Abstract
This chapter introduces the argument that Gulliver’s Travels is best understood as a book about the contrast between ancient and modern societies, and ancient and modern books, with Swift consistently preferring the ancients. To put this argument in context I discuss how political debates today, including debates as to whether what is considered progressive is always a good thing, can point us back toward the thought of Jonathan Swift. We also need to consider Swift’s art of writing, including his use of somewhat unreliable narrators such as Gulliver. There is a discussion of the debate about ancients and moderns that was prevalent in Swift’s time, and in which he took part with Battle of the Books. As valuable as it may be to consider Swift in a context of his time and place, we must be guided to some extent by his undeniable originality.
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Notes
- 1.
Kearney:
Philosophy is the subject matter of much of Swift’s work. … He never produced a philosophical treatise. However, Swift was very familiar with the whole of the philosophical tradition …. In his correspondence, Swift shows a fondness for Plato, but only in political matters. The philosopher with whom he has most in common is Aristotle. Kearney (2005), 3.
- 2.
Travels III.4, 197. Page numbers refer to the Kearney edition.
- 3.
Swift may have been the first to anticipate: travel by air using an inanimate machine, including the ability to fly closer to, or farther from, the ground, and to both land and take off; and bombardment from aircraft. Asimov (who ought to know) says of the description of the flying island:
Others had invented fanciful flying cities before this, but Jonathan Swift was the first to attempt an explanation of its workings in line with the findings of contemporary science. This section of the book is therefore true science fiction, perhaps the earliest example we have of it. To include earlier works as science fiction involves broadening the definition of the genre to include works not strictly based on a scientific background, and thus little more than adventure fantasy—like, for instance, the first two parts of Gulliver’s Travels. (#10, p. 144)
- 4.
See Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”:
Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.
- 5.
Swift has Projectors experimenting with various ways of learning and communicating bits of knowledge (or data) more quickly and easily; there is at least a hint or anticipation of a computer. There is also a suggestion that the only “information” that can be conveyed this way is small, more or less meaningless “facts” that are trivial in themselves, and soon forgotten. See the “Projectors in speculative learning,” apparently including the “school of languages” and the “school of mathematics”; III.5, 203–8; Asimov #21, p. 174; #24, p. 175; Houston pp. 430–1, finding a possible source in a work by Comenius.
- 6.
See Forbes.
- 7.
This might be referred to as the “Thrasymachean” view of justice; see Plato Republic 338c–339a.
- 8.
Preaching from the pulpit at St. Patrick’s in Dublin every fifth Sunday from 1713 to 1745, it is thought that Swift produced thirty-five sermons, of which only twelve have been preserved. Swift may have destroyed the other twenty-three. Wikipedia cites the Prose Works edited by Scott to say Swift left all thirty-five sermons to his friend Dr. Thomas Sheridan; Damrosch says Swift “burned” most of them (271).
- 9.
Patey has written on both Swift and Evelyn Waugh, and it is fair to say he sees a similarity in these authors. On the other hand, the New Testament is probably even more discouraging of laughter than the Old Testament, which in turn is more discouraging than Plato.
- 10.
A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick (1729).
- 11.
Swift’s projector says that unless cannibalism is practiced on a considerable scale, abortion will be common. This is treated as a greater evil. Today we hear arguments for abortion on demand that bear some similarity to the projector’s arguments for cannibalism—above all, saving children from a miserable life.
- 12.
The title of Mandeville’s Modest Defence of Public Stews, which advocates for the legalization and licensing of brothels in order to minimize the problems that usually arise from this trade, is echoed in the Swift piece. Prendergast (2014):
If it is accepted that Swift had Mandeville’s Modest Defence in mind when he wrote his own Modest Proposal, we can see him as beating Mandeville at his own game by showing that there were really no bounds on what could be justified by consequentialist reasoning.
Although Swift made no direct comment on Mandeville, there is good reason to assume familiarity with his work. … Moreover, as Rawson … suggests the work of the two authors appears to show “a pattern of tacit or interlocking awareness of one another,” and “a reciprocal array of undeclared allusion.”
- 13.
See Speck.
- 14.
Damrosch 6.
- 15.
Mullan (review of Damrosch).
- 16.
See Damrosch 144–6.
- 17.
An Argument to Prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England May, as Things Now Stand Today, be Attended with Some Inconveniences, and Perhaps not Produce Those Many Good Effects Proposed Thereby, commonly referred to as An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708); Damrosch 152–3. Prendergast (2010) suggests that this piece responds to one by Mandeville—a kind of early draft of Fable of the Bees.
- 18.
A Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the Reformation of Manners. By a Person of Quality (1709).
- 19.
The Sentiments of a Church of England Man, With Respect to Religion and Government (1708).
- 20.
Damrosch 147–8. The enemy was Jonathan Smedley; the friend was Patrick Delany, a fellow clergyman.
- 21.
A Letter to a Young Clergyman, Lately Entered into Holy Orders (1719–20).
- 22.
Strangely, Swift says at one point that “the system of morality to be gathered out of the writings or sayings of those ancient sages, falls undoubtedly very short of that delivered in the Gospel”—as if the substance of duty might differ from what Christ taught. But then he allows this thought to go unrepeated and undeveloped.
- 23.
A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, With the Consequences they had upon both these States.
- 24.
Battle of the Books was published in the same volume as Tale of a Tub, largely written perhaps in 1696. The Dedication is addressed to Lord John Somers, a member of the Whig Junto whom Swift found admirable apart from party politics. In the mid-1690s Somers was at the peak of his career, Lord Chancellor and newly created Baron; he came under repeated attacks by his enemies beginning in 1699 and 1700, was removed from office by the King, and within a short time largely retired to private life. By 1704 Somers had returned to much of his earlier respectability and prominence, although the Whigs did not come back into office until 1708. Swift may have made a strategic decision as to when to publish with a dedication to Somers.
- 25.
Temple refers to “two Pieces that have lately pleased me …one in English upon the Antediluvian World, and another in French upon the Plurality of Worlds.” The first is Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, originally in Latin, published in English in 1684 and 1690; the second is Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, translated into English in 1688. He goes on: “I was so pleased with the last … that I enquired for what else I could of the same hand, till I met with a small Piece concerning Poesy”; this is Fontenelle’s 1688 book on “Poesies Pastorales,” which included some poetry, a “Discourse” on this type of poem, and the “Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes.”
- 26.
A serious study of fossils as evidence of ancient plants and animals that were quite different from contemporary ones came to England in the 1660s with Hooke and Steno. The most groundbreaking work on telescopes looking into space and finding “worlds” there was probably done by Galileo, who published the Siderius Nuncius in 1610.
- 27.
Swift refers almost in passing to fossils (II.7, 151), apparently recognizing that knowledge about the past can be gained by a careful study of such things. On the other hand, it is not clear any big political question can be settled this way. Does it really matter whether Yahoos or Houyhnhnms were actually aboriginal in Houyhnhnm-land? In a funny way, a kind of realistic space travel may have been invented by Swift; he holds out no hope that there are interesting or superior people or beings out there somewhere.
- 28.
Between the publication in France of Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds and his Poesies, Charles Perrault recited a poem at the meeting of the French Academy, extolling moderns, particularly poets, at the expense of the ancients. The French debate got caught up in questions such as whether human beings have declined in overall quality or will decline in the future—something Swift takes up in various ways; poetry is a major theme, with progress in science perhaps simply taken for granted. Somewhat surprisingly, Fontenelle in his praise of Descartes did not accept the findings of Newton on gravity.
- 29.
One may of course wonder about the great scholastic thinkers, who will come up below. What about the architecture and related visual arts of the High Middle Ages—the flying buttress, and Gothic cathedrals? Temple says that in ancient times painting, statuary and architecture achieved “inimitable excellencies” that are “undisputed”; 20.
- 30.
Such thinkers tended to write in Latin; Swift says he is “heartily glad” that Latin has been “almost entirely driven out of the pulpit.”
- 31.
It has been established for some time that the “Epistles of Phalaris” were in fact spurious, dating from several centuries after the time of the real Phalaris, and either written or falsely attributed to Phalaris in order to embellish his reputation. The letters were widely diffused in Europe for centuries before Temple wrote. Richard Bentley disposed of the controversy and proved Temple to be completely wrong, in a book published in 1699. Bentley’s name comes up in Battle of the Books.
- 32.
S. 2. For the ancient Greeks, Parnassus was the holiest of holy sites. The oracle at Delphi, dedicated to Apollo, was only one of many associations in religious myth; the mountain was also sacred to Dionysius, and the home of the Muses. There were thriving communities on and near Parnassus in pre-Greek or proto-Greek Mycenean times. The name is so ancient it is clearly not Greek, but it is difficult to ascribe to either a Mycenean or an even more ancient Anatolian language.
- 33.
S. 8. Francis Bacon: “antiquity is the youth of the world”; Advancement of Learning, I.8.
- 34.
S. 3. There was no good Latin translation of the works of Plato (except the Timaeus) in the time of Scotus, and virtually no one could read Greek. Aristotle’s works by contrast had come to be fairly widely available in good Latin translations. William of Moerbeke is said to have translated the works of Aristotle from Greek into Latin at the request of Thomas Aquinas.
- 35.
III.8, 221–1. The word “dunce” meaning “intellectually lacking” was added to the English language by way of various attacks on the thinking and works of Duns Scotus. There may have been Protestants attacking Catholic medievalism well before Swift who achieved this usage, but Swift and his friends probably gave it wider currency.
- 36.
When Gulliver mentions the agreement between the Master Houyhnhnm and “the Sentiments of Socrates, as Plato delivers them,” he says this is “the highest Honour I can do that Prince of Philosophers”; IV.8, 301. This is the only mention of Plato in the Travels.
- 37.
When Gulliver is getting to know the king of the giants, he finds that there are some intellectuals who are at least trying to be moderns: they make “a determination exactly agreeable to the modern philosophy of Europe, whose professors [disdain] the old evasion of occult causes, whereby the followers of Aristotle endeavoured in vain to disguise their ignorance …” (II.3, 111–2).
- 38.
S. 30.
- 39.
If one were to re-construct a Swiftian bestiary, one would need to consider what Gulliver says to the King of the Brobdingnagians: “… among other Animals, Bees and Ants had the Reputation of more Industry, Art, and Sagacity than many of the larger Kinds”; Travels II.6, 139. The King partly responds after he learns about gunpowder, and the ways in which modern weapons can maim and destroy the human body: “He was amazed at how so impotent and groveling an Insect as I … could entertain such inhuman Ideas”; II. 7, 148, cf. II.3, 115. The Master Houyhnhnm later says that it is “no Shame to learn Wisdom from [small] Brutes, as Industry is taught by the Ant, and Building by the Swallow”; IV.9, 307.
- 40.
Thucydides (I.10) makes no direct mention of the Parthenon, built in his lifetime, or other grand buildings on the Acropolis of Athens or elsewhere. He predicts that people in the future will exaggerate the power of Athens, based on her buildings, and will greatly underestimate the power of Sparta, which has so to speak no buildings.
- 41.
Swift seems to have given the English language this phrase “sweetness and light.” Ancient bees apparently make not only honey, but beeswax for making candles and thereby producing light—not the brightest or most impressive light, but light as opposed to darkness nonetheless. Perhaps it is light that does not dazzle or deceive.
- 42.
Damrosch says that Swift came to have his own taste in books, somewhat distinct from the way they were emphasized in his school days: “In later years he showed no interest in theological dogma, regarded abstract philosophizing with contempt, and loved the classics”; 24. “Temple was a voracious reader with a superb library, and Swift took advantage of it”; 80. “In later days Swift was deeply proud of the way he had educated himself,” and would stress that such a process, of deep learning and “stripping” oneself of prejudices, inevitably required a long period of time; 81.
- 43.
Bloom (1990): “Giants and Dwarfs: An Outline of Gulliver’s Travels.”
- 44.
“Harvey Mansfield XIII Transcript.”
- 45.
Nichols.
- 46.
See pp. 1168–9.
- 47.
The full title is close to Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts … by Lemuel Gulliver (Faulkner edition, 1735).
- 48.
“An Old World and a New”; see Tieje.
- 49.
Lucian: A True History or A True Story (second century CE) which could be classed as “fantastic tales” and inspired Rabelais and Cervantes; and Dialogues of the Dead (somewhat like Gulliver’s conversations with the dead in the third voyage, possibly involving time travel). Ovid, Metamorphoses; on Swift and Ovid see Kelly (2008) 441–2 and Fox 32. Other possible sources that have been discussed include what might be called early or proto-science fiction, including Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1620–1630) and Godwin’s The Man in the Moon (1620s); imaginative works about time travel and the dead including Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; Thomas Brown’s translation of G.B. Gelli, Circe; Perrot D’Ablancourt, translation of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead that included some additions by D’Ablancourt himself; works of La Rochefoucauld and Philastratus.
- 50.
Holdridge cites Derek Mahon and says “like Aristophanes, Swift parodies the abuses of rationalism, yet remains aware … that any lapse from a briskly rational standard … and Pandora’s box might turn into a temple of winds.” Nordell has linked the Travels to Aristophanes’ Clouds and various dialogues of Plato. A copy of the plays of Aristophanes in Greek and Latin, inscribed by Swift, sold in 2015 for $20,000 U.S.
- 51.
Cyrano de Bergerac, Histoire des Etats et Empires de la Lune.
- 52.
Tieje:
[Swift’s] practice rendered great service to the satirical type of the voyage imaginaire; for whereas in Hall the attack was of a general nature and in Cyrano de Bergerac so vague as to lose much of its force, in Swift it is direct and trenchant. The object upon which his wrath falls can never be mistaken. … The effect of this new development upon the imaginary voyage is seen in Swift’s immediate descendants — Desfontaine, Brunt, Holberg, Bethune, and Houmier. (200–1)
- 53.
Letter XXII, Letters Concerning the English Nation, trans. Lockman.
- 54.
Scott, “Notes and a Life of the Author,” 487.
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Robertson, L.W. (2022). Introduction. In: Political Philosophy in Gulliver’s Travels. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98853-1_1
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