George Berkeley and Slavery

 

George Berkeley is known for his doctrine of immaterialism: the counterintuitive view that there’s no material substance underlying the ideas perceived by the senses. We tend to think of a horse-drawn coach as a thing, but Berkeley tells us it’s really a set of ideas – the sound of the coach in the street, the sight of it through a window, the feel of it as we get in. We regularly perceive these ideas going along with each other, but there’s no material thing, beyond the ideas, that supports or holds them together – the ideas are all there is. It’s a hard view for a present-day reader to stomach. It was hard on the stomachs of readers even in Berkeley’s day in the early 1700s. He acknowledged that ‘it sounds very harsh to say we eat and drink ideas’ but insists that nourishment is nothing more than various ideas of the senses.
 
Berkeley also says that pain, real pain, is an idea. This assertion seems to have antagonised and amused his contemporaries. John Arbuthnot, physician to Queen Anne, engages in some light-hearted teasing when writing to his and Berkeley’s friend Jonathan Swift in 1714 that the ‘Poor philosopher Berkley [sic]; has now the Idea of health which was very hard to produce in him, for he had an Idea of a strange feaver upon him so strong that it was very hard to destroy it, by introducing a contrary one.’ It was and is hard to think of all phenomena as ideas and nothing more; even harder to think of our own perceiving, feeling, digesting bodies as ideas and nothing more.
 
Nevertheless, Berkeley is clear on this: such things as coaches don’t exist independently of being perceived, because they consist of ideas and perceptions. Without there being a perceiver, they simply can’t exist. Do things exist when not perceived by any human mind? Here Berkeley gives a positive answer in the notebooks he kept while he was developing this new doctrine, as he called it: the horses are in the stable, the books are in the study despite no one being there to see, smell, hear or touch them. That is, even when I’m not there to perceive these things, they exist. How so? After all, things exist only when perceived by a mind.
 
Here, God comes in: because God wills things into existence when she (Berkeley would have said ‘he’) perceives them, then anything that God creates has an existence in her mind. Because God knows and perceives all, those things that are at any given time unperceived or unconsidered by any finite mind have an existence through the infinite mind. God comes into this picture as a saviour, preventing Berkeley from having to say that objects enter and leave existence continually as they’re perceived and then not perceived and then perceived again by particular finite minds.
 
But God’s role in Berkeley’s thought is not only or most importantly as a backstop for his immaterialism. It is as the giver of laws that other minds must try to follow. These God-given laws structure the moral, social and political world, just as others structure the phenomenal world. I would like to reorient the understanding of Berkeley by bringing the social and political consequences of his religious beliefs to the centre and seeing his immaterialism in relation to them. This aspect of his philosophy is often neglected by those who want to introduce Berkeley as a specimen in the history of philosophy, someone who took empiricism to its limits. A fuller appreciation of the role of God in Berkeley’s philosophy explains why he adopted immaterialism, and why he thought his immaterialist philosophy would serve a social purpose, something that isn’t immediately obvious from the narrow view of Berkeley’s approach that we find in histories of philosophy.
 
At an early stage in his intellectual development, Berkeley realised that the created universe depends on God, a universe that is known to humans through the relatively dependable series of ideas they experience. God is, then, central to Berkeley’s thought, providing the context in which the human world elaborates itself: he described the biblical creation as God progressively revealing to other minds some of the eternal contents of her own mind. It’s only because God determines that human acts of will have certain consequences in visual, tactile and other sensory ideas that we have any ideas of our bodies, and that human agency has consequences in the world at all, let alone dependable consequences. It is for these reasons that Berkeley said that the visual world was a universal language ‘whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions’, that the phenomenal world was designed by God to demonstrate his grandeur and show us how to behave. Berkeley’s purpose in writing was to convince his readers that we have a ‘most absolute and immediate dependence’ on God.
 
The precise conception Berkeley has of dependence on God and its consequences for human obligation – to God, to other humans, and to the rest of the creation – isn’t an aspect of his thinking that can be bracketed and ignored (as it has been so often by philosophers). The relationship of dependence on God is one of subordination to laws that humans, as responsible agents, are obliged to try to follow. These two things, the existence of a God and the moral responsibility of humans, would have made up the second part of Berkeley’s most famous book, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), had the manuscript not been lost while he was touring Europe. Berkeley’s universe is best understood as a body of law that human agents and other finite minds attempt to read and then follow through their actions.
 
This is where I think we should start, with a legible world dictated by God, when interpreting Berkeley today. Such a reading will give us a philosopher who is not just or even foremost an immaterialist, but rather a social and religious philosopher who is constantly emphasising the need for subordination, the following of rules and laws, and the necessity of obedience. His immaterialism, indeed, somewhat surprisingly, serves that end. That is why Berkeley conceived of his immaterialism as part of his lifelong struggle against what he variously called atheism, scepticism or free-thinking – the challenge to religious authority over the social world.
 
Immaterialism is not (just) a counterintuitive doctrine that surprised Berkeley’s contemporaries and still surprises his readers, nor is his God just the saviour of that doctrine. Rather, Berkeley expressed, through a wide range of writing including his great immaterialist texts, the necessity of social, political, moral and religious dependence on higher beings. He was a thoroughly religious philosopher, and his religion implied a politics. That politics was of a conservative cast, and included (disappointingly) the defence of slavery, as well as some more progressive or emancipatory forms of conservatism such as the promotion of education and economic development. Appreciating the role of God-given laws in his outlook unlocks a fuller understanding of his immaterialism. Without this, it’s very hard to appreciate why immaterialism is so relevant to some of his other somewhat eclectic concerns, including economic development, the swearing of oaths, and slavery.
 
In a text built up from three discourses delivered in the Chapel at Trinity College Dublin as part of his duties as a fellow, and published in 1712 under the controversial title Passive Obedience, Berkeley asked ‘what relation is there more extensive and universal than that of subject and law?’ He was talking about humans living under human laws, but just a few paragraphs earlier he’d made a case for the comparability of natural and moral laws. The laws of nature are ‘nothing else but a series of free actions produced by the best and wisest Agent’. The natural and moral worlds are to be conceived of as the free actions of God, and binding as laws for all other spirits. We should recognise both the kinds of law that govern events beyond our wills, such as those of gravity, and also those that require us to exercise our wills, such as the absolute negative moral law against rebellion that Berkeley elaborated in this short book. This conception of the human relationship to God as conforming to the will of a superior should remain central to our understanding of Berkeley’s philosophical project. We’re under an obligation to conform to natural and moral laws because a superior agent wills them, and wills that we conform to them.
 
In his roles as fellow of a college, chaplain, dean and bishop, Berkeley preached, and a significant part of his preaching addressed the question of how people should manifest in their behaviour the duty they owe to God. Religion, he said, ‘is nothing else but the conforming our faith and practice to the will of god’. ‘What else is the design and aim of vertue or religion,’ he asked in the same sermon, ‘but the making our several distinct wills coincident with, and subordinate to, the one Supreme will of God?’ We honour and show love for superiors ‘by performing their will, & endeavouring that others perform it’. This subordination isn’t of all finite spirits equally to the one infinite spirit: there are degrees of conformity to God’s will. Berkeley says there is ‘Some sort of union with the Godhead’ in all people ‘but with men, Xtians, inspired persons, Xt in different degrees.’ Different degrees of conformity are different degrees of unity with God.

Conformity brings spiritual rewards. It also brings temporal privileges. As Berkeley said in an early sermon on zeal: ‘As we are Christians we are members of a Society which entitles us to certain rights and privileges above the rest of mankind.’ In his ‘Address on Confirmation’, Berkeley said that, while the whole world might be understood as the kingdom of Christ, the phrase also had a more restrictive sense and applied to ‘a Society of persons, not only subject to his power, but also conforming themselves to his will, living according to his precepts, and thereby entitled to the promises of his gospel.’ That is, when Berkeley talked about the phenomenal world of ideas forming an instructive discourse directed to us by God, the God he had in mind requires conformity to his will. Greater or lesser degrees of conformity result in privileges expressed in the social and religious hierarchy of this world.
 
The God who produces the immaterial world, then, requires specific behaviours of different kinds of people, and grants them specific privileges. The distinction is not just between Christians and non-Christians, but between various types and classes of person in Christian societies. Here Berkeley is quite in line with his times and the large number of books dedicated to differentiating and specifying the duties of types and classes of people – children, parents, spouses, magistrates and so on. Berkeley’s sense of stratification and distinction by social status or rank is most obvious in his economic writings of the mid-1730s, chiefly the three volumes of rhetorical questions called The Querist, which put forward a programme for Irish economic renewal. The (‘native’, Catholic) peasantry are to give up their alleged sloth and dirtiness for habits of cleanliness and industry. The (absentee, Protestant) gentry are to give up imported wines and textiles for Irish cider and linen. Both classes will find they have higher desires – the peasants for beef and better clothes; the gentry for local productions of the fine and useful arts. A national bank will support the increased rate of circulation in the economy, or its momentum, as Berkeley calls it. And a class of philosophical educators such as Berkeley himself will manage the necessary transformation of opinions, desires and practices, chiefly by educating the gentry. Different classes of people – the higher, the lower, the educators – have different roles in practising and producing conformity to God’s will.
 
All classes of people have responsibilities to God that are in part expressed through their behaviour towards their own and other classes of people. ‘Charity’ is the term that, for Berkeley, captures the fulfilment of these responsibilities. He preached on charity at the English merchant colony in Livorno in Italy in 1714, saying – perhaps with an eye to the background of his audience – that the mutual satisfaction of wants through commerce was a form of charitable action within the reach of all. Duty to God and charity to his neighbour will make the true Christian attempt the conversion of heathens and infidels, Berkeley said in the sermon he preached to the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts on his return from his failed expedition to found a university in Bermuda. That project was itself geared towards the conversion of Native Americans, as well as the religious reform of white colonists.
 

Berkeley wrote Alciphron (1732) while in Rhode Island awaiting the funds for the university he hoped to found, which never arrived. One of the characters who voices views closest to those Berkeley expressed elsewhere says that it’s an obligation to dispense ‘Medicine for the Soul of Man’. In 1734, Berkeley became Bishop of Cloyne in southern Ireland. He described the poor of Cloyne, a small town in Cork, as ‘objects of charity’, and the employment of around 100 men in agriculture led by his wife Anne as ‘a charity which pays it self’. Berkeley’s last major work, Siris (1744), is an idiosyncratic text that begins with instructions on how to mix water with pine resin to create a medicinal drink for treating the epidemic of dysentery that swept Ireland in 1740-41, and continues to argue for the compatibility of ancient and Christian accounts of the soul and the Trinity. He said there that he was ‘indispensably obliged by the duty every man owes to mankind’, and that ‘charity obligeth me to say what I know’.
 
 
Charity is, if you like, the positive side of an obligation to other people, and to God. In contrast, Berkeley frequently expressed a negative or restrictive obligation that’s broadly concerned with implicitly or explicitly giving one’s word. It’s one of the assumptions of Passive Obedience that any social order is better than none, and that accepting the benefits of social order (simply those of not ‘anarchy’) is to accept the legitimacy of the sovereign who governs that order and the absolute obligation not to rebel against that sovereign. When Berkeley wrote to persuade Tories not to break their oaths of allegiance to George I as the Jacobite uprising of 1715 unfolded, he noted that:
 
‘’Common mutual faith is the great support of society; and an oath, as it is the highest obligation to keep our faith inviolate, becomes the great instrument of justice and intercourse between men. Whatever, therefore, lessens the sacredness or authority of an oath must be acknowledged at the same time to be highly detrimental both to the Church and the Commonwealth.”
 
Berkeley presented similar views in 1738 when he thought the social fabric was under threat from the atheistical blasphemies of a rogueish Dublin society called the Blasters. ‘Obedience to all civil power is rooted in the religious fear of God,’ and only reverence for God ‘can beget and preserve a true respect for subordinate majesty in all the degrees of power, the first link of authority being fixed at the throne of God.’ Misusing oaths is to threaten the very source of civil life, submission to the authority of God.
 
More specific oaths also concerned Berkeley. He took a strong view of the obligations of the marriage vow. When one of his brothers was condemned to death for bigamy, but saved by the interventions of Berkeley’s friends, Berkeley wrote to reimburse them for the expense. He noted, however, he ‘would not have disbursed half the sum to have saved that villain from the gallows’. When Berkeley excerpted a discussion of the marital vow of obedience from a book on The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants (1705) for his anthology The Ladies Library (1714), he inserted some thoughts of his own: that it is ‘a Command, the Breach of which is a Sin, and the Punishment of all Sin, Death eternal’. If we have any interest in order at all, if we have an interest in the world appearing to us as a regular, dependable, interpretable chain of events, an interest in our own wills producing predictable and stable outcomes, then we must obey the source of this order, the supreme authority of God.
 
Obedience can be presented more positively as charity, but it remains an attempt to conform to a higher will, in the expectation of gaining privileges and responsibilities in this world and the next. Humans depend on God for an orderly sequence of ideas and experiences as they interact with the physical world; they also depend on God for social and moral order. To maintain social and moral order, humans must feel religious awe towards God, and acknowledge the legitimacy of subordination of people into different classes and ranks, with different privileges and responsibilities. God doesn’t exist to repair the problem of occasionally existing objects in Berkeley’s immaterialism. Berkeley’s immaterialism exists to give his readers a sense of their entire dependence – social, moral and political as well as experiential – upon God. Dependence upon God models forms of human dependence and relation that Berkeley described in a wide range of writings.
 
As we have just seen, Berkeley’s God is the source of all authority, subordination and order. Finite spirits aren’t obliged to obey only God, but also to obey their superiors in the social order. Servants are obliged to obey their masters. In a way that distinguishes him from immediate predecessors such as John Locke or Samuel Pufendorf, Berkeley blurred the line between servitude and slavery, between contractual and forced, temporary and permanent servitude. In The Querist, Berkeley asked: whether ‘other nations have not found great benefit from the use of slaves’ for public infrastructure projects? ‘Whether temporary servitude would not be the best cure for idleness and beggary …?’ ‘Whether all sturdy beggars should not be seized and made slaves to the public for a certain term of years?’
 
Berkeley’s language here minimises the difference between slavery and servitude. Likewise, in notes for a sermon preached in Rhode Island, he said that in the New Testament ‘servants’ signified ‘slaves’. I’m not suggesting that Berkeley believed slavery was a positive good. Rather, he believed that what he understood to be dissolute, dirty, cynical, slothful, asocial forms of life were a great ill, and that being forced to participate in projects promoting the public good was better than being left at liberty to dehumanise. Such a view, of course, legitimises slavery.
 
 
Berkeley presents slavery within an orderly Christian society as preferable to forms of liberty that, he believes, limit the development of important human capacities. When Berkeley was in Rhode Island waiting for his college funding, there’s evidence of him buying two and baptising three enslaved people. The historian Travis Glasson has convincingly argued that the Yorke-Talbot legal opinion, issued in 1729, that baptism and slavery were compatible was the result of the activism of Berkeley or his circle, trying to facilitate the baptism of enslaved people in America. Berkeley had argued in his Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches (1725) for the college that would take Native American and Black students, as well as the sons of white planters, that ‘Slaves would only become better Slaves by being Christian’. Berkeley supported obedience to forms of temporal subordination that are now recognised as morally repugnant, and argued that some forms of forced labour, perhaps temporary, perhaps not, were a social good – a greater good than the ills of servitude or slavery.
 
There’s much about this picture of Berkeley’s God, and the human and divine relationships it implies, that Berkeley shares with other Christian writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s not surprising to see Christianity connected to subordination and obedience, both in political and social life, and encompassing slavery, for instance. It’s more unusual, perhaps, in the precise obligations it entails for someone like Berkeley, a philosophical educator. This person has to conform to God’s will by following laws, by accepting privileges and responsibilities to shape and govern other people through discourse and through the founding and maintenance of social institutions, from colleges to farms, in order to produce the same great good for them – conformity to the highest will. In doing these things, the philosophical educator is imitating God. God discourses continually to humans through the phenomenal world, through its regularities and dependable phenomena; but also through its less predictable events, such as illness, earthquakes and extreme weather. The philosopher should also learn to read these phenomena.
 
The immaterialist doctrine exists to promote this understanding of and conformity to God, rather than God being a convenient backstop for immaterialism. In both its typical and its more idiosyncratic respects, therefore, Berkeley’s sense of the religious foundation and lived texture of social life isn’t something that can be set aside without the risk of mischaracterising his immaterialism and his philosophical ambitions in general.
 
The central realisation Berkeley wanted his readers to undergo is that of absolute and continual dependence upon the will of a superior for everything in their world – their sensory experiences, the laws of nature, the capacity of their wills to bring about consequences, the complex coordination and subordination of wills involved in producing a social world. This realisation issues in the striking doctrine of immaterialism. But it also issues in the particular form of conservative political and social life that Berkeley lived and promoted in his varied activities as a churchman, economist, husband, brother, slave-owner and so on. Understanding Berkeley’s immaterialism, and the role of God in his immaterialism, requires an acknowledgement of his religious view of political and social life. Some of that view is closely shared with other Christian writers of his time, some of it more idiosyncratic and characteristic of the visionary immaterialist that he was.
 
On the Necessity of Obedience. By Tom Jones. Aeon, June 18, 2021.

 

May 2021 marks the publication of a major new intellectual biography of Bishop George Berkeley by Tom Jones (University of St Andrews), George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life (Princeton University Press, 2021). Trinity Long Room Hub is pleased to host a conversation with Dr Jones that will centre on Berkeley’s life, connections to Trinity and Ireland, and his relationship to colonialism as he moved between the ‘new’ world and the ‘old’. 
 
George Berkeley, Colonialism, and Ireland: A Conversation with Tom Jones.  TLR Hub , May 19,  2021

 

The days of uncritically lionising great men of western civilisation are coming to an end. Some see this as a threat to social order but surely hero-worshipping was never a good idea, given that every man – after a certain length of time – starts to resemble an embarrassing uncle.
 
Go back a few hundred years and it’s hard to find a European writer who didn’t have views on race or gender that we would today consider backward.
 
Last month, this column queried the rap sheet against Enlightenment thinker David Hume but there’s a more troubling case closer to home. The “good bishop” George Berkeley (1685-1753), who is synonymous with Trinity College Dublin (TCD), is widely regarded as Ireland's great philosopher but recently he has attracted negative attention due to his ownership of slaves while doing missionary work in Rhode Island.
 
Last February, TCD launched a two-year investigation into the college’s “complex colonial legacies” – a project that will be greatly aided by a new biography of the Co Kilkenny-born Berkeley by Tom Jones.
 
George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life is not only a meticulously researched and clear-sighted assessment of the philosopher’s character, it also measures the weight of his “revolutionary” ideas. Jones, a long-standing Berkeley scholar who is based at University of St Andrews, Scotland, describes the process of biography as trying to avoid the traps of both hagiography and “attributing a great or even implausible degree of internal coherence to a particular life”.
 
Berkeley was a man of contradictions - a social reformer heavily engaged in charitable works and prescient in advocating the public ownership of banks to curb reckless speculation but he also believed strongly in obedience to hierarchy. Jones explores these incongruities further as this week’s Unthinkable guest.
 
JH : You’ve written extensively on Berkeley over the years but how did this particular project come about?
 
TJ : “There hadn’t been a book-length biography of Berkeley since 1949, so I wanted to bring together all of the material that different scholars and historians had discovered since then, and add my own researches to see what picture of Berkeley emerged.
 
“There were also two things that it seemed to me no biography had ever attempted before. The first was to show how other people and institutions – family, schools, colleges, societies, the church – shaped Berkeley’s beliefs and actions. The second was how Berkeley’s philosophy related to his practical life – as a teacher, churchman, family man and social activist.
 
“Berkeley’s life in education is a good illustration of these points. I think he was very strongly shaped by the orderly and emphatically Protestant environment of Kilkenny College and Trinity College. He took a lifelong interest in educating others – students at Trinity, his own – male and female – children, the children of colonial Americans, Native Americans and African-Americans.
 
“Berkeley’s wife continued to educate and guide her children after his death, frequently citing his example. So I tried to tell a story of Berkeley’s life that showed how his striking and individual philosophical beliefs were woven in and out of his relationships with other people, and how his active life was tied up with his contemplative life.”
 
 
JH : Is it fair to say that, to the extent that Berkeley was interested in the condition of slaves, it was on the narrow point of whether or not they should be baptised?
 
TJ : “Slavery is a subject Berkeley only touches on a few times in his writings, and what we know of his practical involvement in the question of slavery could be interpreted in various ways, so this is a complex issue.
 
“It is important to acknowledge that Berkeley never openly questions the legitimacy of the system of chattel slavery, that he bought enslaved people, and that he was therefore involved in this great historic crime – as were, more or less directly, many British subjects of his era.
 
“Baptism is, indeed, what seems most to concern Berkeley about slavery... For him, however, baptism is not a narrow point, but a key element of human dignity. Being admitted to religious instruction and the rites of the church was being recognised as human where it mattered most, in Berkeley’s view.
 
“In his writing on economic questions Berkeley blurs distinctions between servitude and slavery. That can have the effect of legitimising slavery. But it can also be an argument that slavery shouldn’t be more punitive than servitude, or exclude enslaved people from recognition of their humanity. So when Berkeley baptised Philip, Anthony and Agnes Berkeley, identified as ‘his negroes’, he was doing something he would have regarded as a recognition of the most important aspect of those people’s humanity.
 
“There don’t appear to be records of baptisms of any other people of African heritage in the same church in Berkeley’s two years in Rhode Island – not that skin colour would necessarily have been consistently noted in such records – so he might have been making quite an unusual and visible statement. So, whilst this is a narrow concern from one perspective, it is also testimony to a concern for the religious education of African people in America.”
 
JH : Was Berkeley just “a man of his time” in respect to defending slavery or was there something more much calculating going on?
 
TJ : “One thing I try to do in the biography is compare Berkeley’s views to those of other people and groups of his time, and the one group that is actively organising against the institution of slavery in the late 1720s is the Quaker community – as Brycchan Carey has shown. Berkeley does not challenge the existence of the institution, and indeed points out ways in which it is compatible with his aims of religious conversion and instruction.
 
“He doesn’t defend slavery by saying that it is all certain groups of people are fit for, or that it is a property right that cannot be challenged. His defence is more that slavery is like servitude, and it may be better – in his view – to be obliged to serve a greater good than to be free and live a life that seems to go against God’s intentions for humanity.
 
“It’s useful to compare Berkeley’s thinking about the Catholic population of Ireland here. Late in life he compared the ‘native’ Irish both to Africans in America and to Native Americans, saying their conditions of life were savage and abject. He suggested that a way for Irish peasants to avoid a degrading life of dirt, sloth and beggary was for them to be seized and made ‘slaves to the public’ for a period of time.
 
“So there is a calculation going on that involves asking whether it’s better to be free and degraded, or enslaved but orderly and productive. For Berkeley, that participation in social order was really central to being human.”
 
JH : You say there is no record of what happened to the people Berkeley purchased. Is it possible they were brought to Ireland?
 
TJ : “It is possible that the people Berkeley bought in America came to London and then Ireland with him and his family, although there is no evidence either way. The historian Patrick Kelly noticed that a set of reading cards for children referred to two of Berkeley’s servants at this time by name – Patrick Norway and Enoch Martyr. So these are not the same people as were baptised by Berkeley in America.
 
“In occasional references to Berkeley’s servants in letters and other documents no mention is made of a servant of African heritage – though again ethnic background might not always have been mentioned in such papers.
 
“One historian puts the black population of Ireland in the second half of the 18th century between 1,000 and 3,000. It seems likely that some of these people arrived in Ireland with families by whom they were owned or for whom they worked, across the Irish sea or the Atlantic. The people Berkeley bought could have been among them.”
 
JH : Of Berkeley’s philosophy, you comment in the book: “There was something revolutionary about his immaterialism, but it was one of those conservative revolutions that seeks to leave things as they are.” For all his philosophical innovation, was Berkeley ultimately engaged in a very reactionary religious project?
 
TJ : “Berkeley’s religious project was radical in asserting the entire dependence of the universe on the will of a superior being, God. It’s radical because Berkeley says we are dependent on God for all the ideas conveyed by our senses – not on matter that lies behind and provokes ideas or sensations...
 
“It’s a striking picture of God constantly talking to his creatures through the creation itself. The central feature of this religious view of the world is dependence on a superior will, though, and it echoes through Berkeley’s social and political thought. He believed lower sorts of people ought to trust to the higher sort to govern, and to religious educators to mediate ideas they could not expect to grasp themselves. So hierarchy is built into Berkeley’s view of the world, by analogy with his religious vision.
 
“Many other political and religious thinkers of the 18th century held similar views, but none of them in the unique combination of immaterialist metaphysics, religious vision and social reform that characterise Berkeley.”
 
George Berkeley: A Philosophical Life by Tom Jones is published by Princeton.
 
Was Ireland’s greatest philosopher a hero, villain or ‘man of his time’? By Joe Humphreys. The Irish Times , July 15, 2021.

George Berkeley is one of the greatest philosophers of the early modern era. Along with John Locke and David Hume, he was a founder of Empiricism, which championed the role of experience and observation in the acquisition of knowledge. He influenced Kant and John Stuart Mill, and even pre-empted elements of Wittgenstein. His book The Principles of Human Knowledge is a masterwork still set on university philosophy courses the world over, and indeed there is a famous university named after him in California. The celebrated Irishman even inspired a limerick.
 
Yet Berkeley is also widely misunderstood. Different aspects of his thinking, not to mention his character, seem to clash quite spectacularly. His most famous doctrine was viewed as heretical in its day, yet Berkeley was a bishop and fierce believer in the supremacy of the Anglican church. He simultaneously advanced radically counter-intuitive and staunchly conservative arguments. He was a passionate social reformer but was complicit in appalling social evils. This makes Berkeley a fascinating subject. He appears a study in contradiction—but stick with him long enough and you realise that maybe there is no contradiction at all.
 
Tom Jones, an academic at the University of St Andrews, is well qualified to tell the story, having spent years researching and publishing on the life and work of this multi-faceted thinker. Here, over 550 richly detailed pages, he carefully explains how the different parts might fit together. It is a project of some importance, because you can only assess a thinker’s worth by seeking to understand them in the round.
 
Born in south-east Ireland in 1685, Berkeley studied at Kilkenny College and then Trinity College Dublin. He entered a world of ideas recently transformed by the likes of Descartes, Locke and Malebranche, and was publishing from his early twenties, when he developed the theory that would come to define him in the public imagination: immaterialism, the view that matter does not actually exist and all objects are in the mind.
 
The intuitive view tells us that when we perceive an object, our perception connects to something “out there” in the external world. When I look out of the window and form the image of a tree in my mind, I assume there is a lump of matter in the garden lying behind the image—namely the tree. There may be questions over the nature of the relationship between the tree and my perception of it—and these were interrogated in depth by Berkeley’s contemporaries—but the idea that the tree exists in material form was not disputed. Locke had said: “the certainty of things existing in rerum natura, when we have the testimony of our senses for it, is not only as great as our frame can attain to, but as our condition needs.”
 
Yet for Berkeley there was no reason to assume the existence of a material object at all. When we think we perceive the tree, what information do we have? Nothing beyond the perceptions themselves: sense data of its shape, size, colour and so on. This sense data, for Berkeley, is what constitutes the object. To most people it seems like a radically sceptical view, perhaps even more so than doubting the existence of free will or objective moral laws. But Berkeley, advancing the theory chiefly in his Principles and the Socratic dialogue Hylas and Philonous, thought it was precisely the opposite. Like Locke, he stressed the role of sensory perception in human knowledge, but took this position to its logical conclusion: when something is unperceived, it ceases to be. The famous question of whether a falling tree makes a sound if no one is around to hear it is inspired by Berkeley.
 
In Berkeley’s conception, the only things that exist are spirits (of which God is the greatest), minds and ideas.
 
This was not a universally popular theory. Pope, otherwise an admirer, called it “the most outrageous whimsy that ever entered into the head of any ancient or modern madman.” Boswell described a conversation with Johnson: “we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that though we are satisfied, his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’” Johnson was appealing to the common-sense view that matter—the rock—exists, and in this case has obvious solidity.
 
It was immaterialism that earned Berkeley his reputation as an iconoclast. But what at first glance seems revolutionary is in fact another facet to Berkeley’s profoundly conservative disposition. His is the story of a reactionary coming full circle.
 
Objectionable social attitudes are elevated to philosophy in Berkeley’s reflections on hierarchy and social order. He believed that subordination to our betters is a good in itself. Unreflective obedience is not just right and proper but speaks to humanity’s participation in the divinity: life is structured around order, regularity and chains of command, with God at the top. It is right that human societies echo this in their own relations—be it sovereign and subject, master and servant or husband and wife.
 
This extends to slavery. Berkeley owned slaves and wrote in support of the practice. He may even, possibly inadvertently, have helped solicit the infamous Yorke-Talbot opinion from the British law officers, which served as a legal bulwark for slavery throughout the British Empire. Berkeley was not much more enlightened in his views towards Irish Catholics, whom he regarded as innately inferior to their Protestant compatriots. He advanced the primacy of the Anglican church with literally missionary zeal at home and overseas, planning unsuccessfully for several years to found a college in the Americas to spread the gospel.
 
In his daily life the most important figure was God, and his chief intellectual opponents were the “free thinkers” whose irreligion he condemned in his Christian apologetic Alciphron.
 
Despite the heretical appearance of immaterialism, Berkeley didn’t actually believe he was facilitating scepticism, let alone atheism. In fact, while for him God did not create the world in a material sense, he lies behind all of our ideas, imprinting them on our minds. Berkeley’s system thus retains God as the ultimate cause and creates an intimacy with the deity which can form the basis for our moral judgments. He wrote that his philosophical project was “directed to practise and morality, as appears first from making manifest the nearness and omnipresence of God.”
 
For Berkeley, the real problem arises if we take the existence of matter as a given. Then we have to describe the relationship between our perceptions and the external world, and admit the possibility of disharmony between the two. In this gap there is the room for doubt: why think that what I see, feel or smell accurately corresponds to what is “out there”? This is “the very root of scepticism,” he writes, for whether our ideas “represent the true quality really existing in the thing, it is out of our reach to determine.”
 
His ingenious solution was to circumvent the problem completely, by collapsing one category into the other: if you identify the object and sensory experience of it as one and the same, the room for scepticism disappears. Immaterialism is thus, in Berkeley’s framing, a solution to sceptical doubt rather than an example of it. It is specifically designed to dispel “impious notions.”
 
That is not to say Berkeley was home and dry. Some asked how hallucinations fit into his picture, alleging that they sever the link between ideas and reality in some distinct way his system cannot account for. Another classic objection has it that the corollary of believing that things do not exist unless they are being perceived is that objects must be continually popping in and out of existence depending on whether they are being looked at or not, which is metaphysically untidy to say the least.
 
The response available to Berkeley is to argue that God is a perceiver too, and that it is unlikely that God has stopped perceiving the tree. This point is captured in a limerick attributed to 20th-century theologian Ronald Knox:
 
There was a young man who said “God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there’s no one about in the quad.”
 
 Reply:
 
“Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.”
 
The conservatism underlying the immaterialist philosophy becomes clearer when you realise that in the final analysis, it tells us that there is a tree in the quad, and that the rational agent perceives it accurately. Berkeley writes: “my speculations have the same effect as visiting forein countries, in the end I return where I was before, set my head at ease and enjoy my self with more satisfaction.” The exercise is a clarificatory one, aimed not at demolishing our current understanding but improving it, thus enhancing our relish of the world God has provided for us—and leaving its inequalities intact.
 
Jones is an authoritative tour guide through all of this. He admits from the outset that constructing a unified portrait from inevitably fragmented historic evidence is challenging, made more difficult still when comparing the different elements of such a complicated thinker. The end result, carefully written and impeccably well researched, is a must-read for those with a background in philosophy. Some passages will be intimidatingly complex to beginners, especially given the book is not strictly chronological, while the focus can stray towards areas that you suspect Jones is interested in personally (such as Berkeley’s belief in the medicinal properties of tar water) rather than having been written with the general reader in mind. None of this changes the fact the book is overwhelmingly a success.
 
What Jones has revealed is the fascinating combination of chaos and coherence laced through Berkeley’s life. What was his ultimate contribution? For Schopenhauer, Berkeley was “the first to treat the subjective starting-point really seriously and to demonstrate irrefutably its absolute necessity.” Much great philosophy followed from this, both in support of and opposition to Berkeley’s ideas, with Kant’s “transcendental idealism”—stressing the role of perception in our knowledge of the world, and like Berkeley’s theory aimed at combatting scepticism—perhaps the most famous example. To this day, even if you think Berkeley’s metaphysics is wrong it can be difficult to explain precisely why. And there is so much more to explore, including highly original contributions to the philosophy of science and language. Berkeley was not a perfect thinker and his philosophy will remain the subject of misconceptions. But it overflows with riches.
 
Mind over matter: the contradictions of George Berkeley. By  Alex Dean. Prospect Magazine, May 25, 2021. 

Jonathan Swift: To Vex The World

 To place Jonathan Swift and the Marquis de Sade next to each other looks at first like setting up hero and antihero. Jonathan Swift is the fierce but righteous satirist; the Marquis de Sade is, as Henry James put it, the “unnameable” pornographer. Swift was the consummate Church of England man who had no shortage of invective to lob against libertine freethinkers like the Earl of Wharton and advocated for theater censorship to stave off vice. Sade was reported to the police by a prostitute for masturbating on a crucifix.

 Their characters may never have been clearer than at the end of their lives. Swift’s self-penned Latin epitaph for his burial site at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, where he was a dean, translates as “Fierce indignation can no longer injure the heart. Go forth, voyager, and copy, if you can, this vigorous (to the best of his ability) champion of liberty.” Sade, who died in prison sixty-nine years after Swift, struck a more defiant and grandiose tone in an oft-cited passage said to be from his will: “Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the likes of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.”

 Their parting words left an imposing, almost abstract, impression of these authors on subsequent generations. They had become monuments, examples, ghosts. Whether they were benevolent or malevolent depended on what those conjuring chose to see. At times Swift’s writings were obviously the work of a lunatic, while Sade’s writing was capable of driving people to lunacy and even fits of epilepsy. At other times Swift was lionized by the likes of Irish president Eamon de Valera as “one of the [Anglo-Irish] pioneers…who realized that they ought not to permit themselves to be governed by ministers from England.” William Butler Yeats offered a more grandiloquent, un-Swiftian translation of Swift’s epitaph, claiming that “he served liberty.” In 2014, on the bicentennial of Sade’s death, the scroll manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom Sade had spent thirty-seven days in the Bastille writing was put on public display in Paris; in 2017 it was declared a national treasure by the French government, which ordered it to be withdrawn from private auction.

 Treating the manuscript as an object of admiration was likely preferable to trying to actually finish it. Neither author made for easy reading. Sade’s best-known novels are huge bricks alternating between philosophical digressions and sexual depravity that are both comically grotesque and repetitively vulgar. “One of the most fascinating things about Sade’s writing,” Maggie Nelson writes, “is its immense capacity to shock, and its equally immense capacity to bore.” The challenges of Swift are more temporal. His writings are filled with conflicts, controversies, and people long abandoned by posterity. Much of the potency of his language is flattened and the sharpness of his irony dulled because the subjects being ridiculed proved so ephemeral. “He has written miscellaneously,” John Boyle, the fifth earl of Orrery, fairly assessed in his otherwise unfair account of Swift, “and has chosen rather to appear a wondering comet than a fixed star.”

 Reading them, we see why Swift biographer John Stubbs calls his subject Sade’s “satirical cousin” with a “technique…classified above all as the art of upsetting people” and whose “determination to vex…prevents any political group from conscripting him.” We see why Swift and Sade are the first two entries in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor. And we follow why, in Simone de Beauvoir’s words, Sade rejected the idea of submission as “hypocritical resignation which is adorned in the name of virtue” that aims “to destroy the individual by imposing upon him a stupid conformism.” All dissidents would admire such attributes, especially at the height of the twentieth-century obscenity trials, when both Sade and Swift could be cast as patron saints of extremism in the pursuit of liberty. Whatever their pursuits, they were extremists who created literature that wasn’t so much great as it was relentless. Even now they make passive reading impossible.

 Jonathan Swift produced enough prose to fill as many as nineteen printed volumes. For him writing was less a vocation than a means for a narrow set of ends. Professionally he was a clergyman, yet he never produced any notable theological work, much to the disappointment of his church superiors. He had strong opinions about the quality of sermons but looked upon his own with indifference; only twelve survive. He was not as innovative a journalist as his rival Daniel Defoe, nor was he as sagacious as his critic Samuel Johnson. Unlike Johnson, who believed that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Swift saw payment for his writing as an affront to his pride. Swift’s aims were loftier than mere cash could provide. He wanted prestige and thought his pen the surest route to achieving it. “Swift was outside the shrewd discipline of talent,” critic Carl Van Doren wrote. “He could not sit down and write prose and verse as if they were sufficient ends…He used them in his tragic role, in his war of ambition, not because he valued them but because they were the only weapons he had.”

 Swift was born in Dublin to English parents and spent his entire life moving from colony to empire and back again. His writing settled down between those two worlds. In England from 1710 to 1714, during the later reign of Queen Anne, he lived the life of a public intellectual. He engaged in coffeehouse banter and court politics. He helped forge opinion journalism as a propagandist for the Tory party and an advocate for the Church of England before the fall of the Tory ministry sent him back to Ireland. His writing thereafter was closer to that of a dissident, though one who was careful to avoid prosecution. Yet Swift looked at Ireland as something foisted on him. “Irishness,” Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote, “is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it. On that definition Swift is more Irish than Goldsmith or Sheridan, although by the usual tests they are Irish and he is pure English.”

 His sharpest weapon was a shapeshifting “I,” by which Swift could effortlessly attract an audience and voice a person’s prejudices. He ridiculed the outgoing Whig party as sore losers and corrupt miscreants in his Examiner papers. His pamphlet Conduct of the Allies helped shift public opinion on the War of Spanish Succession toward peace after a decade of fighting. He could rally another to a cause of his choosing, most successfully with the Drapier letters, inveighing against a coinage-debasing scheme meant to be foisted on Ireland. Yet it is Swift’s more playful ventriloquism that has made a deeper cultural impression. An ear for mimicry, combined with what F.R. Leavis called an “emotional intensity,” enabled savage, inventive, and even delightful attacks on the “enthusiasms” of religious heterodoxy, intellectual frivolity, and political extremism that so provoked Swift. In this mode he became the unstable hack who exemplified the fashionableness and pretensions of “modern” writing in A Tale of a Tub and the arrogant astrologer Isaac Bickerstaff, one of Swift’s funniest creations, predicting the death of a rival.

  Aside from Lemuel Gulliver, no Swiftian creation is more significant than the unnamed speaker of his 1729 pamphlet A Modest Proposal. The three-thousand-word monologue has often been ranked the greatest English prose satire ever written. It is an efficient showcase for Swift’s greatest strengths: his sharp irony, his perverse imagination, and his polished style. It has spurred many imitations but has never been bettered. Yet when it was published it seemed strangely minor compared to Swift’s “Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture” and the Drapier letters. Rather than a rousing piece of writing defying the English colonial behemoth, A Modest Proposal—with its ironical endorsements of child murder, body harvesting, and cannibalism—seemed more provocative than persuasive, “a cry of despair,” in the words of Swift biographer Leo Damrosch. And it was wider in its targets. A Modest Proposal is “unusual,” Swift scholar Claude Rawson writes, “in being a satire aimed not at the English oppressor but at the Irish victim”—that is, the Anglo-Irish “settler class failing to look after its own interest” and disregarding Swift’s earlier, more reasonable appeals.

 Swift wrote his Proposal as a last resort, after several more straightforward tracts about the generally appalling conditions of Ireland’s poor failed to have much impact on the public. The opening sentence, “It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms,” has echoes of the beginning of his 1715 sermon “On the Causes of the Wretched Condition of Ireland”: “It is a very melancholy reflection that such a country as ours, which is capable of producing all things necessary, and most things convenient for life, sufficient for the support of four times the number of its inhabitants, should yet lie under the heaviest load of misery and want our streets crowded with beggars, so many of our lower sort of tradesmen, laborers, and artificers, not able to find clothes and food for their families.” But the sermon and his other tracts had little effect. The Irish, Swift told Alexander Pope, “are all inevitably undone; which I have been telling them in print these ten years to as little purpose as if it came from the pulpit.”

 The “projection” or “project”—a pitch made to the public for the improvement of their welfare—was a popular way of getting noticed in a burgeoning media environment of cheap, fast printing. Projects could be written by anyone and ranged widely in quality from outright scams to substantial, pathbreaking policy proposals. Defoe gained notoriety with an entire book of projects for the reform of mental health care, bankruptcy, the education of women, and other ideas. Not all projects were humanist, of course; Swift also wrote pamphlets in support of suppressing the opposition press and flogging beggars. With his satire exposing the condition of Ireland’s poor and the negligence of their imperial managers, Swift turned the projection on its head. The result is an authorial voice who, in the words of Swift biographer David Nokes, tilts between “nervous” reticence and “lip-smacking relish” over his one neat trick. The first eight hundred words of the Proposal are innocuously grandiloquent:

 “I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance; and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.”

The invocation of “sound, useful members” is perhaps the first red flag. Without further warning, the proposer gets to his point: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.” The selling of Ireland’s poor children for food will ensure a reduction of the noxious Catholics, he argues, and poor tenants will have children as currency to pay rent. “Constant breeders” will make “eight shillings sterling per annum by the sale of their children” and will be relieved from caring for them after a year. The author then makes the famous declaration of his own charitable disinterest: “I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny.”
 
Like Swift’s previous efforts, however, A Modest Proposal had little practical effect. Ireland would continue to be seen as a burden to its neighbor. A famine came in 1740 that killed at least 300,000 people. One million died in the Great Famine a century later. Instead his proposal took on greater relevance the further it drifted from its intended context and came to indict humanity at large. Philosopher John Gray writes: “The final effect of the Modest Proposal is to leave the human story a dark and senseless farce.” This effect is best demonstrated by the reading Peter O’Toole gave in Dublin in 1984. He began by noting that the essay had “a little something to offend everybody,” and his appropriately lackadaisical reading did just that. O’Toole was heckled, people walked out, and the reading, broadcast live on Irish public broadcast station RTÉ, was cut short, setting forth a flock of ironies that would have delighted the dean in his nearby resting place.
 
Swift did succeed in his desire to “vex” his readers—some say far too much. Edward Said noted a “discomfort” in all of Swift’s work, “that we have before us a show of freaks and horrors: a mad writer, an astrologer being murdered, an absurd and impossible war…a gallery of raving freethinkers, men burrowing in dung, and so on.” Leavis went further, contrasting Swift’s cruel irony against what he saw as the less abrasive variety practiced by Edward Gibbon. “Gibbonian prose insinuates solidarity with the reader,” whereas the “ironical” solidarity of Swift is a “betrayal.” To Leavis, Swift’s irony “is a matter of surprise and negation,” as he implies that “this is the only argument that appeals to you. Here are your actual faith and morals. How, on consideration, do you like the smell of them?” It is a small blessing that Leavis lived only one year into punk.
 
  
If Jonathan Swift were a wandering comet, then the Marquis de Sade was the fixed star—or the black hole. He never moved very far, with the second half of his life spent shuffling around the French penal system for various sex scandals and blasphemies. Sade’s writing, begun in earnest once he reached middle age, was not a tool for raising his social station, as with Swift, but a by-product of his decline. Restricted from pursuing his orgiastic and blasphemous hobbies, Sade undertook several writing projects across different forms: philosophical dialogues, short stories, a Candide-esque novel of morals, and drama. In 1783 he wrote his wife from the Château de Vincennes that he had begun a “great novelistic labor” requiring six hundred pages of manuscript paper thin enough to be rolled. The result was, in his words, “the most impure tale ever written since the world began.” Few have been inclined to disagree.
 
 As with A Modest Proposal, The 120 Days of Sodom describes the utmost lengths of human depravity. In Sade’s case, the audience (predominantly four libertine men of eminent rank but grotesquely low character) is an active part of the sprawling narrative. It is an unfinished tale, written after he was incarcerated in the Bastille, then abandoned when Sade was transferred elsewhere for yelling that prisoners were being murdered, and seemingly lost when the prison was stormed just days later. The manuscript was discovered by a man named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, who sold it to the Marquis de Villeneuve-Trans. Villeneuve-Trans’ family kept it until the early twentieth century, when it was sold first to a German collector, and then to Sade’s descendants in 1929. Of the four parts, only the first is near completion; the remaining three are in outline form, some largely just telegrammic lists of obscene acts. Sade replicated the novel’s tone in his subsequent works Justine, Juliette, and Philosophy in the Bedroom, but 120 Days remains the quintessential and most criticized and cited of Sade’s works.
 
“Any decent pleasures, or any prescribed by that beast…that you call Nature…shall be expressly excluded from this collection,” Sade wrote in his introduction, “and should you stumble across them by chance it shall only be in cases where they shall be accompanied by some crime, or tainted by some infamy.” The narrative, such as there is one, is double-layered. Inside a castle in the Black Forest four prostitutes regale the four noblemen with stories of past exploits. The men, eager to explore the “six hundred passions,” then imitate the remembered debauchery with the adolescent boys and girls they have kidnapped and brought to the castle for sexual exploitation along with older male studs, or “fuckers.”
 
Sade’s most salacious novels lead the reader to question how much of it is meant to be read as a litany of straightforward sexual fantasies. He rejected the speculative “wizardry” of the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, but he had a gift for black comedy that won the appreciation of the surrealists. He described one of the storytellers as “the very image of crime incarnate. Her withered arse resembles marbled paper.” One of the libertines, in a test of his strength, “wagered he could suffocate a horse between his legs, and the beast breathed its last at the very moment he had predicted.”
 
“Written down, shit does not smell,” Roland Barthes wrote of Sade with a reassurance similar to a parent telling a frightened child that no monster hides under the bed. One salient criticism of pornography is that it glosses over the less pleasant physical rigors and secretions that accompany the acts depicted: sweat, stench, intrusions of the digestive process, exhaustion, vomit (when applicable), etc. Sade, quite famously, invites and revels in these by-products, which appear with such frequency, and are recounted in such detail, that the pungency of his prose is difficult to tolerate. The reader is ceaselessly confronted with the scents and sounds of Sade’s players and their playthings. Sade lacks the willingness or the ability to keep up the pornographic pretense of serving the reader’s pleasure. Instead the reader is beset with examples of pleasure he is certain they have never thought possible, performed with a sprightly energy that is almost more discomfiting than the acts themselves. One storyteller recalls:
 
“The first, whom I frigged as we stood naked, wanted floods of nearly boiling water to stream over our bodies through a hole in the ceiling as long as our session lasted…One cannot imagine the pleasure he felt as it washed over him; as for me…I screamed out like a scalded tomcat—my skin peeled from this, and I firmly promised myself never to return to that man’s house.”

“Oh my God,” said the Duc. “I feel the urge to scald the love Aline like that.” “My lord,” the latter humbly replied, “I am not a pig.” At once everyone laughed at the innocent candor of her childish response.

 That is probably the most representative Sadean exchange that one can respectably reprint, wherein “pleasure” is a top-down decree. “The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure,” Sade wrote, “reduces one to an equality which spoils the unutterable charms that comes from despotism.” If there is any cogent idea to extract from Sade’s filth, it is the lure of anarcho-tyranny. That was given full expression in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, the equally infamous 1975 film adaptation of 120 Days, set in Fascist Italy. “We Fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we’re masters of the state,” the duke declares in the film. “In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power.” Sade’s worldview combined hostile atheism, might-makes-right determinism, and madcap nihilism, cutting against the humanist and deist grain of the Enlightenment philosophes: when God is absent, man will sooner re-create hell in His stead, not heaven.

 As much as he tried to instill his work with philosophical heft and authorial ambition, Sade was not a writer of ideas—he was a writer of sensory overload. Even in his more thematically and compositionally complete novels, he could not stop pushing beyond the bounds of good taste or sense. Sade remained preoccupied with release at the expense of tension. The only option that leaves for a reader is simply to endure. Those who do endure likely get by on the faint traces of better, more concise narratives that Sade could have wrung out of his excesses.

 If there is an irony in Sade, it is that, rather than scandalize and draw the reader into his morass, he incites them to flee as far away as possible—anything to escape Sade’s tedious and putrid garden of damnation.

 Considering these texts sometimes leads me to wonder about a literary history where things turned out differently for their authors. What if Sade had somehow evaded prison? Doubtless he’d have kept on with his libertine extracurricular activities. His writing might have been a more gentlemanly or remunerative pursuit, producing bawdy but harmless stories and pedestrian infidel tracts. What he channeled into his novels might have been redirected into his letters—indeed, he might have become, as Gore Vidal thought him to be, one of the great letter writers of his age. What if Swift had managed to stay in England, never returning to Ireland—and even managed to attain a much-desired bishopric? More pamphlets and polemics, to be sure, and more banter in coffeehouses with his equals. But also likely a deepening involvement in sectarian issues, leading him to become a more rigid Tory and a more committed High Churchman. He might even have followed his colleagues Bolingbroke and Francis Atterbury into Jacobitism, and hence into exile in France. Something like Gulliver’s Travels would still have been possible, but one that had more in common with the bloody-minded Hobbes than with the anarchic Rabelais.

 What is more certain is that The 120 Days of Sodom and A Modest Proposal have no place in these alternate histories, so wedded as they are to the circumstances their authors encountered at the time of writing.

 The extremes of Sade’s novel would have been less possible if he had been free from the contradictory extremes of prolonged incarceration. The social and sensory deprivation, the regimentation of time and the elasticity of the experience of time, the total absence of freedom and the fluid morality of mere survival, the myopia of living with your own thoughts—all were necessary elements for the creation of The 120 Days. Sade obsessively kept track of the patterns and frequency of letters and visits to make sense of how long he’d been in prison and how long he’d have until he was released. By the time he wrote The 120 Days, Sade had been in prison for seven years; he remained imprisoned for five more before the Revolution freed him, if only for a time. “Prison is bad,” Sade wrote to his wife, “because solitude gives added strength only to ideas, and the disturbance that results therefrom becomes all the greater and ever more urgent.”

 Similarly, Swift’s tract would never have been written if he had remained on the other side of St. George’s Channel, remote from the toll British policy exacted on its nearest colony. Gone would be the vision of a consumer economy taken to its most literal conclusion and of industrialism taken to its logical extreme. Swift makes several references to the overly fecund Catholics, the shameful waste of babies who are aborted, and the equally if not more shameful waste of resources by those babies who are not. At its heart, A Modest Proposal is a coldly concise plan for bodily control, rendered with the greatest simplicity, that comes with the dehumanization of one population by another. Swift never had a perfectly benevolent attitude toward the Irish as a mass, but he found them redeemable enough to conjure the great Swiftian image of a baby leaving an Irish womb only to enter an English mouth.

 Both Swift and Sade created works with tenacious wills to survive. Their legacies now seem to cast them as more beast than ghost at first. Subsequent artists have tried to leash the anger of Swift or the depravity of Sade, taming them for their own transgressive ends. But in truth they are more like warnings. Swift’s and Sade’s literature was neither the literature of majestic vision nor of pure shock. They are not examples of a certain method of execution but of conditions that made other methods impossible. In considering the heirs of this kind of art, we move away from the provocative fantasies of Salò or Naked Lunch and toward the nightmare reportage of Elem Klimov’s film Come and See and Curzio Malaparte’s novel Kaputt. The result is a double-edged critique of humanism, which dredges the enduring capacity for cruelty out from beneath an enlightened, noble surface and shows the mind not as a parent to an idea but under the dictatorship of an idea.

 The Art of Upsetting People : Jonathan Swift and the Marquis de Sade, patron saints of extremism.  By Chris R. Morgan.  Lapham’s Quarterly, August  24, 2020.

Swift: “A Good Fat Child Will Make Four Dishes Of Excellent Nutritive Meat”

 
When Donald the Lyin’ King proposed that COVID-19 might be able to be controlled by injecting bleach, Lysol, sanitizers and other disinfectants into the body, the very idea was so nut-crazy I thought of two satiric works of Jonathan Swift that attacked the policies of English and Irish politicians in the 18th Century. Born in Dublin in 1667, he trained to be a priest at Trinity College and spent much of his life writing satires about the English and Irish. I always enjoyed his work, and so did my senior English students at Fargo Central shared this joy, by reading and analyzing his two most entertaining works: A Modest Proposal for Preventingthe Children of Poor People in Ireland Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick and Gulliver’s Travels: Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World.
 
I was reminded of both by the treatment of the poor by the Trump administration. The Trumplicans and the American Tea Party have always tried to cut food stamps, health, education, and other safety-net programs just as the English “nobility” and landowners treated Irish families 300 years ago.
 
A few lines from A Modest Proposal, as Nixon would say, makes Swift’s position “perfectly clear”: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether served, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragout. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper, or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter. I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar’s child…to be about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat. Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay (skin) the carcass; the skin of which artificially dressed will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.”
 
The paragraph is a sample of the finest satire ever produced in the English language. This one sentence makes it “perfectly clear” why he was so concerned about his fellow Irish: “It is a melancholy object to walk through this great town (Dublin), or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and all importuning every passenger for an alms.”
 
From Lilliput To Brobdingnag To Laputa To The Houyhnhnms
 
Swift was an observer and critic of English and Irish politicians all of his adult life and used satire to ridicule their positions. Dr. Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain, serves as his lead character in his adventures in four foreign lands. As the only survivor of a ship wreck, Gulliver awakens on the shore of Lilliput tied to the beach by people who are only six inches high (equal to many of our politicians). He is taken to the capital city and observes that Lilliputians have ridiculous customs and very petty debates. Lilliput has two political parties, the Tories who wear high-heeled shoes and the Whigs who wear low heels. The court and cabinet positions are held by those who are best at rope-dancing. Lilliput is at war with the empire of Blefusco over which end of an egg should be broken. This represents religious doctrine. Gulliver becomes a hero by capturing Blefusco’s naval fleet. He adds to his reputation by putting out a fire in the royal palace by urinating on it. But he eventually loses favor and is sentenced to be blinded and starved. He escapes by finding a boat.
 
In his next adventure he lands on the island of Brobdingnag, a land of giants. Discovered by a farmer, he exhibits the tiny Gulliver for money while the farmer’s daughter Glumdalclitch falls in love with him. The queen then buys him from the farmer and he becomes a favorite at court. Gulliver describes English customs and governance to the king. The king responds: “The English must be a race of odious vermin.” Gulliver offers to make cannon and gunpowder for the country, but the king is horrified by the proposition. Gulliver is then rescued by a huge eagle.
 
He then lands on the island of Laputa where the people have one eye facing inward and the other facing upward. He is taken to the capital city of Balnibarbri where he sees farm fields in ruins and the people living in squalor. The city has mathematicians and scientists but they are busy trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers instead or working on the problems of Laputa. He meets other strange people and decides to go to another country.
 
He visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, a very intelligent group of horses who are rational, communal, and benevolent. In fact the horses have taken the power away from a degenerate human race called Yahoos. The horses are surprised that, although Gulliver looks like a Yahoo, they register that he is rather civilized. When Gulliver describes England, the horses realize that the English people are as degenerate as Yahoos. The horses decide that Gulliver must leave their country. He returns to England and is so disgusted with humanity that he avoids his family, buys some horses, and converses with them instead.

 
We Seem To Be Living Through A Modest Proposal and the Four Islands of Gulliver
 
I can’t seem to keep Swift and his satires out of my mind as I view the disasters and machinations of Donald the Lyin’ King’s administration. The Trump White House is dominated by Lilliputian men and women who all wear high-heeled shoes but are of low IQ. Their main job is to trample the humans wearing low-heeled shoes. There are horses in the cabinet, but they use only the Southern part of the horse that’s going North. They don’t use the Houyhnhnm head.
 
When I see the Trumplican protesters of scientific state COVID-19 quarantine and stay-home policies shaking hands, violating the six-foot rule and crowding together on the steps of capitals, no face masks, carrying Confederate battle flags, wearing MAGA caps, signs yelling “FREEDOM,” and a few strutting around with AR-15s in battle gear and camos, I can see why the Yahoos of America have lost power to the more intelligent horses. When Gulliver put out the palace fire by pissing on it, I immediately think of the “trickle-down” economic policies of the Lyin’ King and Larry Kudlow, Art Laffer, and the Ronald Reagan true-believers.
 
When I think of the Lilliputian war over which end of the egg should be broken, I recall the number of Southern churches and the ministers who have decided not to observe stay-at-home polices. Pastor Landon Spradlin and his wife went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras to minister to attendees. At a motorcycle rally in 2016 at Daytona Beach he had earned plaudits and national attention with this statement: “I don’t believe there are incurable diseases. God can heal anything. There are documented cases of God healing AIDS. God can cause limbs to grow out where they have been chopped off. God can raise the dead.”

On the way home from New Orleans he posted this on Facebook: “The media is trying to manipulate your life by creating mass hysteria.” We will get a chance to see him raised from the dead. Pastor Spradlin died of the virus in his pickup on the way home from Mardi Gras. His wife thought he had fallen asleep while she was driving. She stopped at a gas station to go to the bathroom and opened the passenger door. He fell out on the pavement dead.
 

The Fight For Income Equality Goes On And On And On…….

More than 300 years ago Swift was fighting for income equality as he watched English noblemen buy up good land in Ireland and turn the owners into sharecroppers. Income equality does not mean that each human end up with the same amount of assets. President Franklin Roosevelt defined it best during the Great Depression: “Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standards of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.”
 
Swift attacked the rich Protestant English landlords who charged exorbitant rents and often reduced their renters to beggary. If the renters couldn’t pay, the landlords seized their property and goods. Historians have studied Swift’s satires and have often identified the exact political moves he was attacking. And Swift did not save the Roman Catholic Church from his scrutiny. I’m going to use the words of David Morrison, an expert of the times, who has analyzed Swift’s attitudes towards English Protestants and the Irish Catholic Church: “The author of the Modest Proposal tries to sell his big idea by suggesting that it would be a useful way of reducing the number of Roman Catholics in Ireland. If poor Catholics can breed children for meat, then that will mean far fewer Catholics in the country. Not only will this save money, it will greatly improve the stability of the realm, as there will not be as many traitors around to stir up rebellion against the established Protestant order. The vast majority of the Irish population then (as now) were Catholics, though their country was run by a Protestant elite. Swift is satirizing the enormous contempt this elite harbored for Irish Catholics, both for their poverty and for their religion. In paragraph 22, the author argues that breeding children for meat will also give poor Irish Catholics something valuable, a highly-prized commodity they can sell on the open market. In turn, this will benefit their Protestant landlords, because their tenants will now be able to pay the rent, their corn and cattle already have been seized.” I’m sure many readers have heard about “The Troubles” in Ireland over the years.

 
Income inequality has never been corrected in Ireland. The “Great potato” famines in the 19th Century forced many to leave the country. There are now 33 million people of Irish descent in the U.S.—while Ireland’s population is presently only 4.7 million. The Irish have accomplished one task. For forty years the Protestants and Catholics murdered about 3,500 over religious ideology called “The Troubles.” Read about the Magdalene Laundries. Because of a dark history, the Vatican has lost control of Ireland. The Irish have pulled their ambassador from Rome while approving abortion and even electing a married gay prime minister. Swift would appreciate that.
 
A Swift Proposal. By Ed Raymond. High Plains Reader ,  May 3, 2020.
 

Pick up Gulliver’s Travels expecting a children’s book or a novel and you will be unpleasantly surprised. Originally published as “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts … By Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships”, it is one of the great satires in world literature.

 First published in London in 1726, the Travels was a sensational bestseller and immediately recognised as a literary classic. The author of the pseudonymous Travels was the Church-of-Ireland Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, Jonathan Swift. Swift wrote that his satiric project in the Travels was built upon a “great foundation of Misanthropy” and that his intention was “to vex the world”, not entertain it.

 The work’s inventive narrative, exuberant fantasy (little people, giants, a flying island, spirits of the dead, senile immortals, talking horses and odious humanoids), and hilarious humour certainly made the work entertaining. In its abridged and reader-friendly form, sanitised of sarcasm and black humour, Gulliver’s Travels has become a children’s classic. In its unabridged form, however, it still has the power to vex readers.

 What’s it all about?

 In Part 1 of this four-part satire, Gulliver is shipwrecked among the tiny Lilliputians. He finds a society that has fallen into corruption from admirable original institutions through “the degenerate Nature of Man”. Lilliput is a satiric diminution of Gulliver’s Britain in its corrupt court, contemptible party politics, and absurd wars.

 In Part II Gulliver is abandoned in Brobdingnag, a land of giants. The scale is now reversed. Gulliver is a Lilliputian among giants, displayed as a freak of nature and kept as a pet. Gulliver’s account of his country and its history to the King of Brobdingnag leads the wise giant to denounce Gulliver’s countrymen and women as “the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth”.

 In Part III Gulliver is the victim of piracy and cast away. He is taken up to the flying island of Laputa. Its monarch and court are literally aloof from the people it rules on the continent below, and absorbed in pure science and abstraction.

 Technological changes originating in this volatile “Airy Region” result in the economic ruin of the people below and of traditional ways of life. The satire recommends the example of the disaffected Lord Munodi, who is “not of an enterprising Spirit”, and is “content to go on in the old Forms” and live “without Innovation”. Part III is episodic and miscellaneous in character as Swift satirises various intellectual follies and corruptions. It offers a mortifying image of human degeneration in the immortal Struldbruggs. Gulliver’s desire for long life abates after he witnesses the endless decrepitude of these people.

 Part IV is a disturbing fable. After a conspiracy of his crew against him, Gulliver is abandoned on an island inhabited by rational civilised horses, the Houyhnhnms, and unruly brutal humanoids, the Yahoos. Gulliver and humankind are identified with the Yahoos. The horses debate “Whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth”. As in the story of the flood in the Bible, the Yahoos deserve their fate.

The horses, on the other hand, are the satire’s ideal of a rational society. Houyhnhnmland is a caste society practicing eugenics. Swift’s equine utopians have a flourishing oral culture but there are no books. There is education of both sexes. They have no money and little technology (they do not have the wheel). They are authoritarian (there is no dissent or difference of opinion). The Houyhnhnms are pacifist, communistic, agrarian and self-sufficient, civil, vegetarian and nudist. They are austere but do have passions. They hate the Yahoos.

 Convinced that he has found the enlightened good life, free of all the human turpitude recorded in the Travels, Gulliver becomes a Houyhnhnm acolyte and proselyte. But this utopian place is emphatically not for humans. Gulliver is deported as an alien Yahoo and a security risk.

 Wearing clothes and sailing in a canoe made from the skins of the humanoid Yahoos, Gulliver arrives in Western Australia, where he is attacked by Aboriginal people and eventually, unwillingly, rescued and returned home to live, alienated, among English Yahoos. (Swift’s knowledge of the Aboriginal people derives from the voyager William Dampier, whom Gulliver claimed was his “Cousin”.)

 Politics and misanthropy

When it was published, the Travels’ uncompromising, misanthropic satiric anatomy of the human condition seemed to border on blasphemy. The political satire was scandalous, venting what Swift called his “principle of hatred to all succeeding Measures and Ministryes” in Britain and Ireland since the collapse, in 1714, of Queen Anne’s Tory government, which he had served as propagandist.

 In its politics the work is pacifist, condemns “Party and Faction” in the body politic, and denounces colonialism as plunder, lust, enslavement, and murder on a global scale. It satirises monarchical despotism yet displays little faith in parliaments. In Part III we get a short view of a representative modern parliament: “a Knot of Pedlars, Pickpockets, Highwaymen and Bullies”.

 Gulliver’s Travels belongs to a tradition of satiric and utopian imaginary voyages that includes works by Lucian, Rabelais, and Thomas More. Swift hijacked the form of the popular contemporary voyage book as the vehicle for his satire, though the work combines genres, containing utopian and dystopian fiction, satire, history, science fiction, dialogues of the dead, fable, as well as parody of the travel book and the Robinson Crusoe-style novel.

 It’s not a book to be judged by its cover. The frontispiece, title page and table of contents of the original edition gave no hint that this was not a genuine travel account. Swift and his friends reported stories of gullible readers who took this hoax travel book for the real thing.

 It is also not reader friendly. The revised 1735 edition of the Travels opens with a disturbing letter from Gulliver in which the reader is arraigned by an irate and misanthropic author convinced that the “human Species” is too depraved to be saved, as evidenced by the fact that his book has had no reforming effect on the world. The book ends with Gulliver, a proud, ranting recluse, preferring his horses to humans, and warning any English Yahoos with the vice of pride not to “presume to appear in my Sight”.

 Readers might dismiss the unbalanced Gulliver, but he is only saying what Swift’s uncompromising satire insists is the truth about humankind.

 In many ways Jonathan Swift is remote from us, but his satire still matters, and Gulliver’s Travels continues to vex and entertain today.

 Why Jonathan Swift wanted to ‘vex the world’ with Gulliver’s Travels. By Ian Higgins. The Conversation,  May 8, 2018. 

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.” These lines from Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick of 1729 must be among the most startling in the history of literature. Swift aimed to prick an indifferent public into realising the extremity of poverty and suffering in Ireland, while mocking the “political arithmeticians” who treated this misery as a problem that could be solved by applying a mechanical calculus of costs and benefits. But no one – certainly not the suffering Irish people – escapes Swift’s ferocious scorn. At times, possessed by a cold and lucid rage, he seems to indict all of humankind.

 
Swift’s Modest Proposal has been read as a contribution to a genre that goes back to the Roman poet Juvenal, whose satires mocked the mores of his society using a variety of literary techniques extending from sarcasm to parody. There can be little doubt that Swift drew on this tradition. But we get closer to the heart of this strange work if we consider how the “deranged yet icily rational social pragmatist” – John Stubbs’s apt description of the persona that Swift adopts in the pamphlet – relates to Swift himself. What is shocking in the modest proposal is how the speaker can mount a defence of cannibalism on the basis of the most logical arguments. The pursuit of reason, Swift seems to be suggesting, can lead beyond the bounds of humanity and sanity.
 
The 18th century was full of political satirists such as Swift, who criticised prevailing policies in the interests of rational reform. But rather than pointing to any more reasonable way of conducting ourselves, the final effect of the Modest Proposal is to leave the human story a dark and senseless farce. Whatever else it may be, this is not mere satire. At bottom, Swift’s essay may have more in common with the absurdist comedies of Eugène Ionesco than with the familiar and somehow reassuring irony of the Roman poet. But this prompts the question: what kind of person could have produced such an extraordinary work?
 
Stubbs summarises Swift’s relatively modest beginnings with beautiful conciseness. “He was a near-abandoned, half-orphaned child. Although a Dubliner by birth, he would always insist he was English. He had English backing on this point, for Ireland belonged, thought London, to England.” Born in 1667, Swift never knew his father. On occasion he would claim – whether humorously or not is unclear – that he had been abducted in England as a child and spirited off to Ireland. In fact, his father died some months before he was born and his mother returned to England after leaving Swift in the care of an uncle, who had him educated at Kilkenny College and Trinity College, Dublin.
 
In 1688, seeing no prospect of advancement in Ireland, Swift left for England and a position as secretary to Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat. It was while working for Temple that he met Esther Johnson, then a child of eight, the daughter of Temple’s housekeeper; she eventually became “Stella”, his greatest muse. Much of Swift’s life was passed in poor health. From the age of  20 he suffered from periodic attacks of vertigo, nausea, tinnitus and deafness, symptoms that would lead 20th-century physicians to diagnose that he suffered from Ménière’s disease.
 
Swift’s illness did not prevent him from pursuing the political intrigues that were necessary to his advancement, or from having an active social life. He enjoyed the entertainments of city living, including the stage and coffee houses. He was a member of the Scriblerus Club, a prestigious informal association of authors that included the poet Alexander Pope and aimed to deflate quackery in politics and culture. Until his ­final years, he sustained a number of mutually rewarding friendships. It was only when he was embittered by the failure of his ambitions and tortured by gout that he came to shun company. He failed to achieve the object he most coveted in life – an English bishopric – and ended up living in a country he loathed as dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.
 
His last years were made pitiable by the slow loss of his faculties. Eccentric habits, such as scrutinising the servants at dinner in a mirror near the table, hardened into what many of his contemporaries perceived as madness. Dementia almost deprived him of speech, but in 1744 he was still able to murmur, in language reminiscent of one of Samuel Beckett’s forlorn solitaries, “I am what I am, I am what I am.” When he died in October 1745, nearly 78 years old, the cathedral bells were rung muffled for four days.
 
Much of the literary and academic commentary on his life is prurient in tone. Were Swift’s relations with Stella and other women platonic or physical? Did he secretly marry Stella, as gossips of the day claimed? Did he have strange sexual obsessions, as might be suggested by the voyeuristic and scatological poetry he produced at various points in his life? These have not proved terribly productive or interesting lines of inquiry. The evidence regarding his private thoughts is scanty, and posthumous psychoanalysis does not yield reliable results. Stubbs relegates these questions to a minor role in his book. The best way of beginning to understand so dauntingly strange a figure as Swift is to re-create him as he appeared to his contemporaries, and Stubbs does this with panache and verve.

Swift as Stubbs presents him was essen­tially double-minded: rigidly authoritarian in his commitment to prevailing institutions, especially the Anglican Church, and at the same time recklessly daring in stripping these institutions of any pretension to seriousness; supposedly a pious believer, yet one who could write that religion taught us how to hate but not how to love; a conservative who valued order over justice, but who put an impassioned condemnation of slavery into the mouth of the narrator in Gulliver’s Travels and defended Ireland, for whose people he had little if any affection, against English power. In his literary life he was a serial hoaxer, and in his most fantastical writings an author who prized truth over imagination; an inveterate joker, affectionately known to his closest female companions as “Presto”, who in later life was never known to laugh. Stubbs describes the paradoxical personality of a man who published most of his work anonymously but whose prose shone out, a guarded yet public figure:
 
    “He was unsmiling, while comic; ruthless in print, yet touchingly sincere and sensitive in his personal relationships. He was a keen walker and rider, and strong in body; and he was extremely delicate on the matter of his personal hygiene . . . Meanwhile, you might say what you liked against Dr Swift – if you dared; the rather fearsome figure in his black coat and wig. But you could not escape having your attention caught by Presto, the spirit of play in Swift’s nature; or by his stories and asides at the club or in the drawing room; or by the hilarious touches in his many sorties in print. Those who knew him also knew there was, however, another facet to Swift, which, for all his seeming robustness and indeed belligerence, could render him helpless in the space of minutes. In the trinity of his nature, along with Father Swift and Presto, the joking Son, this third element was a marauding unholy ghost.”
 
There have been many lives of Swift. Most recently, Leo Damrosch’s Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (2013) illuminated many of the man’s contradictions. This savage misanthropist was a stern critic of war and empire-building, and, living during a period of financial revolution that covered the South Sea Bubble, he attacked an economy that was based on easy credit. Stubbs makes clear his debts to Damrosch and other biographers but, to my mind, he goes further than any did previously in re-creating the world in which Swift lived and exploring the dualities of his character.
 
“[W]ith the sad perspicuity of the invalid,” he writes of his subject’s recurring illnesses, “Swift learned to spot the danger signals in his abdomen and temples, the throb in hearing and vision that might spread and confine him within hours to a wheeling bed.” How many of the stodgy academic studies that clutter the shelves of libraries contain such beautifully crafted lines? Another feature of Stubbs’s biography is its vast historical scholarship. As well as giving us a thoroughly credible Swift, this is a riveting account of English and Irish life in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Above all, he tells us more than we previously knew of Swift’s “mercurial second self”: the elusive author of the Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels. If there can be a definitive life of Jonathan Swift, this is it.
 
What Stubbs does not do is to unravel the contradictions of his subject’s singular mentality; most likely no one can do so. But at several points Stubbs points to a possible explanation of these conflicts. As he represents him, Swift was a lover of reason who believed in God as the guarantor of rationality in the world. When he attacked injustice and hypocrisy, he was invoking an order in the mind – divine and human – against the disorder of society. The savagery of his irony came from this certainty. Swift was the opposite of the postmodern liberal ironist, a commonplace figure today, who imagines that intolerance can be overcome by showing the contingency of our beliefs and values.
 
 “For Swift there is no contradiction between irony and what we might now take as pure intolerance. He was not at all a tolerant person. Swift’s irony instead very often expresses the anger of a moral authority who is presented with the standards of a debased majority, and illustrates their corruption by speaking for a moment as if he accepted and shared it.”
 
 Swift’s disgust with humankind, in this view, was not an accident of temperament, but the result of judging fellow human beings by the standard of reason they claimed for themselves and finding them wanting.
 
Swift’s work illustrates an irony of rationalism. Unlike most rationalists, who use reason to prop up their conventional prejudices and opinions, Swift used it to judge the human world. The sceptical David Hume concluded that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”. Suggesting that reason should serve life rather than rule it, this was a wise observation. But reason, for Swift, was a passion in its own right, and one to which he was enslaved. Gulliver’s Travels is full of incidents showing that human standards of size and strength are relative. Yet he was wholly unable to follow the imperturbable Hume in accepting that reason is powerless against nature, convention and the twists of human events.
 
Writing to his friend Alexander Pope about Gulliver’s Travels, Swift described his chief end as being “to vex the world rather than divert it”. He achieved this, he said, by “proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale”, showing instead that man had only a capacity for rationality, which he failed to use. The structure of Gulliver’s Travels was erected on the basis of “this great foundation of misanthropy”, and Swift wrote that he “never [would] have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion”. Yet what reason did he have for believing that he could provoke his readers into being rational? Or for thinking that “honest men” would recognise how irrational they had been? In fact, the book he produced diverted its readers as few others have done, and became a classic story for children.
 
Aside from his belief in a divine order, which he may well have questioned while never wavering in his commitment to the Church, Swift had no reason for believing in reason. It may have been a nagging awareness of reason’s impotence, together with the normal travails of ageing, which made him sadder as he grew older. Writing again to Pope, he noted: “The common saying of life being a farce is true in every sense but the most important one, for it is a ridiculous tragedy, which is the worst kind of composition.” Human life may be absurd, as Swift suggests – but it is tragic only if you think human beings could somehow choose to be more rational than they have ever been.
 
Against all reason, Swift persisted in this faith until his mind failed. If this inveterate joker found life a dark and desolate farce, it was because in the end he took the human comedy too seriously.
 
The irrational rationality of Jonathan Swift. By John Gray.  New Statesman, November 14, 2016.