Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 339 - I’d Like to Thank the Academy - Florentine Platonism.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 historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, I'd like to thank the Academy. Florentine Platonism. When I was younger, by which I mean before I did the research to write this episode, I always used to think that the ideal life was the one enjoyed by Marsilio Ficino. Admittedly, living in the 15th century as he did, he would have lacked access to indoor plumbing, modern dentistry and almond croissants, the consumption of which makes the need for dentistry all the more urgent. But apart from that, he had it made. His patron Lorenzo de' Medici gave him a country house in Carreggi, just north of Florence. In this pleasant Tuscan setting, he could while away the hours reading and translating Plato and the works of the Neo-Platonists with his friends and students, who, we are told, formed something like a new academy. Now I am older and wiser though, and realize that Ficino's situation may have been less enviable. He was as often out of favor with Lorenzo as in favor. And it turns out that like reports of Mark Twain's death, and everything Donald Trump has said about himself since he was four years old, the stories of the Florentine Academy are greatly exaggerated. Then perhaps most decisively, proximity to power in Renaissance Florence was actually pretty dangerous, as shown by the events of April 26th 1478. Encouraged by the Pope, the Pazzi family conspired to murder Lorenzo, trying to stab him to death while he was attending church. Lorenzo was wounded but made a narrow escape and lived to offer patronage another day. Indeed, this event incidentally highlights the close connections of the Medici to the humanists they sponsored. One of the movement's greatest exponents, Angelo Poliziano, was standing right near Lorenzo during the assassination attempt, and one of the conspirators was Poggio Bracciolini's son Jacopo. Along with their patronage of artists like Donatello, Fra Angelico, and Botticelli, the Medici's sponsoring of humanist scholarship continues to burnish their reputation to the present day. It is thanks to the Medici that we associate Renaissance philosophy more with Florence than with any other city, and the intellectual tradition we associate most strongly with Florentine philosophy is Platonism. This is for good reason, since Marsilio Ficino, who did more than anyone else in the Renaissance to revive the study of Plato, was indeed close to both Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici. Did Cosimo and Lorenzo also have good reason for supporting the intellectual activity of men like Marsilio? Was their interest in philosophy and humanist book culture a disinterested, purely intellectual enterprise, or did a political motive lurk in the background? To answer this question, we need to look briefly at the way that the Medici exerted control over their city. Their period of dominance began in 1434, after Cosimo returned triumphantly from political exile. The preceding decades had been difficult ones for Florence, the plague had struck seven times since its first arrival in 1350, and wars against Naples and Milan had been a drain on the city's resources, both human and financial. Yet Florence remained prosperous, thanks to its silk industry and skilled craftsmen, and no one enjoyed the fruits of prosperity more than the Medici, who parlayed fabulous wealth built up through banking into a network of clients and allies. At no point did Cosimo, his son Piero, who was head of the family for only a few years, or his grandson Lorenzo hold an official position of monarchial rule in the city. They did not need to, because the theoretically republican political system of Florence was in fact subject to their control. The Medici pretended not to be autocrats, as when Cosimo wrote to the Pope to plead that as a mere private citizen he could not pledge Florence's support for a crusade on behalf of Constantinople against the Turks. But in fact, he was king in everything but name, as remarked by that unsentimental observer of political life, Ennio Silvio Piccolomini. You might remember him from episode 333, he was the one who wrote the treatise on the misery of courtiers. The Medici displayed their wealth, while cementing their claim to legitimacy through their patronage of art, architectural monuments, and classical learning. Though they didn't come right out and say so, it's pretty obvious why they might have found Plato in particular to be a congenial classical authority. In his Republic and his Laws, which perhaps not coincidentally was the first Platonic dialogue Lorenzo asked Piccino to translate into Latin, Plato prescribed a top-down political structure in which wise rulers devised the best policies for the unity and prosperity of a city-state. Harking back to Plato and to George Gumistos Platon's political theories, which were themselves inspired by the Republic, the humanists praised the Medici as philosopher rulers, if not philosopher kings, eminent in their virtue and wisdom as well as their power. Already Leonardo Bruni made this connection when he translated the Platonic letters into Latin and wrote to Cosimo to urge that he heed the advice given in them. Piccino, for one, thought the message got through. He wrote, Plato showed me the concept of the virtues but once, Cosimo put them into practice every day. And Poliziano, in the preface of his translation of Plato's Carmadys, said to Lorenzo, you alone of the whole universe of men both rule the Republic wisely and recall philosophy home from long exile. None of which is to say that Florence had a monopoly on humanism or on the study of Plato. Francesco Fillelfo, another translator of Plato, was a staunch opponent of the Medici and wound up as a courtier in Milan. That city competed with Florence for philosophical laurels, which is why the Duke Visconti took the trouble to entice the Greek scholar Cresolorus to move to Milan from Florence. With the help of Uberto de Cembrio, Cresolorus produced a Latin version of Plato's Republic that was supposedly requested by the Duke himself and was hailed as a confirmation of the perfection of the Milanese constitution. De Cembrio's son, Pier Candido, was also a distinguished humanist who continued the study of Plato in Milan, producing a new version of the Republic and defending this text from charges of immorality levelled because of its teachings on such subjects as the common sharing of sexual partners amongst the ruling guardian class. But there's no gainsaying Florence's position as the main center of Platonic studies if only thanks to Marsilio Ficino. His complete Latin version of the dialogues appeared in 1484, followed by commentaries on the most important dialogues in 1496. He also translated other Platonist authors, notably Plotinus, and produced a major treatise called the Platonic Theology. Effectively Ficino was a one-man revival of late ancient Platonism, though he can't take sole credit for the blossoming of this tradition in Florence. Apart from Bruni, we can recall the name of the Byzantine émigré John Argyropoulos, who lectured on Greek at the University of Florence beginning in 1458. His teaching activity has been linked to the fact that, as Ficino put it, the spirit of Plato flew to Italy from Byzantium. This is certainly what Donato Acheole thought. Acheole, whom we already met as the author of a commentary on Aristotle's Ethics that drew on Argyropoulos, said of him, he has diligently opened up Plato's beliefs to the great wonder of those who hear him lecture. But modern-day scholars don't agree about the depth of Argyropoulos' interest in or commitment to Platonism. He may have been more interested in presenting a more systematic approach to Aristotle. Another candidate for inspiring the interest in Platonism is Cristoforo Landino, who began as a lecturer at the University of Florence at the same time as Argyropoulos. His specialty was actually rhetoric and poetry, but he discovered Platonic themes hidden in the poetry of authors from Homer to Dante. It has been remarked that he lectured on philosophers as if they were poets and on poets as if they were philosophers. This brings us to a key question about the study of Plato at Florence. Was the approach that humanists took to the dialogues and later works of Platonist philosophy really all that philosophical? Or was it more a matter of rhetoric and literary appreciation, since Plato's Greek was considered a paradigm of good style, as it had already been in Byzantium? Here it is usual, and to some extent helpful, to contrast Marsilio Ficino to the aforementioned Angelo Poliziano, whose name by the way is sometimes anglicized as Polition. This contrast should not be overdrawn, though. Ficino was certainly an expert philologist and frequently made textual and terminological observations on the dialogues he translated, while Poliziano certainly had philosophical interests. But it would be nonetheless fair to say that Platonist philosophy was Ficino's true calling, whereas the core activity of Poliziano was that of the philologist. We can make that second claim with some confidence, since Poliziano said it about himself. Already before him, Landino had explicitly distanced himself from the title of philosopher in his inaugural lecture, saying, when I have so much difficulty protecting my own territory, would I dare launch a reckless assault on others? Similarly, in a witty and entertaining treatise entitled La Mia, Poliziano says that he would certainly not be ashamed to call himself philosopher, but admits that it is not really a name he merits. For him, Plato has best explained the nature of the true philosopher, a figure who thinks of death constantly even in life and relentlessly pursues virtue. Poliziano modestly allows, I have only barely come in contact with those disciplines that mark the philosopher's competence, and I am just about as far as can be from those morals and virtues. But this is, to use a term that has somehow crept into the English language while I wasn't looking, a case of humble bragging. Poliziano disclaims the status of philosopher so that he can claim a status he cherishes more, that of the scholar or philologist, or as he puts it in Latin, grammaticus. His use of this word is apt to mislead, as it makes Poliziano sound like a mere schoolteacher. He refers to the late ancient Christian commentator John Philoponus as an illustrious predecessor, since Philoponus was nicknamed the grammarian. But this is rather ironic, because Philoponus's bitter enemy Simplicius had applied that label to him precisely in order to sneer at his lack of philosophical expertise. For Simplicius, being a grammarian really did just mean teaching children their letters. For Poliziano though, it is a much more exalted occupation, one that calls for expertise on philosophical texts and much more besides. A grammaticus should work with texts of all kinds. The true philologist is the scholar who, in the words of modern day interpreter Christopher Celenza, has the breadth of vision suitable to confront human intellectual activity in all of its variety. Poliziano's Lamia is a defense of this approach from certain unnamed critics, colleagues at the University of Florence, hence the title. He compares these critics to the bloodsucking sorceresses called Lamia mentioned by ancient authors like Ovid. Poliziano's backbiting rivals are contemptuous of him because they think him incompetent to teach philosophy, as he's been doing at the university. Poliziano's response is that his comprehensive mastery of antiquity includes an understanding of the texts he's been lecturing on. As he says, I am an interpreter of Aristotle, not a philosopher. While he professes to admire those who do earn the title of philosopher, it's clear why he might want to distance himself from that title. As he understands it, philosophers are not scholars immersed in texts, but rather otherworldly figures. Evoking a portrait of the philosophical life drawn by Socrates in Plato's Theaetetus, Poliziano speaks of the philosopher as being at a loss when it comes to the practicalities of everyday life. In particular, he's politically adrift. He doesn't know how to get to the forum, and doesn't even know where the Senate meets. There's more irony here, since some contemporaries saw Poliziano himself as an out-of-touch pedant. Between him and Bartolomeo Scala, who rose to the powerful office of chancellor in Florence, there raged one of those feuds that have become one of the more familiar and, if we're honest, entertaining features of Italian humanism. Scala mocked Poliziano for his concern with such trivia as whether the first vowel in the name Virgil should be an I or an E. The practically and politically minded Scala much preferred the work of earlier humanists like Salutati and Poggio. And there's no denying that Poliziano was a master of philological minutiae and also a book lover, quite literally, according to an admiring biography of him written in the late 15th century, which describes him waking up in the middle of the night and stroking the volumes on his shelves like a wife and a girlfriend. Unlike the earlier Salutati and Poggio, he entered the field of philology when it was already highly developed and was producing learned commentaries on classical texts where any originality the commentator might have was typically drowned in a sea of detailed textual remarks. As Anthony Grafton has put it in a study of Poliziano, in such texts waves of notes printed in minute type break on all sides of a small island of text, that is, the text being commented upon. Poliziano broke with his tradition by collecting his miscellaneous learned remarks so as to highlight his own perspicacity as a textual critic. My favorite of the details he brought to light is, inevitably, his point that the ancient Latin word camelo pardis is the same in meaning as the 15th century girafa, a loanword from Arabic. That, by the way, is not the only giraffe that lopes into our story. One contemporary witness records that Lorenzo de' Medici received one as a gift from the Sultan of Babylon. Like that remarkable livestock shipment, bettering the achievements of the earlier humanists was going to be a tall order. But Poliziano achieved it by adopting a new, more historically grounded approach to philology. Whereas some measured all Latin prose against the standards set by Cicero, he realized that individual authors have their own styles and that good style also changes over time. For this reason, he was not that impressed by the theory of literary aesthetics he found in Aristotle. Whereas Aristotle believed that all good drama should conform to certain universal rules, Poliziano was more interested in the distinctive goals pursued by each poet. And his approach yielded other insights that are still applied by philologists. In fact, some of them came up in that interview we did with Oliver Primavesi about Byzantine manuscripts. In particular, Poliziano realized that if one manuscript can be shown to have been copied from another, then the copy adds no additional information, and the same when it comes to historical narratives. In both cases, only independent evidence should be taken into account. Or as Poliziano put it, the testimonies of the ancients should not be so much counted up as weighed. If Poliziano was Florence's greatest philosophically minded philologist, then Ficino was its greatest philologically minded philosopher. From early on in his career, he was distancing himself from a rhetorical approach and adopting a philosophical one. As a young man, he wrote to a friend, let us speak in the manner of philosophers, despising everywhere words and bringing forth weighty utterances. Perhaps taking a cue from Socrates in platonic dialogues like the Gorgias and Protagoras in which sophists are mocked for offering long speeches aiming at persuasion, rather than straightforward statements aiming at truth, Ficino complained that philology too often meant speaking at undue superfluous length. One reason he admired the neo-Platonist Plotinus, to whose works he devoted so much effort, was that Plotinus instead used a compressed, extremely brief style, which is certainly an accurate assessment. What of Plato himself, whose works are far more readable than those of Plotinus? Well, the dialogues adopt a more complex approach to philosophical discourse in which Plato's own views are rarely put forth. Only in a few texts, like the Laws, does Ficino think this happens. Usually the characters in the dialogues represent multiple points of view and express theories that may be only probable being like the truth rather than necessarily the truth itself. We'll look more at Ficino's work on Plato in the next episode. For now let's return to the context that made that work possible. Did Cosimo really arrange for the foundation of a new academy in the suburbs of Florence, where Ficino could immerse himself in Platonic scholarship? In a word, no. At least, that is the conclusion persuasively established by James Hankins, who in a pair of articles published back in the early 1990s poured cold water on the story of the Florentine Academy. For one thing, as Hankins nicely put it, it is highly improbable that the aged Cosimo would have entrusted a dreamy 29 year old medical school dropout with a major cultural initiative. For another thing, not a single contemporary source, apart from Ficino, speaks of such an institution. This despite the fact that humanists were falling over themselves to praise Cosimo for his support of humanist culture. When Poliziano and others do praise the Medici, what they especially highlight is their extravagance in paying for those luxury items that kept the humanists awake at night, books. And it's this, according to Hankins, that lies behind a famous passage in which Ficino seems to say that Cosimo, having been inspired by an encounter with Emistos Plithon, was moved to set up a so-called academy. As we know, Plithon did attend the Ecumenical Church Council at Florence. It was in fact a major diplomatic coup for the Medici that they got the council to be held in their city. But it seems most likely that Ficino is metaphorically explaining that Cosimo acquired a copy of Plato's dialogues based on a manuscript brought to Italy by Plithon. When Ficino goes on to say that Cosimo conceived deep in his mind a kind of academy and charged Ficino himself with bringing that project to its fruition, the word academy is another metaphor referring to a Latin version of Plato's writings. Likewise, when Ficino alludes in various places to his colleagues as academics, he seems to mean not members of an institution based in his house at Carreggi, but simply fellow humanists and students, to whom he offered private instruction in the urban setting of Florence itself. So that's kind of disappointing, but it should not detract from our excitement at Ficino's achievement. Even if he did consult previous translations for some dialogues, it was a staggering feat to render all of Plato, plus a wide swathe of Neoplatonism from Greek into Latin. The right reaction is the one displayed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Ficino tells us himself that Pico came to Florence at Cosimo de' Medici's behest and arrived on the very day that Ficino's Plato edition was published. The two celebrated this historic literary event, and then Pico advised Ficino to get to work on Plotinus. In due course, Pico too would become an intimate of the Medici. He was in attendance at the deathbed of Lorenzo, who showed his zeal for patronage to the last, supposedly remarking to Pico, I only wish I could put off the time of my death to the day when I should have completed your library. Pico was cherished by Ficino and also by Poliziano, who extolled him as a truly complete humanist scholar. It's hard not to agree. In addition to studying the Platonist literature made available by Ficino and writing a text called On Being a Unity at the behest of Poliziano, who wanted him to evaluate the relative merits of Platonism and Aristotelianism, Pico also learned Hebrew and studied the Kabbalah, learned Arabic and studied a Varroist Aristotelian philosophy, got involved in a celebrated argument over the importance of style and philosophy, and monumentally annoyed the Pope by persistently defending theses that the Church thought might be heretical, but got away with it in the end. Maybe I should instead have been fantasizing about being Pico all these years. But let's not give up on Ficino just yet, since we still have to look properly at the ideas he extracted from his study of Plato, Plotinus, and later Neoplatonists, and see how he embraced frankly pagan ideas with an enthusiasm not seen since Platon. This embrace was of course a purely Platonic relationship, as we'll see next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps