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The Humanists

The humanists set philosophy against the schools’ disputation and measured it by the life it makes. Petrarch, in On His Own Ignorance, answered the Aristotelians: “It is better to will the good than to know the truth”, satius est autem bonum velle quam verum nosse. Aristotle’s moral books had left him “more learned … but not better”, and “the true moral philosophers and useful teachers of the virtues are those whose first and last intention is to make hearer and reader good” (tr. Nachod).

Erasmus, in the Paraclesis prefaced to his Greek and Latin New Testament of 1516, called Christ’s teaching a philosophy and said what kind: “this kind of philosophy doth rather consist in the affects of the mind, than in subtle reasons. It is a life rather than a disputation. It is an inspiration rather than a science. And rather a new transformation, than a reasoning” (anonymous English, 1529).

Montaigne titled an essay “Que philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir”, that to philosophise is to learn to die, and opened it: “Cicero dit que Philosopher ce n’est autre chose que s’aprester à la mort”, Cicero says that to philosophise is nothing but to get ready for death; yet the whole work of reason should “tendre en somme à nous faire bien viure”, tend in sum to make us live well (Essais I.19 in the 1595 edition). “La Philosophie est celle qui nous instruict à viure”, philosophy is what instructs us to live, and it is the “ergotismes”, the quibbles of the schools, that have made it, even for people of understanding, “vn nom vain et fantastique”, an empty and fanciful name (I.25). And of himself: “Mon mestier et mon art, c’est viure”, my trade and my art is living (II.6).