A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes - Thomas Taylor (1792)
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- Опубликовано: 8 июн 2023
- The following introductory remarks are by Louise Schutz Boas (1965) and are important for understanding the context in which this text was written:
"A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes is an exercise in irony, a witty, merry book in which Taylor, using the weapon of laughter, professed agreement with the radical ideas recently published by two of his friends, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, and by carrying these to their logical extremes, reduced them to absurdity. That it was their ideas which eventually triumphed does not lessen the reader's enjoyment of his wit, or alter the usefulness of his parody of what he regarded as an oversimplification of the nature of man, an over-generalization of the worth of all men, and an egalitarianism he could not accept..."
"Indirectly Taylor's mock-serious defence of the rights of brutes stemmed from the publication in November 1790, little more than a year after the storming of the Bastille, of Edmund Burke's unsympathetic Reflections on the French Revolution. This book led to an immediate reply from Mary Wollstonecraft; two editions of her open letter to Burke, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, were published in November 1790, followed in 1792 by her more famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Of the great spate of refutations of Burke's Reflections the most powerful, famous, and effective was Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, written in 1790, published in London in 1791, and swiftly banned; to own or to sell a copy was a criminal offence, but four months later Paine wrote to his friend George Washington that already eleven thousand of the sixteen thousand copies printed had been sold. Paine, very helpful in the American Revolution, was now active in the French Revolution, with a seat at the Convention. He had left England for Paris before this first part of the Rights of Man was published; he returned, but in 1792 when the second part was published he fled to France to avoid the trial for seditious libel it provoked. The magic phrase, "the rights of man," used decorously in America, was in France highly inflammatory, as indeed it tends to be today when on all sides, in many parts of the modern world, there are repetitive cries of the right to strike, to vote, to assemble, to march, to demonstrate."
"Mary Wollstonecraft as a guest in Taylor's home had called his study "the abode of peace." He was not in sympathy with her radical ideas or those of Paine; he was not an advocate of an egalitarian world, but if they insisted upon agitation for this, he could show them how much farther they must carry their theories. His Vindication of the Rights of Brutes endeavors to demonstrate that who has said A must say B; and that B leads on to an unforeseen Z."
"Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men was not concerned wholly with political rights or the injustices suffered by the poor. She was angered by Burke's tendency to "vitiate reason" which she postulated as man's highest quality, leading him to virtue, and so distinguishing him from the animals, who have not the gift of reason. This is the sounding board for Taylor, who sets out to prove that animals have reason; he supports his thesis with multiple quotation from the Greek philosophers, thereby making his point without direct statement that men are not equally blessed with reason. He believed that "in every class of beings in the universe... there is a first, a middle, and a last, in order that the progression of things may form one unbroken chain, originating in deity, and terminating in matter... a golden chain of beings" formed by the first and smallest class, the multitude forming the lowest. He set out therefore to show the impracticability of an egalitarian society."
"The worship of animals, and the statues of gods with animal heads or bodies Taylor offered as an indication of the high estimation in which men have held the brute creation whose rights he was now demanding. Lacking time to pursue the matter further, he left to others the task of vindicating the rights of rocks and stones and trees, and the very dust beneath men's feet..."
Full text freely available here: books.google.ca/books?id=A-hh...
#platonism #neoplatonism #history #philosophy #literature #thomastaylor
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I would love to watch your debate or comment on James Lindsay's lectures eg. The Gnostic parasite, where he repeatedly criticize Hermeticism as well as other mystics and perennialists and comperes them directly to marxism, woke culture and postmodernism. Thank you for your hard work and for what I've learnt from you
One of my favorite Taylor pieces. Thanks for reading!
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for this wonderful reading. I was unfamiliar with this text, and a few minutes in I thought "okay, this has to be parodic". Of course it is! And laugh-out-loud funny in places (the elephant stuff in particular). Tres amusant!
Thank you so much for posting this. I think this is one of the most important writings that should be taught to school children. Such an important perspective for the modern world, the true logical end of prejudice.
Wonderful! Thanks for all your hard work. So much material I've never been exposed to. May the algogods make your channel grow!
I would have thought Plotinus might have led us in different directions than satirizing equality between species...the rationality of laughter, the contemplative action of nature, etc. Doesn't Willemien Otten do something along those lines?
I've always wanted to understand the birds, who knew I could....all things being equal and all 🤗
Unironically this.
If you read “The Dawn of Everything” by D. Wengrow and D. Graeber, you will understand where these ideas of freedom and equality came from.
The enlightenment of the western mind started in the now named americas.
It's oversimplification
Ta Dan wonderful x
Heck ya dan
dude... when u started reading the descriptions of animals i couldnt help thinking about bojack horseman lol esp the part where dogs are actors
I would love to watch your debate or comment on James Lindsay's lectures eg. The Gnostic parasite, where he repeatedly criticize Hermeticism as well as other mystics and perennialists and comperes them directly to marxism, woke culture and postmodernism. Thank you for your hard work and for what I've learnt from you
I haven't read the works of Wollstonecraft and Paine; could someone briefly explain what makes their ideas so absurd?
They argue that all men are endowed with reason, and therefore equal, without elaborating on the fact that there is a quality to that reasoning power that is unequal among men (which makes them differently suited to different roles). If you recall Plato's Republic, an idea like this runs entirely contrary to Plato's idea of a well-ordered society. Taylor argues, by extending his friends Paine and Wollstonecraft's logic, that animals are reasonable too, and so by this logic, we should have elephants as surgeons and their wages could go towards paying off the national debt.
Oddly relevant to my current surroundings.
I love how Taylor wrote this simply to show the absurdity of Wollstonecraft and Paine's ideas. It's too bad that political irony like this isn't practiced more in modern times.
I haven't read the works of Wollstonecraft and Paine - what makes their ideas absurd?
Are you vegetarian?
I'm not, but I wish I was. I've tried several times and always succumb to a burger. It makes me realize I'm a total hypocrite. I eat meat because it comes in nice cellophane package. I could not kill an animal.
No, maybe some day.
@@Bildgesmythe There is great value in knowing where your meat comes from by killing it and butchering it yourself. You are like a girl who refuses to touch an icky worm in order to bait a hook.
@Bildgesmythe I hope you don't give up the endeavor friend. I'm about 2 weeks in and have been feeling more energized than ever before.
Also even now I feel like a hypocrite, considering how much time I spent in my life before shitting on vegetarians.
i hope that you are okay during the fires, Dan 🩵💙 with the smoke:::
(.... the apocalypse fires... )
Hey Mandy, thanks. We're doing OK here, it's been significantly worse directly south of Quebec than here where I am. A slight haze and smell of burning wood, but nothing like the dense orange fog over New York. It's getting discouraging though, first the Ohio derailment, now this. None of it bodes well for us.
well... i saw vide footage yesterday and i began crying; they reported that the fires are burning hotter than before; i thought of the animals.... / i thought, how can we stop this economic system?, or, also, human evil. Like in this reading, it seems that theres kindness and sympathy with animals and nature in most humans....but no one has figured out the problem of the power hungry humans... and now we are on a global system with this issue.
some humans can be appealled to and become wise and gentle...whereas others are evil, and nothing will sway them. we are not so far from the animals, and i love how the egyptians understood the powers of the hybrid divinities. 💚
hmmn. ps when i extrapolate on the theme of animal sacrifice, i think of the earth as a totality wherin the "powers that be" are performing one grand sacifice-
@@mandys1505 I'm in Alberta Canada. The fire season is longer, hotter, and covers more area. Same with the actual fires. It's truly sad to see the aftermath to humans and animals. God bless the firefighters! They are literally giving their lives.