Juan Luis Vives: Politics, Rhetoric, and Emotions

262 Pages·2022·25.842 MB·English

by  Kaarlo Havu

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Kaarlo Havu
Juan Luis Vives: Politics,
Rhetoric, and Emotions
By looking at rhetoric and politics, this book offers a novel account of Juan
Luis Vives’ intellectual oeuvre. It argues that Vives adjusted rhetorical the-
ory to a monarchical context in which direct speech was not a possibility,
demonstrated how Erasmian languages of ethical self-government and
political peace were actualised rhetorically and critically in a princely envi-
ronment, and finally, rethought the cognitive and emotional foundations of
humanist rhetoric in his late and famous De anima et vita (1538). Ultimately,
towards the end of his life, Vives epitomised a distinctively cognitive view
of politics; he maintained that political concord was not a direct outcome
of institutional or legal reform or of the spiritual transformation of the
Christian world (an optimistic Erasmian interpretation) but that concord
could only be upheld once the dynamics of emotions that motivated politi-
cal action were understood and controlled through responsible rhetoric that
respected decorum and civility.
Kaarlo Havu works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki,
Finland. He specialises in early modern intellectual history and has published
on Renaissance humanism, political thought, and the history of rhetoric.
Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of
Knowledge
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(University of St Andrews, UK)
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This series explores Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge
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Juan Luis Vives: Politics,
Rhetoric, and Emotions
Kaarlo Havu
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 Kaarlo Havu
The right of Kaarlo Havu to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-032-14669-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-14671-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-24045-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003240457
Typeset in Times New Roman
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Becoming a Humanist: From Paris to Louvain (1514–1520) 19
2 Conversation and the Rhetoric of Counsel (Around 1520) 59
3 Managing Discord: Vives on Politics (1523–1529) 97
4 Redefining Rhetoric in De disciplinis (1530–1531) 137
5 Rhetorical Decorum and the Functioning of
the Soul (1532–1540) 174
Conclusion 212
Bibliography 222
Index 249
Acknowledgements
There are several people and institutions I wish to thank for their support
without which finishing this book would have been impossible. The European
University Institute, the University of Helsinki, and the University of York
have provided a stimulating atmosphere for the development of my thought.
The Academy of Finland, the Alfred Kordelin Foundation, and the Niilo
Helander Foundation have all believed in my work.
There are also a number of colleagues who I want to thank for their
intellectual and emotional encouragement throughout the project. At the
EUI, Martin van Gelderen and Antonella Romano, both in their own ways,
helped me to broaden my understanding of early modern intellectual cul-
ture. At the University of Helsinki, I am particularly grateful to Markku
Peltonen and Kari Saastamoinen for their comments and healthy criticism.
I have also greatly appreciated the intellectual and moral support of Jonas
Gerlings, Matti Lamela, Brian Olesen, Alan Granadino González, Tupu
Ylä-Anttila, and all those who attended the intellectual history working
group seminar at the EUI and the seminar of history at the University
of Helsinki.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my lovely parents Eva and Jukka,
to my sister Laura and her family, and to all my other relatives. Last but
certainly not least, Eeva, Tuomas, and Mikael have offered me love and
support throughout the project.
Introduction
In 1538, towards the end of his life, Juan Luis Vives (1492/3–1540) wrote
in his preface to De anima et vita (hereafter De anima) that knowledge of
emotions was ‘the foundation of all moral philosophy, whether private, or
public’.1 The explicit link indicated between the understanding of emotions,
ethics (private moral philosophy), and politics (public moral philosophy) in
this well-known passage has often been praised as one of the many signs of
the modernity of Vives’s psychology.2 In many of these accounts, De anima
has been seen as the moment of the emergence of an anti-metaphysical
and ethically orientated interpretation of the operation of the soul, which
anticipated a distinctively modern and experimental attitude to psychology.
With a focus on De anima as a moment of striking originality that hints
at things to come, these readings have primarily been future orientated,
and, consequently, less interested in the historical (conceptual, political,
cultural) framework within which questions of the soul arose.3 Because of
this, they have largely ignored the extent to which late medieval philosophy
had inspected the operation of mental faculties in a metaphysical vacuum,
and they have rarely elucidated the complexity of the moral and political
questions that De anima was seeking to answer.4
The purpose of this book is to offer a historical account of Vives’s politi-
cal and ethical thought by placing it in the context of his views on rhetoric.
The study sustains that rhetoric, with its powers to shape and direct the
mind, provides a link between humanist practices of ethical self-cultivation,
civic participation, political concord, and Vives’s theory of emotions as it
was outlined in De anima. It suggests that Vives, who never developed a
systematic political or ethical philosophy, engaged deeply with the cognitive
and emotional basis of ethics and politics in his encounter with rhetoric.
This, I believe, is more than of anecdotal interest and has broader signifi-
cance for our understanding of humanist political thought, which, as James
Hankins has recently argued, has often been brushed aside as ‘mere rheto-
ric’.5 Through Vives, I aim to show that much of his work was intended as a
reflective take on the most pressing political and religious issues of the time.
My main argument is that Vives, in a particularly tumultuous moment
in European religious and political history, gradually developed a view of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003240457-1
2 Introduction
rhetoric that came to underscore the pivotal significance of what in classical
rhetorical theory was referred to as decorum (appropriateness, propriety).6
As I will show, Vives’s interpretation of decorum linked the standard mod-
ern meaning (propriety of conduct and speech) with a promise that only
through decorum persuasive speech was possible. This decorum was more
than a rhetorical principle; it served as a nexus between his theory of ethical
self-government, political concord, and rhetorical practice.
In scholarship on Vives, it has been common to emphasise that ethical
self-control and virtue resulted from the control of harmful passions, and
that political concord followed from the virtuous behaviour of those in
power. As I aim to show, these issues were intrinsically linked with rhet-
oric since language played a pivotal role in the construction of emotional
dispositions and in the activation of specific emotions. In stressing the suit-
ability of one’s speech to socially accepted rules and the avoidance of open
verbal confrontation, Vives wanted to secure that strong and harmful pas-
sions were suppressed, which contributed to the ethical self-government of
the speaker and his/her audience and, consequently, to political and reli-
gious concord. Yet this rhetoric of decorum simultaneously implied that,
when one combined knowledge of socially accepted rules with a meticulous
understanding of the emotional dispositions of one’s audience, one could
speak convincingly, realise the humanist ideal of an active life in the ser-
vice of the community, and enhance political concord. Lastly, I argue that
this interpretation of the ars rhetorica, formulated most clearly in the 1530s,
must be seen as a solution to the political and religious discord of the time
which, for Vives, was partly due to the potential of adversarial rhetoric to
divide humans and destabilise concord. These concerns, I suggest, provide
a significant context to much of what is stated in De anima about the con-
nection between knowledge of the soul and moral philosophy.
Vives and Northern Humanism
One of the underlying hypotheses of the study is that rhetoric offers an inter-
disciplinary perspective on Vives, which enables us to go beyond internal
histories of political thought, the mind, or the emotions, whether contextual
or longue durée. The book does not, however, merely reconstruct a system-
atic or thematic account of Vives’s theory of rhetoric and politics. It rather
aims to show that Vives’s attempts to delineate a rhetoric of decorum and to
connect rhetorical and moral philosophy with knowledge of emotions can
be seen as a historically specific reflection of the educational, rhetorical, eth-
ical, and political projects of a generation of Northern humanists. Reading
Vives in the context of Northern humanism illuminates what he was doing
in his rhetorical works and in De anima, but it also allows us to better grasp
a particularly interesting take on the rhetorical and emotional presupposi-
tions of the broader Northern humanist reform movement. As Margo Todd
has argued, this reform movement, epitomised by Erasmus’s work, aimed at
Introduction 3
‘the moral reconstruction of the social order’ both in spiritual and earthly
matters.7 I, therefore, trace Vives’s attitude towards ethics, politics, and
rhetoric in a close connection with the faith of Northern humanism from
its early optimism of the 1510s about the malleability and perfectibility of
humankind to the gloomier late 1530s. I contend that Vives’s work brings
to light a largely unknown strain of Northern humanist thought that, in
the 1530s, outlined a distinct approach to rhetoric as an art of decorum and
grounded this interpretation of the ars rhetorica in a theory of the soul.
To read Vives in the context of Northern humanism, while not a highly
controversial move, is not without its problems. In the first place, Vives is
undeniably a peculiar figure in the historiography of Northern humanism.
It is often pointed out that he was considered a member of the leading tri-
umvirate of transalpine humanism alongside Desiderius Erasmus (1466–
1536) and Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), and many of his works, especially
De disciplinis (1531) and De anima, have been praised for their scope, qual-
ity, and pivotal importance for humanist culture.8 Still, while his stature as
a humanist is recognised, he has been omitted even from companions to
Renaissance humanism. Indeed, in comparison to Erasmus, Thomas More
(1478–1535), or even Guillaume Budé, he remains a largely unknown thinker
in the Anglophone world despite being the second most frequently printed
Catholic humanist in the sixteenth century after Erasmus.9
Perhaps the primary reason for this neglect is that in the aftermath of
the formation of national traditions of historiography, there has been some
confusion as to the intellectual context in which Vives should be placed.
Whereas a strong Belgian tradition, originating in the work of Henry De
Vocht, has considered Vives a Northern humanist, many Anglophone schol-
ars have willingly adopted him into the circles of Tudor reformers, and, more
importantly, Spanish scholarship has often sought a place for Vives within
a distinctively national narrative.10 This was particularly important for a
well-established nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish conservative
tradition – epitomised by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo and Adolfo Bonilla
y San Martín – which saw Vives both as an orthodox Catholic thinker and
as a strikingly original Spanish philosopher who anticipated some of the
major developments of later European philosophy (Baconian empiricism,
Cartesian method, Scottish philosophy). When the conservative paradigm
was challenged in the 1960s due to new findings that proved the converso
background of Vives’s family, Spanish history did not lose its centrality.11 In
the most influential work on Vives in the twentieth century, Carlos Noreña’s
Juan Luis Vives (1970), the Iberian element was not forgotten, although it
was given a distinct reading within the Jewish strand of Spanish history.
Noreña, who was acutely aware of Vives’s European dimension and focused
extensively on his Central European connections, still placed his basic men-
tality inside the Spanish converso-tradition.12 In a similar spirit, and despite
the rapid opening of Spanish academia to international currents in the post-
Franco era, it has been quite common to acknowledge Vives’s prominent