Philanthro
Man in humanism and enlightenment.
Cassirer, Burckhardt and Ruehl are the mandatory readings of this chapter.
Pico della Mirandola.
An Italian nobleman born in Modena in 1463-1494. He was trained as a clerk and studied philosophy and then dedicated himself fully to philosophy without ever becoming a priest. He was poisoned probably by some opponents of the Medici family with whom he was close. He went to Paris to study at the university there – the Mecca of high scholasticism at that time. Scholasticism was not a dusty age-old philosophical discipline like we imagine it today. Scholasticism in the time of the scholastics was a kind of renaissance thinking. It is considered as the cultural and intellectual motor that made the renaissance possible. It was the earliest rebirth of the civilisation of western countries. This was the initial rediscovery of the Greek text and their interpretation into the Bible. Making Aristotle useful in the interpretation of religious texts. Mirandola took a lot of inspiration from scholastics, and was also a convinced platonist. He implemented Greek thought in his interpretation of the human being. After coming back from France, he wrote 900 theses, and then went to Rome to defend these. These were about the correct interpretation of holy text. He was also impressed by Jewish Kabbalah, which he implemented in Christian thought.
He is the entrypoint of a christian interpretation of Kabbalah. He is kind of all over the place in the currents that existed at that time. He publishes his 900 theses which he wanted to defend publicly.
The journey was very difficult (stealing women or something), and then eventually came to Rome at which point the pope banned his 900 theses because they were wrong. The pope afterwards, Alexander IV, reestablished Pico’s text and lifted the ban on them, because he was a friend of the Medici family, who Pico was friends with.
The Medici guy, the ruler of Florence, died, and with him died also the main supporters of him, and this is probably why Pico was also poisoned. The preceding pope, Innocentius VIII, made Pico reject all his theses cause he didn’t wanna get burned.
What we are reading is Pico’s oratio on the dignity of man which is the introduction to his 900 theses, De Hominis Dignitate. This name was actually invented by his nephew which was published after he died.
There is a fundamentally new interpretation of the human, which is very characteristic of the renaissance.
The book starts with some common themes in ancient thought and literature. There is a praise of man as an inventor of the arts and crafts, the protagoras myth, man as being distinguished by speech and intellect, how man is closer to God and other creatures – and furthermore man’s special place in the cosmos – which was already discovered in scholasticism through the nearness of man to God, as Jesus was once a man. So we are all copies of Jesus in a sense. So we are all much closer to God than a mouse. We stand in the center of God’s creation. Someone of us got sacrificed for the sins of the world. This is a common theme in medieval humanism already. There is also a humanistic inspiration in scholasticism.
The very new theme that Pico actually comes up with is Man’s liberty and freedom. Man is not determined by nature but only by freedom of choice. Man determines himself, and is not restrained by any natural boundary except for the boundaries he lays upon himself. God created man, but in a very peculiar way: as a being of pure potentiality. Nothing is pre-ordained or pre-determined in the nature of man. God took man as a creature of indeterminate nature.
”The nature of all other being is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, ocnstrained by no limits, in accordiance with thine own free will, shal ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We ahve made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.
Cassirer in interpreting this text says that Pico reframes the problem of human libery by inversing the relationship between being and acting in scholasticism. Operating and activity follows being. You cannot talk of an activity if it is not the act of something that is. There needs to be an entity for there to be any action. The act cannot hang in the air, it must be attached as a property of a being that is.
Pico says that this is possible because man is nothing but pure self-determination.
Sartre thinks that the essence of man is to be nothing, because every essence is the outcome of an act, but the act comes first and thereby gives a nature to the actor. But the actor does not exist without the act. ’ In the beginning was the act ’ ; Goethe. This is like Fichte as well, in the beginning was the Tathandlung, the action of the act. A lot of German Enlightenment takes this piece out of Pico and interprets it further.
It is not that being prescribes once and for all the lasting direction which the mode of action will take. Rather the mode of action determines and places being. Gives it a certain determination.
Man has a procedural character, it is a process and not a being as such. It is a process and a constant activity. It is first an activity to be human.
”But it is the nature and the peculiarity of the human world that ini it, the opposite is true. It is not being that prescribes once and for all the lasting direction which the mode of action will take; rather, the original direction of action determines and places being. The being of man follows from his doing; and this doing is not only limited to the energy of his will, but rather encompasses the whole of his creative powers. Both the being and the value of man are dependent upon this completion (Vollzug). Therefore they can only be described and defined dynamically, not statically.” - Cassirer.
Renaissance man then has a processual character and only a virtual determination.
The dialogue of Pico is between God and Adam, in paradise. For Pico it is meant as a self-clarification of those who reads the theses. It is meant to talk about the readers.
Man participates in everything without being limited or reduced to it. There is a sea of everything in ourselves. Renaissance humanism is very much focused on the centrality of man in the whole universe, in creation. Not only because Jesus got sacrificed, but because all the other things in God’s creation all point to man. In the renaissance universe it is not that everything unilaterally points to God, but rather, everything points to man, which in turn points to God. Only through us is there any mediation to God that is possible in the world.
”On man when he came into life the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit. If they be vegetative, he will be like a plant. If sensitive, he will become brutish. If rational, he will grow into a heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God.” – Pico.
Cassirer is talking about a proto-copernical revolution in the Renaissance within Pico.
The renaissance is the first tradition of thought that puts man in the center.
We find also in Aquinas medieval humanism in which man is already in the center of God’s creation.
Scholasticism is not the mode of thinking that it was usually painted as by modern philosophy.
Jakob Burckhardt 1818-1897. The civilisation of the renaissance. 1860.
He was a historian of art, and was born in Basel where he would later teach.
He was the one that was arguing that there is a clear cut between the medieval age and the renaissance. Renaissance means rebirth of European culture in the 14th century. It is a rediscovery of ancient texts and Euclidean geometry and the implementation of geometrical laws into the understanding of perception and vision. This is where 3dimensional perspectival paintings emerge.
But it is also the moment of high-technological inventions. Many famous inventors and artists emerge.
Burckhardt shows that besides all these technological revolutions, there is also a revolution in the conception of the self and the individual; it is in fact the invention of the individual.
He frames the notion of Kulturgeschichte, which is an interpretation of humans though their social, political and cultural milieus and the arts. Their political and cultural visions.
The center of historical movement: the factual nature of man (not political rationality as in Hegel).
The aim and end of history is unknown.
He invents a new way of talking history: people were reading burckhardt like we watch youtube. It is a kind of literary piece in which we can delve imaginarily into the renaissance.
History is not just a history of mere facts. It is not a summation of what has happened. It is a description of characteristic figures, actors and institutions in which the ideas of a certain epoche are expressed. It focuses on actions, institutions and modes of sociality. In these cultural creations he tries to understand the spirit of an epoche. The spirit of an epoche is materialised in the political organisations of a certain society.
Culture is one of the 3 potencies in which human life unfolds. The others are politics and religion. In his book on the renaissance he shows how culture is intertwined with religion and politics. After the renaissance society lost the nature of man.
He visited Italy twice and didn’t speak good italian so not much came of it. However, his books are considered fairly accurate.
The name renaissance was invented by Jules Michelin.
Renaissance for Burckhardt means the emergence of modern man and the discovery of the individual.
The most important discovery, is the uomo universale, the universal man.
”The disocvery of world can only be discovered in its politico-social complexity if you discover man himself. In the middle ages, both sides of human consciousness, that which was turned within, as without, lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual and recognised himself as such.”
All these cities in Italy were independent states with quasi-oligarchic regimes were representants from the different classes of the city decided on its future, in a constant struggle against each other. 500 years long was the war between Pisa and Florence, and today Pisa is the trashhole of Florence, as Florence won. Cities organise themselves in a rational way which lets the state emerge, and with it the individual emerges as a conscious thing which has to implement that order. At the same time, the subject looks into itself and sees its psychic complexity, its will, hungers, lusts etc.
What is amazing in renaissance authors like Hobbes or Machiavelli, there is a theory of the intrapsychic processes of the subject. When Hobbes theorises the state of the republic of Venice, it is the same causal mechanism that guides the events in the state and that guides the natural events.
The invention, or discovery, of the equal importance of what happens inside and outside the subject. And Burckhardt thinks this is the essential discovery of the self as an individual. We will see that the individual is also the discovery to organise society better, to express one’s power even more efficiently.
”But at the close of the thireenth century Italy begant o swarm with individuality; the ban laid upon human personality was dissolved; and a thousand figures meet us each in its own special shape and dress.”
The openness of the future was getting bigger.
The examples of Burckhardt, for the universal man, are merchants, statesmen, artists and intellectuals. What Burckhardt understands as universal, is that someone is multifacetted – is able to understand multiple different things. He has the capacity to think unbridled by tradition, and giving himself the laws of conduct, whilst striving to be powerful. Universal man, is man who takes the space which they thought they would deserve, and imposes their will onto the others. Constantly striving for the highest excellency. These are complete persons, in the sense that they are intellectual, are practical, knows how to discover and are lovers etc. They have strong emotions and live them to the fullest whilst expressing their individuality.
Universality is understood as having an enormous scope and extension of capacities.
We find here something of the ancient platonic idea of paidea – of education. Plato’s idea of man is that they need to be educated to be more fully human. This means striving for excellency – arreté. The perfectness of all the skills. In renaissance we find this thinking of excellency in a very individualistic context: for their own sake. In a milieu of heavy competition in a Hobbesian setting of the war against all.
In Burckhardt’s intepretation Pico’s nondetermined man becomes the agent of a multi-facetted and tyrannic self-creation. It is a tyranny of self-realisation – you have to do it. This is also why some individuals, the tyrants, are the best expression of this universal man. So some of the renaissance leaders who are the most violent, the Gewaldtmenschen, the most individual individuals that exist. The Viscontis and the Medicis. As well the condottieri. An example of Burckhardt is Cesare Borgia. He inspired a lot of people in the wake of Burckhardt. This is why people got crazy about his book. Characters like Borgia are expressed in all their brutality, and their entire willingness to appropriate others for their own well-being. The father of Cesare was the pope, but the pope who reestablished Pico’s writings, Alexander IV. And after having killed his brother, Cesare returned to secular life and became a militray leader. And with his father he tried to conquer all of Italy. The pope and his son attempting to create an entirely new destiny. Borgia was very brutal and a genius military leader and Da Vinci invented war machines for him in attacking Milano. He was the guy who took the occasion to invent his own destiny. He is one of the pure incarnations of the individuals that Burckhardt wants to depict. Condottieri and tyrants are creators of themselves and their states as works of arts. There is a creation of oneself and also a creation of the state. By building themselves and realising all the skills in all domains, they also spread out their personality and establish it firmly in a new state that bears the image of themselves.
According to Burckhardt, modern educated man (Bildungsbürger) of the 19th century is but a shadow of renaissance men, these violent men. So we lost the true individual, and this is specifically why Burckhardt is writing. He wants to tell his fellows that they are worthless and suck.
The potentially was priorly there that we develop ourselves differently from the homogenisation of the masses, and now there is only homogenisation of the masses.
It is meant to be an idealised intepretation of our past in order to understand our origins and the parts of that which we lost.
”Burckhardt tried to imagine the renaissance as the beginning of an alternative modernity, one quite distinct from his own mundane, unheroic modern age, which in his eyes was defined by the crass materialism and timid acquiescence of the middle class as well as the proletariat’s increasingly vociferous demands for political participation and social justice. As a consequence, Burckhardt, in contrast to previous liberal historians of the early modern period, associated the new secular, individualist spirit of the renaissance not so much with mercahnts, scholars or artists but with military leaders and despots like the Sforsa and Visconti, whose complete immoralism both fascinated and distured him.”
Before Burckhardt in Michelet, there was rather a beauty to the renaissance. Love was in the air and were ethical friends and beautiful lovers and invented art and machines. This distorted the vison of the past as an epoche of fundamental piece. This was also how people of the 19th century interpreted ancient greece of nice democrats, art, literature and poetry. Burckhardt tries to show the exact same thing in ancient Greece. His histtory is about capturing the dark side of the past, instead of only filtering out the beautiful positive moments. What transpires is a certain fascianation with evil and brutality.
Burckhardt was a cultural pessimist. Since modernity, everything becomes worse.
”O this cursed universal education! It is it which every few weeks produces a new fashion of enthusiasm on the big bunch, which daily builds up a whole case of conventional views, ie. illusions around us, in which then whole big layers of the society move. There is no longer any question of it still being possible for a person to form himself purely out of his own impulses. The hardship of the tims is too great, people can no longer be left to their own motivations, they need a general stamp so that everyone will fit into the monster that is called modern life.”
Universal education destroys the seed of individuality. What we are, what we become, is the expression of this very ontological energy that we incarnate – as such the will to power. We are only incarnations and expressions of this will.
Burckhardt is not really a nietzschean, but you can quite clearly see these impulses in his writing.
Every cultural revolution triggers the same fears. What is original is always that which preceeds etc.
In the present there is for Burckhardt a failure for general education to reproduce outstanding individuals. People are rather homogenised. And this homogenisation obstructs the inner dynamics of the individual. The reason for the cultural decay is the monster that is called modern life.
The future leads to an epoche of barbarism where no one is cool.
”Now a days so many individual sparks of education flow to everyone, he may be as stipid as he wants, that he considers himself educatied with skin and hair. In the old days, everyone was an idiot on his own and left the owrld in peace.”