Cruel Delight

"Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman" investigates cruelty and its contribution to concepts of the human in the Enlightenment culture of the eighteenth century. It reveals the way that cruelty moved from being an inherently inhuman act that undermines the humanity of the perpetrator to an eminently human trait stemming from human agency and reason. Mindful of the widespread critique of the Enlightenment and its conception of the human, James A. Steintrager draws from original sources in art, philosophy, and literature to illustrate the shifts and turns taken by the concepts of cruelty and moral monstrosity.His discussion ranges from ethical philosophy, and how it elaborated a notion of moral monstrosity within an ethics of sentimentality, to depictions of cruelty - of children mistreating animals, scientists engaged in vivisections, and the painful procedures of early surgery - in works like William Hogarth's "The Four Stages of Cruelty", to the conflict between human sympathy and human freedom illustrated by the work of the Marquis de Sade. In each instance, the wish to deny cruelty a place within the human is matched by the strength of its continued existence as one of the human passions. "Cruel Delight" shows how the category of the inhuman in sentimental ethics was eventually transformed into a humanity of a higher order and how the ability to choose cruelty and ignore pity became a sign of human freedom.