PHILOSPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 2.1
Figures:
- Pico della Mirandola (900 theses)
- Heidegger (and his similarities with Pico)
- the schoalistics (as critiqued by Pico)
- Aristotle (and his layered soul)
- Jacob Burckhardt (anti-humanism, tyrannical universalism)
- Nietzsche (anti-humanism)
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA:
- 900 theses against papal powers (a Ranaissance manifesto)
- wrote on the creation of man through God
- Protagorean influence: man created arts and crafts
- man is different from animals via speech and intellect
- man is closer to God than to animals
- man is special in the cosmos (God incarnated as Christ, and not, lets say, a cow)
- man is not determined by nature, but by freedom of will
- MAN IS A CREATURE OF PURE POTENTIALITY
- man is of an indeterminate nature
- we have not only capacities/possibilities, but the capacity to build new capacities (Heidegger → possibilization)
The scholastics:
- scholastics: no act can follow without a pre-determined scope or schema for it to unfold itself upon [every act follows being]
- this is similar to Aristotle’s soul (it has levels, all possibilites can only unfold through the pre-given levels)
- realization vs potentiality: the example of the sleeping grammarian (when asleep → potentially grammarian; when awake → realized grammarian)
Pico (against the scholastics):
- being follows action
- for Pico man creates himself, and does not follow a pre-determinate schema (since man is indeterminate)
- nothing except self-determination and the capacity to create is predeterminate in man
- this is VERY similar to Existentialism is a Humanism
- the renaissance man: potentiality, activity, creativity
- man is God reincarnate → the capacity to create oneself, like how God created the world
- man is free to rise unfathomably high, or unfathomably low
[The core of Renaissance humanism: everything is reflected in man, so move away from understanding the whole cosmology and understand man instead, through this you’ll understand the whole world]
Thus: man is virtually determined (not actually), man creates himself, cration of oneself comes before Being → the core of post-Kantianism, close to Heidegger
JACOB BURCKHARDT:
- Civilization of the Renaissance
- Kulturgesichichte: understanding people through their way of living (not a history of events)
- the history of culture, essentialy
- not facts, but typical actions, social repetitions, expressions of a given epoch’s Geist
- Culture is one of the domains into which human life unfolds
Burckhardt’s Renaissance Man:
- for him Renaissance is the discovery of world and man
- the discovery of a rich inner world and a rich outer world (subjectivity and objectivity)
- objective developments: socio-political relations, institutional bonds, legislation, economics
- Renaissance Man is that man who has strong bonds to all of these new objective developments
- the gaze turned inwards desires man to develop ALL possibilities available to him
- man and world emerges together as objects of inquiry
- pre-Renaissance people were indeed individuals, but they have no proper individuality, rather they followed social schemas and traditions passed down upon them (like the serf)
- in Italy’s city states individuality blossomed (lack of fully hierarchical governance, open trade)
- THE UNIVERSAL MAN: merchant, statesman, artist, intellectual (practicing all these spheres at once, to different extents)
- this also includes a rebirth of ancient Greek and Roman values (this the ‘Rebirth’ → the rebirth of those values)
- the unviersal man is a complete man: a mix of intellectual and practical talents (multidimensionality of the self)
- its not just about possessing these talents, but pushing them to excellency
- people like Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Alberti → they’re however tyrannic, having an almost Nietzschian strain
- people who simply take what they need and push their selves to their extreme (tyrannical, violent genius)
- universality here means a quantity of capacities, rather than the quality thereof
- universality needs to be achieved → Pico’s idea of capacity creation
Tensions that lead to the Renaissance Man:
- individual aspirations vs collective/state power (the state had problems with this class of universal people)
- individual vs collective interests
- egoism vs communitarianism (new system vs old system)
- the passage through social contradictions makes the individual stronger
- because of this the veil of Maya melted away
Types of universal men:
- many-sided (dabble in many/some spheres)
- all-sided (proper multiplicity of talents)
- true giants [Gewaltmenschen] (the most brutal, all-taking individuals, the most violently individual ones)
Gewaltmenschen:
- tyrants from mighty families
- mercenary leaders (Cesare Borgia, the almost-pope)
[obviously important idea for Nietzsche] - these are men who fufill their own personal journeys like works of art (achieving personal excellence)
- the modern intellectual is but a shadow of the Gewaltmenschen
- the Renaissance is the great origins of something lost in modernity (no tyrannical universalism)
- what is interesting here is that he does not associate the absolute spirit of the Renaissance with artists or merchants, but with MILITARY LEADERS (a kind of glorification of a lost, heroic age)
- Burckhardt: in the Renaissance people did not become more MORAL, but more IMMORAL, more brazen, more violent, untamed, wild
He is against universal education [neo-humanistic] → homogenization, rather than letting people follow their own persuits and developing as individuals
Burckhardt’s critique of modernity:
- homogenization of individuals
- education not producing outstanding individuals
- obscuring the individual
- urbanization, technology, industrialization, public education, republican democracies, social security…
- the individual dies and becomes simply educated bourgeois
His Anti-Modernism:
- against: universal values, democracy in general, liberal humanism
- he defends aristocracy, where only the excellent have power
- thus, he is also ANTI-HUMANIST
- EDUCATION: not for everyone, supposed to be for creating multi-faceted, violent individuals
Nietzsche’s similarities to Burckhardt:
- anti-humanism, belief in modern barbarism, anti-universal education, anti-modernity, anti-industrialization, anti-intellectual bourgeois, etc.
- both: reactionistic, glorifying aristocracy and anti-democracy
- this will tie back into Heidegger
Anti-Humanism (for the two)
- selfishness, brutality, tyrannical universalism, violence which cannot be expressed through the modern ‘humanistic’ framework
- favour of the singular over the universal
- the dark side of man’s glorification