But it is an important question for another reason as well, a reason having to do with how historians think about the development of European society. For many historians, the response to illusion, deception, and uncertainty functions as a central explanatory device in popular and enduring accounts of Europe’s transition from a medieval or premodern society to an early modern one. According to these varied interpretations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the origins of European modernity depend in large part on how people reacted to the specter of uncertainty and skepticism, the result of a widespread crisis of confidence in which long-held religious, cultural, and scientific institutions and beliefs had become unstable, even untenable.18 Members of the early modern court were hardly immune to these pressures, and scholars have long wondered about the rather cheerful tone of Castiglione’s great work, even as his characters discuss the ominous consequences of life in the newly emerging absolutist states. It is in the court that the epistemological and ethical crises in early modern Europe came together most dramatically.19
One particularly useful way into this enormous historiographic debate focuses on two distinct types of response to uncertainty: those that privilege the theoretical intellect and those that privilege the practical intellect.20 Descartes offers an example of the first approach when he famously addresses the problem of uncertainty in his Discourse on Method. Describing his time spent at one of Europe’s most esteemed colleges, Descartes informs us that the upshot of his education was the disheartening discovery that there is practically nothing upon which everyone agrees. Every authority has its detractors and every theory its objectors.21 In the Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes would radicalize this uncertainty through a series of thought experiments culminating in his invention of a “malicious demon of utmost power and cunning” whose sole purpose is to deceive us about all things, all the time. Descartes responds to the threat of global uncertainty with a drastic limitation or restriction concerning what qualifies as knowledge. He will accept as true only those opinions that are indubitable, necessarily true, and incapable of being false. Certainty, Descartes argues, is the only feasible response to uncertainty.22
While this approach may well have proved useful for the natural philosopher, it was hardly practical for anyone else, even that same natural philosopher in daily life, where certainty can rarely, if ever, be had. The second response to early modern uncertainty, an approach that privileged the practical intellect and the faculty of prudence, addressed precisely these more immediately pressing concerns. Accepting uncertainty as an unavoidable feature of our lives, any number of early modern writers and thinkers turned to rhetoric and dialectic as a means of making sense of themselves and their actions in the world.23 In a series of lectures from the 1570s on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the Oxford scholar John Rainolds argues that we must reject the Aristotelian notion of scientific demonstration based on first principles because we possess few, if any, real first principles. Proponents of Aristotle, Rainolds writes, “wish a demonstrative proof to be understood with reference to nature, not to us.” The problem, Rainolds contends, is one of perspective. By demanding that knowledge must begin with necessary first principles, Aristotelians fail to consider the real limitations that frame and condition our attempts to know the world. “Being men with wits enslaved to error,” Rainolds argues, “we scarcely know what might be ‘first principles,’ ‘unmediated terms,’ and ‘necessary propositions’ for ourselves, much less for nature.” The evidence of our confusion is everywhere, he adds: just look at the disagreements among the Skeptics, the Epicureans, and the Pythagoreans.24 For Rainolds, dialectics replaces demonstration precisely because the rules and tools of rhetoric provide the individual with a means for evaluating and selecting among the competing choices that confront us in our lives. “Rhetoric,” Rainolds reminds his readers, “does not create probabilities, but instead perceives them.”25
Rhetoric may have provided the analytic and interpretive tools, but it was prudence, the practical intellect, that put those tools to use. Rainolds argues that prudence can apply dialectical techniques to practically any question, and even the most summary review of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature reveals that he was not alone in this belief. The French skeptic Pierre Charron argues that prudence “is a general guide and conduct of the other virtues, and of our whole life … in a word, the art of our life, as physic the art of our health.”26 A good thing this is, too, as our uncertainty about things extends far beyond the confines of natural philosophy. “[O]bserve how all mankind are made up of falsehood and deceit, of tricks and lies,” Charron writes in his most famous work, Of Wisdom, “how unfaithful and dangerous, how full of disguise and design all conversation is at present become, but especially, how much more it abounds near [the prince], and how manifestly hypocrisy and dissimulation are the reigning qualities of princes’ courts.” Given “the great uncertainty and inconstancy of human affairs,” the fickleness of human nature, and “the inexpressible variety of accidents, circumstances, appurtenances, dependencies and consequences, the difference of times and places and persons” that constantly surround and confront us, there can be few hard-and-fast rules to guide our conduct, few principles on which we can always rely.27 In such circumstances, demonstration gives way to dialectic, and it is left to prudence, Charron contends, to determine when we ought to follow “established laws and customs in common use” and when we will be “obliged to go off the beaten road, and have recourse to difficult stratagems and unusual methods.”28
In The Book of the Courtier, Castiglione would offer similar advice for similar reasons. Modeling his own dialogue on Cicero’s skeptically tinged treatise The Orator, Castiglione leads his characters through a series of conversations that, in true rhetorical fashion, consider every question from both sides, generating doubt and a general distrust of first principles and dogmatic positions. Before embarking on his depiction of the ideal courtier, one of those characters, Count Ludovico, warns that “to recognize true perfection in anything is so difficult as to be scarcely possible; and this is because the way of opinions vary.”29 When it comes to questions of aesthetics, morals and ethics, not only do different people prefer different things, but even each change of circumstance requires its own unique response. During the second evening of discussion among the guests at the Court of Urbino another character, Federico, advises that “in everything he does or says” the perfect courtier should follow “certain general rules.” Before speaking or acting, the courtier should match his words and deeds to the ever-changing demands of the moment. If he hopes to succeed, “he should consider well what he does or says, the place where he does it, in whose presence, its timing, why he is doing it, his own age, his profession, the end he is aiming at, and the means that are suitable.”30 Only through these careful dialectical and prudential calculations will the courtier be able to act in the most pleasing, the most useful, and most beneficial manner.
Beneficial for whom? The importance of early modern Europe’s alleged rhetorical turn, historians contend, depends on how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers answered this question. Machiavelli’s response is, no doubt, the most infamous, but he is really only the very representative tip of the proverbial iceberg. Machiavelli’s valorization of a prudential politics is but one example of an alleged separation of prudence from not only its traditional religious but even its ethical moorings.31 Confronted with the vagaries of fortune and a dangerous populace (“Men,” Machiavelli famously notes, “are ungrateful, fickle simulators and deceivers, avoiders of dangers, greedy for gain”32), the prince must act in his own self-interest, and this might require dissimulation, hypocrisy, and lies. Life in the court was no different, and behind the urbane conversations of Castiglione’s noble men and women is a constant awareness that the court is a dangerous place, full of intrigue, deception, and self-serving sycophants ceaselessly seeking their own success at another’s expense. In this atmosphere, prudence becomes a tool of
self-defense and self-interest, demarcating ever more clearly the courtier from his surroundings, his inner thoughts and intentions from his outward performance. Dissimulating one’s thoughts, parrying dangerous and intrusive questions with ambiguous or witty responses, is the stock-in-trade of the successful courtier. In The Book of the Courtier, Gaspare Pallavicino fears that Federico reduces the courtier to a liar. Federico does little to dispel these concerns, adding that “even if it is deception it is not to be censured.”33
From uncertainty to probability and from prudence to deception, historians trace a path that severs early modern Europe from its medieval past, leading us forward into a modernity that privileges the interior over the exterior, the individual over the community, utility over truth. Unfortunately, neither the path nor the destination were entirely new. Medieval writers knew all too well the perils of the court and how to respond to them. What changed between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, between John of Salisbury and Castiglione, between Pierre Charron and Bernard Mandeville, was not the recognition that sometimes we must lie but rather the role that lies play in human society.
UNCERTAINTY AND SKEPTICISM IN THE MEDIEVAL COURT
In The Treasure of the City of Ladies, an early fourteenth-century handbook for women at court, Christine de Pizan considers the daily dangers that face the princess or noblewoman. Christine asks her readers to imagine the noble lady glorying in her position and possessions as she awakes in the morning wrapped in her luxurious bedding, in her well-appointed room, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting. Temptation, always ready to seduce, whispers in her ear, “By Almighty God, is there in this world a greater lady than you or one with more authority?” Her vanity and pride begin to swell and soon, forgetful of who she is and how she should behave, she comes to believe there is nothing she does not require, no pleasure she should not satisfy. Temptation encourages her with more baseless compliments: “It’s no more than your deserve.”34
Christine undoubtedly understood the seductions of court life. Having grown up in and around the court of Charles V of France, first as the daughter of the king’s physician, later as the wife of one of his courtiers, she would have witnessed, perhaps even experienced, them. In Christine’s writings the court teems with danger, and the unwary noblewoman, filled with false and illusory promises of power, riches, and comfort, can all too easily plunge headlong into her own undoing. John of Salisbury had warned of precisely the same dangers in the Policraticus when he invoked his decidedly Platonic analogy to describe the courtier’s relationship to the court. Just as the soul can all too easily lose itself to bodily sensations and “by a sort of self-betrayal go astray as the result of its desires amid the deceptions of the outer world,” so too can the unwary courtier lose himself amidst the false delights of the court. Forgetful of his own interests and nature, he chases hungrily after tantalizing diversions and base pleasures, degrading himself so that man, who was made in the image of the Creator, “is transformed into a beast by a sort of similarity of character.”35
Christine may well have read John’s treatise, either in the original Latin or in the French translation that Charles V had requested from Denis Foulechat in the 1370s.36 In any event, they speak with one voice when it comes to diagnosing and responding to the nature of court life. Both Christine and John describe the court as a place of deception in which the illusion of truth stands in for the truth itself, and at the heart of these illusions are the flatterers in all their treacherous variety. Whereas Plato stressed the dangers of sensation and warned his followers against those insidious pleasures and pains “that rivet the soul to the body and … weld them together,”37 John stresses the dangers of language, of false words and feigned gestures. “One who is called flatterer in the strict sense of the word,” John explains, “is he who whitewashes another’s fault, and, that the latter may not see himself, spreads before the eyes of his victim a cloud, as it were, of vanity and fills his ears with encomiums.”38 Christine, likewise, warns her readers against accepting anyone at face value. “There is not the least doubt,” she writes, “that according to the way of the world and the movements of fortune, there is no prince so grand in this world, however just he may be, nor was there ever a lord or lady or any other man or woman who was loved by everyone.”39 Even Jesus had socalled friends plotting his arrest and crucifixion, and the noble woman must never forget that behind even the kindest words and most innocuous asides there can lurk dishonesty and treachery, false counsel and pointed gossip.
Confronted with the ever-present threat of deception, both John and Christine counsel their readers to approach the court with a carefully cultivated caution and suspicion. While Christine simply assumes this approach throughout the Treasure, John elaborates its philosophical underpinning and justification when, in the prologue to the Policraticus, he proclaims his allegiance to the ancient Academic skeptics.40 In a slightly earlier treatise, the Metalogicon, John aligns himself with a form of ancient Academic skepticism whose followers “do not precipitate an opinion concerning those questions that are doubtful to a wise man.”41 John associates this type of skepticism with Socrates’s pupil Antisthenes, who distinguished between self-evident things and things known through experience. While we can know the former, our knowledge of the latter is never so secure. What we know through experience, what usually happens, John cautions, need not always happen. About these sorts of things, things that are credible if not certain, Antisthenes advised moderation in judgment and speech. We should restrain and qualify our words, adding phrases like “I believe” or “I think.”42 In the Policraticus, John refers to this sort of knowledge in terms of probability. “In philosophy,” he writes, “accepting as I do the Academic system, I have admitted that which seems to the best of my judgment likely or probable.” John claims that both Cicero and Augustine had ascribed to this cautious approach to human knowledge, recognizing that while there are some questions we cannot doubt, “no one speaks with greater safety who is circumspect in language just to guard himself from falling into error.”43
Skepticism reveals apparent certainties to be mere probabilities. Probability, John explains in the Metalogicon, is one of the three branches of logic, “the science of argumentative reasoning.”44 Unlike demonstrative logic, which focuses on principles and “rejoices in necessity,” and sophistry, whose “only objective is to lose its adversary in a fog of delusions,” probable logic concerns itself with “propositions which, to all or to many men, or at least to the wise, seem to be valid.”45 Probable logic itself consists of two parts, dialectic and rhetoric. The difference between dialectic and rhetoric is one of focus and, perhaps, purpose.46 Dialectic investigates and seeks answers to questions of a general nature. John offers an example drawn from the field of moral philosophy: “Is it better to obey one’s parents or the laws when they disagree?” Unlike logical demonstrations, which begin with necessary first principles, the dialectical proof will begin with propositions or “theses” that themselves “are well known to all, or to the leaders in each field.”47 A dialectical proposition is probable if it “holds true in several cases,” if it can counter most, even if not all, objections. By contrast, rhetoric analyzes particular cases. The orator will construct a persuasive speech based on hypotheses that derive from the circumstances. “Such circumstances,” John adds, citing Boethius’s Topics, “are: ‘Who, what, where, by what means, why, how and when.’ ”48
We need the methods of dialectical and rhetorical analysis, John argues, because our knowledge of the world is limited, imperfect, sometimes confused, and too often wrong. Late in the Metalogicon, John serves up a list of impediments to human understanding that includes our invincible ignorance concerning the truths of faith, the frailty of the human condition, and the brevity of our lives. As serious as these obstacles are, none is more pernicious than sin, which “separates us from God, and bars us from the fountain of truth.”49 John’s emphasis on the connection between sin and human ignorance places his entire d
iscussion of skepticism in a decidedly theological framework. By the same token, it also allows John to conceive of sin, in its root causes at least, almost entirely in epistemological terms. We sin when we pursue idle and useless knowledge and claim to know with certainty things that lie beyond our understanding. Curiosity is a sin, John warns, and those pagan philosophers who occupied themselves with investigating the “hidden causes” of things became vain through their own fault. John repeats these warnings in the Policraticus, again citing the example of the pagan philosophers who “reared on high the structure … of their own genius in a war against heaven” only to find themselves unknowingly barred from truth.50 Curiosity itself, however, is really more symptom than cause of our broken human condition. The pagan philosophers pursued their investigations beyond proper bounds because they forgot who and what they were. Having become mysteries to themselves, they thought they were wise when in fact they were fools. “When the mind is over-occupied with numerous questions that do not greatly concern it,” John writes, “it wanders far afield from itself, and often becomes oblivious of itself and no error can be more pernicious than this.”51
And so it is that John’s skepticism returns him to the court with its flatterers and tempters, with its amnesiac courtiers and noblewomen forgetful of themselves, their stations, and their duties as they chase after false goods and fleeting pleasures. “Returns” may even be the wrong term. John’s discussion of skepticism, demonstration, and dialectic never left the court. While John’s stated purpose in the Metalogicon is to defend the traditional educational program of the liberal arts from a new breed of critic, he is quick to remind his readers that these critics are none other than his peers and opponents. “Utterly at a loss to evade the snapping teeth of my fellow members of the court,” John contends that he had no choice but to respond to them in writing.52 But John is defending more than a pedagogy and style of learning. He is defending his position at court. In the hothouse of the court, pedagogical attacks become personal attacks, and the personal is always already political. “Being respectful of all and injuring no one,” John laments, “used, of yore, to assure one of popularity.” Clearly the old ways have been forgotten, and with his status at court in question, John has no choice but to strike back against his enemies’ daily carping.
The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment Page 19
