Theoria

I am slowly nearing the end of my dissertation. I need to complete one last substantive chapter (on Mandeville) and then work on the general framing of the dissertation — I should also come up with a suitable title at some point. In the absence of some sort of framing, the dissertation, as it stands, reads more or less as four separate studies: on Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees. This results, roughly, in a time period running from 1609 (the first edition of Butler’s book) to 1724 (the last edition of Mandeville’s book). Unfortunately, mine is not one of those programs wherein you can submit three or four publication quality “articles” bound together and call it a dissertation. The general theme is the relation between the concepts of the human and the animal in these texts, but beyond that there is no significant thread. In the Butler chapter I look at the role of the queen bee in relation to the hive and how the hive represents an idealized form of the human community; in the Hobbes chapter I look at how animality needs to be excluded or repressed in order for the human community to be possible; in the Locke chapter I look at how Biblical dominion over the animals forms the basis of all other human institutions; and in the Mandeville chapter I look at how humans are “taught animals.” I do not seek to provide a general theory of the relation between the human and the animal. Indeed, I don’t think such a thing is even possible. For instance, Richard Bulliet’s and Adrian Franklin’s attempts in history and sociology respectively are fairly disappointing. (My supervisor suggests I read Phillippe Descola’s Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), roughly “Beyond Nature and Culture” if my mediocre French is correct, but at this point I really don’t feel like reading a seven-hundred page book in French!) I do not trace a consistent set of concepts through the opposition of human and animal. I rarely make reference to the topic of one chapter in another. What, if anything, ties the chapters together? As it stands, the best I have is that all the texts are responding to a particular crisis. Butler is defending one form of monarchy (Elizabethan) against another (Stuart); Hobbes, troubled by civil unrest, is looking at the conditions of possibility for any stable community regardless of its political form; Locke is looking at the basis of new forms of property; and Mandeville is trying to justify the emerging financial society following a series of crises, such as the South Sea Bubble. But this would only lead to a further question, one which I am unable to answer: why do, at the very least these four people, turn to the differences between humans and animals when crisis sets in? This doesn’t seem like a general truth about humans and animals: for instance, I don’t think Kojève is responding to any particular crisis when he writes “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel.”