Link: http://books.guardia...1055379,00.html
Date: 10-04-03
Author: Lisa Jardine
Source: The Guardian UK
Title: Bodily Functions
Comment: Book Review on Roy Porter's "Flesh in the Age of Reason" which proposes that the reason for the disembodyment of mind by the greath 18th century thinkers was more a form of psychological dissocation from their own flesh in which they felt they were trapped.
Bodily functions
Lisa Jardine is struck by the uncanny realisation of Roy Porter's argument in his last, great book, Flesh in the Age of Reason
Saturday October 4, 2003
The Guardian
Flesh in the Age of Reason
by Roy Porter
Roy Porter's new book, Flesh in the Age of Reason , offers a brilliant and engagingly readable account of the process whereby a peculiarly post-Enlightenment version of the relationship of the human mind to its body-container emerged. Painting on a huge canvas, yet with brushstrokes that are meticulous in their brightly pigmented detail, he gives us a vivid picture of how modern accounts of the paradoxical relationship between bodily organs and informing sensibility developed, tracing lucidly the transformation of the pre-modern rational soul into a peculiarly modern subjectivity and sense of self.
One of the book's key themes is the belief, fundamental to modernity, that we outlive our mortal existence most enduringly in the writings and ideas we leave behind. This makes reviewing Flesh in the Age of Reason a peculiarly painful process, since Porter himself died, unexpectedly and in his prime, just after completing this masterly final work. Now his books - the traces of his uniquely original thought- are all we have left. Flesh in the Age of Reason is, uncannily, the material realisation of the intellectual argument posthumously advanced by its author.
Simon Schama voices a similar thought when he writes in a foreword to the book: "It is, I suppose, some sort of scant consolation that Flesh in the Age of Reason actually enacts, in the enduring imprint it leaves on the reader, some of the more optimistic beliefs of its 18th-century protagonists, who imagined the mind as the place where identity is built, where consciousness, sentiment and memory dwelled; the lodging- house, in fact, of humanity."
"Fleshing out" the thinking that shaped the age of Enlightenment, and out of which our own self-understanding came, is exactly what this book does. Edward Gibbon, author of the monumental, six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , turns out to have been a 4ft 8in fatty, known unkindly to colleagues as "Chubby-Chubb". His obesity was exacerbated by his weakness for fine wines, as a result of which he suffered from chronic gout and was permanently in pain. As if this were not enough, he had an embarrassingly visible and debilitating swelling of the scrotum, which made him smell and eventually killed him. Thus when Gibbon writes of his body as strictly "subordinate and disciplined, a means to an end", and as a "machine" to be kept under control and in strict running order, as casing for the infinitely subtle mind it encloses, he is, Porter argues, really whistling in the dark. Concentrate on the mind, he is saying, and you might be able, briefly, to forget about that mortal coil.
The author of the side-achingly funny Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy , Lawrence Sterne, wrote his picaresque tale of the struggle of rationality with the caprices of the body, while in the advanced stages of tuberculosis, coughing up "bed fulls" of blood. His TB started while he was an undergraduate; by the time he wrote his comic masterpiece his condition was worsening; he was suffering "the most violent spitting of blood mortal man [ever] experienced". One of the many strengths of Porter's writing is his commitment to fiction and non-fictional texts alike as revealing the crucial shifts and transitions in intellectual history. Here he juxtaposes an all-too in-the-flesh Sterne with a brilliant reading of Sterne's much-loved novel as the first sustained attempt to give narrative form to the new philosophical picture of man as a deeply confused subjectivity inside a resolutely flesh-and-blood body.
And so for the procession of influential writers and thinkers who Porter considers contributed most to our changing understanding of the "mind in the machine": Samuel Johnson's body was convulsed by spasms and tics, "his mouth almost constantly opening and shutting" as if he was chewing; David Hume suffered from palpitations, consumption and a disfiguring skin-condition; Lord Byron was an exercise fanatic, whose slimming addiction verged on anorexia. Chapter by chapter, Porter sets the bodily discomfort and unease of each of his chosen authors against his ground-breaking intellectual attempt to make a convincing case for the lasting pre-eminence of mind and spirit.
Thus Porter makes substantial - quite literally - the debates that have traditionally been conducted around arcane intellectual separations of body and mind. His thinkers are perpetually uneasy with their own mortal frames, practically willing themselves to believe that mind will endure, once the acutely inconvenient, painful, unwieldy, suppurating body falls away. By the end of the 18th century, Porter argues, the mind-body question is less about the immortal soul than about the possibility of diverting attention from the inconvenience of flesh - of disembodying the voice of reason.
The Enlightenment strategy of distracting the intellectual investigation of rationality away from the body altogether, which Porter explores here with such élan, certainly left its lasting mark on philosophy. Those of us who took philosophy courses at university in the 1960s can recall the rarified debates about "mind", conducted between disembodied philosophical voices entirely isolated from any contact with the "real" world. Until I read this book I had not understood how much against the grain of real-life experience, historically, that disembodying of the philosophical process actually was. We may call the long 18th century the age of Reason, but for those who lived in it, it was the age of acute bodily discomfort, the flesh decaying in the midst of life, with no hope of medical cure, and addiction to painkillers and mind-numbers like opium to take the mind off the body altogether. As always when Porter offers us a historical explanation, what was an esoteric academic discussion becomes a rounded, full-blooded encounter with thinking in action.
Edward Gibbon, writes Porter, "was a man publicly happy to ignore his mortal coil. There is no immortal soul - and no tears are lost over that. There remains nevertheless a hope of immortality through 'literary fame'. He would not go to heaven. But his books might last. His mind will thus live on." Porter is gone, but this great book is testimony to the vital and vigorous way in which his own mind does live on.
· Lisa Jardine's latest book, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man who Measured London, is published by HarperColli
