Introduction

Charles T. Wolfe (University of Sydney)

The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth:
now is the time of monsters.

– attributed to Antonio Gramsci.[1]

Why should philosophy be concerned with monsters? If this term referred solely to mythical figures such as griffins, gorgons or chimeras, that is, creatures of our imagination, they would be the object of philosophical inquiries into the faculties of the mind and their productions, and by extension, the demarcation between reason, madness and myth. But if we actually open a work of early modern philosophy[2] – by Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Nicolas Malebranche, John Locke or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, to name a few – without a predetermined sense of what we are looking for (such as the usual, mildly anachronistic topics: the theory of ideas, the status of experiments, or perhaps the defense of a ‘position’ on substance, causality and the like), we will be struck by the presence of a different kind of monster: hairy men, “Changelings,” “Drills,”[3] conjoined twins or even children bearing on their faces the marks of objects their mothers had coveted.

At the heart of early modern metaphysics, as already (but differently) in Aristotle, we find a concern with Nature ‘missing its target’ and producing non-viable forms, a concern in which metaphysical considerations of genus, form and essence, necessity and accident collide with emerging biological science, producing what one might call an ‘ontology of the biological world’. Are these anomalies a threat to order itself? “Where do anomalies end and monstrosities begin?”[4] In order to answer this question, philosophy has to enter into the fray of debates on form, species, and the mechanisms of generation themselves. As Jean Céard pointed out in his study of monsters in the Renaissance,[5] most classic treatises on generation in that period devoted a chapter to monsters.[6] This may be because accidents in the course of generation, such as the development of the embryo, call into question basic intuitions about organic life as a source of order.[7] Indeed, such accidents challenge the idea of Nature as something regular and law-like – as a source of order, a cosmos. As the young Darwin put it, “If all forms freely crossed, nature would be a chaos.”[8] But of course, inasmuch as these anomalies seem to cross species boundaries, from the wolf-man to the monk-calf (Munchkalb), they also threaten our sense of what it is to be human, as appears in this remark by the sixteenth-century traveler and essayist Pierre Boaistuau:

I remember that St. Augustine, in his book The City of God, makes mention of sundry monsters or strange forms, found in deserts or elsewhere, whereupon grew a question, whether they were descended of the first man Adam, or had a reasonable soul or not…[9]

Since our judgment about what constitutes a “strange form” or an extreme case of hairiness or deformity is of course dependent on our perception, there has been a long tradition of approaching the problem of monsters from the viewpoint of ‘philosophical anthropology’, focusing on our perception of normality and abnormality, and usually revealing that it is constructed (socially, historically, culturally) or structured according to polarities (symbolic, psychoanalytic, etc.). This approach can be said to have its first ‘patient’ in Aristotle, who infamously declared that even a child who does not resemble its parents is already a kind of monster, closely followed by ‘woman’ as ‘the monster of man’.[10] It informs many of the interesting works on monsters that have appeared in recent years.[11] But the approach taken here is neither a study of myth, or of perception, nor even of ‘moral monstrosity’, despite the relevance the latter might have to philosophical inquiry. This will become clearer if I specify how this project came to be. It did not begin with the contemplation of gargoyles on the façade of a cathedral, a painting such as Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” or a disturbing anatomical collection like Peter the Great’s Kunstkammer, his chamber of curiosities in St. Petersburg. Rather, it began with an interest in materialist thought in the French Enlightenment, and the realization that this episode, particularly Diderot’s masterpiece, D’Alembert’s Dream (c. 1769), was permeated with monsters, in its drive to ‘apprehend’ the emerging biological sciences – a drive which had a pronounced polemical and radical dimension.[12]

Rather than just being ‘naturalized’ away, monsters seemed to be stubbornly present in this philosophical episode, whether as transitional figures on the way to a ‘positive science’ of teratology – as in Fontenelle’s comment that monsters, which were hitherto regarded as “games of nature” (lusus naturæ), must now be considered as part and parcel of ‘serious Nature’ with its rules and regularities[13] – or as a more metaphysical challenge of the sort glimpsed by Darwin, and flaunted by Lucretius and his Enlightenment avatar, Diderot:

But since Substance is One, why are Forms so various?[14]

            Most of the essays in this volume focus on the answers that have been given to this question, in different ways, with

— The reaffirmation of norms over and against the apparent multiplicity and anarchic production of forms (Johannes Fritsche on Aristotle, Michael Hagner on nineteenth-century biological science in Germany);

— The recognition that our judgments about normality and order might turn out to be hollow (Tristan Dagron on the Renaissance destruction of the Augustinian worldview, Justin E.H. Smith on early modern species debates, Annie Ibrahim and myself on radical Enlightenment thought);

— The emphasis on the inextricability of anatomical and metaphysical questions
(Annie Bitbol-Hespériès’ discussion of the rich conceptual ‘network ’within which debates on conjoined twins took place at the Académie Royale des Sciences, Roger Ariew on Leibniz’s inclusion of various oddities in his scientific project, Anita Guerrini on scientific analyses of monsters in learned societies in the mid-eighteenth century), or, lastly,

— The concern with our own identity as beings in perpetual conflict with monsters (Morgan Meis on Lucretius, and Elfriede Jelinek on the “Alien” film series and beyond).

In addition, Beate Ochsner provides a more synoptic view, with her reconstruction of the ‘word-history’ of ‘monster’, which is also a conceptual investigation.

            Considering the centrality of some of the figures discussed – Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, Locke, Leibniz and Diderot cannot be dismissed as cataloguers of anatomical wonders, like Gesner, Paré or Liceti – it may not be unreasonable to hope that the pairing of ‘monsters’ and ‘philosophy’ might shed new light on the history of the latter, no longer understood as a solitary, a priori enterprise, but as a more collective, more engagé contribution to the enterprise of deciphering the secrets of Nature.