The Humanists' Ethical View of Man as Citizen
Della Casa's theme of “conversation” implemented humanism's commitment to civic-minded allegiance to the community, excluding the recluse, the misanthrope, and the hermit. This bias invested much of the philosophical moral literature of the Italian Quattro- and Cinquecento, from Leonardo Bruni to Lorenzo Valla and on to, say, the Sienese Alessandro Piccolomini, a reader in philosophy at the University of Padua. In two versions of a lifetime work running from 1543 to 1582, Piccolomini spoke of the “animale civile e comunicativo” that thrives in the society of the city, whereas the hermit ceases to be truly human. Social living requires manners (costumi ) that are developed by education through literature and poetry, history and eloquence, the natural sciences being only instrumental.[32] Similarly, another Piccolomini, Francesco (1520–1604), stressed the scienza civile over and against the heroic virtue worthy only of heroes.[33] It was all part of that humanistic concern with the viver civile which runs through both Castiglione and Della Casa, continuing some specific themes of the medieval curial tradition and applying them to social conduct in new environments.[34]
Other ethical treatises embodying mature humanistic views were due to Sperone Speroni, Pietro Pomponazzi, Agostino Nifo, Giambattista Gelli, and Paolo Paruta.[35] In his Capricci del bottaio and Circe (1541–1548) the spirited Florentine shoemaker/philosopher/littérateur Gelli (1498–1563) dramatized the motif of man's freedom to choose between rising to the nobility of angels or stooping to the materiality of brutes—a motif that had been made famous by Pico della Mirandola's Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486).[36] Speroni was radical in his defense
of the active life (in the second part of his Dialoghi, Venetia 1552, new ed. Venezia 1596: 180–215). Marc-Antoine Muret's Roman oration De moralis philosophiae laudibus (1563) extolled ethics above the natural sciences and the contemplative life, as the philosophy of the active man in the full blossoming of the civic community. In his Della perfezione della vita politica (1579) Paruta proclaimed that a goal of philosophy was preparation for the active life, incomparably superior to the works of the solitary man who lives only for himself. On a more professional philosophical level, a host of commentaries on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics carried on the message of the superiority of praxis to pure contemplation, as part of civic humanism's stress on the citizen's duty toward the social group: we are human only by being an active part of society. Referring to the works of Bernardo Segni, Agostino Nifo, Crisostomo Javelli Canapicio, Felice Figliucci, A. Scaino, Antonio Brucioli, Pietro Pomponazzi, Simone Porzio, and Torquato Tasso (Dialoghi ), one of the most authoritative students of this literature, Eugenio Garin (1965: 204), found it to be generally lacking in originality and ultimately sterile, even while it perpetuated an important message of Quattrocento humanism. Yet, for all its relative platitude, what interests us in this once successful production is the continuous vitality of specific motifs of chivalric and courtly virtues, which, rather than being overtly brought forth in treatises with a specific chivalric/courtly theme, were generalized, disguised, and eventually assimilated to classical virtues.