For this week's blog posting I chose to focus on Evelyn Fox Keller's article, "Gender and Science: Origin, History, and Politics." At first read I had the impulse to scoff--what with all the talk of the "autonomy of the egg cell as an active participant in the process of human conception" and such (as opposed to some fluid-filled organic orb that passively floats from one place to the next, waiting to be unceremoniously "assaulted" by the insensitive sperm cell); but then I opened my mind a bit (a rare occurrence, to be sure)and realized that, while I feel it is a bit over the top to take the gender wars to the level of scientific terminology, a valid point is still being made. Historically, phenomena in science that exhibit strength, assertiveness, power, or dominance in any way have been characterized as male. Likewise all that is weak, passive and assault-able, if you will, is deemed feminine. Sometimes these designations are accurately assigned, but at times they are not. Keller feels that these are sociocultural constructs that have been presented as "the natural order of things" and have existed as such for so long that many take them for fact. Some may argue that her time is better spent on more crucial concerns like the real oppression of women in various volatile parts of the world instead of nit-picking at whether or not female reproductive cells are portrayed as having agency, but I would say to them words have power. Keller believes there is an ideology behind these patriarchal-flavored terms, and this ideology is attempting to present itself as the "natural" order by way of scientific legitimacy. This made me think about our class, in a way, because the way I see it, one of our major aims in this course is to define a term: nature. We are going to attempt to dissect and examine all the ways the term has been used and what that term means to us today. Keller's article was a helpful primer for me to get into that frame of mind.

"The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" and the Law of Non-contradiction

 William Blake's “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is intellectual dynamite. Here Blake is at his most paradoxical, anarchistic, and defiant. One of  the main points is summed up in the last line of the work: “One law for the lion and ox is oppression.” This rejection of dogma and coercion functions both on the level of form and content. This does not mean that the “The Marriage” has no coherence or order. On the contrary, it is knit together by related ideas and motifs, and the combination of disparate elements (poems, proverbs, fancies, demonstrations) provides a kind of order. Blake rejects as tyrannical the philosophical empiricism of the Enlightenment, which is related to an exaltation of Necessity – perhaps most succinctly state by Pope: “Whatever is, is right.” Blake rejected this both metaphysically and politically. Unlike the political radicals of France who dethroned the Virgin and replaced her with the goddess Reason, for Blake political liberation from the dominance of church and state can only occur through a revolution of the mind or spirit. We must change the way we perceive the world. The irreducible joy and frustration that come from reading “The Marriage” lie partly in the demolishing of strict categories and the challenging of certainties. His unique vision is multivalent and willfully contradictory, and when we take him seriously, instead of simply telling ourselves that he's crazy, we too have to look into that void that terrified the angel – something we mostly try to avoid.

It would be interesting to look at how contraries of order/disorder formally structure the work, but I'm going to focus on some of the ideas and explore a few examples of Blake's truth-in-contradiction. The “marriage” of Heaven and Hell results from the recognition of their contrariness, for “opposition is true friendship.” He distinguishes Energy and Reason as one of the pairs of contraries without which “there is no progression.” However, “the voice of the Devil” affirms that “Energy is the only life.” Blake also rejects the opposition between body and soul, not because the soul is produced by the body, but because the body is the limitation of the soul. That is, soul is the prior reality. The body is like a cave through which the soul sees. “The chinks in the cavern” are the five senses which are “chief inlets of the soul in this age.” This is not just a poetical conceit for Blake, but he indeed believed that the soul exists independently of the body and the body is a kind of “incrustation” on the soul. As he says in “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” “I look through [the eye] and not with it.” He goes on to compare the eye to a window, saying that he does not question his "corporeal eye" any more than he would question a window about a sight. Similarly, in “Marriage” he refers to “the doors of perception” which must be cleansed for the world to appear infinite. The senses are merely doorways which limit the vision of the soul. My point with this discussion is to show that Blake contradicts his own affirmation of contradiction. He proposes to show the contraries underlying experience, but also destabilizes the basis of these very contraries. His dualism becomes monism when he chooses. Indeed, any “systematic reasoning” would undermine the very purpose of “Marriage,” which affirms unsystematic “exuberance” (and even does so with mockingly “systematic” methods like arguments and lists).

For Blake, the overthrowing of the tyranny of limited sensory experience is inseparable from the overthrow of a tyrannous political regime. This makes both political conservatives and rationalists/empiricists uncomfortable. However, Blake's spiritual beliefs also make the conventionally religious uneasy. In what we might call Blake's theology we find another instance of contradiction and paradox that recur through “Marriage.” A major fear of the early Church Fathers was pantheism – of which they accused the pagans – because it abolished the distinction between human and God. If God is inseparable from his creation, the incarnation loses its meaning of reconciling God and man. Blake seems to be rejecting this distinction between human and divine. He states that “all deities reside in the human breast” and that “God only acts and is in existing beings or men.” Again, he says that “there is no other God” than “great men.” He calls Jesus “the greatest man,” diminishing Jesus's divinity. However, Blake also describes “Jehovah” as “he who dwells in burning fire” – indicating that he is “the God of inspiration and mercy” (A Blake Dictionary, Damon 206). Although Jesus is the greatest of men, after his death “he became Jehovah.” So Blake emphasizes at once Jesus's humanity and divinity, and he simultaneously obliterates the distinction between God and man and discusses God as a distinct being. These paradoxes, after all, are essential to Christianity, which in its beginning defiantly intended to insult reason and philosophy. (Blake used the paradoxical formulation of Athanasius in “There Is No Natural Religion”: “God becomes as we are that we may be as he is.”)

Blake's “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” challenges our prejudices, the ways we make sense of the world. His vision is sufficiently (and masterfully) contradictory (even contradicting his own contradictions) so that he threatens and upsets just about everyone. He questions the reality of a stable empirical world existing apart from our perceptions (“Where man is not nature is barren”). Instead, he suggests that our own beliefs – our own mind – deeply affect the reality we perceive: “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” If the angel, whose head is full of Aristotle's Analytics, sees devils, monsters, and spiders in the void, for Blake the vision dissolves, as he finds himself on a riverbank in the moonlight listening to a singer whose theme is, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.” In “Marriage” no single truth reigns, but rather multiple truths coexist. Once Blake has thrown out Aristotle's law of non-contradiction, the world becomes a less certain place but perhaps a more wondrous place: “Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.”

Gender, Science, and Language

 

               Keller brings up an interesting point as she explores the trading zones between nature, gender, and science. Both Keller and Haraway articulate the inherit subjectivity of gender embedded within the natural sciences. Although Keller does not explicitly state that there is subjectivity in scientific reasoning, she does explain that science is a story about nature (37). Even though science is founded upon empirical evidence, it is expressed within a narrative framework which is ultimately influenced by societal norms. Regardless of the evidence discovered, the way in which the knowledge is disseminated will dictate an ideology that is influenced by the social constructions of gender. She uses the literature that was historically used to describe the human reproduction process to underscore her point. When scientists and/or society in portrays the sperm as an active agent who penetrates through a passive and ineffectual egg, one can easily see that the narrative framework and the language used to describe this scientific or  “natural event,” is embedded and conflated with gender stereotypes. Keller recognizes that what is described as natural is also firmly based on the construction of gender, race, and class (37). What is considered natural cannot be isolated from our social and political constructs, because the way in which we communicate with one another is deeply engrossed in language. This then raises the question, what is natural?  If even science is also bounded by societal constructions, then what constitutes nature? Even though Keller does not dive deeply into answering these questions, she seems to skirt around the issue of nature. She does not state that science is simply socially constructed; instead, she seems to allude that science/nature constantly interacts with societal norms and ideologies. She does not explicitly state what is natural and what is not, but she is highly aware that one cannot discuss science without examining societal constructs, particularly gender constructs.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s essay “The Vindication of the Rights of Man” also raises some of the same questions about nature; however, with Wollstonecraft, she views certain liberties such as reason, as a natural right of mankind. She argues that these liberties are not simply reserved for men only and should be considered for women as well. She seems to suggest that reason is a part of the natural world and that women should also be able to utilize their reason just as men do.

            With both authors, the issue of what is natural underscores both of their arguments, but what is glossed over is how the language that is used to disseminate these ideas or narratives regarding nature/science continue to perpetuate gender norms and stereotypes. Even though Keller calls for gender in science to not only be recognized and integrated within the history of science, it may also be helpful for her to go beyond gender in the general sense and explore how language in particular effects and influences our constructions gender, science, and gender in science. By isolating the English language, one might be able to then see how language itself gendered and how it then shapes our various modes of thought. 

           

A Battle Over Language: Burke Versus Wollstonecraft

       What strikes me as especially artful about Wollstonecraft’s rejoinder to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is how she uses his own words—one word in particular—to feminize his argument. Although Burke only says sensibility on five occasions in his book, each time he either commends its exercise or deplores its absence; therefore, he ascribes a positive, masculine meaning to the term. Yet the word had a distinctly feminine connotation to genteel eighteenth century Europeans. The “cult of sensibility” revolved around the idea that women have a delicate nervous system, which manifests itself in frequently “crying, blushing and fainting” and in the extreme by weakness, feebleness, and gullibility ((Earle NP).[1] As Wollstonecraft begins “A Vindication Reflections of the Rights of Men” (the unabridged version), she associates Burke’s ideas with feminine words like excitement, vanity, and beauty. She then digs her knife deeper in the fifth paragraph with a backhanded compliment: “Even the ladies, sir, may repeat your brightly sallies, and retail in theatrical attitudes many of your sentimental exclamations.” In the next sentence, she leverages Burke’s positive meaning of sensibility. “Sensibility is the “manie” of the day,” she declares, as if the nexus of each of Burke’s 407 paragraphs turns on the word. Completing her sentence, Wollstonecraft marries sensibility—by juxtaposition if not grammatically—to its darkest connotation: “. . . and compassion the virtue which is to cover a multitude of vices, whilst justice is left to mourn in sullen silence, and balance truth in vain” (123). This statement also lays the groundwork for her main argument, that Burke’s political philosophy sanctions injustice. But Wollstonecraft also continues to feminize Burke’s use of the term: his sensibility becomes pampered sensibility; his flights of metaphor become pretty flights; and his reflection inflames his imagination.

Modern liberals could take a cue from Wollstonecraft. Right-wingers already have, as evidenced by the adhesiveness of terms like panty-waist and bleeding-heart. Could Frank Luntz be the Mary Wollstonecraft of our age? Although the above epithets probably originated before the boy wonder of Fox News was born, he is credited with renaming the estate tax the death tax. But Burke and Wollstonecraft viewed the issue of inheritance in different terms: he favored continuation of prigmoniture, she the right to divide one’s estate “amongst all the children of a family” (126). The locus of the debate on inheritance is radically different today. Ironically, Warren Buffett’s argument in favor of the inheritance tax has Burkean overtones. Buffet says that the rich owe part of their wealth to the nation’s infrastructure—schools, roads, public safety. Is this not similar to the debt that Burke says we owe our forefathers for their “spirit of philosophical analogy” (115)? Of course, Burke could argue that the dead cannot collect taxes. (ha ha!)

Burke tries a linguistic tactic of his own with reason, by associating the word with power—“the empire of light and reason”—and primitivism—“our naked shivering nature” (119). In Burke’s revered pre-enlightenment society, however, power was “gentle” and obedience “liberal.” But Wollstonecraft appropriates this word too, capsizing it by using it as a verb: “Quitting now the flowers of rhetoric, let us, Sir, reason together” (125). How can Burke deny such a gracious invitation?

Work Cited (other than course texts)

Earles, Megan. “The Cult of Sensibility.”  

ww.unc.edu/courses/2006spring/engl/021/006/REFERENCES/CultofSensibility.html

Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Vindication of the Rights of Women. 1792. Project Guttenberg. www.guttenberg.org.

Burke, Edmund. The Sublime and the Beautiful. 1757. Bartleby.com. www.bartleby.com

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[1] Wollstonecraft articulates this view in her 1792 book, The Vindication of the Rights of Women: “Their [women’s] senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected; consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility (my emphasis), and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling” (NP). Burke himself expresses the idealistic side of the paradigm in The Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). In the chapter on Delicacy, he writes: “The beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness, or delicacy and is even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it” (III.16).

On Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Alternative Perceptions

The readings were very interesting, but I was particularly drawn to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake argues that the contraries of attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, and love and hate are necessary elements for human existence and progression. Blake categories these contraries according to the religious constructs of good and evil, respectively. Blake rejects the separation of these contraries, particularly of the body and soul, arguing that the body and soul are inextricably linked and form a whole. The body and soul, as well as the contraries mentioned above, are interconnected aspects that govern human nature. Blake rejects the limiting religious constructs of good and evil and the Enlightenment’s privileging of reason above energy and imagination. The erroneous notion that the body and soul are distinct limits our understanding of human nature and the forces at work within us and around us.  Blake advocates a change in perception from the finite and senses-based to the infinite. Blake states “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite” (26). Blake challenges the reader to step outside the confines of religious and Enlightenment constructions of human nature and explore alternative modes of perception. In order to fully understand the seeming dualities of human nature, Blake argues that one must converse with angels and devils alike. For this reason, I loved the challenging Proverbs of Hell.

            The Proverbs of Hell were very complex and insightful. Blake makes an explicit connection between man and nature stating, “Where man is not, nature is barren” (20). I am still wrestling with this proverb and what exactly Blake means by nature. The proverb is a bold statement that immediately triggered the query: If a tree falls but nobody is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? Is there no nature if human beings are not there to witness it or partake in it? Does our energy and vitality contribute to Nature in such a significant way for it to be barren without us? I am I missing the mark completely? Perhaps nature and man are two seeming contraries that are really interrelated like reason and energy.

            Another proverb I found interesting was “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings” which reinforces Blake’s assertion that we should use our creative energies in conjunction with reason and not be afraid of intellectual and creative freedom (14). The proverb “improvement makes strait roads, but crooked roads without improvement made, are roads of Genius” contrasts the Enlightenment notion of progress with the innate Genius of Nature (19). A road is strait if it is man-made or manipulated through improvement, whereas the crooked or “natural” roads are “roads of Genius.” Blake aligns the “crooked” with the “natural” and with Genius, whereas the strait road is not inherently strait but made so. Religion and the Enlightenment impose artificial constructions of human nature, preventing the recognition of innate contraries that make human nature appear “crooked” but are really marks of Genius.

Blake advocates altering our perceptions in order to move toward more sophisticated ways of understanding ourselves and our surroundings. The episode of the protagonist who finds himself “sitting on a pleasant bank besides a river by moonlight, hearing a harper” whose theme “[t]he man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breads reptiles of the mind,” reinforces the need for mankind to alter our perceptions (34). As the Proverb of Hell has taught us, we should “[e]xpect poison from standing water,” or West Nile virus. Stagnant ideas and imposed religious and cultural constructs limit our perceptions of human nature and the natural world. We need to use our energy and not let our creative forces atrophy in the name of reason or religion. Ultimately, we need to accept the union of contraries as part of the natural world and human nature.  

Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Boston: J.W. Luce and, 1906. Archive.org.The Library of Congress, 31 July 2009. Web.

On Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” and Contemporary Feminist Ideas

Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” though published in the 18^th century, still addresses issues widely debated amongst feminists today. Early in her piece, Wollstonecraft identifies the main obstacles of equality for women as the “misuse” of chastity and the idolization of women by men. She states, “Chastity will never be respected in the male world till the person of a woman is not, as it were, idolized, when little virtue or sense embellish it with the grand traces of mental beauty, or the interesting simplicity of affection” (289). In other words, it seems Wollstonecraft advocates the idea that women cannot make any progress if their success or talent relies upon the use of their bodies. If a woman were to use any other device, other than her intellect, to advance in society she would run the risk of “stopping the progress of knowledge and virtue” (288).

Ariel Levy, author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs,” advances a similar notion for the advancement of women with a 21^st century concerns. Levy states, “Women who have wanted to be perceived as powerful have long found it more efficient to identify with men than to try and elevate the entire female sex to their level” (286). The female chauvinist pig (FCP) represents a woman who goes about attaining power, in some cases a great deal of power, but through the wrong means. When a woman becomes this FCP she openly tries to not only identify with men but also when she tries to become like a man. Levy argues, “Instead of trying to reform other people’s perceptions of femininity, the FCP likes to position herself as something outside of the normal bounds of womanhood…defining her own little turf involves degrading other women”  (275).The FCP strives desperately to live up to all the stereotypes constructed for her by men.  For example, contemporary television shows, such as The Man Show and Howard Stern have provided an outlet for some women to buy into a male dominated television industry. Women are often degraded and insulted on such television programs, but “38 percent” on The Man Show viewers are women (Levy 276). By taking on the stereotyped role of a man, women openly surrender their possibility of advancement by “stopping the progress of knowledge and virtue.”

                Wollstonecraft places a central focus on the idea that “intellect will govern” and that “women are, in fact, so much degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence…that such a notion produces a propensity to tyrannize” (293). It seems notions of “female excellence” entail a capacity for the domestic and children as where men have the rational capacity for virtuous behavior (293). These “notions of female excellence” coupled with a “propensity for tyranny” create a paradox or contradiction for the advancement of women in society (292). This paradox works to inhibit the interest of women to even attempt to subvert the typical male notion of “ladies” or women in the upper class (292). It seems ladies represent the largest struggle for women’s rights because they have been “corrupted by extremes of wealth” and the influence of men in their class (292).

                Again we can see the distant echoes of Wollstonecraft’s fears in Levy’s work. Levy’s main argument centers on the paradox that FCPs face in modern society. When women advance their careers and personal interests at the cost of feminist ideals they, in a certain sense, degrade their sex. By giving into prescribed gender roles, e.g. engaging in hyper-sexualized behavior for the amusement of men, women might win influence or secure monetary gains but they ultimately degrade the progress of feminism. Levy captures this conflict in stating, “If you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress” (278).  Overall, it seems women can never be respected when “women are idolized …and not respected for their mental beauty” and potential for advancement (289).    

Alfred C. Valrie Jr.

English 560

April 11, 2013

Professor Garrett

A Defense of Womanhood & A Rejection of Male-Centered Values

                I am first attracted to the names in Blake’s prose-poem.  Theotormon suggests to me a man tortured—“tormented”—by strong, unswaying principles which may at one time have been based on Biblical teachings, hence the “Theo.”  That is to say that in his heart there is only law and no forgiveness.  So when Oothoon, a name which conjures an ethereal, spiritual presence, is raped, Theotormon cannot look past her “fallen” state.  Instead of recognizing her as victim, Theotormon considers her “harlot” (Plate 2, line 1).  Bromion sounds like a potentially unstable chemical compound and also a lot like “bromide,” a meaningless statement meant to distract from aberrant behavior.  Accordingly, when Bromion speaks following his rape of Oothoon, he identifies black female slaves as desiring of violent domination: “Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent” (Plate 1, line 24).  Blake ingeniously links white and chattel slavery in a fundamental way: that the privilege of both exists only in the mind of the tyrant.  It is ironic, then, that America—which gave birth to new liberty—also gave birth to a race of people, African Americans, who bear the “signet” (Plate 1, line 22) of the rape of black African women by tyrannical white men.  Bromion later indicates in a series of platitudes (Plate 4, lines 13-24) that life exists only by extremes (wars, sorrows, riches, and ease).  For Bromion, life exists only in the taking—that the strong must take, and the weak must submit.  Theotormon, on the other hand, cannot see past his own sadness.  When he binds Bromion to Oothoon, he dooms Oothoon’s womanhood.  Theotormon’s concept of purity is based not on Oothoon’s unyielding devotion but the former integrity of her undefiled physical state.

            Oothoon, consequently, bemoans the quality of man-made laws which have “bound” (Plate 5, line 20) women to men and in turn cause women to think “murderous thoughts” (22) in private and sublimate hidden “longings” (26).  The “rod over her shrinking shoulders” (24, 25) recalls also the strictures of chattel slavery.  I struggle, though, with the concept of the invisible quality of oppressed white womanhood being exactly similar to the physical torture immanent in American chattel slavery.  It is not the same.  While the two—white and chattel slavery—are linked in that they both spring from the mind of the tyrant, chattel slavery had profound psychological and economic consequences for an entire race of people.  Many white women benefited from marriages where they may not have been similarly fated as Oothoon.  One could argue that where upper-class white women are concerned, Oothoon is the exception, not the rule.  Oothoon is an extreme example held up as the epitome of white female plight.  Oothoon is first and foremost a rape victim.  In how many cases were women who were properly groomed for marriage, raped, humiliated, and then doomed to spinsterhood?  I don’t think too many.

Works Cited

Blake, William.  “Visions of the Daughters of Albion.”  The Longman Anthology of 
           British Literature Fifth Edition Volume 2A: The Romantics and 
          Their Contemporaries.  Ed. Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning.  Boston: 
          Pearson Education, Inc., 2012.  218-224.  Print.

Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine on "Nature"

One of the questions that Raymond Williams, in his essay “Ideas of Nature,” kept coming back to was whether or not humans have been included in the definition of the term “nature,” as it has been defined throughout history. He answers that nature eventually had to be separated from man, but I refer to Williams’ question because as I read the selections from Edmund Burke’s Reflections and the responses to it from Thomas Paine, I noticed how the texts contain an ambivalent understanding of the term nature, and how Williams’ question is very much relevant to both. Burke has in mind a hierarchical view of nature, one that should protect the nobility from relinquishing their right to rule. Paine offers a more democratic, so to speak, definition of nature, yet Paine’s idea of the term shares common principles with Burke’s.

What interested me about Burke’s use of the term nature is the variety of attributes he designates it with. Speaking of England’s monarchy and the established order of its constitution, he refers to this “entailed inheritance” as “the result of profound reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it” (LABL 115). The operative word “or” can arguably posit two different interpretations of the word nature. One would be that this entailed inheritance is the result of a long tradition of critical thinking about our place in society, which suggests we are separated from nature. The other interpretation, and one that Burke identifies with, relies on us being included and following the pattern of the natural world. The nobility can and should rule because that is the course nature takes, according to Burke. In this sense, the natural world seems to be void of any agency. Whatever wisdom nature contains, Burke doesn’t seem to suggest there is a mind with volition behind it.

In fact, he claims nature acts out of an “unerring instinct, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason” (LABL 116). Our reason [whether nature bestowed us with reason Burke does not specify] is subordinate to the natural world. The implications are that instinct—which is an impulsive, spontaneous response—in the natural world, defeats our mediated, reflective, conscious decisions. But not only does nature trump our reason, it, according to Burke, also “teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended,” which seems to me to account only for the nobility (LABL 116). This suggests, once again, a hierarchal principle that Burke believes can be traced back to history, following the course of nature. He admits, “each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of society, linking the lower with the higher natures…according to a fixed compact which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place” (LABL 117).

Much like Burke’s Reflections rely on a principle of analogy that compares society to the natural world, Thomas Paine’s selections from The Rights of Man also suggests “the laws of every country must be analogous to some common principle” (LABL 133). While Paine’s text seeks to disassociate with Burke’s hierarchical view of nature, it nonetheless shares with Burke an idea of commonality. Paine says “all men are born equal and with equal natural rights, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation, the latter being only the mode by which the former is carried forward” (LABL 136). Paine, like Burke, believes there is an essence about human beings that remains constant, although outward appearances of their mortal bodies decay and change. While Burke attributes that essence to the workings of nature alone, Paine suggests that nature has a created origin. For Burke, the nobility inherits the right to rule, but in Paine’s case, every man shares that right, which suggests that man can break the supposedly fixed order of the natural world. Every human birth should be equaled to the divine creation at the beginning of the world, even though humans descend from one generation to the next. This view echoes Burke’s notion that regarding the constituent parts of the state, the monarchy follows the principles of “succession by common law” by calling it now “succession by the statue law” (LABL 114-15). In both cases, Burke’s and Paine’s, the means to inheritance has changed, but there is an essence through that inheritance that remains constant. Where Burke and Paine part ways is in the way they suggest our human nature depends on that inheritance. Burke’s ideas that the nobility’s human nature is superior is contrasted with Paine’s views about our human nature is essentially the same. Comparing Burke and Paine made me reflect on the way they both traced an inheritance, similar yet different in some ways, to a long, antiquated past. Burke and Paine admit that nature hands down certain rights to man. Paine ascribes the origin of nature to a divine mind, but Burke seems to duck the question about nature’s origin altogether. The difference between the two implies how one defines human nature, and whether, like Williams asks, we share our ontology with the natural world.

Two writers, One Common Strategy

The late great Christopher Hitchens once offered the insightful observation that a frequent modus operandi seen in radical polemics is to “assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one” (Hitchens 130-38). Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in Reflections on the Revolution in France and A Vindication of the Rights of Men respectively, operate no differently, refusing in their polemical attacks to address the possibility that the other side may just be as morally minded as themselves in their the reasons to support or not support revolution and the ascertaining of human rights. 

For instance, Burke, after offering a withering critique of the arrest of the Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, castigates the philosophy of the Jacobites who would begin France anew, as if without historical memory, the wisdom of such an endeavor that Burke himself leaves in no uncertain terms: “On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests” (Burke 115). Worried that once institutions of authority are dismissed entirely, Burke agues that what must follow is a kind of relativistic notion of right and wrong among the citizens, something that in incommensurate with an orderly society.  Such acerbic prose as Burke’s, however skillful, nevertheless remains woefully unconcerned with several other important values in writing, like for instance fairness or generosity to one’s adversary’s, making for a polemical strategy that was probably meant to appeal more to those who already held his opinions. 

Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, is just as guilty of being uncharitable in her polemic, taking nearly every opportunity to impugn Burke’s character rather than remaining focused on the dismantling of his arguments on their own terms: “All your pretty flights arise from your pampered sensibility; and that, vain of this fancied pre-eminence of organs, you foster every emotion till fumes, mounting to your brain, dispel the sober suggestions of reason” (Wollstonecraft 119). One can only wonder what Wollstonecraft really thought of Burke. And yet, the appreciation of each writer’s polemic depends precisely on just such moments of rhetorical flourish and character assassination. As skilled rhetorically as each writer clearly was, they certainly could have decided to write in a style suggesting greater sobriety and disinterestedness on their part. However, they likely were less concerned with suggesting impartiality than they were in the rousing up of the sentiments of their political base, a strategy that journalists, activists, and politicians traditionally have turned to to win the public’s approbation, however intellectually dishonest such a tactic might be.

This is not to suggest, however, that neither writer fails to present good evidence for their arguments or foregoes the use of logic in favor of purely emotional appeals. Burke, for instance, reminds us of the importance of thinking of tradition as a form of collective wisdom rather than merely the outdated opinions of the dead: “Society in indeed a contract...a partnership....between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” (Burke 118). This idea also calls to mind Chesterton’s famous formulation of the same idea two centuries later, that “tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” Both men recognize that more unbelievable than things in society going wrong are things going right, and the taking down of long-standing institutions with great rashness will surely have unintended consequences.

The danger of holding tradition with such deep reverence, however, is the possibility of ignoring or condoning social evils that have a very real chance of being eliminated, given the right combination of reforms and visionary thinking, something pointed out most strongly by Wollstonecraft when she attacks the insensitivity of Burke’s idea of the poor relying on the hope of the afterlife in the face of today’s injustices: “Where is the eye that marks these evils, more gigantic than any of the infringements of property, which you piously deprecate? Are these remedies evils? And is the humane heart satisfied with turning the poor over to another world, to receive the blessings this could afford?” For Wollstonecraft, in other words, Burke’s attitude is too callous toward the less fortunate and patently absurd in light of his being so upset for someone like Mary Antoinette, a person who has lived a life of luxury that most everyone else can only dream about. In sum, both writers present emotionally resonating cases for their points of view about the French Revolution and the rights of man, relying on similar strategies of ad hominem attacks and rhetorical flourish for the most part, but not without being combined with well-reasoned arguments that are frequently supplemented by strong emotional appeals designed to rouse their political base.