Leonardo da Vinci (fèin-phortraid) "Boireannach le Eirmin" (1489-90)
Leabhar 1 Earrann 2/2 - ÈIRIGH NA SMAOINE
FEALLSANACHAIL DAONNAIRICH
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Volume 1 Part 2/2 - THE RISE OF HUMANISTIC
PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT
In the meanwhile the ecclesiastically unified culture broke down. It was no longer dominated by the high medieval conception of the "Corpus Christianum". This breakdown was partially prepared by the powerful influence of nominalistic spheres of culture. They undermined the medieval hierarchical Idea of social life and they revealed individualistic tendencies wherever they unfolded (1).
The hierarchical institutional Roman Catholic Church had undermined its own influence by secularization. Political life and economy now broke loose from its unifying grasp. And science, art, ethics, and the faith of the individual soon followed suit.
The collapse of the ecclesiastically unified culture.
National states began to form which re-conquered piece by piece the terrain lost by the Church. They employed the most unscrupulous means to strengthen and maintain their power. Economic life emancipated itself by all sorts of evasion of the canon law's prohibition of interest and of the doctrine of the justum pretium. Supported by the discovery of the new gold- and silvermines, finance assumed an increasingly central position. The rise of large-scale industry and business brought about an expanded establishment of credit. An early capitalism arose with all of its social problems And the discovery of the sea routes to America and India opened unlimited perspectives for the future.
Medieval society, impregnated with the organic guild-idea, saw its foundations methodically undermined. The process of social differentiation and individualization began: the individual began to feel free and independent in all spheres. The contact with the East, established by the Crusades, brought contact with other religions. Presently, when in the general process of secularization, the absoluteness of the Christian religion was relativized by philosophy to the highest stage in the development from natural religion, this contact became the stimulus of a strongly neo-Platonic and mystic-theosophically tinged "universal theism". In Italy the prophet of this theism was GEORGIUS GEMISTHOS PLETHON, the spiritual father of the Platonic academy at Florence. In Germany, the movement was led by MUTIANUS RUFUS, the Erfurter humanist.
After the discovery of the pure sources of Greek and Roman culture an additional resentment was present in the struggle against the barbarian linguistic forms of scholasticism. This resentment arose against the mutulation of the ancient world- and life-view due to its synthesis with Christianity. Especially in Italy, the first cradle of the Humanistic Renaissance, the side of the ancient world-view was often taken without reserve.
The transition to a new historical period announced itself in this revolutionary ferment. A great Humanistic spiritual movement arose. It soon methodically built its secularized outlook upon a new cultural basis and impressed its own religious mark upon philosophy.
In Germany, and especially in the Netherlands, the paths of a so-called Biblical Humanism and Reformation temporarily crossed; yet the tendencies to complete the secularization of Christian doctrine were present from the start in a preponderatingly moralistic interpretation of the Holy Scripture, as it was found in ERASMUS and other Biblical Humanists. In my previously cited work, "In the struggle for a Christian politics", this whole development has been treated in detail. In the present context it was only necessary that we should prepare our inquiry into the basic structure of the transcendental ground-Idea of Humanistic thought.
A closer consideration of the religious ground-motive of Humanism: the motive of nature and freedom.
We have seen, that this transcendental Idea is determined by the religious ground-motive which since KANT must be designated as the motive of nature and freedom. We must now pay closer attention to the latter.
This new dialectical motive rests upon an absolute secularization of the Biblical motive of creation and Christian freedom (as a fruit of redemption). After introducing a fundamental change in their original religious meaning, it assimilated also the central motives of Greek and scholastic philosophy. We shall subsequently discover the form-matter motive and the motive of nature and grace in an entirely new Humanistic sense in the philosophy of LEIBNIZ and KANT.
The ambiguity of the Humanistic motive of freedom.
Unlike that of the Greeks and the scholastic thinkers, the inner dialectic of the Humanistic ground-motive is not born out of a conflict between two different religions. The deepest root of its dialectical character lies in the ambiguity of the Humanistic freedom-motive. The latter is the central driving force of the modern religion of human personality. And from its own depths it calls forth the motive to dominate nature, and thus leads to a religion of autonomous objective science in which there is no room for the free personality. Nevertheless, the religious self-surrender to autonomous science is, in the last analysis, nothing but the religion of autonomous human personality itself, which splits itself up into two opposite directions, not to be reconciled in a really critical Humanistic self-reflection. This is the result of the Humanistic secularization of the Christian motives of creation and freedom in Jesus Christ. By this secularization the insight into the religious radical unity of human personality is entirely lost.
In its motive of freedom, Humanism requires absolute autonomy for human personality. This implies a rejection of all faith in authority and of any conception according to which man is subject to a law not imposed by his own reason. However, this secularized freedom-motive displayed various tendencies which came into conflict with one another.
Modern man wished to have his destiny in his own hands, and therefore he wished to free himself from all faith in "supernatural" powers. Humanism applied the Copernican revolution in astronomy to the sphere of religion. The latter must concentrate on man and his religious needs. It must no longer require man to surrender completely to a Sovereign Creator and Redeemer, it could no longer be based upon a "heteronomous" Divine Revelation.
The Idea of a personal God could be accepted only in so far as the autonomous personality has need of it. This Idea could be accepted as a metaphysical foundation for the truth of mathematical thought (DESCARTES), as a postulate of practical reason (KANT), or as a requirement of religious feeling (ROUSSEAU). It may be accepted in any other Humanistic form, but it may never be held to be the fruit of the self-revelation of a sovereign God.
The new ideal of personality of the Renaissance.
In the Renaissance the new religion of personality also secularized the Christian idea of regeneration. The ideal of personality preached by the Renaissance in its first appearance in Italy required a renascimento of man which should ring in a new period. This ideal of personality is permeated with an unquenchable thirst for temporal life and with a Faustian desire to subject the world to itself.
The individualistic orientation of the new Humanistic freedom-motive during the first phase of its development led the nominalistic tendencies of late scholasticism in a new direction.
The Occamist depreciation of natural reason was replaced by a truly religious confidence in its liberating power.
The new ideal of personality expressed itself originally in a strongly aristocratically tinted life- and world-view. And it scarcely wished to mask its antithesis with the ecclesiastically bound outlook of the Middle Ages.
In Italy in the 15th century this ideal of personality had become the watchword of the new period which, as we observed above, expected a "renascimento" in a Humanistic sense. The Idea of the "uomo universale" is voiced in LEO BATTISTA ALBERTI'S autobiography as well as in the figure of LEONARDO DA VINCI. This new ideal was soon to spread over all the lands which were bearers of the culture of the Renaissance (2). And even at the start it was filled with a Faustian spirit, which looked forward to the progress of culture, and sought this progress in the subjugation of nature by scientific investigation which knows no authority higher than science.
The motive of the domination of nature and the ambiguity of the nature-motive.
For from the very beginning the Humanistic motive of freedom led to a revolution in the modern view of nature.
The Greek vision of physis was, as we saw, dominated by the religious motive of matter and form. In the light of the form-motive nature bears a teleological character, and gives expression to the Greek Idea of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
The motive of matter with its unpredictable and orderless anangkè led the Greek view of nature to the extreme counterpole of the super-sensory form: the mysterious depths of life and death in the eternal process of growth and decay.
The Biblical Christian view of nature was dominated by the central motive of creation, fall, and redemption. The revelation of the radical depravity of nature due to sin casts an infinitely darker shadow over the temporal cosmos than that of the Greek motive of matter.
Humanism broke in principle with both the Greek and the Christian view of nature. It had intended to free human personality from all faith in super-natural powers. It also intended to emancipate nature from the bonds of this faith. Modern autonomous man considers the "immeasurable nature" external to himself in the same way that he thinks of himself. That is to say, the same ambiguity which is inherent in the Humanistic motive of freedom will also reveal itself in the motive of nature.
"Unmeasurable nature" can be viewed as a macrocosmic reflection of the autonomous freedom of human personality. In this case Humanism yields to an aesthetic enjoyment of the "creating freedom" which reveals itself in nature. But nature can also be viewed as a reflection of the Faustian domination-motive, which permeated the Humanistic ideal of personality from the very beginning. In this case nature can only be viewed as an object that can be dominated by autonomous science.
The motive of nature now becomes a new motive of domination, which can only lead to a deterministic theoretical view of reality. GALILEO and NEWTON laid the foundations for modern mathematical natural science. Grasping the phenomena of nature, according to their mathematical aspects and their aspects of movement and energy, in a system of functional causal relations, natural science actually pointed towards the way which would enable us to rule natural phenomena.
After these foundations had been laid, Humanism embraced this new scientific method with a religious passion, and elevated it to a universal model for thought. All of reality should be construed in terms of this new method. To this end, all modal structures of individuality, which are grounded upon the divine order of creation, must be methodically demolished. Autonomous theoretical thought will now recreate the cosmos by means of the exact concepts of mathematical natural science. It will bring forth a structureless view of reality, in which all phenomena are ordered in a continuous causal series. At this point the dialectical tension between the motive of nature and that of freedom is directly in evidence.
Nature conceived of in this way does not have any place for an autonomous freedom of human personality.
This religious dialectic was henceforth to dominate Humanistic philosophy. In our transcendental critique of theoretical thought we have become familiar with the general lines of this process. We have seen how primacy is alternatively ascribed to either of the antagonistic motives, and how the attempt is made to draw a line of demarcation between their two separate spheres of validity while recognizing their polar antithesis. We have become familiar with the attempts to bridge over this religious antithesis by means of a dialectic manner of thought, and we are acquainted with the subsequent disruption of this apparent synthesis.
The Renaissance did not explicitly develop the model of thought of modern natural science. Nevertheless, it displayed, in its developed ideal of personality, the germ of the ambiguity that we have indicated above. At least, we are safe in saying, that it contained the tendencies of a new science-ideal, which was directed toward the domination of nature. Naturally, as long as this motive of domination did not lead to a deterministic view of nature, the conflict with the motive of freedom was not in evidence. But this domination-motive was predisposed to a deterministic view of reality according to its religious meaning, and in time could only develop with an inner necessity in this direction.
Late scholasticism had lost itself in endless conceptual distinctions. The rising Humanism turned away from such "formalistic hairsplitting" and wished to show its sovereign power over the cosmos. The watchword "to the things themselves" was given; not only in critical philology, but also in the research of endless nature, in which, since COPERNICUS' introduction of the heliocentric view of the world, the earth had lost its central position. The autonomous human personality wished to test its unlimited power of expansion in the endless spaces of the universe.
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(1) In this connection see the important study of PAUL HÖNNIGHEIM, Zur Soziologie der mittelalterlichen Scholastik (Die soziologische Bedeutung der nominalistischen Philosophie) in Hauptprobleme der Soziologie, Erinnerungsgabe für MAX WEBER (1923), S. 173-221. [On Sociology of Medieval Scholasticism (The Sociological Significance of Nominalistic Philosophy, in Chief Problems of Sociology, Memorial Gift for MAX WEBER (1923), pp. 173-221].
(2) See JACOB BURCKHARDT'S Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ch. II in 1 /4, pp. 143 ff.
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(Herman Dooyeweerd, New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol I/ Part2/2 pp 188-194)
