Flesh in the Age of Reason
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Authors: Roy Porter
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FLESH IN THE AGE OF REASON
ROY PORTER
FOREWORD BY SIMON SCHAMA
ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
ALLEN LANE
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2003
1
Copyright © the Estate of Roy Porter, 2003
Foreword copyright © Simon Schama, 2003
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
EISBN: 978–0–141–91225–7
To Natsu, the love of my life
For, what was ever understood
By human Kind, but Flesh and Blood?
JONATHAN SWIFT
,
‘A Receipt to Restore Stella’s Youth’
The Corruption of the Senses is the Generation of the Spirit.
JONATHAN SWIFT
,
A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of
the Spirit in a Letter To a Friend. A Fragment
I said, ‘we were not stocks and stones’ – ’tis very well. I should have added, nor are we angels, I wish we were, – but men cloathed with bodies, and governed by our imaginations.
LAURENCE STERNE
,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Will this be good for your worships’ eyes?
LAURENCE STERNE
,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
7
THE
SPECTATOR
:
THE POLITE SELF IN THE POLITE BODY
9
SWIFT AND THE SCRIBLERANS: NIGHTMARE SELVES
10
JOHNSON AND INCORPORATED MINDS
11
EDWARD GIBBON: FAME AND MORTALITY
23
WILLIAM GODWIN: AWAKENING THE MIND
24
WILLIAM BLAKE: THE BODY MYSTICAL
26
CONCLUSION: THE MARCH OF MIND
FOREWORD
About half way through Roy Porter’s intellectual epic, he has his hero Laurence Sterne rail against the ‘dirty planet’ in which ‘strange fatalities’ rain down ‘“body blows” against the “delicate and finespun web” of life, all stage-managed, it seems, by a malignant spirit’. And for those of us who knew, admired and loved Roy Porter, reading
Flesh in the Age of Reason
is necessarily an acutely painful pleasure. For it is mercilessly clear that Roy died at the height of his powers. The book is great Porter, which is to say the best history anyone could ever want to read. Never was the presence of the author so strongly present: deeply serious in the depth of his philosophical inquiry, yet wearing his massive erudition lightly. As always in his work, exacting arguments of intellectual history are made accessible as narrative; the ideas themselves not suspended in some realm of disembodied play, but fleshed out as the title of the work implies and embedded in the lived historical experience of thinkers both mighty and paltry.
The unmistakeably eighteenth-century irony, that the subject of Roy’s posthumous masterpiece is itself the long, vexed relationship between the body and the rest of us (soul or mind), would have drawn from the author one of his famously expansive full-body chuckles. But for those of us who bitterly miss his personal as well as his intellectual presence, the exhilaration of reading this shockingly vital and exuberant book is punctuated by the mournfulness of realizing that there will not be another like it. It is, I suppose, some sort of scant consolation that
Flesh in the Age of Reason
actually enacts, in the enduring imprint it leaves on the reader, some of the more optimistic beliefs of its eighteenth-century protagonists, who imagined the mind as the place where identity was built; where consciousness, sentiment and memory dwelled; the lodging-house, in fact, of humanity. But it
is, nonetheless, hard for his friends to read Porter’s revisitings of the likes of Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, Sterne and Coleridge, all of whose beliefs in the supremacy of vigorous reason were deeply threatened by the fragility of the flesh – and not feel a sharp pang.
For Porter aficionados there are some familiar faces in this volume whom Roy has written about elsewhere – Thomas Beddoes, George Cheyne; Thomas Day; David Hartley; Erasmus Darwin – yet the accounts of what each had to offer to the long debate about the relationship between mind and body never feel stale. (Erasmus Darwin, for example, the founder of the Lunar Society, is made more clearly than ever the progenitor of the theory of evolution consummated by his grandson.) And this is because, in this last work, Porter brought the huge weight of his encyclopedic knowledge to bear on the most demanding questions which have exercised restless minds since Plato: What can we know of ourselves and how would such knowledge be conditioned or compromised by the physical apparatus of its cognition? And, most ambitiously – and for the reader most thrillingly – Porter tackles, through the first hundred or so pages of his book, the history of the idea of the soul. This takes him to places where most eighteenth-century social and cultural historians shrink from trespassing: to the Greeks and the classical Christian philosophers and theologians, and eventually on to René Descartes’s dualism. One of the many reasons to be wistful as well as grateful for
Flesh in the Age of Reason
is that one realizes that Porter was warming up to grapple with the torments of the Christian seventeenth century with much the same critical shrewdness and historical sympathy as he had shown for the Enlightenment rationalists of the eighteenth. The readings of Descartes, Milton and Hobbes are as thoughtful and penetrating as those of Hume and Millar for the eighteenth.
As vast as the scale of the undertaking is, the book is never heavy going. It is lightened, not by any relaxation in the sharpness of argument, but by Porter’s brief to himself to register the imprint of ideas in social action; and to see, in turn, how such social action might affect the onward discourse of debates about body and mind. So there are, as usual in his work, passages of dazzling description
which conjure up whole worlds of freshly agitated self-consciousness. The dawning of the idea that hysteria or hypochondria were physical maladies (rather than purely moral disorders), and were thus susceptible of some sort of corrective regimen, gets vintage Porter analysis, the witty asides always softened by compassionate empathy. And alongside the major figures in the canon Porter makes room for more eccentric figures who nonetheless play their own part in the long, tortured relationship between soul or mind and the body in which it was taken to be imprisoned: Luigi Cornaro, for example, the prophet of a temperate life whose dining habits were so perfectly balanced that he could write ‘I feel when I leave the table that I must sing.’ Cornaro, Porter tells us, wrote his first book of counsel at 83, his fourth at 95 but then ‘passed away prematurely at the disappointing age of 98’. Or at the other end of the scales, George Cheyne, who ballooned to a massive 450 pounds before subjecting himself to the brutal regime of vomits, purges and fasts which entitled the (relatively) skinnier Cheyne to lecture his contemporaries on the perils of gluttony and idleness.
Flesh in the Age of Reason
manages, over and again, to spot the moments where a familiar modern preoccupation gets born and circulated in the wider culture, whithout any kind of anachronistic projection. Thus, Porter sees the change in the second half of the eighteenth century, from a culture which celebrated embonpoint and fleshiness as a sign of vitality to Byron’s narcissistic regime of diet and exercise, as a genuinely fateful moment: the beginnings of the obsession with youthfulness (especially svelte youth) as a paradigm of beauty. Similarly, he is marvellously illuminating on the first writers, like William Alexander, a whole generation before Mary Wollstonecraft, able to argue that gender was a social construction.
Throughout the whole book flashes Roy Porter’s wickedly wonderful way with language; unafraid of importing street talk when it makes sense and delivers his argument with punchy humour. Eighteenth-century England, he writes of the anxieties voiced by Cheyne, was ‘becoming a nation of fatties’ and ‘for certain of Johnson’s contemporaries, the blues were a treasured identity badge’. Then, too, Porter
allows his almost Johnsonian gift for aphorism full play. The 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury ‘was lastingly charmed by the flair and creativity of his genius’. Johnson’s ‘daily bread was monstrous toil, menial, grinding against the clock; the lexicographer was indeed a drudge’. But these edgy little jabs are just accents in a book where the writing is so exhilarating that it is often difficult to resist smiling at its sheer brio. For Roy Porter, historical prose was never a workaday thing, but in this book, where all of his passions and preoccupations are in overdrive, he lets his feeling for language as a succulent, luscious, toothsome thing, rip. Great writing from the eighteenth century and Romantic masters – Dr Johnson, Gibbon, Hazlitt and Blake – draws from him, as if in irresistible yet admiring emulation, passages worthy of them. The long discussion of the body wars in
Tristram Shandy
may be the single most perceptive and intensely engaged commentary on that book ever written, and, perhaps surprisingly in a book that journeys from Plato to Francis Crick, it is at the very heart of the matter, nowhere more acutely than when Porter writes, movingly as well as wittily:
