The Pre-Platonic Philosophers

This chapter examines Empedocles’s idea of monstrosity in the early generation of life, when the earth spontaneously produces all sort of monstrous beings, only some of which will survive and generate viable forms of life. Empedocles intends to establish the norms of life on the process of generation and selection of monstrosities. Nature is not an artist that shapes normal life after many unsuccessful attempts. Empedocles rather sees Nature itself as the successful result of spontaneuous events that create limits and boundaries for viable life. The other major philosopher of the pre-Platonic period is Democritus. I explore his materialism and its relationship with necessity and chance. Atomists have been accused of paradoxically grounding their universe on both necessity and chance. I show that the paradox, however, is only such from the Aristotelian perspective, which aims at establishing teleology as the highest form of causality, in particular in the biological realm. Through the idea of monstrosity, Democritus grounds its atomism on the concept of the spontaneous formation of life. Beyond Empedocles, Democritus flattens even further the material ontology of nature, grounding it on the epigenetical production of normal and mostrous life alike. Through a reading of the agonistic process of life formation, monstrosity becomes the antidote to teleology.

Aristotle

This chapter argues that Aristotle’s enquiry on the nature and meaning of monstrosity is rooted in his positive attitude toward the knowledge of lower nature, which enjoy the same status of the science of higher beings. Heavens and earth are thus connected through the divine principle that is active throughout the whole nature. Gods thus become author of, but also responsible for, what happens in nature, and Aristotle’s argument provides the ground for every future theodicy. Monstrosity plays a major role in this philosophical approach. Aristotle develops the opposition between the normal and the abnormal development, through the concept of accidental necessity, namely the necessity that is at stake in natural processes that not always happen in the same way. Monsters are of pivotal importance in this ontological picture, because of their paradoxical ambiguity. On the one hand, they are the sign and symptom or a resistant nature, which opposes itself to Aristotle’s major ontological invention, namely the form and the final cause. On the other hand, without this hyatus between formal perfection and actual reality, nature would not exist in the way we experience it: there would be no diversity, no better and worse, no normal and monstrous. Monstrosity is necessary for Aristotle to explain nature and its ontological structure based on the substitition of dynamic forms and ends to both the static ideas of Plato and the exclusively material reality of atomists.

Plato

Grounded on the reading of Timeus, book X of The Laws, and book V of The Republic, this chapter analyses the process of invention of idealism, which consists first and foremost in the subordination of the material principle of the atomists to a higher divine principle. Through this process, Plato is able to shape the idea of a hierarchy of perfection in the universe which, as on a scale, relies but also distinguishes superior and inferior things. Monstrosity thus becomes the feature of the lower parts of the universe, the material and necessary parts, recalcitrant to their ordering by the superior and divine ones. This chpapter’s thesis is that, in Plato, the threatening character of monstrosity becomes a dangerous threat for the order and harmony of the universe. Monstrosity is the inferior other of divinity. Plato also reinforces Socrates’s teleology and opposes the realm of ideal truth to that of aimless, rumbling and chaotic causality that monstrously characterises the lower reality.

Stoicism

Stoics contribute to the debate on monstrosity forging original intellectual tools to explain imperfection and evil in the framework of a rational cosmos providentially built and guided by a divine principle. The original position developed by Stoics lies on a nominalism that treats all generalisation and universalisation as illusory abstractions of a weak human imagination. Through nominalism, Stoics obliterate the idea of transcendency and think the multiplicity of the material world, with all its imperfections, through the unfolding of a divine rational principle. Such immanency, however, is different from the absolutely material one of atomists. Stoics order the universe according to degrees of perfection, and instead of ruling out qualitative differences (e.g. between good and evil, normal and abnormal, beauty and ugliness), they reintroduce them in a divine and providential structure, teleologically oriented. Monstrosities are thus explained with original and powerful ideas, such as the panspermia (i.e. the origin of the seed from the whole body, and more broadly from the whole genus), the vital forces informing matter, the semina rerum and, more in general, the uniqueness of every being, which Christian thought eventually transforms in the free creation of wonders by God’s omnipotence.

Introduction

Monsters abounded in the ancient world. They proliferated on and around Phidias’s lost sculpture of Athena Parthenos, one of the most renowned cult images of ancient Greece:1 amazons and giants were depicted on her shield, which hid the snake Erichthonius, centaurs adorned her sandals; Medusa was represented on her peplos, and the Gorgoneion decorated the aegis. Finally, a Sphinx and two winged gryphons stood on her crest. Athena, endowed with skilful wisdom and warrior virtue, subjugated the monsters who had tried to subvert the Olympian order and who are shown here tamed, thus confirming her might. The Greeks praise the gods, celebrating their final victory over chaos and monstrosity....

Epicurus and Lucretius

This chapter focusses on Epicurus’s and Lucretius’s treatment of the generation of life, its constancy and consistency, but also its mutability which, together, constitutes the major challenge for the atomist response to the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. Only by explaining abnormality and monstrosity atomists can make sense of their immanent ontology that, based on matter in motion and nothing more, rules out every transcendent, divine, and providential principle of organisation. Order exists in the universe, and yet it includes monstrosity. This concept, thus, must be explained within the limits that nature has to produce its diversity, and the foedera naturai that guarantee such stability. My thesis is that the foedera, and the limits that nature has, are neither imposed on nature from above, nor established by nature in its realm. They are rather the result of atomic motion. Within a plane of radical immanency, thus, not only the foedera discriminates between the possible and impossible kind of monstrosities produced on earth. Successful monstrosities also contributes to determine what these foedera are. This chapter argues that the Lucretian expression foedera naturae is less of a natural law, and closer to the idea of a conjuction or concourse of favourable events. The consequence is to think the inclusion of monstrosity in nature in a completely different way from what Aristotle had done. Whereas Aristotle speaks about monsters’ accidental necessity, this chapter’s thesis is that Lucretius views them as necessarily contributing the self-shaping of nature’s regularity.

Middle and Neoplatonism

This is the longest chapter of the book, because of the number, nature, and importance of the philosophers that take the side of Plato and develop his teleological idealism in different directions. It also includes several early Christian thinkers – Augustin among them – whose philosophical background and inspiration are largely Platonic. For reasons of consistency, this chapter explores this complex and long-lived philosophical movement through the same categories that have been used in previous chapters, namely the conflict between immanence and transcendence, the questions of nature’s hierarchies, teleology and providence, as well as the origin of evil. However, new elements are introduced because of the puculiar reworking of these ideas within the new and original monotheism of the Judeo-Christian early tradition, as well as their importance for the later medieval and early modern philosophy.

The Myth and the Logos

This chaper explores the question of monstrosity through the conflictual nature of the archaic and ancient mythology. Already in the early cosmogonies, monstrosity fights for alternative orders of being. Against them, normality is established through a long, painful, and challenging process in which, curiously, monstrosity is not only the principal enemy, but also one of the tools that paradoxically helps the mainstream forces to establish themselves. The material analysed in this chapter constitutes the ground to present the passage from myth to logos and to better understand the genealogy of two alternative visions of nature, i.e. materialism and idealism which, long before the great Attic systematisations, divide the field of pre-Platonic philosophy.