One of the central claims of the book follows from these examples. In many eighteenth-century texts, personification functions less as a figure that enacts “the change of things to persons,” as Samuel Johnson would have it, than it does as Erasmus Darwin characterizes it at century’s end: as a “poetic art” that serves “to restore … [an] original animality.”8 Unsurprisingly, the sense that animality needs restoring is a roughly post-Cartesian one, a response to what was widely characterized as the Cartesian assault on animal life. For many of the writers in this book, as for so many of their contemporaries, Descartes stood above all for a philosophical schema that established human uniqueness by identifying animals with things. This schema is encapsulated in a well-known section of the Discourse on the Method that identifies animals and machines and then describes “two very certain means” of distinguishing a machine from an apparently identical human twin:
The first is that they could never use words, or put together other signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words which correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs…. But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do. Secondly, even though such machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others, which would reveal that they were acting not through understanding but only from the disposition of their organs…. Now in just these two ways we can also know the difference between man and beast.9
Citing this passage in isolation—as many others have done, and I do here—does little justice to the complexity even of Descartes’s thesis of the animal-machine.10 But it does register the astonishing move he makes when he collapses the distinction between speaking and acting into a uniquely human capacity for response or “meaningful answer” and so denies animals the very attribute for which they are named.11 Identifying animals with machines—which is to say, with organized but essentially inanimate objects, set in motion by an agency not their own—Descartes ejects animals from the realm of acting altogether, not only from deliberative and intentional action but also from what was variously referred to as animation, self-motion, or motivity—the sort of acting that commonly distinguishes animate beings from inanimate things, and that was widely taken to imply some sort of mind or conscious purpose. (Acting “from the disposition of their organs,” animals are pictured less as self-moving than as moved from without, by a structure of parts common to every member of a species, and the external stimuli that occasions their motion.) Some time ago, Julian Jaynes referred to this as Descartes’s “rapier-like attack on the animism of animals”—his breathtaking intervention into seventeenth-century debates about the nature of animate motion itself.12 As Jaynes details, the question of animate motion was so unsettled in the period before Newton that it could be attributed to the cosmos as a whole (as in Tommaso Campanella’s response to Copernicus, “Mundum esse animal, totum sentiens!”) or restricted, as in Descartes, to human begins alone.13 In a familiar but not trivial sense, Descartes’s rendering inanimate of the animal marks a decisive moment in the constitution of the “modern” division of all beings into (human) persons and (nonhuman) things.14
This move may have been decisive, but it was met by considerable and often complicated dissent. John Locke frames his massively influential Essay Concerning Human Understanding, for example, as an extended reply to Descartes, contesting the Cartesian commitment to innate ideas in particular, and more broadly, calling into question key aspects of Descartes’s account of both human and animal cognition. “They must needs have a penetrating sight,” Locke quips, “who can certainly see, that I think, when I cannot perceive it my self, and when I declare, that I do not; and yet can see, that Dogs or Elephants do not think, when they give all the demonstration of it imaginable, except only telling us, that they do so.”15 In part, Locke is resisting Descartes’s collapse of demonstration into declaration (of action into speech), by insisting that animals demonstrate mind as certainly as we do—though how certainly we do this is, for Locke, a real question. Locke is also and perhaps more basically resisting Descartes’s claim that “I” am essentially and substantively something that exists in and as thought—resisting, specifically, the implication that I always think, despite my own sense that sometimes I do not (as in sleep, or lapses in consciousness, or simply when my mind is empty). But the terms of Locke’s objection—that I am in the best position to know whether and when I think—are themselves drawn from Descartes’s own logic, from the roughly Cartesian insistence on the epistemological priority of the first person. Locke thus registers his disagreement with and debt to Descartes in one and the same moment, a moment that seeks to reconfigure the interrelationship of Descartes’s twin figures of the animal-machine and the cogito.
Locke’s quasi-Cartesian objection to Descartes begins to indicate what it meant to “restore animality” in this moment, and ultimately, why personification plays a role in this restoration. Most basically, Locke shows that while Descartes’s “rapier-like attack on animism in animals” met with considerable resistance in eighteenth-century Britain, his sense of the epistemological and ontological primacy of the individual person—and of the first person in particular—was far more widely shared. This is not news. At least since Ian Watt, the literary and intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Britain has been characterized according to a narrative of modernization and rising individualism that begins with Descartes, a narrative that has been much disputed and revised, but that remains influential.16 What I want to emphasize here is the close relation between the originary figure of this familiar narrative, Descartes’s “I,” and the animal-machine. Indeed, in the context of the Discourse, the animal-machine emerges at least in part to contain a possibility the cogito generates: the possibility that I might be alone in the universe, that there exist no other beings like me. Descartes’s claims about animals—in particular, the claim that even animals that produce articulate sounds or skillful actions “cannot show that they are thinking what they are saying” (or doing)—largely serve to define human beings differently: securing other people from doubt by way of their capacity to transform thought into something we can, as Locke puts it, “certainly see” (115).
Unconvinced by the Cartesian account of animals but compelled by Descartes’s sense of the primacy of first personhood, writers like Locke are left to grapple differently with the epistemological and ontological questions of other people that Descartes’s animal-machine in part serves to address—questions about the relationship between the individual and the species, the first person and some larger kind or collective. This, finally, is what “restoring animality” means in this period, and in this book. It means restoring our own animality, in the sense either of a species identity that could shore up the newly unsettled relationship between myself and humankind, or of the more capacious and creaturely identity that inheres in the relation between the first person and the living body (a form of identity I share with other human beings, and perhaps with other animals). Restoring our animality in this way also means restoring animality as such: restoring animality as a unique form of being and relation, a mode of agency and generality in which it is difficult to distinguish between moving and being moved, individual and species. Understood