of sentiment, and the critical veneration of Shakespeare.
Hence we may recognize this notion of character, in its originary Cartesian moment, as an instrument for defining and maintaining the species barrier. It is no accident that the Discourse on Method (1637) remains almost equally famous for two distinct philosophical postulates: the cogito and the bête-machine. These principles emerge hand in hoof from Descartes's meditations, in symbiotic and mutually reinforcing relation: the former crafts a notion of humanity composed of inwardness and speculation, while the latter denies such qualities to the nonhuman. Taken together, these philosophical constructs offer a response to earlier notions of human character that had come by the early modern period to appear increasingly untenable. In the process Descartes's principles also paved the way for new literary techniques of representing the human, techniques that in turn proved essential in consolidating the species distinction on which they were based.
But to return to more conventionally literary writing, what then of Shakespeare? How is this very pre-Cartesian playwright conscripted so durably into the Enlightenment project of literary character construction? We might start to answer this question by noting how haunted Shakespeare is by the relationship between people and other animals. From Launce and Crab to the asinine Bottom, from the “inexecrable dog” Shylock (Merchant of Venice [1596–97] 4.1.128) to Banquo's currish murderers (Macbeth [1606] 3.1.91–104), from Lear's “pelican daughters” (3.4.75) to the man-fish Caliban, the poet's work seems like nothing so much as a protracted, uneasy meditation on the ties that bind species together and the traumas that tear them apart. From this standpoint, Shakespeare's particular claim to fame may lie not so much in the characters he created as in the discomfort he expressed through them: that is to say, in the resonance and clarity with which he lent voice to the problem of distinctions that preceded the Cartesian moment. Perhaps there is something a bit complacent, even self-infatuated, in recent efforts to celebrate Shakespeare as the inventor of the human. Perhaps we should remember him instead as the poet of humanity in crisis.
Character and Premodernity
Hence my core argument: Shakespeare and his contemporaries inherit a crisis of distinctions that expresses itself through a fixation on the human-animal relationship; Descartes resolves this same crisis a priori, by granting humanity exclusive access to consciousness via the ability “to use words or other signs…to declare our thoughts to others” (46); and in the process, he also creates a new purpose for literary activity—that of drawing and redrawing the species boundary through the elaboration of literary character as defined by the revelation in words of a distinctive personal interiority. This, of course, is the very same mode of revelation through which Descartes confirms humanity's unique access to the exercise of reason, and its presumed absence in nonhuman animals leads him to conclude that they, by contrast, “have no mental powers whatsoever” (48).
By no accident, this notion of the species boundary conforms to Bruno Latour's “modern Constitution” (29): that grand division of the map of knowledge into two zones—a “scientific” one for “representing things” and a “political” one for “representing subjects” (29)—that Latour regards as distinctive of society in its modernized western form. Insofar as literature, the arts, and the humanities count for anything at all in this dispensation, they belong squarely within the second of these two zones. Thus it makes perfect sense that they should be charged with the task of representing, defining, and refining the human through the creation and exploration of character. Likewise, it makes equal sense that the assignment of human attributes to nonhuman beings—the problem that Ruskin calls the pathetic fallacy—should emerge as a compound form of category confusion, not only confusing people with nonpeople but simultaneously confusing the modes of discourse proper to the understanding of each. On this logic the humanities should rightly declare that Nihil humanum mihi alienum est, whereas the pathetic fallacy drops the first adjective.
To this extent we might, in fact, take the pathetic fallacy as an error peculiar to the arts and humanities; in any case, that is certainly how Ruskin presents it. Latour's critique of the modern constitution, however, suggests something very different: that despite the most rigorous attempts to suppress them in the name of modern disciplinarily, such modes of category confusion have become more the rule than the exception. For Latour, the modern constitution must be understood as a mode of false consciousness, seeking an unattainable ideal of “analytic continuity” (7) consistent with the distinction between scientific and sociopolitical modes of understanding. However, its efforts in this direction are forever frustrated by the appearance of “entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture” (10), of which Ruskin's pathetic fallacy, with its distinctively modern morbidity, may be seen as only an initial instance. For Latour, indeed, this is the very tragedy of the modern: that its dream of discursive purity lies forever out of reach, that “the more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding becomes” (12).
One may therefore find it instructive to discover a parallel to the language of pathetic fallacy operating not in the disciplinary regime of the humanities but rather in that of the biological sciences. Here again questions of animal consciousness throw the problem into relief. Surveying the vocabularies of zoological and ethological observation, Eileen Crist concludes that differing scientific idioms generate very different ways of understanding the inner life of animals. On one hand, the “Cartesian verdict of an unbridgeable hiatus between humans and animals” (1) produces “a technical and causal language” of scientific observation that “leads to the portrayal of animals as objects,” “blind to the meaning and significance of their activities and interactions” (5). On the other hand, “the Darwinian affirmation of evolutionary continuity” (1) elicits a very different model of discourse, which “deliver[s] subjectivity to the world of animals” by presenting their actions “as meaningful, authored, and continuous” (4). In both cases there is a sense in which the scientific methodology in question actually invents the conclusions it is ostensibly designed to discover, so that “divergent portrayals of animals as subjects, on the one hand, and as objects, on the other, form the conceptual foundations that, respectively, allow the emergence of animal mentality or prescind its very possibility” (6).
Crist's narrative is rich with irony. To begin with, it yields the spectacle of a Darwinian theory apparently grounded in Cartesian empiricism yet nonetheless producing a view of “animal mentality” at odds with that proposed by Descartes. (Darwin draws on scientific observation to argue for the development of certain species out of others through a process of adaptation and natural selection; adaptation, in turn, argues for some kind of individual agency; however, to attribute agency to animals is to endow them with the beginnings of a mental life, despite the fact that Descartes insists they have “no mental powers whatsoever.”) This, in turn, leads to the further ironic possibility that Descartes's empiricism might prove less rigorous than it at first appears, since it is grounded on the a priori assumption that the human-nonhuman species barrier is defined by “mental powers” or their lack. This suspicion, in turn, gives way to yet another layer of irony, if one agrees with Crist that neither the Cartesian nor the Darwinian position can be accepted as rigorously empirical, insofar as the language of observation employed by each tends to predetermine the significance of what is being observed. From Latour's perspective, both Cartesianism and Darwinianism are hybrid constructs, aspiring to an “analytic continuity” they can never possess. From the perspective of Ruskin, both are forms of the pathetic fallacy, projecting onto the nonhuman world the mental environment of its human observers.
So far, I have spent a good deal of time here defining and investigating the emergence of modern attitudes toward animal mentality and its relation to human character. However, my purpose in doing so is to move beyond these attitudes, in effect by moving behind them to the issues and developments that preceded them. My instrument for doing so is character study, that most downtrodden and disrespected of critical tools, which I shall reconfigure so as to render it amenable to the treatment of nonhuman animals. In so adapting the notion of character, I return it to its pre-Cartesian status as elaborated in the Aristotelian and Theophrastan tradition of nature
