Ullrich Langer

The Renaissance Novella as Justice

This essay examines short narrative (the Decameron, the Heptameron, the histoire tragique, and Till Eulenspiegel) as reflections of different models of justice within the Aristotelian-Ciceronian tradition. The exchanges among characters, and the conclusion of these exchanges, are patterned in ways that provide justice without requiring the virtuousness of any one character. The link between short narrative and justice illuminates the more general relationship between literature and moral language in the Renaissance.

Montaigne and skepticism

Montaigne has been called the founder of modern skepticism. According to this view, he was the first to put forward in a compelling way the arguments of ancient skepticism that had been rediscovered in the sixteenth century. The “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaignes longest and most explicitly philosophical essay, presents the skeptical case in a sympathetic way and that presentation has been taken to express Montaignes own philosophical position. But is Montaigne a skeptic? Is his philosophical stance a reappropriation of ancient skepticism or is he rather a profoundly original philosopher who in some way incorporates a skeptical tone or “moment” within his own original thought? ANCIENT SKEPTICISM The history of ancient skepticism spans five centuries, from the third century b.c. to approximately 200 a.d. Skepticism was not, however, one continuous philosophical movement or school. Rather, there were two forms of skepticism, the Pyrrhonian and the Academic. Pyrrho of Elis, the first skeptic, left no writings, so that what we know of him comes through his disciple Timon and Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Pyrrho. Academic skepticism emerged out of Plato’s Academy when Arcesilaus became head of the Academy in the third century b.c. The Academic skeptics were inspired by the Socratic dialectic of some of the earlier dialogues. Carneades became head of the Academy in the mid-second century b.c. and continued the skeptical tradition there. Aenesidemus broke away from the New Academy and founded a movement based on a revival of Pyrrhonism.

Lyric in the Renaissance: From Petrarch to Montaigne

Ullrich Langer begins by carefully distinguishing between the ‘lyric’ poetry of premodern times and what the term has come to mean since the eighteenth century. However, he finds in early modern poetry a ‘hint of modernity’ that also separates it from classical poetry ‘through the existential singular which it puts forth especially with and after Petrarch’ (p. 6). Langer covers a great deal of critical ground in relatively few pages, with chapters devoted to Petrarch, Charles d’Orleans, Ronsard, Du Bellay, and, less predictably, Montaigne. As he points out, his choice of authors, which could have included Marot, Sceve, or Labe, is somewhat ‘arbitrary’ (p. 18). This is therefore not a comprehensive study of the widespread influence of Petrarchism, which was of course not limited to France. Instead, Langer considers what ‘Petrarch does’ or achieves in the Canzoniere, and how the textual practices of subsequent authors reflect ‘the intensity of certain features of Petrarch’s poetic language’ — authors who were not necessarily influenced by direct contact with Petrarch’s poetry, but who picked up ‘elements of his writing through the mediation of later poets and editors’ (p. 17). In the first chapter, appropriately devoted to Petrarch, Langer seeks to differentiate between the ‘existential singular’ that characterizes the poet’s lyric production and the ‘classical rhetorical common place’ (p. 26). Petrarch’s poetry, due to its insistence on the intensity of love and its effects on an isolated individual, cannot be reconciled with the shared premises and the goal of persuasion of classical rhetoric. To buttress his arguments, Langer provides close readings of excerpts from the Canzoniere, comparing some of them with quotes from Ovid and Horace. In the following chapters, Langer finds variations on Petrarchan ‘singularity’ within the works of the French authors he has chosen, all of whom echo the fact that ‘Petrarch’s Canzoniere is not foremost an exemplary document in which all those struck by Petrarchan love can find general truths’ (p. 49). Within the context of the pervasive melancholy or nonchaloir of Charles d’Orleans, ‘the particular emerges in questions “why am I this?” or “why have I been lost?” and in answers to those self-interrogations’ (p. 52). In Les Amours de Cassandre, Ronsard’s lyric ‘is complementing and softening Petrarch’s radicalness, in representing mutuality at the heart of erotic longing’ (p. 101). At once an imitator and a satirist (‘Contre les Petrarquistes’) of the Petrarchan tradition, Du Bellay, whose poetry often ‘seems closer to prose, closer to commentary’ (p. 104), also provides a transition to Montaigne. Langer justifies his inclusion of the Essais in his book by asserting that Montaigne shows ‘both an awareness of the singularity of lyric language and an acute appreciation of the ethical (or anti-ethical) scenarios implied by love lyric’ (p. 125). Whether or not the chapter on Montaigne is appropriately placed within this work, readers will find it to be, like the rest of the book, well informed and insightful. Langer’s detailed, erudite, yet very readable study will be of interest to a wide readership.

Montaigne on moral philosophy and the good life

Moral philosophy today is not what it was in the Athens of Socrates and Plato, nor what it was in Montaignes France. Philosophers today tend to think their task is, as Alexander Nehamas puts it, “to offer systematically connected answers to a set of independently given problems.” Philosophy is understood, moreover, as a largely if not wholly theoretical enterprise. Montaigne did not see it that way; and if we want to understand his relation to moral philosophy we need to begin by asking what he could have taken it to be. We must moreover include some consideration of how he saw the good life. With everyone else, he took it that in ancient philosophy - the philosophy he mainly studied - the pursuit of philosophy and the pursuit of the good life were inseparable. In this chapter I examine his reactions to some views of moral philosophy that he scrutinized with great care. I then consider what bearing his responses had on the moral philosophy that came after him, which for convenience I will refer to as modern moral philosophy.

Hypothetical Necessity and Fiction in the Early Renaissance

The figure of the poet and the role of the reader in Renaissance fiction have been the focus of much critical attention: Robert Durlings classic analysis of the poet in epic, and Terence Caves recent studies of the reader and reading are two emblematic cases.1 The poet and the reader are roughly the two poles of the communicative situation, and the emergence of strong poet and reader figures are signs of the increased insistence on the process of communication in the early modern period. Increased rhetorical self-consciousness also problematizes that communicative process, and one may argue consequently for the emergence of epistemological issues in the literature of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Turning Toward the Beloved (Virgil, Petrarch, Scève)

Orpheus’ turn toward Eurydice, while ascending from Hades, is a memorable way of emphasizing the absolute intentionality of love. Langer analyses this episode of the myth in Virgil’s Georgics as not only conveying the “frenzy” of love, but also as advancing an argument for equity (and pardon), using the kinesic intelligence that allows us to absorb and understand the physical turn toward the beloved. This particular empathic movement is essential to a more general movement from universal qualities to specific qualities that is at the heart of Renaissance love lyric, as illustrated in a mourning sonnet by Petrarch and in a poem of praise of the beloved, in Sceve’s Delie. Orpheus’ tragic gesture constitutes the core of a kinesic memory in the lyric tradition.

Should We Practice Justice Toward Nonhuman Animals? Radical Animal Interests, Humanism, and Classical Justice

This chapter considers the challenge of the animal liberation movement to humanism. Peter Singer’s suggestion that humans not reproduce, in order to reduce suffering of all species, negates the centrality of human beings in classical and Renaissance humanism. It runs counter to two principles: the notion of “human dignity,” founded not on universal rights but on a status conferred by God, and the notion of justice, which includes a criterion of reciprocity, and implies a natural design. Both “human dignity” and reciprocal justice exclude animals. The notion of a collective self-sacrifice of the human species would be thought of as absurd by humanism which simply does not share the utilitarian premises of the (Anglo-American) radical animal liberation movement.

Montaigne’s ‘Perfect’ Friendship

In the history of the philosophy of friendship, few contributions have caught the attention of the popular and critical imagination as much as Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1580, 1588, 1595), and in particular a chapter entitled ‘De l’amitie’ (Book 1, chapter 27).1 This attention brought to Montaigne’s book is a curious phenomenon: in terms of the philosophy done in his own time, the Essais do not really qualify as philosophy, that is, as a treatise or dialogue containing consistent argumentation and commentary. Neither do they qualify as a compendium of moral philosophy, with its systematic presentation of topics and opinions. Nor do they qualify as a sourcebook for legal or political or ecclesiastic rhetoric, with sayings and examples arranged in alphabetical order, although some editions after Montaigne’s death in 1592 include an elaborate index of topics designed to facilitate just such a use. The Essais are altogether something else, and often frustrate philosophers seeking unequivocal positions and elaborate arguments, since Montaigne proposes neither, really. Even his Pyrrhonian skepticism, the most obviously ‘philosophical’ argumentation we encounter, is not without glaring inconsistencies, or at the very least is an intermittent feature of his book.2