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August 31, 2019
Leibniz and the singing dog
(part 1)
Tediously long, research dump of a two-part post follows.
Apropos of less than nothing:
The following passage is TiR’s current favorite from Gottfried Leibniz, because in its midst is a parenthetical that contains a true WZT moment.
From “On the Ultimate Origination of Things” (1697) (emphasis supplied)
Why was an ape hanging around the 15th century court of the King of Denmark? Tossing around the royal infant?
Could we get some details on this story?
The king evidently is Christian II, born in Nyborg in 1481.
John Fulford Vicary’s A Danish Parsonage (1884) has a dissociatively understated reference to the tale:
There is not so much to see in Nyborg. . . . "Is there anything to relate about Nyborg, Herr Pastor?" asked Hardy.
"There is not much specially," replied the Pastor. "There is the story of the monkey taking Christian II out of his cradle when there was a royal residence at Nyborg, and jumping out of the window with him, and taking him upon the roof, so that it was with difficulty that they got him down again.
"There is also the story of the ghost of Queen Helvig . . . ”
“We are told that one day when [Christian] was sleeping in his cradle, a tame ape lifted him up and ran with him to the flat roof of the castle, where the creature was seen dangling and tossing the infant up and down. The royal servants were in great alarm, but they dared not call out or follow the animal lest he might throw the child to the ground, and so they waited till the ape of its own accord brought him within reach of the nurse.”
Nyborg Castle, today a tourist destination, is not above playing up the legendary incident for visitors, and on its website offers a detail that we like very much:
“Fortunately, a servant girl who was good with animals worked at the castle. She talked the monkey into coming to her, and saved the little baby prince.”
Finally, elsewhere the castle’s website (.pdf) attempts to explain the most bizarre question: Whence came the monkey?
“Danish participants in the Portuguese crusades probably brought it back from Africa.”
TiR imagines that it would be a logical and entertaining story if the monkey were brought back by a Danish participant in Portuguese king Alfonso V’s invasion of Alcácer / Ksar es-Seghir (Morocco) in the late 1450s.
If the monkey were a male Barbary macaque, they have a lifespan of around 25 years, long enough to have been brought from Alcácer then later to meet the young Christian II. They are well known for the tendency to play with, groom and carry around (usually their own) infants.
Several years after the above essay, Leibniz offers a further, potentially kinky explanation for practices like baby-tossing: Pain can be fun!
Or the fun, as Leibniz puts it, is a kind of subtly nuanced “uneasiness, which I show to consist in something that differs from pain only as the small differs from the great, and which often brings about our desire and even our pleasure by giving it a kind of spice.” (Preface to the New Essays on the Understanding (1703-05), here (pdf.))
Is baby-tossing therefore mutually enjoyable, for both parties, the tosser and the tossed? In 1481, who got more of a thrill out of it, the infant Christian II or the gorilla?
Per Enlightenment and early modern minds, the answer may have depended on whose soul and perceptions were more sensitive.
To meander through these Enlightenment-era conversations involves for the modern reader (by which we meanTiR, who proudly lets their superficiality flag fly -- we're no experts) traversals of vast tundras of boringness punctuated by phantasmagoria of weirdness.
These old-fashioned debates unfold on an initial plane of yawn-inducing obviousness, insofar as us moderns have science, which has dissolved many of the confused questions of olden days. However, that is why TiR really ought to avoid reading early modern and classical texts too much, too indulgently, too generously, lest our verities turn topsy-turvy. Otherwise our facility at generating glib, instantaneous, smart ass, hot take judgments (especially those we keep to ourselves) about every possible topic would seize up into paralysis.
But back to Leibniz: He is unobtrusively remarkable, above, in how smoothly his consideration of the things in which “we” delight (say, infant tossing) slaloms from the human “we,” to the animal (an ape), then back to the human.
Leibniz thereby stomps his foot squarely into the then-vexed question of animal psychology or more precisely animal ensoulment, which seems to be a recurring early modern and Enlightenment controversy.
Do animals have “souls”? If so, what kind? And what would be the implications of that? If not, why not, and how would we even know?
Leibniz’s “Monadology” (1714) embroils him even more deeply into the wrangle over the animal vs. the human soul, not least when he invokes the name of the author “Rorarius.”
And here things get fun.
That would be Hieronymus Rorarius, a/k/a Girolamo or Jérôme Rorario (1485 - 1556), born and died in Pordenone, Italy.
However, Leibniz’s true interlocutor is not Rorarius himself but a more historically proximate target: Pierre Bayle and his Dictionary (1697), which mentions Girolamo R. almost in passing, as a jumping off point to address thornier problems.
Bayle’s Dictionary steers directly into a nest of questions, including some that the future King Christian II's court at Nyborg might well have debated after tucking the freshly juggled and aerated royal infant back into his crib.
Why do animals sometimes do “human-like” things?
Moreover, given that animals can and do, who is smarter or stupider, an ape or an individual peasant [Bayle's wording: un gros lourdaud de paysann]?
Whose actions are more ridiculous, those of apes or those of the mass of stupid humans [les gens stupides]?
Among animals themselves, whose soul is more “refined,” that of an ape, a dog or an ox? And how could we tell?
If the human soul is more elevated, and the soul on some level “controls” the body, why do humans in their conduct so often end up behaving like such beasts?
These questions and others thread through, for example, the section of Bayle’s Dictionary entitled on “A Specific Difference Between the Souls of Men and Those of Beasts” (original here, translation here, at p. 907), with which Leibniz is in discussion.
Richard Fry (SIUE) does an admirable summary of Bayle (here (.pdf)), the various sides of the issue, and related considerations. Fry is also adept with the well-chosen quotes:
“Aristotle and Cicero, at the age of one year, never had more sublime thoughts than those of a dog.” (Bayle)
“God governs minds as a prince governs his subjects, whereas he disposes of other substances as an engineer handles his materials.” (Leibniz)
“What shall we do with so many immortal souls? Will there be for them also a Heaven and a Hell? . . . How many insects are there which only live a few days? . . . The microscopes discover them to us by the thousands in a single drop of liquor.” (Bayle)
Fry nicely captures one nodal (or as he might put it, “dilemmatic”) point as follows:
“The notion that non-human animals might have souls like ours -- or that we might have souls like those typically attributed to them -- is a matter apt for moral panic among the religious.”
But what of Rosarius himself, who kicked off all this nonsense? What more do we know?
Prof. Dennis Des Chene (here (.pdf)) displays the flair of a dramatist, in his introductory depiction of the incident which started it all:
Sometime before 1539 in Velletri, after dinner, Cardinal Bernard of Cles, a “man of all hours,” had a dog perform for his guests. Not only did it perform the usual tricks, jumping through hoops and so forth, but when its trainer brought out a book of music, the dog, “jumping up on his knee,” began to sing, “now with a high voice, now with a low, sometimes drawn out with continuous breath, sometimes varied and modulated.” Girolamo Rorario, better known by his Latin name “Rorarius,” was quite taken with the animal's uncanny performance. . . .
“But why”, the cardinal asked, “have you said that reason rules most powerfully in man? Do you not believe that reason likewise occurs in animals?” Rorarius said that he had long been troubled by that very thought – that indeed “reason oftentimes is found to be better in brutes than in men.”
Out of that conversation came the manuscript of a work that was published only a century later. . . . A half-century later it drew the attention of Pierre Bayle . . .
Des Chene then goes on to give a terrific blow-by-blow account and explanation of Bayle’s Dictionary article and the deeper and wider issues in play.
In the mix, the nagging question recurs: Might “lower” primates be as much or even more reasonable than are humans?
Contemplation of whether a meaningful, behavioral or cognitive dividing line exists between apes and humans naturally has deep historical roots.
Confining ourselves only to the mid-to-late 20th century, a partial list of obvious and important contributions to this body of research would therefore encompass the following contributions:
Brassens’ (1960)
Harry Belafonte (1961)
Major Lance (1963)
The Miracles (at approx. 6 mins.) (1964)
Rufus Thomas (1964)
Gino Washington (1964)
Joe Tex (1965)
The Maytals (1969)
The Kinks (1970)
Honey Cone (1971)
Fela Kuti (1975)
Patti Smith (1978)
The Dickies (1978)
W. Zevon (1980)
The Mighty Diamonds (1981)
The Pixies (1989)
The Mummies (1993)
However, the definitive conclusions on this inquiry were of course set forth by Dave Bartholomew (1957).
To TiR’s ears, we believe that Bartholomew’s conclusive findings were delivered with the rock solid, backing support of the immortal Earl Palmer.
The same results were reproduced or at least valuably reinterpreted a decade later by the lesser known Dinsdale Thorpe (1967).
The critical findings articulated above are supplemented and expanded upon by an even newer body of important on-line investigations.
TiR will present more information on this in Part II, to be posted in one month.
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