Of Animals and Men: The Tempest

Abstract

In the treatises of moral philosophy of the Renaissance humanist period, there is a paradigm that recurs describing what it is like to be human. The paradigm, it can be argued, is revealing of some aspects of the characters and the fairytale quality of The Tempest. Moral philosophers write about this paradigm in different ways but they refer to it invariably as being made up of three elements, the nature of which supports their common vision of humanity. In a quotation supposedly from Plato, for example, Baldwin describes the human being as constituted of two elements, the soul and the body, and there is nothing remarkable in this statement. But as he develops his argument, he points out that the soul too is constituted of two elements, first a pure spirit that gives it its otherworldly character and next a reason that has characteristics of both the spirit and the body. “Man,” Baldwin writes, “is a creature made by God of two parts, of a soule everlasting, immortall, of substance materiall, wherein is reason, wisedom, and knowledge: and of a body, fraile and corruptible, made of foure elements, whereof cometh life, lust and senses.”¹ We are no longer in a notion of man as spirit and matter but in one that conceives of him as a spirit and a body and a third thing in between them somehow made up of both, known generally as reason. Reason is at once spirit and matter and that part of it conceived of as “matter” is the soul functioning in time. in this paradigm, Baldwin encapsulates the meaning that contemporary moral philosophers attributed to human life as a working vision of their ideals of wisdom, will, and emotion.