Philosophic Classics From Plato to Derrida

210 ARISTOTLE

25

30

*Phalaris, tyrant of Acragas in the second quarter of the sixth century B.C., was said to have built a

hollow brazen bull, in which he roasted his victims alive, presumably to eat them afterwards. There were

several other stories current in antiquity about his brutality.

Lapith and Centaur,Metope from Parthenon, 477–438 B.C. According to a Greek myth, the Lapiths invited the

Centaurs to the wedding feast of their king, Peirthon, as a gesture of goodwill. Upon seeing the beauty of the

Lapiety bride, the Centaurs succumbed to their animal instincts of lust and drunkenness and turned the feast into

an abduction attempt and brawl. The Lapith warriors, under the cool wisdom of Apollo, brought a sense of calm

to the chaos. The image is a symbolic lesson in its appeal for human reason and order over the lower animal

instinct of passion and brutishness—a lesson also taught by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics.

(©

near the Black Sea, that they delight in eating raw meat or human flesh, and that some

of them lend each other their children for a feast; or the story told about Phalaris.*

These are characteristics of brutishness. Another set of characteristics (2a) devel-

ops through disease and occasionally through insanity, as, for example, in the case of the

man who offered his mother as a sacrifice to the gods and ate of her, or the case of the

slave who ate the liver of his fellow slave. Other characteristics are the result of disease

or (2b) of habit, e.g., plucking out one’s hair, gnawing one’s fingernails, or even chewing

coal or earth, and also sexual relations between males. These practices are, in some

cases, due to nature, but in other cases they are the result of habit, when, for example,

someone has been sexually abused from childhood.

When nature is responsible, no one would call the persons affected morally weak

any more than one would call women morally weak, because they are passive and not

SEF/Art Resource, NY)