The Animal in Pope’s Essay on Man

Why are there so many animals referenced in Alexander Pope’s poem Essay on Man? Traditionally, animals were separated from man throughout history. Namely, the animal was denied logos and access to the polis. However, this article claims that neither of these traditions hold true throughout Pope’s work. Rather, man is placed on a level on par with the animal in order to “vindicate the ways of God to man,” Pope’s explicit purpose of the poem. The article concludes that the agnostic figure of the animal, oddly, becomes the “guarantor” of God’s ways in the eyes of man through its comparison with man.

Fortune, Felicity and Happiness in the Early Modern Period

OH happiness! our being’s end and aim! Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate’er thy name: That something still which prompts th’ eternal sigh, For which we bear to live, or dare to die … Fix’d to no spot is happiness sincere, ’Tis no where to be found, or ev’ry where: ’Tis never to be bought, but always free, And fled from monarchs, St. John! dwells with thee. … Some place the bliss in action, some in ease, Those call it pleasure, and contentment these … Who thus define it, say they more or less Than this, that happiness is happiness? …Alexander Pope’s lines from the Essay on Man (1734) suggest the richness, diversity and overwhelming, transgressive nature of the concept of happiness. In the above quotation, happiness seems to be curiously self-evident and inconclusive at the same time. It is the central motivation for any action or non-action, all-pervasive, omnipresent and elusive. The obviousness with which Pope uses the word ‘happiness’ for so many different states of existence (material wealth, flourishing, bliss, the good life, the common good) is, however, the result of a long process of semantic change that is convincingly described by Phil Withington: being ‘derived from the Old Norse noun hap, meaning luck or fortune’, the word ‘happiness’ was, according to Withington’s findings, first used by William Caxton in his translation of Raoul Lefèvre’s French History of Troy. The addition of the English suffix ‘ness’ to the adjective ‘happy’ denotes ‘the quality and state of hap (i.e. fortune) or the circumstances and phenomena that exemplified such a condition’. The word changed its meaning from denoting good luck and favourable external (providential) conditions to signifying ‘the active pursuit of virtue and the common good’. Happiness became an umbrella term referring to a ‘commonplace mixture of physical well-being and psychological content’, to the individual and collective desire for and pursuit of ‘public improvement’, autonomy, liberty, ‘consumer self-interest and national aggrandisement’.

Pope, Johnson and Swift: A Comparison of their Poetic Styles and Views on Human Nature

This paper aims to compare the poetic styles and views on human nature of three literary giants in English literature, namely, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. As the three men of letters almost lived in the same age and they were all fond of writing on human nature, it will be very interesting to compare their respective styles and views on this issue. Since no previous studies have been found on this topic, this paper will be of great significance in exploring how their individual style and thinking vary from one another. Through close textual analysis of their representative poetic works, including An Essay on Man by Pope, The Vanity of Human Wishes by Johnson, and finally Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D. by Swift, this paper discovers the extent to which the three great authors differ from one another in their poetic styles and views on human nature. From Alexander Pope to Samuel Johnson and then down to Jonathan Swift, their respective poetic styles drop in formality and start to be increasingly less serious. Their views on human nature, accordingly, become increasingly hopeless and bleak. For Alexander Pope, self-love and reason are the central traits in human nature; to live a righteous life man has to use reason to counterbalance his self-love. For Samuel John, it is vanity that motivates all human actions; to resolve all the unhappiness in human life, however, man must use reason. Therefore, both poets emphasize reason as a combating force against all the ego-centrism inherent in human nature. As for Jonathan Swift, he even did not believe human beings are capable of reason; what he perceives in human nature is mere selfishness. This means that Pope and John are still serious about human nature and believe all the evilness in human nature can be mended or bettered, while Jonathan Swift starts to jeer at it, which signifies his complete loss of faith in human nature. Although they all believe ego-centrism to be intrinsic in human nature, we can conclude that Jonathan Swift, among the three, possesses the bleakest view of human nature.

“Whatever Is, Is Right”

Beginning with an analysis of a painting of the slaveholding founder of the Redwood Library of Newport, Rhode Island, that shows him holding a copy of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, this chapter documents the reading of Alexander Pope’s works in colonial America in relation to the Atlantic slavery economy. In doing so, it provides a theory that portraiture featuring books should count as evidence of the reception of them. It shows how slavery philanthropy fueled the Rhode Island book trade and endowed its libraries, and how patriot thought and activity emerged from these libraries. In examining the fragmentary remaining circulation receipt books of the Redwood, it shows patterns of reading that suggest that members of the library were more concerned about their own political “slavery” to Britain than with the condition of the Africans they were enslaving. It also investigates Rhode Island abolitionism in figures like Samuel Hopkins.

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778)

Voltaire remains the most celebrated representative of the reformers and free-thinkers whose writings define the movement of ideas in eighteenth-century France known as the Enlightenment. He was not, however, a systematic philosopher with an original, coherently argued world-view, but a philosophe who translated, interpreted and vulgarized the work of other philosophers. His own writings on philosophical matters were deeply influenced by English empiricism and deism. His thought is marked by a pragmatic rationalism that led him, even in his early years, to view the world of speculative theorizing with a scepticism that was often expressed most effectively in his short stories. As a young man, Voltaire was particularly interested in Locke and Newton, and it was largely through his publications in the 1730s and 1740s that knowledge of Lockean epistemology and Newtonian cosmology entered France and eventually ensured the eclipse of Cartesianism. After his stay in England Voltaire became interested in philosophical optimism, and his thinking reflected closely Newton’s view of a divinely ordered human condition, to which Alexander Pope gave powerful poetic expression in the Essay on Man (1733–4). This was reinforced for the young Voltaire by Leibnizian optimism, which offered the view that the material world, being necessarily the perfect creation of an omnipotent and beneficent God, was the ‘best of all possible worlds’, that is to say the form of creation chosen by God as being that in which the optimum amount of good could be enjoyed at the cost of the least amount of evil. Voltaire’s later dissatisfaction with optimistic theory brought with it a similar loss of faith in the notion of a meaningful order of nature, and his earlier acceptance of the reality of human freedom of decision-taking and action was replaced after 1748 with a growing conviction that such freedom was illusory. The 1750s witness Voltaire’s final abandonment of optimism and providentialism in favour of a more deterministically orientated position in which a much bleaker view of human life and destiny predominates. Pessimistic fatalism was a temporary phase in his thinking, however, and was replaced in turn by a melioristic view in which he asserted the possibilities of limited human action in the face of a hostile and godless condition.

Taocriticism in an Essay on Man

Taoism, as a distinct type of philosophy, radically differs from many other philosophies in China, such as Confucianism and Mohism, by taking a much broader, much greater and more transcendental view of the world. Many similar notions of Tao have been found in the “An Essay on Man” in four epistles penned by Alexander Pope. Therefore, a challenging and daring approach to employ Taoist perspectives to interpret An Essay on Man penned would shed light upon new ways of undertaking literary criticism, namely, using non-western philosophical outlooks to re-read western literary works. The Taoist ideas used herein include oneness, small knowledge, instrumental mentality, and yin-yang. The method of using Taoism to read literary texts is dubbed Taocriticism.