On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T. Asma (review)

No less an authority than Aristotle urged that before embarking on any serious study, it would behoove one to have a definition of the topic at hand. The Stagirite's advice (as per usual) is sound, commonsensical even. Following that advice, rather, is anything but simple. For Aristotle, a good definition lies not in the mere disclosure of a word's "meaning"—what philosophers call its nominal definition—but in the discovery of the very "essence" (that is, "the what it is to be") of the thing the word signifies—known, by contrast, as its real definition. The quest for essences is alive and well within certain branches of scientific inquiry—focused, for instance, on unraveling the fundamental natures of matter, time, and space—and it thus makes sense as an operative principle within the contrived setting that the laboratory (uniquely) provides. It ultimately fails, however, as a reliable guide to lived human realities, shaped as they are by the contingencies of person, place, and taste. Many, if not most, objects of inquiry offer multiple interpretations and yield best to indirect investigation, something Aristotle's teacher Plato well recognized in his (early) dialogic approach to topics such as friendship, courage, and justice.¹

A like admission is offered by Stephen T. Asma regarding the titular subject of his On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. To the impatient or undiscerning, this admission comes late; only in the epilogue does the author state, "One will search in vain through this book to find a single compelling definition of monster" (281-82). To the more perspicacious reader, the reason for its delay is evident early on: Asma is a pragmatist (though he doesn't self-identify as such and may well reject the label). As a contemporary philosopher (Asma is Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Scholar at Columbia College Chicago), he takes quite seriously the postmodern challenge leveled against essences and absolutes—against the naive portrayal of truth as "correspondence" between language and reality (an especially biting problem for the historian!)—but refuses to be intellectually crippled by it. Like the classical American pragmatists and Wittgenstein before him, Asma finds in the postmodern challenge an invitation. Free from the scholastic strictures that would accompany the search after monster's transhistorical essence—its real meaning—he is able to explore a rich plurality of its nominal uses throughout history, as well as theorize on its conceptual and cultural origins.

Like many of the objects it considers, On Monsters is a hybrid specimen. Part description-part speculation, the work fuses traditional historical methods—primarily focused on objectively retelling who, what, where, and when, with modern narrative approaches—more concerned with imaginatively reconstructing how and why. The resulting synthesis is intriguing and partly what makes this history "unnatural" (as its title openly admits), if not unwieldy. In three-hundred-plus pages, the author investigates monsters ancient (griffins, hermaphrodites, hydras, centaurs, cyclopes), medieval (demons, dragons, ghosts, golems, witches), and modern (conjoined twins, microcephalics, craniofacial anomalies, psychopaths, terrorists), addressing complicated matters of scientific (evolutionary theory, comparative anatomy, physiology, psychotherapy, cognitive neuroscience), philosophic (Cartesianism, embodiment, existentialism, posthumanism, vitalism), and religious (creationism, fundamentalism, natural theology, theodicy, bioethics) import throughout. The uninformed or weak-stomached thus have their work cut out for them. Yet Asma, having prior proved his mettle as a guide to topics complex and disturbing (see his 2003 Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums, also published by Oxford University Press), does a fine job of presenting monster's long and colorful history in a sometimes provocative, at most times coherent, and at all times highly readable fashion.

The introduction opens with a series of personal anecdotes, interesting and instructive, that draw immediate attention to monster's widespread use as a term of abuse—something most readers will have an intuitive (if not intimate) familiarity with on some level. Given its seemingly universal...