The Souls of Animals: John Donne’s Metempsychosis and Early Modern Natural History
The Souls of Animals: John Donne’s Metempsychosis and Early Modern Natural History
复制标题
动物的灵魂：约翰·多恩的轮回与近代早期自然史
DOI：
10.1007/978-0-230-59302-2_4
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发表时间：
2007
影响因子：
0.4
通讯作者：
Elizabeth D. Harvey
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Elizabeth D. Harvey
约翰·多恩的《轮回》是一首充满了H. W.詹森称之为“一个真正令人敬畏的圣经和动物学知识的数量，”2记载了灵魂通过一系列连续的植物，动物和人类宿主的轮回。3在他与毕达哥拉斯轮回的接触中，多恩诗意地参与了当代道德和自然哲学家关注的哲学辩论，这首奇怪的诗在胚胎中表达了许多更大的关注：索马和心灵之间的联系是什么性质的？灵魂穿越，会记得前世吗？理性的灵魂是人类独有的吗？植物和敏感的灵魂是否以改变人类与环境联系的方式将人类与植物和动物结合起来？这些问题，以及轮回的伦理和哲学含义，质问人文主义的基本信仰。在皮科德拉·米兰多拉认为理性从根本上将人与动物区分开来的地方，多恩用灵魂的三重性和毕达哥拉斯的灵魂轮回的思想来考察人文主义的黑暗面：如果植物和动物的灵魂最终没有被归入理性的灵魂，而是与它共存，那么上帝赋予人类的对所有生物的主权就受到了质疑。
John Donne’s Metempsychosis,1 a poem enriched with what H.W. Janson calls “a truly awesome amount of biblical and zoological lore,”2 chronicles the transmigrations of a soul through a successive series of vegetable, animal, and human hosts.3 In his engagement with Pythagorean metempsychosis, Donne participates poetically in philosophical debates that preoccupied contemporary moral and natural philosophers, and this strange poem articulates in embryo, as it were, many of these larger concerns: what was the nature of the linkage between soma and psyche? If a soul transmigrated, did it remember its past lives? Was the rational soul unique to human beings? Did the vegetative and sensitive soul join human beings to plant and animal life in ways that changed their connection to the environment? These questions, and the ethical and philosophical implications of metempsychosis, interrogate the fundamental beliefs of humanism. Where Pico della Miran-dola argued that reason radically distinguished men from animals,4Donne used the ideas of the tripartite soul and Pythagorean transmigration of souls to examine humanism’s darker side: if the vegetable and animal souls are not finally subsumed into the rational soul, but rather coexist with it, then the sovereignty over all living things that God supposedly conferred upon human beings is called into question.