Gulliver the Houyahoo: Swift, Locke, and the Ethics of Excessive Individualism

“Wherein then, would I gladly know, consists the precise and unmovable Boundaries of that Species?” — Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

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In 1603, a 12 year-old shepherd named Jean Grenier was tried in Bordeaux for cannibalism. The boy claimed that the “Lord of the Forest” gave him a magic ointment that turned him into a wolf when the moon was full. He freely admitted to eating several other children. The final verdict was controversial: against the protests of many clergymen and superstitious citizens, the judge saved the boy from being burned at the stake and found him innocent by reason of insanity.

As with so many other legal decisions, then as now, the verdict depends upon the context in which the question is placed. Do we judge from the perspective of the victims, the accused boy, the wolf, or even the “Lord of the Forest”? Do we accept the identity of the boy from his own perspective, or from our own? Social legislation and religious doctrine apply to humans, and natural laws apply to animals, but what are the binding laws for hybrids between the two?

These moral questions often seemed familiar before the eighteenth century, and they may well become familiar again in the twenty-first century as we enter a new era of genetic engineering. But during the eighteenth century, I argue, questions much like these were posed by Jonathan Swift in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels. They were also posed, in a somewhat different guise, in the philosophical writings of John Locke. W.B. Carnochan goes so far as to argue that all of Gulliver’s Travels is Swift’s own version of an essay on human understanding. Gulliver’s Travels as a whole is certainly about “understanding,” but Book IV in particular most emphatically questions our perspectives on the “human.” By reading Book IV through Locke’s ideas, all of which were familiar and still provocative in Swift’s time, we can begin to see the outlines of an ethics of hybridity.

When Gulliver visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, he is the only representative of his species. No one there has ever seen or heard of a human being before. The reader is faced with a choice of three perspectives, all of which re-contextualize the criteria for moral judgment. Gulliver and his fellow human readers see the Yahoos as reason debased, a step down from our current species. But the Houyhnhnms see Gulliver as barbarity tamed, a step up from a subservient species. From both the Yahoo and Houyhnhnm perspectives, Gulliver is a hybrid, stuck between two different species representing two different physical and mental states. From our human perspective, Gulliver is not a hybrid at all, but a representative human being stranded in a land of grotesque and comic caricatures. When we are dealing with animals and hybrids, multiple perspectives assume multiple bases of reason. In an early eighteenth-century context, before Rousseau, Burke, or the sentimental interest in the “noble savage,” the intersection of the animal and the human is the intersection of unstructured nature with classical reason: the morally neutral is made to confront the morally culpable. As such, Swift satirizes the potential and responsibility of human reason to “conquer” nature. For example, Claude Rawson finds the sharpest critique of human reason to be the Houyhnhnms’ debate over the extermination of “our representatives,” the Yahoos. One could argue that the introduction of genocide shifts the ethical argument onto religious grounds. It may perhaps seem unusual to invoke Locke at this point, since Locke’s religious views are usually seen as unconnected to his political views, and his ethics are largely undeveloped in either category. When it comes to questions of species identification and the basis for human reason, however, Locke’s position is that our ability to work with abstract concepts makes us fully human (since even beasts can reason to a limited extent). Locke claims that if we can conceive of God, then we have the moral responsibility to answer to God’s law. Since this ability to be aware of God’s commandments makes us equal, it is only ethical to treat one another with justice and tolerance. Reason and faith are therefore united in the service of ethics when defining the borders of our common humanity.

Hybrid creatures such as the Houyhnhnms therefore test the limits of Locke’s theory. They have an abundance of what Locke would recognize as reason and the ability to work with abstract ideas, but they are entirely lacking in their ability to recognize a divinity. They need no religious law because they apparently do not sin: “As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by Nature with a general Disposition to all Virtues, and have no Conceptions or Ideas of what is evil in a rational Creature; so their grand Maxim is, to cultivate Reason, and to be wholly governed by it” (242). This leaves them somewhat more than animal, but somewhat less than Locke’s sense of the human. This disjunction is also the source of their ability to consider the exchange of offspring, the abandonment of the elderly, the banishment of Gulliver, and ultimately what we may see as the genocide of the Yahoos, with hardly a trace of compassion. As Jeremy Waldron extrapolates from Locke, this accounts for why humans can exterminate animals without the same moral consequences as exterminating other humans. People can make moral decisions to act one way or another, and this makes “a huge difference to how such a being may be treated in comparison to animals whose capacities are such that this whole business of knowing God and figuring out his commandments is simply out of the question.” Within Locke’s framework, which we can assume would be shared by many of Swift’s readers, the Houyhnhnms are therefore more culpable for banishing Gulliver, who shares a modicum of their exalted reason, than they are for being willing to castrate or massacre the Yahoos.

Swift is therefore using issues of hybridity to structure an elaborate metaphor in answer to a quintessentially eighteenth-century question, and one particularly well-suited for the early novel: How are ethics implicated in the nature of individuality? His answer is not the expected one that moral failures are the result of spineless conformity and a lack of strong individual conviction; rather, Swift shows that moral failures can be the result of an excess of individualism. As we have seen, moral codes are set by the parameters of the species. But what if a creature is a hybrid with no samples of the two host species from which to make the relative comparison or compromise? A Yahoo seems to us to be part human and part orangutan, but there are no humans or orangutans on the island. The Houyhnhnms seem to us to be part human and part horse, but there are no humans on the island, and the closest thing they have to a beast of burden is the Yahoos, which turns the mirror back onto us. Gulliver is the sole representative of his species on the island, seen by us as wholly human, but seen by the hybrids around him as mutant and suspect. Since readers see animals as morally neutral and humans as morally responsible, then Swift challenges us to consider the status of a human ethics in a mirror-image place where animals are morally charged and humans are reduced to a single example.

Gulliver’s situation serves as a test case for aspects of Locke’s philosophy that intersect and overlap with Swift’s own recurring themes: madness, identity, and relative morality. Locke held that identity is seated in consciousness, accounting for how a person can be the “same” even as the physical body changes over the years. It became a common objection to Locke’s scheme that a hypothetical madman who sincerely believed himself to be another person genuinely would be. Swift saw deeper. “The question whether identity is confined to a charmed circle of consciousness is related to the larger question of whether or not there are absolute criteria of truth,” writes Michael DePorte. “In Locke’s example of the lunatic who believes himself a king and acts accordingly, the unstated premise is that his delusions will be apparent to everyone save himself and that the awareness others have of his lunacy will severely curtail the scope of his actions. Delusion, in this view, is deplorable, but essentially harmless. For Swift, on the other hand, deception of self is only the first step toward deceiving others.” Note that the only thing that makes delusion “harmless” is the presence of others who form a baseline of standard sanity, something like Stanley Fish’s “interpretive community” setting the parameters of acceptable (self)-interpretation. The narrator in “A Digression Concerning Madness” in A Tale of a Tub wonders “Whether Things that have Place in the Imagination may not as properly be said to Exist as those that are seated in the Memory.” But in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift affirms that identity matters more than sanity or insanity (at least until the final paragraphs), thereby exposing the fissures where Locke’s empirical theory of reason and identity begins to come apart. Gulliver’s status as a hybrid among hybrids makes him even more isolated than Robinson Crusoe: Crusoe brings with him and maintains his entire battery of political, social, cultural, and religious assumptions, all of which Gulliver rejects, neglects, or questions because he stands outside a framework of definable species that makes them relevant. All that can remain of Gulliver’s identity is what he believes it to be — ironically the empirical definition of both sanity and madness when taken to extremes (as Swift does).

Gulliver goes through all of Locke’s stages in empirical learning. As he makes his journeys in the first three books, Gulliver learns new languages and ways of associating words with physical objects and simple ideas. By the time he arrives in the Country of the Houyhnhnms, he has moved from sensation to reflection. Swift shows how it is this final stage, reflection, that moves in several competing directions for a hybrid creature in a hybrid culture. On the literal level, the full impact of his outsider status hits Gulliver in the several passages where he sees his reflection in a body of water: “When I happened to behold the Reflection of my own Form in a Lake or Fountain, I turned away my Face in Horror and detestation of my self; and could better endure the Sight of a common Yahoo, than of my own Person” (262). Many critics over the years have interpreted the symbolism of Gulliver’s eyeglasses, including Carnochan, who reads their frequent appearance and importance as suggesting Locke’s emphasis on sensory input as the basis for knowledge. Gulliver initially bases his notion of identity on nothing more than the information from his physical sense of sight — he compares his body to the Yahoos’ and simplistically concludes that he is one. He then easily extrapolates a moral judgment from purely empirical evidence: “When I thought of my Family, my Friends, my Countrymen, of human Race in general, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in Shape and Disposition, perhaps a little more civilized, and qualified with the Gift of Speech; but making no other Use of Reason, than to improve and multiply those Vices, whereof their Brethren in this Country had only the Share that Nature allotted them” (262). It is the connection (or lack thereof) between our sensory impressions of identity and our intuitive understanding of reason that provides the axis upon which much of the satire in Book IV turns, and it is related to Locke’s all-important distinction between the “nominal” and “real” essences of species.

Locke thoroughly examines the subject of species naming and identification in book three, chapter six of the Essay, “Of the Names of Substances.” To oversimplify matters for the moment, the “nominal essence” is the single name we attribute to our collected ideas of something, and the “real essence” is “the constitution of the insensible parts of that Body, on which those Qualities, and all the other Properties . . . depend” (III.vi.2: 439). One of Locke’s early examples is “Man,” and his words form a striking parallel to the epistemological travels Gulliver makes on his way to the Country of the Houyhnhnms:

So that if it be asked, whether it be essential to me, or any other particular corporeal Being to have Reason? I say no; no more than it is essential to this white thing I write on, to have words in it. But if that particular Being, be to be counted of the sort Man, and to have the name Man given it, then Reason is essential to it, Supposing Reason to be a part of the complex Idea the name Man stands for. . . . [W]hatever particular Thing, has not in it those Qualities, which are contained in the abstract Idea, which any general Term stands for, cannot be ranked under that Species, nor be called by that name, since that abstract Idea is the very Essence of that Species. (III.vi.4: 441)

There is a circularity to this argument that synchronizes with Swift’s satiric framework. When it comes to identifying a species or category, our names are based upon our complex ideas, our complex ideas are based upon real essences, and real essences refer back to the names. Gulliver looks at physical appearances and names himself a Yahoo, learns that the essence of a Yahoo is to be a filthy odious brute, and then comes to think of anyone of that rough shape as Yahoovian. Leibniz disagrees with Locke to a degree, arguing that our sense of an essence and our definitions of species are subject to change and correction as we increase our knowledge. But Paul Guyer says that Locke is not basing his theory of species identification just on our available knowledge and observations, but on his “underlying theory of the connection between general names and abstract ideas, which implies that no matter how much objective similarity there is between natural entities and how much we know about them, we must still choose which similarities to make the basis of our system of classification.” It is this question of choice which drives Gulliver’s thinking in Book IV. Excessive individuality is shown to be inimical to accuracy in determining the essence of a species, with deep implications for ethical decisions which are based upon those determinations.

For example, if Gulliver sees himself as a Yahoo, and then later sees his shipmates and family as Yahoos, then why can’t he bring himself to embrace them, even if reluctantly, as companions? Swift may again be parodying Locke’s distinction between sensation and reflection: “These two, I say, viz. External, Material things, as the Objects of SENSATION; and the Operations of our own Minds within, as the Objects of REFLECTION, are, to me, the only Originals, from whence all our Ideas take their beginnings” (II.i.4: 105). It is only the physical sight and smell of his fellow human/Yahoos that repulse Gulliver; by contrast, “I am not in the least provoked at the Sight of a Lawyer, a Pick-pocket, a Colonel, a Fool . . . This is all according to the due Course of Things.” Once Gulliver establishes (what Locke would call) the “essential nature” of the species, the moral judgment easily follow: “But, when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately breaks all the Measures of my Patience; neither shall I be ever able to comprehend how such an Animal and such a Vice could tally together” (280). Swift here identifies the aspect of species identification that Locke omits from his primarily linguistic and epistemological method. It is not so much that people can reason that makes them human, it is whether or not they abuse that reason. Then Swift adds his characteristic ironic twist: those who take pride in their abuse of reason are the most essentially human, placing them even below the Yahoos. The Houyhnhnms are Lockean taxonomists, starting with a word and working their way out with abstract associations from there:

The wise and virtuous Houyhnhnms, who abound in all Excellencies that can adorn a rational Creature, have no Name for this Vice [pride] in their Language, which hath no Terms to express any thing that is evil, except those whereby they describe the detestable Qualities of their Yahoos; among which they were not able to distinguish this of Pride, for want of thoroughly understanding Human Nature, as it sheweth it self in other Countries, where that Animal presides. (280)

In passages like these we see the Houyhnhnms defining a species according to the associations they have with it. Associative thinking, the basis for character development in so many eighteenth-century novels, is instead an impediment for Gulliver as he defines himself into obscurity as a confused hybrid. By reversing the conventional associations of reason with higher morality and even humanity itself (as God’s favored creation), Gulliver concludes that to be rational means he must imitate the horses in his stable. Chains of associations are used to surreal effect throughout Gulliver’s Travels, most strikingly in Book IV. One of the ways in which Swift critiques empiricism in general, and associative thinking via the senses in particular, is by basing Gulliver’s misplaced sense of “natural essence” less on abstract reasoning and more on the superficiality of outside appearances. Gulliver compares his body to the Yahoos and selectively isolates those biological similarities that reinforce his abstract notions of character similarities. Whereas Locke has our abstract ideas building upon our observations, Gulliver works in the opposite direction. Gulliver’s emphasis on the physical appearance of the Yahoos therefore corresponds to Locke’s nominal, rather than natural, essence of the species: without a clear sense of which species the hybrid most clearly belongs to, physical appearance illogically becomes the default indicator of natural essence. When their content cannot be read, books are judged solely by their covers. (This remains historically true, unfortunately, in stereotyping individuals with birth defects that give their bearers perceived resemblances to animals.) This is where linguistics, ethics, and epistemology intersect: the Houyhnhnms misread Gulliver and banish him based upon his appearance rather than his nature, and Gulliver likewise misreads Captain Mendez and his family after leaving the island.

A related test case for issues of personal identity, real essence, and the hybridized physical body is in the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, co-written by Swift and Alexander Pope. One of the longer episodes in the text is the story of a pair of twins, Lindamira and Indamora, joined at the buttocks and sharing one set of sexual organs. Martinus has a legal dispute with the Black Prince for her/their hand(s) in marriage. They are not “hybrids” per se, but they pose similar kinds of identity conundrums. The situation is based upon the seven-year-old conjoined twins, Helena and Judith, who were exhibited in London in 1708. Apart from the expected sensation they caused in a period fascinated with anything exotic or novel, Helena and Judith occasioned a series of lurid philosophic dialogues about what Locke might call the “real essence” of the twins. “For nearly a month, The British Apollo had to respond to a flow of inquiries from their readers,” writes Dennis Todd. “Did the twins have one or two souls? If one were guilty of a capital crime, how would she be punished? If someone were to marry one of the twins, would he be committing incest?” Swift and Pope satirize the “mechanistic materialism” of the metaphysicians who claimed that the soul takes its place somewhere in the physical body. (Swift takes a similar line of satire in A Tale of a Tub’s “Digression Concerning Madness,” where the physicality of vapor, semen, spirits, etc. drives abstract ideas and intuitions in the mind.) Todd argues that the twins represent the “totality of human drives, appetites, and instincts — which is not singular or unified, but which is heterogeneous. . . . Such a single yet heterogeneous self can be pictured only by paradox or by statements subjected to continual redactions . . . such as Swift’s unstable triangulation of the human self using the unfixable points of Gulliver, the Yahoos, and the Houyhnhnms.” Todd’s metaphor of triangulating with unfixable points is problematic, however. Rather than unfixable points of three distinct species to sketch a single human consciousness, it is closer to Swift’s project in book four to see each species as a heterogeneous hybrid (or, if you will, the centers of other interlocking triangles): the Yahoos are part orangutan and part man, the Houyhnhnms are part horse and part man, and Gulliver is biologically human and culturally part Yahoo and part Houyhnhnm (yet paradoxically no part orangutan or horse). The three species form not so much a triangle with unfixable points as a Mobius strip, folding back onto itself in a paradox that deconstructs Locke’s easy bifurcations of “nominal” and “real” essences. If the “single” self refers to the physical body and the “heterogeneous” self refers to the mind, the formulation works better with Gulliver’s adventures in Books I through III. By the end of Book IV, however, it is Gulliver’s hybridized body that is heterogeneous and his closed mind that is single.

This singleness of mind is constructed, Locke famously claims, from the free association of ideas that makes each person’s perceptions of the world unique. Using the simple example of how two different people might perceive the colors of blue and yellow, Locke writes, “the same Object should produce in several Men’s Minds different Ideas at the same time”:

For all Things, that had the Texture of a Violet, producing constantly the Idea, which he called Blue, and those which had the Texture of a Marigold, producing constantly the Idea, which he as constantly called Yellow, whatever those Appearances were in his Mind; he would be able as regularly to distinguish Things for his Use by those Appearances, and understand, and signify those distinctions, marked by the Names Blue and Yellow, as if the Appearances, or Ideas in his Mind, received from those two Flowers, were exactly the same, with the Ideas in other Men’s Minds. (II.xxxii.15: 389)

In other words, so long as we have a sense of where the poles are, we can distinguish the gradations of the things that fall in between them. If we understand blue and yellow, however we understand it, then we can also understand the hybridity of green. Something similar occurs when we assemble an image of a hybrid between two different species of animals. Locke writes that we observe particulars, the “manifest qualities,” and filter out the variables to guide our expectations of unseen individual examples we may encounter in the future (III.iii.9:412). Similarly, Gulliver is a man free of the contexts that allow the reader to leave out and/or retain aspects of the species which frame our expectations of him. There are multiple layers of interpretation and variation at work here, and Swift takes advantage of all of them to clear a space for his satire on both the species as a whole and the reader as an individual.

Each of us has our perception of reality from which we each construct our complex ideas, and from those we assign mutable words to our definition of species. Definitions of species are therefore basically matters of social agreement between observers, not conclusions based on intrinsic qualities that exist in nature independent of our observations. Again, Locke’s recurring example is the difference between a human and a horse: “For when we say, this is a Man, that a Horse; this Justice, that Cruelty; this a Watch, that a Jack; what do we else but rank Things under different specifick Names, as agreeing to those abstract Ideas, of which we have made those Names the signs?” (III.iii.13: 415). Hence monsters and hybrids between species disprove the idea that natural essences inhere within species, independent of our observation and subsequent complex ideas. Locke reduces hybridity into a kind of eccentricity — a creature who has the name of one species but does not match all of the associations that name implies. This is precisely the ethical problem that the Houyhnhnms have when banishing Gulliver as a potentially rebellious Yahoo (despite the observable fact that he has no rebellious tendencies) and that Gulliver has when refusing to keep company with his family (despite the observable fact that they have none of the significant behavioral qualities of the Yahoos). Gulliver, the adept student of languages and minute observable details throughout his voyages, fails in his final test when faced with the shock of rejection stemming from being the subject of misinterpretation himself.

Both Locke and Swift are concerned with issues of madness and delusion. For both writers, these mental states are the result of an asymmetry between reality, the perception of reality, and the language we assign to those perceptions. Hybridity, for both authors, is a test case in all three conditions. “Who knows not what odd Notions many Men’s Heads are fill’d with,” writes Locke. If we believe our fantasies about hybrids such as harpies and centaurs, then they will have “as true propositions made about them. . . . For in both the Propositions, the Words are put together according to the agreement of the Ideas in our Minds: And the agreement of the Idea of Animal with that of Centaur, is as clear and visible to the Mind, as the agreement of the Idea of Animal, with that of Man; and so these two Propositions are equally true, equally certain.” (IV.v.7: 577). Locke makes the distinction that the Houyhnhnms do not, since they have no concept of lying or falsehood and can only refer to such ideas as saying “the Thing which was not.” (243). The Houyhnhnms have an advanced ability to reason, but they miss the distinction Locke makes between “verbal truth” and “real truth” — “that being only verbal Truth, wherein Terms are joined according to the agreement or disagreement of the Ideas they stand for, without regarding whether our Ideas are such, as really have, or are capable of having an Existence in Nature. But then it is they contain real Truth, when these signs are joined, as our Ideas agree” (IV.v.8: 578). In short, you cannot wholly verify your sense of truth unless you have a conception of falsehood and the language with which to express it.

Monsters and hybrids provide examples that require an ability to adjust existing labels to new realities. They are the challenge that “real truth” poses to “verbal truth.” Since Locke concedes that both reality and fantasy can be equally “true” in the individual mind, it comes down to a simple matter of linguistic sophistication. When Gulliver adopts the Houyhnhnms’ policy of referring to himself as a Yahoo, he splices together the “verbal truth” and the “real truth” regardless of whether or not he shares the essence of the Yahoos that Locke claims should support such conflations. Insofar as Christian ethics are authorized by humankind supposedly sharing the “essence” of God, being created in His likeness, Swift uses Gulliver’s marginality as a hybrid to satirize the hypocrisies of Christians who work by doctrine alone, as if following a set of established codes (“verbal truth”) will provide a certain pathway to virtue (“real truth”). Such certainty in the Enlightenment would have incorporated the related idea that in order for our systems of classification to truly designate nature, we must assume that God’s reason would have created an orderly Nature consisting of regulated, established essences (the kind of Platonic “Nature” that Pope finds reflected in Homer, for example, in “An Essay on Criticism”). But Locke and Swift remind us that this condition is not met — Nature throws up “monstrous Productions” that challenge these boundaries, hybrids such as “the mixture of a Bull and a Mare” and the “Issue of a Cat and a Rat . . . wherein Nature appear’d to have followed the Pattern of neither sort alone, but to have jumbled them both together” (III.vi.23: 451). Since there are no established words for these hybrids, no coherent abstract idea for them, then they are without a species and their “real essence” is unknown. Knowing the basis of differences among things in nature is the very essence, in turn, of sound judgment and ethical behavior.

Locke believes that our ability to understand difference is the source of our common unity in reason — it is paradoxically the individuality of our perceptions that forms the basis for our ability to integrate into the wider community. Swift demonstrates, however, that it is possible to have a case of excessive individuality. When each person is left alone to invent an ethical framework — free from the domineering contexts of church, law, and society — the result will supposedly be something like “natural law,” something perhaps a bit closer to the pre-lapsarian Paradise known by the ultimate isolated hybrids, Adam and Eve. But something cannot be free from a context unless the context is already at least implied. Swift plays with these edges of these ideas: Gulliver is without a species, but he is always talking about and thinking about his species — humankind is always the frame for his sense of alienation and hybridization, as of course it inevitably is for the reader.

The “real essence” of Gulliver’s alienation from the world does not start until Book IV. In the first three books, the world seems alien to Gulliver, not the other way around, and the framework for his sensory perceptions (and therefore self-concept) remains intact. The elements of Lilliput are described as small, rather than Gulliver dwelling on how elements of his own person are huge. The same principle applies in Brobdingnag — the reader is never made to feel as if Gulliver’s human scale is no longer the baseline, the normal, and the true. In Book III, mental differences generally displace physical ones, and these are described as eccentricities against the default norm of Gulliver’s Western common sense (as flawed as Swift portrays it `to be). But in Book IV a significant change happens — when Gulliver is the odd man out, when there are no other humanoids around him, Gulliver begins to question his baselines of comparison. Socially (and at times physically) naked, Gulliver loses his “essential properties” when he is the only representative of his (to the Houyhnhnms, mythical) species. Locke feels it is a “trifling” thing to consider man in his minute particulars free of the complex idea that makes him a representative of a larger species (III.vi.43: 465–6). What Locke prioritizes instead is the “essence,” the complex idea that comes both before and after we use the word “human”: “That which is essential [to an individual], belongs to it as a Condition, whereby it is of this or that Sort: But take away the consideration of its being ranked under the name of some abstract Idea, and then there is nothing necessary to it, nothing inseparable from it” (III.vi.6: 442). It is an apt description of Gulliver’s species identification among the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms — nothing is necessary to him, and nothing is inseparable from him. But what Locke writes of taxonomies could also be written of Gulliver’s moral marginalization, both as subject and object of ethical judgments: “That take but away the abstract Ideas, by which we sort individuals, and rank them into common names, and then the thought of anything essential to any of them, instantly vanishes: we have no notion of the one, without the other: which plainly shews their relation” (III.vi.4: 440). The nameless hybrid has no essential ethics.

With no easily deducible ethical framework attached to his kind, the Houyhnhnms are forced to banish Gulliver based not on his inherent goodness or evil (after all, he shows his Houyhnhnm master only docile behavior), but instead on his freedom to go either way. It is not Gulliver’s ethics, but his free will to decide upon his ethics, that makes the Houyhnhnm council ban him as a potential ringleader for the rebellious Yahoos (263). The Houyhnhnms recognize him as a moral free agent, a kind of were-Yahoo capable of changing natures, who (like the creatures on Dr. Moreau’s island) has no enforced loyalty to an established moral code other than his own unknowable genetic predestination. In this sense Gulliver’s predicament seems more in accord with Leibniz’s theory that our understanding of species is always provisional, conjectural, and subject to change as we increase our knowledge. But Guyer argues that Locke is basing his theory of species identification not only on our available knowledge and observations, but also on a wider philosophy of language: “[N]o matter how much objective similarity there is between natural entities and how much we know about them, we must still choose which similarities to make the basis of our system of classification.” Since Gulliver is a mysterious hybrid on the island, the Houyhnhnms use their freedom of choice to select a system of classification that makes Gulliver feared for his freedom of choice.

Free will and the unpredictability of moral choice instantly put us on the familiar but treacherous terrain of religious debate. Like Adam and Eve, Gulliver is a creature of mixed good and evil in a suspended world between Heaven and Hell where God and Satan do not make their home. Swift shows his appeal to the Existentialists, because in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, individuality is neither a blessing nor a curse, but a state of moral culpability. We are shown to be hybrids, but we are not quite sure what we are hybrids of, like the Yahoos in a land where there have never been humans or orangutans. Lest we take comfort in the facile response that we are simply hybrids of our parents, or even hybrids of one another in society, Swift responds with his famously bitter conclusion: the sight of his family “filled me only with Hatred, Disgust, and Contempt; and the more, by reflecting the near Alliance I had to them. . . . And when I began to consider, that by copulating with one of the Yahoo-Species, I had become a Parent of more; it struck me with the utmost Shame, Confusion and Horror” (273). The conclusion of the novel provides the key moment for the reader to reevaluate not only Gulliver’s sanity, but also his reason, religion, and ethics.

When Gulliver rejects his wife sexually, there is perhaps a hint of the episode where he is bathing naked and is attacked by a female Yahoo. Whereas this realization leads him to internalize his disgust for the Yahoos as self-loathing while he is on the island, when he returns to England, that loathing is projected outward onto others while he confidently congratulates himself on his own superior existence. When faced with his own wife, he sees her as the Yahoo, not himself, and he feels the horror of miscegenation, a revulsion at the mixture of races and species. Mrs. Gulliver is white and European, and she still gets rejected, so the satire runs well beyond miscegenation and into misanthropy. The satire in “A Modest Proposal” is similar; the narrator has no claim to civilized ethics the moment he considers the children of Ireland to be a different species, basically cattle.

Gulliver’s rejection of his family upon his return home is ethically wrong, therefore, because there is nothing reasonable about it. There is no social context to support it, it is hypocritical, and it is ultimately self-centered. Gulliver’s crime is one of self-absorption, the trait Robinson Crusoe so studiously avoids. Gulliver’s radical individualism challenges us to consider what the boundaries of a “species” might be. Whereas in the Essay species classifications are a matter of convention, in Two Treatises of Government and elsewhere Locke applies his theology to elevate the status of humanity as a matter of natural law. If the individuality of the unique human soul is what ultimately makes us human, therefore, then Swift shows us the point at which this individuality can paradoxically become the source of moral transgression. Clearly Gulliver has crossed this invisible line (as did, arguably, Adam and Eve). The singularity of Gulliver’s perspective in the final pages reflects back on the singularity of the individual reader, with the end result of causing this entire book about travel to other cultures to be reinterpreted as a study of introspective eccentricity. Gulliver’s body is back home, his heart is with the Houyhnhnms, but his mind seems to settle somewhere back in Laputa.

What Swift shows us in Gulliver’s Travels, as well as in “A Modest Proposal,” is that there is nothing inherently ethical about being human. We have the reasoning potential to discover ethics, of course, but it is far from being a part of our “real essence.” Gulliver’s position as a hybrid among the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms, and later among his family back in England, gives him little or no law to follow: no divine law, civil law, or law of “opinion or reputation,” all of which Locke identifies as the forces which shape our sense of reward and punishment/good and evil. Gulliver’s overly individualized situation is particularly illustrative of Locke’s argument that religion has no essential connection to the “essence” of our species, and hence to our morality. Morality concerns laws and obligation, and these require concepts that can only be understood in terms of a lawmaker. The first lawmaker is God, and He clearly does not reward or punish us equitably in this life, so therefore a second life beyond this one must be inevitable (I.iv.8: 87–8). Morality can only be innate if ideas of God, law, punishment, and mortality are innate, which Locke observes is plainly not the case. God gives us reason to think for ourselves and discover all we need to know, which makes innate ideas unnecessary because these would just make us automatons (I.iv.24: 101–02). Swift is clearly on Locke’s ground here with the exploration of an ethics of individualism and its relationship to species identification via “essences.” Both writers claim that ethics are not innate, no more than the names that are rather arbitrarily assigned to hybrids who are lost between the categories of two or more familiar species.

Once Swift has built upon Locke’s ideas to demonstrate that moral ideas are not innate, the result is a stinging critique of moral absolutism. As loathsome as the Yahoos are, Swift forces us to acknowledge that our capacity to judge them is clouded by our resemblance to them. Our admiration for the Houyhnhnms is likewise clouded, since the degree of our difference from horses is about the same as our degree of similarity to Neanderthals. Once doubt is introduced in any corner, it cuts deep into the foundations. Since Locke bases identity in consciousness, and consciousness is uncertain and variable, then so are the ethics of an individual. The Christian ethic is his only solid ground, but that too seems somehow arbitrary. There is nothing in Locke’s philosophy that proves that God is necessarily benevolent or good; judging solely from the experience of our senses, the evidence is mixed at best. By the end of his travels, Gulliver has unquestionably had an extraordinary collection of experiences, but the sum total adds up to no inherently normative ideas. His strength of will, on which Locke bases our ability to make moral choices, is as great as ever; but this has contributed almost nothing to his pleasures or to an increase in freedom. Gulliver, isolating himself in the barn with his horses, has cut himself off from what Locke claims are the sources of any moral laws: power and sanction. “The empiricist epistemology cuts off any other source of normative force. God’s will then can only be understood as arbitrary,” writes J.B. Schneewind. For the same reasons, so can Gulliver’s. The moral ambiguity that results is sharply summarized by Carnochan: “Swift is concerned not to show that Gulliver is wrong, but, rather, that there is no certainty of his being right.”

Reading Gulliver’s Travels in a world after Freud makes this moral ambiguity even more difficult. The “death of the subject” posited in recent theory can make the idea of personal identity based in the individual consciousness seem like so much road kill. Instead, as Laclau, Mouffe, and others have argued, our ethical decisions are made never in a Narcissicistic vacuum, but always within a social and political context partially formed by our sympathetic bonds with others. The subject is replaced with the subject position; the “subject cannot be a substance of its own (e.g. a self-centered consciousness),” writes Laclau, marking our distance from Locke’s concept of an individual’s “real essence.” Yet ethical decisions, then and now, must nevertheless originate in the mosaic of a person’s subjectivity. There is an “unbridgeable distance,” writes Laclau, “between my lack of being (which is the source of the decision) and that which provides the being that I need in order to act in a world that has failed to construct me as a ‘Modification’ (modus) of itself.” This need for the “other” for an act of self-completion, the precondition for ethical decision-making, (not unreasonably) assumes a human “other.” Laclau sees all social bonds as arising only after political structuring, but if we substitute Laclau’s word “modification” with the related word “hybridization” and switch from the realm of the human to the realm of the animal, it becomes clear that the process of bonding is much more complex. If we construct our self-consciousness by reaching out to the animal world (surely a potential source for sympathetic bonds as great or greater than the human world), we can expect the hybridized subject positioning to lead to a very different kind of ethical decision-making. From our human perspective, perhaps this would look like insanity. “The madness of decision,” Laclau writes, is a “regulated one.” In Gulliver’s case, and in other situations where the human absorbs the animal as the self-completing “other”, this “regulation” can never be a simple matter of one thing “always already” linearly preceding another: it is a hybrid of a hybrid, the result of a complex and cyclical interaction between human self/human self, human/animal, and animal/animal. A conception of human identity based on a binary opposition to animals begins to look hopelessly simplistic and, in Swift’s satiric vision, naively optimistic.

If both ethics and species identification are seen to be the product of difference between “real” and “nominal” essences, as Locke puts it, then perhaps an ethics of hybridity can be constructed with a philosophy of language and naming. Moral ideas, like detailed biological taxonomies, are complex ideas assembled by us to rank things (II.xxx.4: 373–4). Morality is a matter of either innate ideas or learned behavior shaped by social context, and Swift shows the distinction between the two throughout Book IV by isolating the aspects of the human mind that are clearly innate and define our “real nature” as a species: animalism and aggression (represented by the Yahoos) and reason (represented by the Houyhnhnms). Swift then places Gulliver directly between them as a hybrid, trying to find his way back home, no longer as certain as he used to be where exactly that is anymore.

(Notes and bibliography omitted to discourage plagiarism. See the original in Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics, ed. by Frank Palmeri. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. 67–81.