Biting into a Pin-cushion 
A.D. Nuttall
This book opens with a resounding question: ‘Who are we?’ The many pages that follow, highly entertaining and richly informed as they are, never directly answer this question. Instead, they answer another question: ‘Who or what do we think we are?’ Perhaps the choice of the plural form – ‘Who are we?’ rather than ‘Who am I?’ – already betrays the fact that the writer has the mind of a historian, since it assumes the existence of a social object of investigation, rather than the mind of a philosopher, who would assume as little as possible. Imagine how different it would have been if Descartes had written: ‘We think, therefore we are.’ Roy Porter tells the story of evolving conceptions of human nature in the Enlightenment. The basic answer offered to the unstated second question is: ‘Living as we do in an originally Christian culture, we see ourselves as a mixture of flesh and spirit.’ The word ‘mixture’ can be unpacked in various ways, as we gradually learn. Porter, who knows all about 18th-century medicine, naturally chooses to lay his emphasis on the part played in the story by flesh.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
A.D. Nuttall’s many books include Dead From the Waist Down, a study of the idea of the scholar in relation to sexuality. He is a fellow of New College, Oxford.
print layout
tell a friend