Friday, November 18, 2016

"Swift believed that humans have an innate capacity for reason, which they fail to use."

The irrational rationality of Jonathan Swift

Swift believed that humans have an innate capacity for reason, which they fail to use. But did he take the human comedy too seriously?


"Swift as Stubbs presents him was essen­tially double-minded: rigidly authoritarian in his commitment to prevailing institutions, especially the Anglican Church, and at the same time recklessly daring in stripping these institutions of any pretension to seriousness; supposedly a pious believer, yet one who could write that religion taught us how to hate but not how to love; a conservative who valued order over justice, but who put an impassioned condemnation of slavery into the mouth of the narrator in Gulliver’s Travels and defended Ireland, for whose people he had little if any affection, against English power. In his literary life he was a serial hoaxer, and in his most fantastical writings an author who prized truth over imagination; an inveterate joker, affectionately known to his closest female companions as “Presto”, who in later life was never known to laugh." 

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