The philosophical beast: On boccaccio’s tale of cimone

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2014

Abstract

Beast.“l Although the son of a noble aristocrat, Cimone is born and remains an animalistic idiot-until the day that he chances to catch sight of a most beautiful woman, whereupon he is almost instantly transformed into a brilliant philosopher and man of letters, a godlike sage. The first half of the tale recounts Cimone’s sudden rise from the depths of bestiality to the heights of human perfection. He has become a metaphysician, one who “deems divine things more worthy of reverence than worldly ones.�?2 Now, if the tale ended there, it would be a rather unexceptional Platonizing insistence that love, triggered by the sight of physical beauty, can ennoble the human soul, can deliver the lover from animality to divinity, can end up as theoria, as the rational This notion that the philosopher cannot escape animality was greatly pleasing to certain medieval audiences, if we can judge by the tremendous popularity of a legendary episode in the life of Aristotle, a thinker whose authoritative status in the later Middle Ages was such that he was often simply called The Philosopher. According to the thirteenth-century Old French Lai d’Aristote, for example, Aristotle, after having exhorted his pupil Alexander the Great not to waste his time loving a certain beautiful young woman, is himself seduced by and enamored with this very same woman. In the end Aristotle is forced to “become beast,�? as the woman makes him perform a curious sort of foreplay, makes him prance around on all fours, horselike, while she is mounted in a saddle on his back. Aristotle is turned into a horse, a traditional symbol (since at least the time that Plato wrote in the Phaedrus of “the wanton horse of the lover’s soul�?) for that part of us that turns against our higher otherworldly metaphysical salvation in favor of this worldly satisfaction. 5 son’s persistent animality is not an aberration, that insofar as he is both philosopher and beast he is more like his father than unlike him, that the philosopher is always in some sense an animaL And this shall be the question that guides us for the rest of this essay: in what sense is the philosopher an animal?.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History

First Page

23

Last Page

41

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