Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 334 - Chance Encounters - Reviving Hellenistic philosophy.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department of King's College London and the LMU and Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Chance Encounters – Reviving Hellenistic Philosophy. Dip into any introduction to Renaissance philosophy, and you'll quickly find a reference to Poggio Braccioini's rediscovery of On the Nature of Things, an ancient Latin poem by the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius. This podcast series is no exception. I mentioned Poggio and Lucretius back in the first episode on the Italian Renaissance. But what exactly did it mean to rediscover an ancient Latin text? Nowadays, tracking down a book usually involves little more than entering its title into Google. Other internet search engines are available. You'd probably be annoyed even at having to click through to the second page of search results. In the 15th century, the process was a bit more taxing. It was more like today's record collectors who sort through bins of dusty vintage vinyl, or perhaps even gold prospectors in pioneer-era California. Tracking down a lost book required willingness and opportunity to travel long distances. It called for patience and a connoisseur's eye. And these were all assets that belonged to Poggio. The famous discovery happened in 1417 in Germany, probably at a Benedictine abbey in Fulda. Poggio had come so far north because he was in attendance at the Council of Constance in 1415 as secretary to Pope John XXIII. Things didn't go so well for the pope, who was deposed after fleeing the council, but Poggio's book collection fared much better. In addition to finding Lucretius, he had the triumph of tracking down a copy of Quintilian's work on rhetoric at St. Gall. In one of the more than 500 surviving letters written by Poggio, he explains that this priceless text was lying in a jumble of mouldering books in a sort of foul and gloomy dungeon at the bottom of one of the towers. Like the modern-day vinyl enthusiast who is trying to locate the rare first pressing of a 1960s Beatles album in the bargain bin at a record store, the humanists hunted for treasures that most people considered to be old junk. Parchment manuscripts were often scraped clean of their ink, destroying old text just to have new, blank writing material. To make new discoveries of old books, the humanists usually had to leave Italy, since the collections there were pretty well explored. Poggio spent some years in England but reported bitterly that the libraries there were useless, in other words full of medieval works and not ancient ones. But in France and Germany, especially in monasteries and other religious institutions, you could find long unread texts listed in library catalogs or just have a lucky chance encounter looking through discarded manuscripts, as at St. Gall. The humanists would have had no scruples about bringing antiquities home to Italy. Poggio himself talks enthusiastically in another letter about having a marble bus sent from Greece for his house. He quivers with excitement at the prospect of installing the head of Minerva in his library. But, as I can tell you from personal experience, German librarians tend to be strict. So when he found Lucretius, Poggio was not able to abscond with the manuscript. Instead he had his scribe copy it out and sent this transcription to his friend and colleague Niccolò Nicolì, who made a second copy that still survives today. This whole story should remind us of what we learned about Byzantine manuscripts. As in medieval Constantinople, in early 15th century Italy every book was a unique handmade object. The arrival of printing was still decades away, and making a single copy of a sizable work could take many weeks. These scholars would have killed to have access to a Xerox machine. Other office copiers are available. So humanists like Nicolì and Poggio had to be craftsmen as well as intellectuals. These two men were involved in developing a new, clearer style of handwriting based on the miniscule lettering of early medieval manuscripts from the Carolingian period. They worried about pens and ink, about paper and parchment. Indeed, requests for parchment and comments about its quality are a constant refrain in Poggio's correspondence. Because a book was a unique and valuable object, you had to be careful what you did with it. Another running theme in Poggio's letters is the trading of manuscripts between humanists. He wrote to Nicolì asking to borrow a text so he can have his scribe make a copy or do it himself. The book will be sent straight back, promise. And Poggio was a lender as well as a borrower. He complained of books that were not returned, such as that copy of Lucretius which Nicolì held onto for a full 12 years to Poggio's mounting frustration. Your tomb will be finished sooner than your books will be copied, he complained to his friend. So bent were these men on getting books into their libraries that you wonder whether this was an end in itself. Were the humanists like the vinyl collector who doesn't want to play the records she's bought and just puts them on a shelf? No, they did read them as well as collecting them. In her study of annotations found in surviving Renaissance manuscripts and early printings of Lucretius, Ada Palmer has shown that these were working texts. Scholars made lines or dots next to passages that particularly struck them revealing the interest they brought to the text, and added comments in the margins. As Palmer explains, the annotations are most often philological in nature, notes about Latin vocabulary, indications of names of noteworthy ancient people and places, and so on. One scholar, Pomponio Leto, made extensive notes throughout his copy which were so useful that they were taken over in subsequent copies made from his manuscript. While many of these are also of a philological nature, they also reveal something about Leto's reaction to the philosophical content. Next to a passage arguing that the soul is not immortal, he cautioned the reader with an annotation that said Non-Christian Teaching. And here we come to the crux of the matter. That copy of Lucretius unearthed by Poggio was worth its weight in gold, but it was also explosive like dynamite. Thanks to Cicero, the humanists were already well acquainted with Epicurean ethics. We saw last time that Lorenzo Valla found it relatively unproblematic to integrate these doctrines into those of the Christian faith. If a blessed afterlife is the most pleasant of all prospects, then Epicurus's hedonism pointed in the right direction. In the words of our recent interview guest, Jill Cray, this amounted to wrenching an Epicurean doctrine from its pagan context and using it to reinterpret Christian theology, yet the same point was made in a letter written by another humanist, Cosma Raimondi. He admits that the Epicurean obsession with pleasure may seem effeminate, but praises the school for valorizing the natural urge to pursue pleasure and beauty. Epicurus is not, after all, recommending the pleasure of animals, but a more sophisticated approach that locates the most pleasant life in a moderate lifestyle. This understanding of Epicureanism can also be found in the letters of Poggio, as when he invites Nicoli to dine in his house, but warns that the fare on offer will be Epicurean, in the truest sense of the term, nothing but water and mush. The discovery of Lucretius's poem, though, brought home to its readers that Epicureanism involved more than pursuing pleasure while avoiding fun. It argues at length that the soul dies with the body, the point flagged in that annotation by Pomponio Leto. Lucretius also presents a detailed theory of atomism. This by itself was perhaps not so shocking, as some medieval scholastics had flirted with atomist physics, but he also contends that our universe emerges through brute physical necessity through the random entanglement of atoms. These are chance encounters that no pious Christian could accept, since the Epicurean cosmology involved denying divine providence. Epicurus and Lucretius did accept the existence of gods, but thought that they pay no attention to our lives, which is actually a good thing because it means we do not need to fear them. Now, it's not as if all this had been completely unknown before Poggio went to Germany. Since antiquity, the word Epicurean had been a near-synonym for atheist, and more recently within Italian culture Dante had put the Epicureans in hell for their teaching on the soul. But, now that Lucretius had been added to the list of classical texts admired for their outstanding Latin, the humanists were confronted as never before by the problematic nature of Epicurean thought. An annotation found in one early printed copy suggested that readers of Lucretius should simply accept the true parts and reject the falsehoods. For some, this meant rejecting all of it. A good example is Marsilio Ficino, who studied Lucretius as a young man while learning about Cicero from Cristoforo Rondino. Ficino even wrote a short commentary on the poem, but when he became a convinced Platonist, he destroyed this juvenile text. He turned against the poet he had admired, refuting Lucretius on the issues of soul's immortality and divine providence. A more tolerant approach was taken by Ficino's fellow student Bartolomeo Scala, who wrote a letter in 1458 summarizing Lucretius's doctrines. Scala continued to draw on these doctrines later in life, for instance in a dialogue about the wisdom of marriage in which the positive case is put by a character with Epicurean leanings. One of the things that attracted Scala to Epicureanism was its emphasis on the role of chance. Though this might fly in the face of Christian teachings about providence, it made good sense of the political instability experienced by humanists in Florence, especially towards the end of the 15th century when the French invaded Italy and the Medici lost their grip on power. In the wake of these events, the theme of chance and fortune was emphasized in the work of Marcello Adriani, one of the Renaissance philosophers who engaged most closely with Epicureanism. He admired this philosophy for its promise to help us retain happiness even in times of misfortune and political upheaval, and more generally for its aim of freeing us from disturbance and fear. This was thematized in a lecture by Adriani called Nil admirare, meaning wonder at nothing. We fear what we do not understand, and Lucretius can help us to dispel our fears by explaining natural phenomena and teaching us not to live in terror of divine wrath. Though he was atypical in his enthusiasm for Epicurean thought, Adriani was very much typical in his concern with the question of human autonomy in a world apparently governed by chance. Here the most obvious example is Niccolò Machiavelli. We still have a copy of Lucretius with annotations in Machiavelli's hand which show that he was especially interested in the atomic theory and the fact that the randomness of atomic motion explains why humans have free will. Prefiguring a central theme from his famous work The Prince, Machiavelli wrote a poem on the topic of fortune and, in a marginal note added to another of his early works, described how the successful man copes with chance. Each man, he wrote, must do what his mind prompts him to, and do it with daring, then try his luck, and when fortune slackens off regain the initiative by trying a different way. But Epicureanism was not the only Hellenistic philosophical school offering advice for coping with chance. Some Renaissance humanists were attracted by the uncompromising view of the Stoics, that good and bad fortune are both matters of indifference since only virtue truly matters. Poggio was one of them. He wrote a whole work about the vagaries of fortune in which he used an image that he may have borrowed from Lucretius but to make a Stoic point. He advised cultivating an attitude of Stoic detachment, looking upon the miseries of this world as a kind of theatrical performance that cannot affect our happiness. On the other hand, he also made a point worthy of Machiavelli that chance may be seized and exploited by men of action. This explains the success of figures like Alexander the Great, who, as we might say, boldly trusted his luck and was rewarded for doing so. But what to do when fortune does not favor us? Poggio thought the Stoics had the right answer. In one of his letters, he nicely summarized their idea that, whereas all other things are subject to the influence and control of others, virtue is our own, so it should be our paramount, if not sole, concern. These issues were also of great interest to Leon Battista Alberti, a humanist who is most famous for his treatise On Painting, which we'll be discussing in a future episode when we come to talk about philosophy and Renaissance art. In other works, especially a series of so-called dinner pieces, charming literary productions that often touch on philosophical issues, Alberti dramatized the confrontation of virtue and fortune. In one of them, he describes a personification of virtue being accosted by fortune, stripped, beaten, and left to complain of her rough treatment. Mercury regretfully informs her that fortune cannot be controlled not even by him and the other gods, so virtue will just have to hide herself naked and despised until fortune smiles on her again. Another piece imagines a philosopher visiting the underworld and learning how souls are set to navigate the river of life. Those who have the smoothest sailing are the virtuous, who enjoy the sport of the gods, but even they can be dashed on the rocks. Alberti advises clinging to the planks that are the liberal arts which offer the best stability in the rough waters of life. Others were less optimistic that knowledge and virtue can shield us from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The pioneering humanist Salutati, for instance, was at first impressed by Stoicism, but then found its cold-hearted advice to be of little comfort when he was faced with the death of his son. Exactly the same experience came to another humanist, Gionazzo Manetti. When his own son died, he rebuffed consolatory remarks inspired by Seneca, instead voicing his agreement with the Aristotelians who teach that moderate grief is appropriate. And then there was a third major Hellenistic school, one that offered good reason to think knowledge will forever remain out of reach in both ethical and theoretical matters. This school was, of course, skepticism. One humanist who was influenced by the skeptics was Francesco Guicciardini, a historian and statesman who was a friend of Machiavelli. He tended to think that philosophy, especially metaphysics, was an all-but-fruitless pursuit, since men are bound to remain in the dark about such things. In practical affairs, a knack for dealing with each situation as it arises, which Guicciardini calls discretion, is far more useful than all the general precepts laid down in ethical treatises. But ultimately, the insane may prosper, while the wise suffer depending on the whims of fortune. This was an unusually bleak view for the time, though not without parallel. As with Epicureanism, the humanists had some awareness of skepticism thanks to Cicero, who alongside his various presentations of Hellenistic philosophy, gave his own allegiance to the so-called academic skeptical tradition. But Renaissance thinkers tended not to emphasize this aspect of Cicero's thought, probably because they found it so disconcerting and difficult to reconcile with Christianity. Cicero's major work on skepticism, the Akademika, was not among the humanists' favorite texts by this most admired of Latin authors. When they did engage with it, they usually did so in order to fend off its critique of non-skeptical or dogmatic philosophy. Thus, for instance, Mario Nizzolio and Giulio Castellani, both working in the second half of the 16th century, repudiated Cicero's stance, suggesting that dogmatic thinkers like Aristotle could withstand skeptical attack if their systems were properly appreciated. Castellani was downright annoyed by Cicero's presentation of the dogmatic approach to philosophy, because he thought it stacked the deck in the skeptic's favor by presenting that approach too weakly. Much as Cicero's portrayal of Epicureanism was complemented by the discovery of Lucretius, so renewed access to long-unread ancient works allowed the humanist to go beyond his presentation of skepticism. Through the biographies of Diogenes Laertius, Renaissance readers learned about the teachings of the first skeptic, Pyro. More important still was the recovery of Sextus Empiricus, whose writings were brought to Italy from Constantinople by Francesco Fidelfo. Cardinal Bessarion also owned a manuscript of Sextus, in fact a better one than Fidelfo's, which had what he called windows in it, meaning gaps in the text. Philologists, like History of Philosophy podcasters, really don't like gaps. If the humanist had taken Sextus really seriously, he might have caused even more disquiet than Lucretius did. Sextus's Pyronian skepticism provides the tools to undermine all beliefs, leaving the proficient user of these tools in a state of suspended judgment. But for the most part, the humanists were not inclined to turn Sextus's arguments against other philosophical schools to say nothing of the teachings of the Church. They had good reason to be wary of the skeptics, since they could read in the Greek patristic author Gregory Nazianzus that this movement was a kind of disease that threatened to infect the Church. The result is that, as one scholar of skepticism in the period has put it, the 15th century witnessed a revival not of skeptical philosophy, but rather of skeptical texts. A good example would be Angelo Poliziano, who engaged with Sextus but only at the level of philology and as a doxographical source, an approach that he also took with Lucretius. To see true appreciation of ancient skepticism, we're going to have to wait for figures beyond Italian humanism, with the most famous example of its influence being the works of the French 16th century philosopher Montaigne. But within the present context, there is one figure we should highlight, namely Gianfresco Pico della Marandola. He was the nephew of a more famous philosopher named Giovanni Pico della Marandola, who was going to come into focus later on in this series of podcasts. The nephew, Gianfresco, was a member of the intellectual circle around the religious crusader Girolamo Savonarola. A remarkable political figure, Savonarola was closely involved in the aforementioned upheaval at Florence at the close of the 15th century. It was he who connived with the invading French forces to kick the Medicis out of power in Florence so they could be replaced with a Republican government. You'd think this would have kept Savonarola too busy to concern himself with the humanist project of recovering and translating Greek texts, but he took an interest in the work of Sextus Empiricus because he realized its potential as a weapon for undermining the pretensions of rationalist philosophy. Though a Latin translation envisioned by Savonarola did not come to fruition, Sextus' ideas were put to use by Gianfresco Pico della Marandola, who echoed Savonarola's agenda when explaining his own motivation. The skeptics can be helpful in fending off the arrogance of the philosophers and in displaying the superiority of the Christian faith. The principles of our faith are not derived from human beings but from God himself, through the light of faith as well as through wonders and miracles, against which no one can argue. From our modern-day vantage point, this attitude may seem stunningly cavalier. What we might think could be less immune to skeptical worry than mere unargued religious faith. But Gianfresco assumed that the methods of skepticism laid out by Sextus—relentless demands for justification, arguing on both sides of every issue, identifying disagreements between the philosophical schools—were designed for undermining merely human claims to knowledge. These were methods of earthly philosophy fit for use against other earthly philosophers like Epicureans, Stoics, and Peripatetics. The supernatural truths of Christianity would remain serenely untouched by the methods of Sextus and would thus be the only doctrine left standing after the demolition of all the philosophies devised by human nature. In this episode, we've touched on a number of famous figures who will be occupying our attention in future installments, men like Ficino, Savonarola, and of course Machiavelli. But not all famous Renaissance thinkers were men. In coming episodes, we'll be making a discovery of our own, namely that quite a few Italian humanists were women. We'll be discussing the most renowned of them, Christine de Pizan, in a couple of episodes. But first I want to linger over one topic that has arisen several times in the last couple of episodes, the emotions. We've seen how humanists wrestled with the value of emotional reactions, wondering whether to endorse the impassive attitude of the Stoics or to cultivate moderation of the passions, as suggested by Aristotle. But what exactly did the Renaissance thinkers understand emotions to be, and what advice did they give for combating emotions when they are counterproductive? We'll find out next time as we're joined by an interview guest with a passion for this particular subject, Sabrina Ebbe-Smaya, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.