A Book Review

In his fairly short, yet incredibly dense work Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman, James Steintrager delves into the intellectual and ethical analysis of the practice of cruelty and its relationship to humanity, as perceived by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. In presenting this morose subject of the human condition, Steintrager endeavors to embark on a multi-faceted analysis of the concept of cruelty through the lenses of Enlightenment philosophy, sociology, history, ethics, art, literature, and intellectual discourse, all within 150 pages. This alone should serve as warning indicator to members of the general academic audience who choose to peruse the pages of this text. Hoping to garner a deeper understanding of the Enlightenment and its accompanying socio-cultural history (the word culture is in the title), this reviewer quickly reached the second and most revealing academic warning at the end of the book’s introduction. Steintrager’s own words cannot be bested in describing the danger an academic is about to find themselves engaged in: “By presenting my material in such a way that a general academic audience will, I hope, find it accessible, I have potentially alienated specialists in my field and not at all guaranteed that general readers will be interested.” (Steintrager, xviii) Thus begins the reader’s cruel journey into the morass of Steintrager’s Enlightenment.

Cruel Delight is composed of three sections (Parts I, II, and III), each addressing separate aspects of the shared concepts of cruelty and inhumanity within the Enlightenment. It should be noted that this is the high-water mark of the text’s organizational structure. Part I, entitled The Inhuman is comprised of two chapters, the first attempting to grapple the construct of, as the author words it, “moral monstrosity,” while the second addresses the definition of inhumanity, in Enlightenment terms. The questions of moral monstrosity and inhumanity are broken down to their philosophical roots, with Steintrager drawing upon the works and ruminations of minds such as Smith, Diderot, Shaftesbury, Hume, Hobbes, and Kant. The list of intellectual heavyweights is impressive, no doubt. However, the muddled presentation of the first two chapters in searching for the root of cruelty within morality and inhumanity is likely to be extremely representative of the reality in which Enlightenment philosophers struggled with the issues at hand. This structure is great for specialists in Enlightenment philosophy (or is it?) but falls far short of roping in the general academic audience (but if they’re alienated, that’s alright, too.)

Is cruelty a trait of humanity, or is it an aberration which exists outside of but parallel to human existence? Is it directly opposed to benevolence, or is it, in fact, a product of benevolence? Is it malice, pity, or simply curiosity? A scant thirty pages (give or take a few) are given to tackling the intellectual and philosophical attempts of Enlightenment thinkers to address these huge questions on human nature. When reading the Steintrager text, one feels as if they are swirling within a vortex of Enlightenment discourse, catching fleeting glimpses of understandable reasoning and discussion, only to have it disappear and be replaced by related, yet substantially different analysis. The reader, in the end, finds that Steintrager has not presented a coherent summation of the subjects addressed, not surprising given the length of analysis, one which could easily fill volumes. There exists a vague impression upon the reader that cruelty and inhumanity are simply elements of the human condition, but such a conclusion is reached with little help from the author. One might be better off personally reading the primary source documents utilized in Steintrager’s analysis, keeping the concept of cruelty in mind, in order to reach a coherent consensus.

Part II, entitled Curiosity Killed the Cat, offers a reprieve to the reader, one that is needed yet unfulfilling at the same time. The broad presentation of this portion of the text brings the reader closest to the elusive spectre of “Enlightenment culture” referenced in the book’s title. At the heart of this “cultural” analysis is a series of four engravings, titled “The Four Stages of Cruelty” by William Hogarth, completed in 1751. Steintrager utilizes these four images to create for the reader a sense of Enlightenment culture and its underlying cruelty, with other source documentation being juxtaposed sporadically. For Steintrager, these engravings are sufficient in presenting to his audience topics ranging from the European cultural shift for animal rights to the process of habituation to the professional detachment among practitioners of medicine. As a student of history, the reviewer found this section of the book to be an absolute disappointment.

Steintrager repeatedly misses the mark in presenting the reader with a concise, or even chronological, glimpse into the culture of the Enlightenment. The major culprit once again lies in Steintrager’s organization (or lack thereof). As in the first portion of the book, familiar names are bandied about: Rousseau, Kant, Locke and Pope. However, they are utilized awkwardly as the narrative skips from one tangent of thought to another, then another and then back again. Steintrager (successfully) maintains the underlying discussion on inhumanity throughout the section, but the relevance and purpose of the theme have a tendency to be lost among the varying threads of thought the author is attempting to force into line. The reader is, again, left unfulfilled, having gained little perspective and insight into the aspects and evolution of Enlightenment culture parallel to the narrative of cruelty and inhumanity. On the other hand, the reader can take faith in the relevance of the discourse which closes the second section. A discussion of Enlightenment cataract surgery and its metaphysical impacts on individual objectivism in regards to morality makes perfect sense, after all.

The Bedside Manner of the Marquis de Sade, title to part III of the Steintrager text, was the author’s final opportunity to make amends with the general academic audience, this reviewer among them. As the final section begins, Steintrager presents to the reader brief anecdotal analysis of one of the Marquis de Sade’s more documented transgressions, “affaire d’Arcueil,” followed by some examples of contemporary Enlightenment response and a few of the Marquis’ personal writings. The reader is rewarded with a small amount of contextual historical analysis, but fulfillment is quickly lost as Steintrager presses forward. Presenting Sade as something of an amateur surgeon, Steintrager elevates this conception to equally important footing in regards to the Marquis’ infamous sexual practices. Sade was as morally monstrous as the surgeon and human vivisector of the Enlightenment era, nothing more, or so it would appear to be in Steintrager’s analysis. A consensus, however, remains elusive even under repeated re-readings of the chapter dedicated to Sade and his namesake sexual practice of sadism.

Chapter six, dedicated to ethics and human vivisection starts out strong. At last it appears as if Steintrager will salvage a portion of his text, as his discourse on ethics and cruelty is both well-organized and intellectually understandable. The Enlightenment argument for and against human vivisection is presented along ethical lines, with the theme of cruelty and inhumanity running parallel in a solid analysis. This brief portion of the text is both well-written and enjoyable, but it is soon revealed that this glimmer of academic hope is to be crushed by the same problematic structure that has persisted throughout the text. The discussion on ethics quickly deflates and is succeeded by discussions on female sexual repression and eroticized suffering as presented in art coupled with images of Enlightenment era mastectomy tools and techniques, of which there is not discussion presented in the text. It must be admitted that at this point in the book, the reviewer began writing expletives with his highlighter across the text, as all sense of continuity and cohesion fled the pages. Steintrager’s epilogue is also of no consolation to the reader as the author chooses not to summarize the arguments presented within the body of the text. Instead, Steintrager chooses to summarize and subsequently analyze the novel Vathek by William Beckford, failing to relate it to the body of the text and further confusing (and aggravating) the reader.

Bravo, James Steintrager! You have indeed remained true to your prophetic words. Not only have you possibly alienated specialists within the field of Enlightenment studies, you have mostly likely alienated the vast general academic audience as well. Poor structure, oversimplification and over-analysis prove to make this text a frustrating and unfulfilling academic read. In all fairness to the author, the specific mind-frame of the reviewer (in wanting historical contextual analysis) may have been asking too much, but given the extremely broad scope of the attempted analysis, the consolidation of the argument and narrative into such a short volume is unquestionably the author’s shortcoming. While the brief discussion and analysis on ethics in chapter six is a strong point, it falls far short of compensating for the remainder of the work. The inundation of poorly ordered primary sources utilized in the first portion of the text followed shortly by singular analysis of the Hogarth engravings in the second serves to put the reader off balance and grasping at straws. There is a lack of continuity despite the presence of the theme of cruelty and inhumanity, weak as it may be. In regards to historical contextual analysis, an M.A. in French and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature do not a historical author make!