Animal Characters. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
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element in historical writing could become a major twentieth-century intellectual event.7 Literary “character,” on the other hand, comes to denote invention rather than reportage, fiction rather than fact. Thus both words are subjected to a sort of spurious purification, consistent with their original reference to nonhuman and human subject matter, respectively.
This false purification furthers the efforts of history to distinguish itself as the most scientific of the humanities—efforts that arguably reach their apex late in the 1800s with the alliance of history and economics under the banner of historical materialism. However, from the standpoint of the study of character, this same purification still invests contemporary approaches to Theophrastus, which generally seek to identify his Characters as a study in “moral behavior” (Rusten and Cunningham 13). On this view, Theophrastus's work finds its closest Aristotelian relative in the Nicomachean Ethics, and in this spirit Theophrastus's most recent translators remind us that the title of the Characters is really a misnomer of sorts—that “the Greek word for character is usually ethos” (Rusten and Cunningham 13). All of this is very true but also quite misleading: it implies that Aristotle and Theophrastus distinguish the ethical from the scientific in ways that they do not, and that instead typify more modern forms of disciplinary thinking.
In fact, Aristotle declares early on in the Historia Animalium that this work, too, is much concerned with character. After three opening pages on comparative anatomy, the philosopher proceeds to other points of interest: “Further differences exhibited by animals are those which relate to their manner of life, their activities and their dispositions [kai ta ethae], as well as their parts” (1:6-7; 487a10–12). Aristotle promises to give special attention to each of these categories, and later sections of the Historia repeatedly engage questions of animal character or disposition or temperament:
The characters of the animals [Ta d’ethae ton zoon] are less obvious to us by perception in the case of the less developed and shorter-lived ones, but more obvious in the longer-lived. (3:215; 608a1–3)
The females are softer, more vicious, less simple, more impetuous,…while the males on the contrary are more spirited, wilder, simpler, less cunning. There are traces of these characters [ton ethon] in virtually all animals, but they are all the more evident in those that are more possessed of character [en tois echousi mallon ethos] and especially in man. (3:218-19; 608a34-608b7)
The animals’ characters [ta d’ethae ton zoon], as we have said earlier, differ both in respect of cowardice, mildness, courage, tameness, and also in mind and ignorance. (3:235; 610b20-22)
Just as it comes about for all animals that their activities accord with their occasional bodily states, so again their characters too change [ta ethae metaballousi] according to their activities. (3:397; 631b5-7)
The animals change their forms and character [kai to ethos] not only, in certain cases, according to their ages and the seasons, but also through being castrated. (3:399; 631b19-21)
On the basis of word choice alone we must grant that the Historia Animalium is in some significant degree an ethical treatise, concerned with questions of character, temperament, and/or disposition. In this respect it sets an important precedent for the bestiarists’ quaint concern with similar matters, and the behavior traits on which it focuses very much include the sort that interest Theophrastus in his Characters:
Some [animals] are mischievous and wicked, e.g., the fox; others are spirited and affectionate and fawning, e.g., the dog; some are gentle and easily tamed, e.g., the elephant; others are bashful and cautious, e.g., the goose; some are jealous and ostentatious, like the peacock. (Aristotle, Historia 1:19; 488b20–24)
[Animals] are seen to have a certain natural capability in relation to each of the soul's affections—to intelligence and stupidity, courage and cowardice, to mildness and ferocity, and the other dispositions of this sort. Certain animals at the same time are receptive of some learning and instruction, some from each other, some from humans. (Aristotle, Historia 3:215; 608a14–19)
Aristotle's word for “cowardice” (deilia) in the second of these passages also provides the title for one of Theophrastus's Characters (25); the fawning behavior Aristotle associates with dogs receives treatment in not one but two Theophrastan characters (2 [Flattery], 5 [Obsequiousness]); and Aristotle's word for “wickedness” in the former of these two passages (kakourgia—literally “evildoing,” or “bad behavior”) could arguably serve as an organizing rubric for all of the traits explored in Theophrastus's treatise.
Consistent with De Anima's assignment of an inorganic rational soul to humanity alone, as distinct from the lower creation,8 the Historia Animalium insists on a sharp difference between the mental capacities of human beings and those of other animals: “The only animal which is deliberative is man. Many animals have the power of memory and can be trained; but the only one which can recall past events at will is man” (1:19; 488b24–30). However, this distinction coexists uncomfortably with the notion that human beings and other animals share the same basic components of character—“intelligence and stupidity, courage and cowardice,…mildness and ferocity,” and so forth. It is a nice question, for instance, to what extent intelligence and stupidity may be gauged independently of the deliberative faculty, and thus by the seventeenth century it had become a popular topic of academic debate to argue whether or not dogs can form syllogisms.9 Elsewhere, Aristotle claims, “In general, with regard to their lives, one may observe many imitations of human life in the other animals” (3:251; 612b18–20). Moreover, Aristotle's argument that physical conditions—castration, for instance, or procreation—can affect animal character carries over to human beings as well, suggesting that despite the supposedly inorganic nature of the rational soul, human character too can have a physiological basis. Thus on the predictable issue of gender difference Aristotle remarks that “a wife is more compassionate than a husband and more given to tears, but also more jealous and complaining and more apt to scold and fight” (3:219; 608b9–11). On the subject of human facial features, he maintains, “Persons who have a large forehead are sluggish, those who have a small one are fickle; those who have a broad one are excitable, those who have a bulging one, quick-tempered” (1:39; 491b11–14). The former of these observations points to a causal relationship whereby anatomy influences character, whereas the latter assumes the opposite: that character expresses itself in the lineaments of the body, and especially the face. It is in this latter capacity, of course, that Marlowe's Tamburlaine can refer to the “characters graven in [Theridamas's] brows” (1.2.169), thus exploiting the semantic duality of the Greek charactaer while also reading character anatomically, in a manner we can trace directly to the Historia Animalium.
Thus we can understand the notion of character in Aristotle and Theophrastus as a complex of ethical qualities or predispositions (for example, courage and cowardice, generosity and jealousy, calmness and irascibility), shared by human and nonhuman animals alike to a greater or lesser extent, related to the body in both a causal and an expressive manner, and susceptible to classification just as are the physical qualities that distinguish one class or species of being from another. This sense of character is readily available to European writers of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, many if not most of whom were well trained in the Aristotelian-Theophrastan tradition. Furthermore, this sense of character exists in tension both with Aristotle's insistence on human uniqueness (as registered by the possession of a rational soul) and with later notions of literary character grounded in exercise of the distinctively human rational faculties.
So, is the difference between human and nonhuman animals one of kind or of degree? At heart the two theories of human-animal relation that have contended most fiercely to replace Aristotle's as the dominant model—the Cartesian and the Darwinian—offer different answers to this question, with Descartes insisting on difference in kind and Darwin favoring difference in degree. Aristotle anticipates both positions while trying to have the argument both ways; his “conflicting comments about animals…reflect Aristotle's recognition of a continuum between human beings and animals while seeking to distinguish human beings on the basis of their rational capacities” (Steiner 76). In other words, both Descartes and Darwin