Naming and Understanding the Opposites of Desire: A Prehistory of Disgust 1598-1755. RICHARD SIMON FIRTH-GODBEHERE Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 I, Richard Simon Firth-Godbehere, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: Richard Firth-Godbehere Date: 2 Abstract In the early 17th century, Aristotelian ideas about the passions came under scrutiny. The dominant, if not only, understanding of the passions before that time came from Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas split most of his main passions into opposing pairs – love/hate, joy/sorrow, fear/bravery etc. Aquinas described the opposite of desire as ‘fuga seu abominatio (flight or abomination).’ Although grappled with by earlier philosophers such as Duns Scotus and Thomas Cajetan, it was not until the 17th century that thinkers attempted to challenge Aquinas’s opposite of desire. This thesis looks at five writers who used a variety of terms, often taken to be near-synonyms of disgust in the historiography – Thomas Wright, Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth, Thomas Hobbes, Henry More and Isaac Watts – and challenges that view. Each of these men wrote works that, at least in part, attempted to understand the passions and each had a different understanding of Aquinas’s opposite of desire. The thesis uses a corpus analysis to investigate uses of the words each thinker chose as an opposite of desire and then examines each writers’ influences, experiences, and intentions, to analyse their understanding of the opposite of desire. Secondly, these various opposites of desire appear to bare a family resemblance to modern disgust. All are based upon the action of moving away from something thought of as harmful or evil, and all have an element of revulsion alongside the repulsion. This has led to much of the historiography of these sorts of passions making the assumption that these words simply referred to disgust. This thesis argues that these opposites of desire are not the same as disgust; the differences outweigh the similarities. 3 Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 8 INTRODUCTION 9 A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF DISGUST 12 PRE-HISTORY 19 A DEFINITION OF DISGUST 20 METHODOLOGY 25 CORPUS LINGUISTICS 26 LEXICOGRAPHY, 1565-1755 29 CLOSE READING 30 NOTE ON SPELLINGS AND PUNCTUATION 35 CHAPTER 1: THOMAS WRIGHT’S ‘FLIGHT,’ ‘DETESTATION’ AND ‘ABOMINATION’ 37 1.1 WRIGHT’S LINGUISTIC INFLUENCES 38 THE WORD ‘FLIGHT’ 40 ‘DETESTATION’ 41 AB(H)OMINATION 45 SECULAR ABOMINATION? 47 1.2 WRIGHT’S MISSION 48 THE PASSIONS OF THE MINDE IN GENERALL 50 CIVIL GENTLEMEN AND THE ‘PHYSISTIAN OF THE BODY’ 51 THE ‘DIUINE’ AND THE ‘PHYSITIAN OF THE SOUL’ 53 THE ‘GOOD CHRISTIAN’ 56 1.3. WRIGHT’S OPPOSITE OF DESIRE 57 FLIGHT OR DETESTATION 58 WRIGHT’S OPPOSITES TO DESIRE 61 HATRED OF ABOMINATION 62 CONCLUSION: FLIGHT AND DETESTATION, ABOMINATION, AND MODERN DISGUST 65 CHAPTER 2: HENRY CAREY’S FUITE AS ‘ESCHEWING’ 68 2.1 CAREY’S LINGUISTIC INFLUENCES 69 USES OF ‘ESCHEWING’ 70 ESCHEWING EVIL 72 NON-RELIGIOUS ESCHEWING 77 ‘ESCHEWING’ AND ‘FLIGHT’ 78 ‘ESCHEWING’ AS A NOUN 80 2.2. JEAN-FRANÇOIS SENAULT 81 DE L’USAGE DES PASSIONS 82 2.3 HENRY CAREY’S OPPOSITE OF DESIRE 86 CAREY’S TRANSLATIONS 88 THE VSE OF PASSIONS 89 THE PASSION OF ESCHEWING 95 CONCLUSION: ESCHEWING AND DISGUST 98 CHAPTER 3: HOBBES’S AVERSION 101 3.1 THE USES OF ‘AVERSION’ 102 4 THE WORD ‘AVERSION’ 104 ‘AVERSION’ IN THE EEBO-TCP CORPUS 105 RELIGIOUS ‘AVERSIONS’ 109 3.2 HOBBES’S THOUGHT 112 3.3 HOBBESIAN AVERSION 116 HOBBES’S GOOD AND EVIL 121 CONCLUSION: AVERSION AND DISGUST 125 CHAPTER 4: HENRY MORE’S HORROR 128 4.1. THE WORD ‘HORROR’ 130 ‘HORROR’ 133 ‘HORROR’ IN THE CORPUS 135 HORROR AND SIN 140 THE HORROR OF CONSCIENCE 142 4.2. MORE’S INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES 145 MORE AND THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 145 MORE AND DESCARTES 148 4.3 MORE’S OPPOSITE OF DESIRE 149 MORE’S PASSIONS 152 MORE’S HORROR 154 CONCLUSION: HORROR OR AVERSION AND DISGUST 157 CHAPTER 5: ISAAC WATTS’S AVERSION AND DISGUST 160 5.1 ‘DISGUST’ AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ‘AVERSION’ 161 ‘DISGUST’ DURING WATTS’S LIFETIME. 162 A BRIEF HISTORY OF TASTE 163 ENGLISH TASTE THEORISTS 167 5.2 WATTS’S INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES 171 WATTS’S PHILOSOPHY 176 5.3 WATTS’S DISGUST AND AVERSION 178 CONCLUSION: WATTS’S DISGUST AND AVERSION, AND MODERN DISGUST 181 CONCLUSION: AFTERLIVES, AND THE PREHISTORY OF MODERN DISGUST 184 AFTERLIVES 184 ABOMINATION 185 DETESTATION 186 FLIGHT 187 ESCHEWING 187 AVERSION 188 HORROR 190 DISGUST 192 WHY ‘DISGUST’? 194 TOWARDS UNDERSTANDINGS OF ‘DISGUSTS’ 195 BIBLIOGRAPHY 198 5 GRAPHS Graph 3.1. Frequency of ‘disgust’ between 1600 and 1700, smoothing of 3, Google Books English Corpus. Graph 3.2. The frequency of variants of ‘disgust’ between 1600 and 1700, JISC Historical Texts. Graph 3.3. The percentage of published texts in the EEBO-TCP corpus that contain at least one occurrence of a variant of the word ‘aversion’ between 1600 and 1679. Graph 3.4. The increase in occurrences of variants of the word ‘aversion’ between 1588 and 1679, searchable JISC Historical Texts. Graph 3.5 Number of uses of the word ‘God’ between 1600 and 1679 in the searchable JISC Historical Texts. Graph 3.6 The number of uses of the words ‘God’, ‘soul’, and ‘sin’ between 1600 and 1680 in the Google Books English Corpus. Graph 4.1. Frequency of ‘disgust’ between 1600 and 1700, smoothing of 3. Google Books English Corpus. Graph 4.2. Frequency of variants of ‘disgust’ between 1600 and 1700, JISC Historical Texts. Graph 4.3. Comparison between the frequency of ‘Disgust’ and ‘distaste’ between 1640 and 1720, smoothing of 3. Google Books English Corpus. Graph 4.4. The number of times that variants of the word ‘horror’ appear in texts between 1610 and 1689, EEBO-TCP corpus Graph 4.5. The number of times variants of the word ‘horror’ appeared in texts between 1615 and 1689, Google Books corpus, generated using Google N-Grams. Graph 4.6. The number of times variants of the word ‘horror’ appeared in texts between 1615 and 1689, generated by JISC Historical texts. Graph 5.1. Frequency of ‘disgust’ between 1700 and 1755, case-insensitive, smoothing of 3, Google Books English corpus. Graph 6.3. Comparison of occurrences of the words ‘detestation’ and ‘disgust’, between 1730 and 2008, case-insensitive, smoothing of 3, Google Books English corpus. Graph 6.4. Comparison of occurrences of the words ‘eschewing’ and ‘disgust’, between 1730 and 2008, case-insensitive, smoothing of 3, Google Books English corpus. Graph 6.5. Comparison of occurrences of the words ‘aversion’ and ‘disgust’, between 1730 and 2008, case-insensitive, smoothing of 3, Google Books English Corpus. Graph 6.6. Comparison of occurrences of the words ‘horror’ and ‘disgust’, between 1730 and 2008, case-insensitive, smoothing of 3, Google Books English corpus. Graph 6.7. Occurrences of the word ‘disgust’, between 1730 and 2008, case-insensitive, smoothing of 3, Google Books English corpus. TABLES Table 1.1. The frequency of the most common words found within five words either side of ‘detestation’ in texts published between 1560 and 1621 in the EEBO-TCP corpus. Table 1.2 Frequency of the most common words found within five words either side of variants of ‘abomination’ and ‘abhomination’ in texts published between 1560 and 1621 in the EEBO-TCP corpus. 6 Table 2.1. Frequency of the most common words found five words either side variants of ‘disgust’ in texts published between 1620 and 1640 in the EEBO-TCP corpus. Table 2.2. Frequency of the most common words found five words either side of both the word ‘eschewing’ and variants of the word ‘eschew’ other than ‘eschewing’ in texts published between 1595 and 1641 in the EEBO-TCP corpus. Table 3.1. The percentage of the occurrence of the words most commonly found within five words of variants of ‘aversion’ in 1590-1650, and 1651-1679, in the EEBO-TCP corpus. Table 4.1. The frequency of words found most frequently within five words either side of variants of ‘horror’ in texts published between 1615 and 1689, before and after the publication of Descartes’s Passions of the Soul in English in 1650. Generated from the EEBO-TCP corpus. Table 4.2. Words found most commonly within five words either side of variants of ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ in texts published between 1615 and 1689, separated by two periods either side of the publication of Descartes’s Passions of the Soul in English in 1650. Words in bold are found in proximity to both ‘horror’ and ‘terror’. Generated from the EEBO-TCP corpus. IMAGES Figure 2.1. William Marhsall, ‘Charles I In HIs Solitude and Sufferings’, engraving; 85 frontispiece to Charles I, King of England and John Gauden, Eikon Basilike (London: s.n., 1648).