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Animals Are from Venus, Human Beings from Mars: Averroës's Aristotle and the Rationality of Emotion in Guido Cavalcanti's “Donna me prega”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Gregory B. Stone
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Abstract

This essay provides a revisionary interpretation of one of the most important treatments of emotion (and its relation to reason) in the early period of modern European vernacular literature, Guido Cavalcanti's “Donna me prega” (“A Lady Asks Me”). According to the prevailing interpretation, the poem denigrates love as an animal power, a subhuman force that destroys our properly human rationality. Reading the poem's treatment of love in the light of Averroës's views, especially as presented in his Long Commentary on Aristotle's De anima, reveals that Cavalcanti celebrates love as paradigmatic of human reason, part and parcel of one's leading a rational and therefore human life. Love, the operation of a rational power that is mortal (not immortal) and natural (not supernatural), is for human beings the “perfect good,” the full extent of our flourishing and the best for which we can hope.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Emotions , October 2015 , pp. 1269 - 1284
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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