Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 331 - Literary Criticism - Lorenzo Valla.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 at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Literary Criticism, Lorenzo Vala. As I've observed before, Medieval Scholastic Philosophy and today's Analytic Philosophy have much in common. The proliferation of distinctions, the delight in logic and linguistic analysis, the technical vocabulary that shuts out the uninitiated, and something else, namely the criticisms these features tend to provoke. Already in the 13th and 14th century, you can find sentiments that are routinely echoed by contemporary observers frustrated by the professional Analytic Philosophy scene. All this logic-chopping and distinction-mongering is mere obfuscation. Philosophers should keep it simple, and speak in a way that everyone can understand. Now, I'm no fan of needless technicality, but I tend to think that these critics are impatient with scholastic and analytic philosophy because they are, indeed, impatient. Any philosophical problem worth thinking about will lead you into complex and difficult territory once you do start to think about it. Fans of the simple answers often just haven't reflected hard enough about what these answers might imply, and what might be said in favor of rival answers. We need to decide whether this applies to the Italian humanists. When they denounced the methods used by the medieval schoolmen and by the scholastics still active in their own day, was that a well-informed and philosophically serious rejection, or were they the renaissance equivalent of people who haven't studied philosophy going on social media to complain that professional philosophy is a waste of time? To answer this question, we can do no better than to turn to the works of Lorenzo Valla. In addition to being one of the most prolific and brilliant of the Italian humanists, he was also especially vocal in his disparagement of scholasticism and Aristotelian philosophy more generally. Above all, he had the intellectual integrity and, it must be said, boundless self-confidence necessary to fight the schoolmen on their own ground, clashing with them on topics like dialectic, the soul, and the metaphysics of free will, alongside his contributions to more typically humanist subjects such as ethics and philology. He even wrote an encomium of that leading scholastic Thomas Aquinas, a document that shows it's entirely possible to damn someone with extravagant, instead of faint, praise. But it's with the philology that we should begin, since it is for his achievements in this area that Valla is best known. He already made a splash in 1428 at the tender age of 21 when he circulated a now lost work to other humanists in Rome including Poggio Bracciolini and Antonio Loci. Here he argued for the merits of the ancient rhetorician Quintilian over the much-admired Cicero. Struck more by Valla's uppity ambition than his precocious learning, Poggio and Loci advised against taking him on at the papal court. Valla was a man who knew how to hold a grudge, so this led to a long-standing mutual hostility. Of Valla's widely used textbook On the Elegance of the Latin Language, Poggio remarked that it should instead have been called On the Ignorance of the Latin Language. In fact though, it was only one of numerous works displaying Valla's profound knowledge of Greek and Latin. Other examples include his rather provocative set of notes to the New Testament, also attacked by Poggio, translations of Thucydides and Herodotus, and most famously his attack on the donation of Constantine, in which Valla gave the world its most entertaining and readable discussion of textual authentication. As Valla would be delighted to know, the donation is now universally thought to be a forgery. Probably dating from the 8th century, it pretends to be a letter from the Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester giving the papacy rule over Rome and the Western Empire, because you know Roman emperors are famous for voluntarily giving up control over huge swaths of their own territory. Valla of course points out the implausibility of this, but by no means does he stop there. Indeed, he pulls out all the stops, deploying every weapon in his formidable arsenal of rhetoric and philology. He imagines the speeches that would have been given in protest at such an imperial gift. The protests that Constantine's own children would have made, the complaints that would have been made by the people of Rome, whose freedom was being curtailed, and most tellingly, what Pope Sylvester would or at least should have said to such an offer. Namely that his power is purely spiritual, and that the mission of the Church would be undermined by such temporal power. The papacy ought to be in the business of evangelium, not imperium, spreading God's word, not extending its political authority. Next, and perhaps most persuasively, Valla points out many details of the text that prove it could not have been written back in the 4th century. It includes words Constantine would not have used, like satrap, displays lamentable historical ignorance, and uses Latin like a barbarian. In sum, says Valla in what may be the worst insult he can imagine, the forger who produced the donation had no talent and no literary taste. This approach is liable to strike us as remarkably modern. Instead of focusing on the question of whether the donation is authoritative in institutional terms, as his contemporaries might have done, Valla concentrates on such issues as historical, psychological, and above all, linguistic plausibility. In other words, he brings forward the sort of evidence that a textual historian of today might use to verify or deny the authenticity of a text. Valla himself said that he had written nothing more rhetorical. Aptly so, given that his penchant for sarcastic and vective, high-flown Latin speechifying, and refined stylistic judgment are here on full display. He would also have seen the work as rhetorical because it showed him speaking truth to power. Right at the start, Valla says that the true orator has a responsibility to stand up for his opinions. Being able to speak well means being willing to speak out. In the present case, he may have had ulterior motives for doing so. Valla was attached to the court of Alfonso of Aragon who had a tense relationship with the sitting pope Eugenius IV. But whatever the occasion or political context, Valla was consistent in stating his views with all candor. He suffered for his frankness and for his habit of making enemies. He was put on trial for heresy in 1444, an event that seems to have ended the most prolific period of his writing career, though he would later receive positions at the papal court. Another show of irreverence came when Valla was asked to deliver one of the speeches at a celebration of Thomas Aquinas, the most ill-conceived invitation since the Romans said to the Goths, sure, come on in. Despite his notorious disdain for scholastic philosophy, Valla is actually generous in his praise of Thomas. He even finds a few nice words to say about Aquinas' writing, which as I've pointed out before, is nice and clear but hardly conforms to Valla's standards of good Latin. However, as Valla puts it in the biggest understatement since the Goths told the Romans they might be staying for a while, it is not my way to remain silent. Many of the inquiries pursued by scholastic theologians are pointless he says, what they call metaphysics and also the theory of the modes of signification. Valla makes clear his preference for the ancient church fathers and his distaste for the new-fangled, spurious Latin terminology devised by the schoolmen, which is of course scattered throughout Aquinas' works. In the preface to a short dialogue he devoted to the problem of free will, Valla is still less diplomatic. The topic at hand may be a philosophical one, but he makes no bones about his opposition to what passes for philosophy in his culture. Indeed, it shows a poor opinion of our religion to think it needs the protection of philosophy. If anything, philosophy has more often been a source of dissension and heresy. This preface gets across a point that is in danger of being overlooked when we think of Valla just as a defender of good Latin and champion of classical rhetoric over scholastic philosophy. He saw his project as a deeply Christian one, a defense of the faith against those who, like the pope wielding secular authority, stray from the simpler path of spiritual truth. Even if some of his works were well received, it clearly galled him that contemporary humanists and churchmen failed to appreciate his efforts properly. As Christopher Salenza has quipped, But the aspects of Valla's writing that annoyed his colleagues are precisely those that may appeal to us. Coming from the medievals with their relentless and complex Aristotelianism, it can be downright refreshing to see Valla call Aristotle stupid and see him make fun of Boethius, or refer to the legal scholars of Bologna and theologians of Paris as the Goths and the Gauls. Valla makes up his own mind, and as he admits in the context of writing about ethics, finds himself disagreeing with everybody. Alongside the entertaining invective and admirable independence of mind, Valla will appeal to those who think philosophy should stick to common sense, which for him is embodied above all in language use. Usually he means the usage of classical Latin, as established by the best ancient authors, but he's capable of saying for example that listening to housewives might give us more insight into an issue than listening to philosophers because housewives use language in practical contexts whereas the philosophers simply play around with words. Or as he puts it elsewhere, Quibbling about everything, philosophers are the first to distort the very nature of words. Valla makes both remarks in his most philosophically rewarding work, which I'll just call the Dialectical Disputations. He produced several revised versions of it, changing the Latin title as he went. This ambitious treatise is Valla's attempt to beat the Scholastics on their own turf. In particular, he contests their views on logical matters, but we know enough about medieval logic to realize that this will probably lead him into disputes about metaphysics and perhaps even natural philosophy. And so it proves, as the disputations become a wide-ranging attempt to dynamite the foundations of Aristotelian philosophy. For an alternative basis, Valla turns to Quintilian, whom he quotes at length and uses as a chief source for his own approach to logic and philosophy as a whole. One eye-catching feature of this approach is Valla's reduction of the categories. As you'll remember, Aristotle and his followers classified all predicated terms into ten types – substance, quality, quantity, relation, time, place, and so on. Valla thinks he can make do with only three – substance, quality, and action. This reflects his method of looking to linguistic usage for a guide. To oversimplify a bit, his three categories correspond to nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Of course, Valla is not the first to wonder whether ten categories is too many. Already in antiquity, there were attempts to reduce the list, and just a century before him, the nominalist William of Ockham had taken his famous razor to Aristotle's scheme, yielding a nice short list of two categories – substance and quality. But Valla is not a follower of Ockham. He has no stake in a nominalist or anti-realist revision of categorical theory, and instead assumes that language is a guide to what is in fact out there in the world. Another more obviously metaphysical question tackled by Valla concerns the so-called transcendentals recognized in medieval scholasticism. These were features that cut across the division between categories. They included being, goodness, truth, unity. All predicates, it was claimed, manifest these transcendental properties for the good reason that every way that anything might be derives ultimately from God – as pure being, goodness, truth, and unity, God bestows these features on everything he makes. But Valla thinks he can make do with less. There is only one transcendental, namely thing, in Latin res. And to speak of goodness, unity, and so on, is really only to talk about things. Again, he takes his cue from language, observing that the medieval's allowed themselves to indulge in typical barbarisms in setting out their theory, like speaking of each thing as an ends or that which is, or as an entity, an entitas. If a normal speaker of Latin really wanted to express this idea, he would instead just say res quaest, thing that is. This example, incidentally, shows that Valla is nothing if not consistent in his carping about scholastic verbiage. He also complains about the word ends, along with such artificial terms as entitas and quititas, in the supposed encomium of Thomas Aquinas. And he can hardly believe the contortions that the Aristotelians get into when trying to explain how beings are at first potential and then cause to emerge into actuality. He writes, will we say that this wood is a box in act? Has anyone ever talked that way? Who wouldn't laugh at anyone talking that way? And this is only the beginning of Valla's list of complaints. He doesn't buy the Aristotelian idea that virtue is a habit or a subtle disposition of character, because someone can on a single occasion display spectacular virtue or for that matter vice. You can permanently become an adulterer or murderer thanks to a single evil act. It's a bit like losing your virginity and need not have nothing to do with permanent habits. Or what about the soul? Aristotle tries to convince us that the human soul is compounded of a rational part and two irrational parts which respectively possess the capacities we share with animals and plants. But this undermines the unity of our soul, underestimates the non-human animals, and overestimates plants. Plants, for Valla, have no souls at all, since all they do is grow. After all, our hair grows. Well, mine doesn't, but maybe yours does, and no one thinks that their hair has his own soul. Animals, by contrast, have souls just like ours because as Valla's beloved Quintilian observed, they have thought and understanding to a certain extent. They even have the power of will, as we can see by considering such cases as the horse that decides which path it should take. Valla takes the opportunity here to show off his Greek skills. He observes that when the ancients called animals aloga, meaning things with no logos, they did not mean that animals have no reason or cannot think, but only that they cannot speak, because logos means both reason and speech. Usually though, it's his Latin that Valla wants to show off and exploit in his Demolition of Scholastic Theories. He has good fun with the artificial regimentation of Latin employed by the schoolmen, as with their arbitrary and ignorant rules about how to negate propositions or their strange idea that not just might mean something other than unjust. When it comes to these so-called modal notions that modify propositions by making them possible, necessary, or impossible, he thinks the scholastics were in a sense being profligate because you can actually get by just with possible and impossible, and in a sense, too restrictive, since there are many other such modifiers possible in good Latin, like easy, usual, or certain. He ventures into the most technical parts of their logic, wielding not so much Occam's razor as a machete of mockery. Why should they insist on arranging syllogistic arguments in certain arbitrary ways? This is just a matter of convention, like the way that Italians use a knife to slice away from themselves and the Spanish towards themselves. And some of their inferences seem to him plainly invalid. Their acceptance of the third syllogistic figure moves him to call them a nation of lunatics. This is, again, all good fun, but is it philosophically convincing? To be honest, the answer is often no. Sticking for a moment with logic, he at one point scoffs at the use of variable letters to clarify logical form, for instance saying all A is B, all B is C, therefore all A is C, as mere obfuscation. Simple though it is, this device is, in fact, one of Aristotle's most brilliant and useful contributions to logic. Indeed, it has some claim to be the single most important breakthrough in the entire history of the discipline since it allows us to isolate and consider logical form in itself rather than giving possibly distracting concrete examples of argumentation. Yet, Valla compares it to showing a prospective bride to a suitor in the dark in hopes he won't notice how ugly she is. In other cases, he falls into the trap I mentioned earlier of criticizing without thinking hard enough about what he is criticizing. His discussion of time and place offers supposed insights that Aristotelian philosophers had thought of and dealt with many times over. In still other cases, he simply reproduces scholastic solutions to philosophical problems without giving them credit for it. That short dialogue on free will I mentioned, for instance, simply restates the common 14th century position that God can foreknow an event without causing that event to happen or rendering it impossible that it not happen. As far as I can see, the only halfway original point brought forward by Valla is that someone who had foreknowledge could cause additional problems by explicitly predicting what will happen to the person involved. It's fine for God to know I will eat eggs for breakfast tomorrow, but if he tells me I shall do so, then I would paradoxically be in a position to render his foreknowledge false, just out of spite. And parenthetically, let me mention that here Valla has put his finger on the fatal problem with the plot of the movie Minority Report. Perhaps the greatest irony is that for all his anti-Aristotelian rhetoric, Valla is in many ways close to Aristotle in approach and philosophical temperament. Consider again the dispute over the categories. Aristotle too thought we should divide up the categories by considering language use. Had Valla been generous, he might have admitted that he was following Aristotle's strategy but updating the account in the light of better grammatical theory. One specialist on Renaissance rhetorical theories, Peter Mack, has written that Valla was too disrespectful to Aristotle to succeed as an Aristotelian and too dependent on him to succeed in presenting a wholly different solution. I think that gets him about right, though we should add that Valla was not only a critic. His impertinence towards Aristotle is matched by his deep respect for Latin classical authors, especially Quintilian, whose works are quite literally unimprovable in his eyes. Valla should thus be credited with conceiving an ambitious positive project as well as a negative critical one. With the resources of authoritative texts other than Aristotle, he wanted to build something new, something we might call a properly humanist logic and metaphysics. Soon enough, we'll be moving on to other aspects of humanism, in particular the contribution that Valla and others made to ethics. But next time, we'll be having our first interview of this series on the Italian Renaissance. We could hardly hope for a more appropriate guest, because we'll be joined by one of the foremost authorities on humanist philosophy, a bit like Aristotle or Quintilian depending on your taste. So join me for a bit of dialogue which hopefully won't be too disputatious with Jill Cray, right here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.