, not the first, namely the carnivorous, but the latter, which graze on the simple gifts of the Earth.’ This observation, he said, was corroborated by the herbivorous diet instituted by God in Eden and by the myths of the classical Golden Age: ‘in this time of innocence,’ Gassendi speculated, ‘man did not want to drench his hands in the blood of animals.’ Because our teeth weren’t properly designed for chewing flesh, he said, they couldn’t cope with all the membranes, tendons and sticky fibres, leaving too much work for our stomachs, overcharging the system with succulent juices and clouding the spirits. Fruit and vegetables, on the other hand were easy to break down into pulp.

Helmont’s interpretation of the facts was totally different. He insisted that man was a microcosmic combination of all the animals: he had the canine teeth of carnivores and the molar teeth of herbivores, and could be nourished by the flesh of them all. That flesh also tasted delicious and nourished the human body was clear proof that ‘it was permitted to man by his nature, to eat the flesh of animals’. 9

Gassendi retorted that the similarities between ourselves and animals – rather than being a mandate for eating them – should teach us to recognise our consanguinity. Taking a sideswipe at ‘a celebrated man’ (presumably Descartes), Gassendi argued that in terms of anatomy ‘monkeys can pride themselves on having the same as us’; ‘notwithstanding they are earthly, they are coeval with us, however much we are used to despising them.’

‘So how come you do not abstain from eating meat?’ Gassendi imagined his opponent asking, to which he replied that his nature had been depraved by being brought up a carnivore, and that it would be dangerous to change his diet all of a sudden (a pervasive assumption rooted in ancient medicine 10 ). But nevertheless, he conceded, ‘I admit that if I were wise, I would abandon this food bit by bit, and nourish myself solely on the gifts of the earth: I do not doubt that I would be happier for longer and more constantly in better health.’ 11

It was ironic that Gassendi framed some of his arguments in opposition to Descartes, for this was just the sort of conclusion that Descartes appears to have come to. Perhaps when Descartes and Gassendi had their famous reconciliatory meeting in 1647, this was one of the topics they agreed upon. If the opinion of Descartes’ disciple, Antoine le Grand, is anything to go by, the Gassendists and Cartesians both agreed that humans were naturally herbivorous. In the Entire Body of Philosophy, According to the Principles of the Famous Renate des Cartes (1672), le Grand endorsed every point of Gassendi’s vegetarian argument. The fact that eating raw meat was instinctively repellent, he insisted, shows ‘that Flesh is not our Natural food , being only introduc’d by Lust , which hath quite changed our Nature from its Primigenial Inclination and Temper’. If a boy were raised on a natural fruitarian diet, le Grand speculated, he might ‘not be inferiour to Stags in running, nor to Apes in climbing of Trees ’. 12