 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 at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, What a piece of work is man? Manetti and Pico on Human Nature. In the 1970s, a philosopher named Peter Singer brought attention to what he saw as an underappreciated form of prejudice. Just as sexism is discrimination on the basis of gender, and racism discrimination on the basis of race, there is also speciesism, meaning discrimination against non-human animals on the basis of their species. Singer argued then, and continues to argue today, that we should include animals within the bounds of our moral concern. It is not being human that makes the difference, morally speaking, but being sentient. That is why it is wrong to harm an animal without having a very good reason, whereas it's not wrong to smash a rock. Rocks can't feel pain. Singer looked back to his fellow utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham. Already in the 1780s, Bentham wrote in favour of benevolence towards animals, saying, The question is not can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer? Yet speciesism also has a considerable pedigree, as Singer admitted. The idea of a distinctive human dignity and worth, he wrote, has a long history. It can be traced back directly to the Renaissance humanists, for instance to Pico de la Miranda's oration on the dignity of man. That's a lot to put at the door of a speech written by a 24-year-old. But Singer is not alone in seeing Pico's oration as a pivotal work in Renaissance philosophy, even in the history of European thought. It is often hailed as signalling a new conception of human nature and of humanity's place in the world, as expressing what you might call a novel philosophical anthropology, anthropology being of course the study of the human. In this speech, Pico gave voice to the idea that humans are radically free and irreducibly individual, each of us blessed by God with the opportunity to choose what meaning to give to our life. Perhaps only Shakespeare is more famous than Pico as a spokesman for individualism in this period we are calling the Renaissance. But in Shakespeare, the obligation to make meaningful choices and thus to become the creator of one's own self can seem more like a burden than a blessing. In the most famous instance, the character Hamlet spends almost a whole play failing to choose. His lack of resolution is an unwillingness to trade the indeterminacy of freedom for determined action. For Pico, by contrast, it is the malleability of human nature that makes humans the greatest of all God's creatures greater even than the angels. For we humans can decide, if we have the strength, to be like the angels and even to be like God himself. Given that choice is the central theme of Pico's speech, it's rather ironic that someone else chose the name by which it is known. Nowadays it is always called the oration on the dignity of man, but this title was associated with it only after Pico's death. Two years after he died, so in 1496, his nephew Gianfresco della Mirandola published it along with other works by Pico. Only in a further edition, which came out in 1504, was the now ubiquitous title applied to it. And that title gives no hint of the original purpose of the oration. Pico intended it as a kind of introduction to the debate of his 900 Theses, which was to be held at Rome until the pope had other ideas. Pico expanded the speech, apparently in several stages, by adding, among other things, a defense of this project, which seemed to some an act of impertinence from a young upstart. If the posthumously added title unhelpfully obscures the immediate occasion for the oration, it does illuminate the wider context of Pico's ideas. For the dignity of humankind was indeed a theme of Renaissance humanism, and the very same title had been used in a much longer work by an earlier author. This was Giannazzo Manetti. As it happens, Manetti was not provoking a pope, like Pico would later do, but instead being provoked by one. The pope in question was Innocent III, who served as pontiff at the beginning of the 13th century. Among his writings was a treatise with the gloomy title On the Miseries of the Human Condition. It was to be supplemented by a companion piece on the excellence of human life, but this never appeared, leaving a gap open for more optimistic later writers. A scholar named Bartolomeo Faccio attempted to fill that gap, but his offering was fairly brief and is mostly remembered for helping to inspire Manetti's longer response in defense of human life. Completed in 1452 and entitled On Human Dignity and Excellence, Manetti's treatise extends over four books and praises the exquisite creation that is the human being, from our cunningly designed bodies to our capacity for reasoning, wisdom, and virtue. From the first page, Manetti shows his humanist credentials, starting with etymological discussion of the Hebrew and Greek words for human, and moving on to extensive quotation from the classical authors Cicero and Lactantius. These initial quotations concern the perfection of the human body, which Manetti demonstrates by referring to such things as the protection offered by our hair. Being bald myself, I'm more persuaded by his observation that the skin around the skull is a solid and rather attractive covering for the bone and brain. The work also draws widely on scholastic ideas, some of which go back to the Islamic world, like the theory of internal senses seated in the brain, which derives from Avicenna. Praise of the body, focusing on the usefulness of its parts, is itself a long-standing tradition that goes back to Aristotle and Galen. Like Galen, Manetti takes it that humans are superior to animals even in respect of their bodies, without even getting into the intellectual and moral powers that are unique to us. Our bodily preeminence is owing to the perfect balance of the blood from which we are made when it is generated out of seed as we gestate in our mothers. But of course, the most valuable part of the human is not the body but the soul. Surprisingly to the modern reader, and it might have surprised Marsilio Ficino too, Manetti singles out Aristotle, not Plato, as the leading ancient protagonist of the soul's immortality. He concedes that Plato too seems to have taught this doctrine, though in a rather obscure way, and not with straightforward arguments. Immortality makes us different from other animals, as we can see from the natural desire we all feel for eternal happiness. This itself proves that we are, indeed, immortal, since desires that are natural to a species cannot be without purpose. Manetti relies throughout on Aristotle's picture of living beings as always having an orientation toward certain ends or purposes, which their bodies and souls are apt to pursue. Christian sources are brought into play too, mostly just to confirm the ideas that can be gleaned from pagan sources. But Manetti does think that Christianity has supplanted pagan notions of our ultimate end, which is properly understood to be worship and knowledge of God. So it is as both a humanist and a Christian that Manetti dares to take exception with Pope Innocent's more pessimistic assessment of the human condition. He is much more polite about this than, say, Lorenzo Valla was when discussing the donation of Constantine, but this is still a firm rejection of papal opinion, and for good measure, he opinions of pagan authors like Seneca, who consoled those who grieve over the death of loved ones by suggesting, effectively, that earthly life is not so great anyway. Of course, Manetti admits that there is bodily infirmity, disease, and death, but reminds us that these are not inherent to human nature, but the result of original sin. Besides, there is much pleasure in life, not only suffering, even in old age when increasing debilitation is offset by certain pleasures. Perhaps one of them is that baldness allows us to show off the nice skin on our scalps. Above all, we should not forget that in the future, the blessed among us will be resurrected in perfect bodies, which will be only 30 years old and will not suffer from any of the defects that come with our current fallen nature. It seems then that Manetti's lengthy, elegant treatise had explored the theme of human dignity pretty thoroughly, but Pico's oration has plenty to add, beginning with its style. It is a work of brash confidence, in which the young scholar seems to be generalizing from his own genius and creative originality to assert the power of all humans to create themselves as they see fit. He boasts of the new philosophy he intends to defend in the envisioned disputation at Rome. Yet here, too, Pico did have forerunners. He may have known Manetti's writing, and no less a theological authority than Peter Lombard, whose work The Sentences was the fundamental textbook of medieval theology, had already proclaimed the superiority of humans over angels. A more intriguing potential influence on Pico is Johann Allemanno, one of the Jewish scholars who taught him the ways of Kabbalah. In his own writings, Allemanno had argued that humans have no one fixed nature. Rather, they are intermediate beings, the last of the natural creatures and the first among the intellectual creatures. This is because humans have both a bodily and intellectual aspect. For Allemanno, the point of this was to embrace both aspects by using Kabbalah. Like many a philosopher, he believed that we need to perfect our mind through contemplation, but he also thought that the ritual actions undertaken in Kabbalah lead us closer to God. This is similar to, but not quite the same as, the point Pico makes in a famous passage towards the beginning of his oration. He agrees with Allemanno that humans are the intermediary, or bond, of God's creation, straddling the material and immaterial worlds. Alluding to both Plato's Timaeus and the creation story of Genesis, Pico explains that, by the time God created humans, he had already made the earth, and whatever is upon it, and the heavens with their intellects and eternal souls. Having filled the lower and higher realms in this fashion, in a sense there was nothing else left for God to make. The purpose of creating humans was so that there might be someone to consider the reason for such a work, to love its beauty and admire its magnificence. Since all the natures had already been created in the earthly and celestial realms, God told humankind in the person of Adam, You have neither particular seat nor special aspect. It is open to you by your choice, in whose hands I have placed you, to fix the limits of nature for yourself. And it's this that makes us the most happy of animals and the one most worthy of wonder. But as Hamlet knew, momentous choices bring dangers with them. Since we partake of the lower natures found in beasts and even plants, we can embrace these natures, thus failing to take advantage of our literally God-given opportunity. This is the choice made by hedonists, who indulge the faculties of nutrition and reproduction found also in plants. And those who love things enjoyed by the senses are acting like non-human animals. In a striking example of Pico's eclectic cultural tastes, he even cites Mohammed, in other words the Quran, for the idea that those who turn away from the divine law become like beasts. What we should do instead is, of course, to focus on higher natures within us, thus becoming no longer earthly, nor even heavenly, but a light that is even more noble, clothed with human flesh. This means contemplating God as the highest angels do, and ultimately even achieving union with the divine so as to surpass angelic nature. This is pretty heady stuff, but unlike Adam being created by God, it did not come out of nowhere. Apart from the background we've already considered in Manetti and Alemanno, the most significant context for understanding this famous part of Pico's oration is the revival of Platonism, led by his older friend and colleague, Marsilio Ficino. In our earlier look at Ficino, we saw him making the point that the human is the bond of the world and a fusion of all other natures. He puts the point nicely in his commentary on the Timaeus, the dialogue of Plato also name-checked in Pico's oration. It behooves the human to be the animal which would worship those above, being the mean between the animals on high, which are immortal in body as in soul, and the animals whose soul and body have fallen. That is, man is mortal through the body, but immortal through the soul. On this point, Ficino and Pico were in good company. Since antiquity and throughout the middle ages, philosophers had been insisting that the human is a microcosm, which literally means a small world. You can find this in all medieval cultures, with particularly detailed versions in such thinkers as Hildegard of Bingen and the 10th century group of philosophers in Iraq who called themselves the Brethren of Purity. They liked the idea so much that they flipped it around, saying that just as the human is a small cosmos, the cosmos is a great human. But of course Pico is not just saying in his oration that humans contain all of creation and even a spark of divinity within them, combining the familiar ideas that the human is a microcosm and is created in the image of God. He's adding the crucial further point that we can choose which of the many natures given to us is our true identity. But this, I think, was simply a matter of drawing out a long-standing idea found in the Platonic tradition. Finally in Plotinus, whose works Ficino translated into Latin, along with the dialogues of Plato, we have the idea that the soul exists on the horizon of the physical and intelligible realms. In Plotinus' Enneads, no less than in Pico's oration, we find the idea that the true nature of the soul resides in a power to identify with one of those two realms. In the treatise that was placed at the head of the Enneads by Plotinus' student and editor Porphyry, Plotinus asks who we are and answers that we are neither an animal body nor an angelic or divine mind. Rather, each of us is a subject endowed with free choice, through which we are capable of choosing to identify with either the body or the mind. This is, of course, to take nothing away from the significance or ingenuity of Pico's speech. It is to recognize the nature of his achievement, which was to retrieve an idea from the older Platonic tradition and update it for Pico's Christian humanist audience. Similarly, Peter Singer was giving Pico more than his fair share of credit, or blame, when he named him and the other humanists as pioneers of speciesism. The superiority of the human to the beast was a well-worn trope of ancient and medieval philosophy based in the Aristotelian and Stoic conviction that reason is distinctive of humankind. So the humanists were actually being fairly traditional when they encouraged us to turn away from our animal natures. It's advice that appears pervasively in the period. Pico himself wrote, in his commentary on Benavieni's poem about love, that our desire for sexual gratification is something we share in common with beasts, whereas rationally we know that such bodily pleasure is in fact destructive of beauty. The same idea appears in other authors, for instance Pietro Bembo and Tulia Daragona, who associated vulgar love with animal passion and honest love with reason. Ficino too sees animals as being, in general, helplessly prey to their desires. He writes in his Platonic theology that our ability to resist temptation is something that distinguishes us from beasts. And this isn't true, by the way. Experimenters have shown that hungry animals can postpone the enjoyment of food if they have good reason to do so. Again, it is rationality that makes the supposed difference, which is why Bembo thinks that, just as it is animalistic to be sexually licentious, so one turns one's back on human nature by giving in to skepticism. He writes that skeptics are mistaken to consider themselves men rather than animals by birth, for in rejecting the faculty which distinguishes us from animals, they deprive the mind of its purpose and strip their lives of our chief ornament. Yet the Italian Renaissance also saw challenges to this age-old contrast between rational humans and irrational animals. You might remember Lorenzo Valla mounting such a challenge in his attack on scholasticism, and his lead was followed by a number of later thinkers. Writing in 1603, the anatomist Giroramo da Quapendente went so far as to suggest that animals are capable of rudimentary language. At about the same time, another man of the same given name, Giroramo Giovanni, was even more impressed by the linguistic capacities of these. Giovanni said that really the only reason we say non-human animals are irrational is that otherwise we would have to give up on the idea that humans alone are, as the classical definition would have it, rational animals. Another late Renaissance thinker who we'll be coming to in due course, Tommaso Campanella, thought that animals could perform zilligisms, as when a dog hunting another animal infers which way to go from the smell of its quarry. He also offered the nice example of a dog he had met who lived with a Polish family and could understand Polish but not Italian. Such discussions suggest that, if anything, this was a period where speciesism was not being invented but being put in question as rarely before. In one breath, philosophers would encourage us to turn away from our animal nature, but in the next breath they might emphasize the continuity between animal and human spheres. Not all animals are the same, after all. Some seem barely more advanced than plants, whereas others are apparently capable of thinking, emotion, and imagination. They can do practically everything that we can. Thus, Renaissance philosophers envisioned a kind of hierarchy in which the more sophisticated beasts are those that are more like humans. This too is part of Pico's message in The Oration, which sees human nature as containing all that is in animal nature. Elsewhere, in his biblical commentary, the Heptapros, he suggests that it is especially the domestic animals that come close to being like humans because they can learn from training. The same sort of point was made by another philosopher we'll be discussing in depth later on, Agostino Nifo. He wrote that, Man is the canon and measure of all animals. For this reason, one animal is more perfect than another, because it resembles more closely to man, such as pygmies and apes. And for this reason, one animal is of lesser worth than another, because it is far removed from men, such as an oyster or sea sponge. Here, Nifo is still thoroughly committed to speciesism, but not because he sees a radical gulf between human and animal. To the contrary, it is because he sees humans as the best animal. How did such ideas come to circulate in the Italian Renaissance? In part because of careful observation, made by anatomists or simply people who were paying attention to animal behavior, as with that example of Campanella noticing the dog who could only understand Polish. But another part of the explanation is, as we saw with the relevance of Plotinus for Pico's Oration, that long-neglected texts from antiquity were being read once again. For non-human animals, there was one text in particular that made a big impact, Porphyry's treatise on abstinence from killing and eating animals. We've just seen that Renaissance authors admitted that animals may be capable of language or reasoning to some extent, and they also anticipated Peter Singer in recommending a vegetarian diet. This was in large part down to the influence of Porphyry, as has been shown in modern-day research, or by one modern-day researcher in particular, and next time we'll meet her. Cecilia Moratori's work has shown the importance of attitudes towards animals for understanding Renaissance ethics, science, and philosophy of mind. Whether or not Pico was right that the human is king among animals, there's no doubt that Moratori is the queen of animals in the Renaissance, as we'll see next time, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.