Lorenzo Valla and the Intellectual Origins of Humanist Dialectic

Abstract

Lorenzo Valla and the Intellectual Origins of Humanist Dialectic* LISA JARDINE FOLLOWING THE IMPORTANT WORK of Hans Baron, discussions of "intellectual origins" in the emergence of humanism have centered on the convictions and ideals associated with the political ferment in Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries ,j Intellectual historians have tended to choose one of two distinct approaches when considering topics in humanism: either they have attempted to map the correspondences between political and social change and changes in attitude characteristic of humanists (for instance, Baron's tracing of Bruni's intellectual development in the face of changes in the Florentine political situation2); or they have concerned themselves with the internal growth within selected specialist fields which humanists , by virtue of their civic role, were chiefly concerned with.3The former approach offers a causal explanation for shifts in interest and attitude; the latter tells us a great deal about what humanism entailed for the development of particular fields of study. What happens as a result of this separation (by the very nature of the differing types of inquiry involved) is that the question ofphilosophical motivation is almost entirely overlooked. Changes in attitude are explained on the one hand as caused by the need to reconcile moral and political theory with changing social realities, and on the other as the direct consequence of cross-correlation of previously separated texts, revisions of manuals, the exigencies of curricula. Yet a recent seminal article by J. E. Seigel has shown that Bruni's "Ciceronianism" may be interpreted more plausibly as a response to his clear understanding of Cicero's intellectual case for a particular relation between rhetoric and moral philosophy, than as the outcome of "civic humanism" in Florence.4In this case, Seigel shows, one may add to previous accounts of the emergence of cinquecento political ideas the humanist intellectual's own growing awareness of the case to be made philosophically for employing the strategies and attitudes of Cicero and the Romans, in preference to those of the scholastics. * I would like to extend grateful thanks to Professors N. Kretzmann, P. O. Kristeller, J. Hutton, C. B. Schmitt and A. T. Grafton, all of whom provided learned and helpful comments on a draft of this paper. I should also like to thank the members of my seminar on humanist dialectic at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, who participated in discussions out of which this paper grew. This paper was written during the tenure of a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Society for the Humanities, to the director and staff of which my thanks are due for making the work possible. LSee, for instance, H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1955; revised ed. 1966), and Humanistic and Political Literature in Florence and Venice at the Beginning of the Quattrocento (Cambridge, Mass., 1955). 2Baron, Crisis. 3On the relation between the role occupied by humanists in society and their fields of contribution see P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 2 vols. (New York, 1961, 1965). 4"'Civic Humanism' or Ciceronian Rhetoric?" Past and Present, 34 (1966), 3-48. [1431 144 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In the case of studies of humanist dialectic the effect of the separation of intellectual stimulus (the social and political climate) and internal development (the relation of one innovative text to the next) has had particularly striking consequences. The starting point for the flourishing discussions of the genealogy of textbook modifications has been the assumption that rhetoric (or "rhetoricized" dialectic) was more useful, politically and socially, than scholastic logic, and hence the natural focus of interest for humanist dialecticians. It is generally accepted that humanists instigated a movement of corruption of "genuine" logic, replacing it by a debased rhetorical study of little historical importance--an interregnum in the history of logic. 5 Now, historically, this is very odd. The new logic curriculum devised by humanists like Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola (at whose door logicians like the Kneales lay most of the blame for the degeneration of logic proper 6) displaced almost entirely the "genuine" logic of high scholasticism by 1530. It dominated logic teaching throughout northern Europe until the eighteenth century. While, as...

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