On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (52 page)
Read On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears Online
Authors: Stephen T. Asma
30
. Aristotle’s famous dictum “All humans by nature desire to know” still stands as a respectable alternative to the view of Foucault and Said that “all knowledge is power.” Actually it was Francis Bacon who originated the knowledge = power formula, but
the postmodernists expanded the notion to mean that any pursuit of knowledge about “the other” is primarily imperialist in motivation.
CHAPTER31
. Pliny,
Natural History
, book VII.
3
1
. References to Livy are drawn from Naphtali Lewis’s collection of ancient primary sources,
The Interpretation of Dreams and Portents in Antiquity
(Balchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1996).
2
. Currently the term
hermaphrodite
is a somewhat contested label, and advocacy groups together with the medical community seem to prefer the term
intersexual
. Intersexuality describes a person whose sexual genotype (actually chromosomal makeup) or phenotype (genitalia) is neither exclusively male nor female. It is extremely rare to find both testicular and ovarian tissue in one individual; more commonly, a person will have a male chromosomal pattern, XY, but then have hormonal abnormalities in utero (e.g., adrenal gland problems), causing the growth of external female genitalia. Likewise, XX females will get abnormal doses of virilizing hormones in utero and develop a mock penis. There is some debate about the percentage of intersexuals in a given population. Anne Fausto-Sterling has put the figure very high, almost five million in the United States, while Leonard Sax, with the Montgomery Center for Research in Child and Adolescent Development in Maryland, puts the figure around fifty thousand. Sax argues that Fausto-Sterling has inflated the numbers by including groups who are not truly intersexual. A high number would help validate Fausto-Sterling’s belief that gender is a “social construction” rather than a biological fact. See Leonard Sax, “How Common Is Intersex? A Response to Anne Fausto-Sterling,”
Journal of Sex Research
39, no. 3 (2002), and Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,”
The Sciences
33, no. 2 (1993) and
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
(Basic Books, 2000). In
The Ontology of Sex
(Routledge, 2006), Carrie Hull points out that Fausto-Sterling revised her numbers down, from 4 percent of all people to 1.728 percent. When Hull checked the math of the new figure, however, she found significant error; she places the number at a mere 0.373 percent. See
chapter 4
of Hull’s thoughtful study.
3
. Carlin A. Barton,
The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster
(Princeton University Press, 1993),
chapter 4
, “Envy.”
4
. Remember Lucretius’s description of prehistoric monsters, some of whom were her maphrodite: “In those days also the telluric world strove to beget the monsters that upsprung with their astounding visages and limbs—the Man-woman—a thing betwixt the twain” (
On the Nature of Things
,
chapter 5
).
5
. Quoted in John Block Friedman,
The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought
(Harvard University Press, 1981),
chapter 9
.
6
. See Pliny,
Natural History
, book VII.
7
. See Luc Brisson,
Sexual Ambivalence: Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity
, translated by Janet Lloyd (University of California Press, 2002),
chapter 1
, “Monsters.” Also see
chapter 2
of Fausto-Sterling’s
Sexing the Body
.
8
. I have to agree with David D. Leitao, who argues persuasively that the transition from Livy to Pliny was not so simple as a triumph of reason. Interestingly, Leitao seems to suggest that Livy probably exaggerated the drowning of hermaphrodites, but it’s equally possible that Pliny was overly sanguine in his report. See Leitao’s review of Brisson in
Scholia Reviews
, ns 12 (2003).
9
. One wonders if Christianity didn’t have a bigger influence than rationality on the growing dignity of hermaphrodites in the millennium that followed.
10
. The passages from
Plutarch’s Lives: Pericles
are taken from the John Dryden translation.
12
. Plutarch relates the story in his “Dinner of the Seven Wise Men,” in book XIII of
Moralia
.
13
. See Borges’s entry on “The Centaur” in
Book of Imaginary Beings
, translated by Andrew Hurley (Penguin Books, 2006).
14
. Aristotle,
Parts of Animals
, 654.
15
. Aristotle,
Parts of Animals
, book II,
part I
. “The ordered and definite works of nature do not possess their character because they developed in a certain way. Rather they develop in a certain way because they are that kind of thing, for development depends on the essence and occurs for its sake. Essence does not depend on development” (Aristotle,
Generation of Animals
, book V).
16
. Aristotle is “fixist” in the sense that an essential form preexists the element potentials, and subsequently that form is not a mere accumulation of material (in the atomist sense). Act precedes potency in Aristotle, and therefore, though he recognizes that embryogenesis is epigenetic, form and function are not merely “effects” of that process.
17
. Aristotle articulates this “essential form” in the context of his overall causal theory: “There are four causes underlying everything: first, the final cause, that for the sake of which a thing exists; secondly, the formal cause, the definition of its essence (and these two we may regard pretty much as one and the same); thirdly, the material; and fourthly, the moving principle or efficient cause” (
Generation of Animals
, book I).
18
. Legend has it that Empedocles threw himself into an active volcano, Mt. Etna in Sicily, to turn himself into an immortal. See Ava Chitwood, “The Death of Empedocles,”
American Journal of Philology
107, no. 2 (summer 1986).
19
. In his
Physics
Aristotle contemplates the possibility that nature cobbled itself together without any sense of direction, without purpose:
Why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity? What is drawn up must cool, and what has been cooled must become water and descend, the result of this being that the corn grows. Similarly if a man’s crop is spoiled on the threshing-floor, the rain did not fall for the sake of this—in order that the crop might be spoiled—but that result just followed. Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g. that our teeth should come up of necessity—the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding down the food—since they did not arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result; and so with all other parts in which we suppose that there is purpose? Wherever then all the parts came about just what they would have been if they had come to be for an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his “man-faced ox-progeny” did. (
Physics
, book II, part VIII)
21
. Ibid., book II.
23
. This whole theory has appeared sexist to some scholars, and perhaps Aristotle was and should be chastised accordingly. But in fairness to him on this particular point, he claims that some of the developmental errors in reproduction can be ascribed to semen as well as uterine material. In Aristotle’s
Problems
(see volume 2 of Jonathan
Barnes’s
The Complete Works of Aristotle
), he says, “Monstrosities come into being when the semen becomes confused and disturbed either in the emission of the seminal fluid or in the mingling which takes place in the uterus of the female.” Furthermore, it’s not much of an insult to argue that women provide variation unless one is arguing for some strange eugenics position, which Aristotle (unlike Plato) did not, and which seems impossible in principle given his point about the inevitability of variation in the mechanics of reproduction.
24
. Aristotle,
Generation of Animals
, book IV.
25
. Aristotle,
Problems
, 898a.
26
. If malformed creatures are aiming at actualizing their respective essences but missing the mark, so to speak, what about the essences themselves? In other words, individual monsters are “failed” members of actual species, but might there exist monstrous species, monstrous essences? The answer is somewhat nuanced. Technically, there are no monstrous essences or species, because a “monster” for Aristotle is an individual animal that fails to achieve its specific
telos
, or developmental end goal. These end goals are the forms or types, and, unlike individual organisms, they are fixed. But Aristotle does admit the reality of very weird and hard to categorize species, whole taxa that seem to straddle the fence between traditional categories (for example, a “slime mold” that appears
both
animal and plant). These are liminal creatures, on the threshold between categories, but they are not monsters. They are rare and intriguing and form puzzling links in the chain of being (
scala naturae
), but they are not mistakes. Nature poses certain challenges for the taxonomist, but strange and exotic creatures will ultimately find a place in the scheme of nature and on the subtle grid of classification (even if they straddle that grid indefinitely). Monsters and bizarre species do not fall
outside
of nature, but reside inside the complex system.
CHAPTER28
. See Julius Obsequens’s popular
Book of Prodigies
, for example. Nothing is really known about Obsequens, not even his dates. But his book, culled from Livy’s history of Rome, appeared sometime between the second and fourth centuries. Napthali Lewis, in
Dreams and Portents in Antiquity
, says, “The simple fact of his making and publishing this collection speaks volumes about the impact of such material on the popular mind.”
4
1
. See Plato’s love dialogue,
Phaedrus
. It’s very rare for Socrates to leave the urban setting of Athens, and he is unapologetic about his distaste for nature, preferring instead the company of people and philosophical dialogue to trees and rivers. Perhaps it is his amorous attraction to Phaedrus, a constant throughout Plato’s dialogue, that leads Socrates to depart somewhat from his usual haunts.
2
. See
Republic
, book IX.
3
. See
Republic
, Stephanus numbers, 573c and 577d.
4
. If this harmony argument were not enough to rescue justice from the pessimistic treatment, Socrates points out another profound feature of gangster life. Gangsters can never have true friends: when people are ruled by their appetites, they will sell each other out when times get bad.
5
. Ultimately Plato rescues love from the more disparaging characterization and argues famously that eros can be redirected from its selfish nature to a selfless concern for the beloved. But this requires a careful balance, preserving the sexual tension (this intense energy is the engine that brings us to glimpse the Forms) while refraining from the actual sex. See the
Symposium
as well as the
Phaedrus
.
6
. In March 1999 Marilyn Lemak of Naperville, Illinois, killed her children, Thomas, three, Emily, six, and Nicholas, seven, by first drugging their peanut butter with antidepressants and then smothering them. The prosecution successfully argued that Lemak killed her children as a means of punishing her husband because he had started to see another woman. In 1994 a South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, intentionally drowned her two children, Michael, three, and Alex, fourteen months, by driving her car into a lake while her children were in their locked car seats. Apparently Smith was attempting to win the affections of a man who had expressed anxiety about getting involved with a woman who had children. These cases of infanticide are quite different, of course, but share the common theme of mothers whose romantic interests seem to have trumped their maternal ones. For a scholarly treatment of the Medea mythology, see Susan Iles Johnson and James J. Clauss,
Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art
(Princeton, 1996).
