In the Office of Humanity

I. Introduction

Ergo vir humanissime, in officiis humanitatis persevere. Marcilio Ficino.
[‘Therefore, most human of men, keep going in the office of humanity’ (My translation)]²

1. Untranslated, Ficino’s exhortation is the banner quotation for Stéphane Toussaint’s elegantly written reconstruction of what he claims was an original prototypically Renaissance ‘cultural consciousness’ of humanity’s truest and most dignified vocation (HA, 16-17). Woven together with hermetic, erotic, and ‘gracious’ threads, the core of Marsilio Ficino’s and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Quattrocento philosophical vision of humanitas comprises an ideal of philanthropy, a postulate of humanity’s moral unity, and a humanizing erudition -- the studia humanitatis.
Today, contends Toussaint, this integral ideal barely subsists. Humanitas’s biggest external enemy has been capitalism’s ‘violent’ drive to profitability (rentabilité), subjecting Humanities university departments to ‘instrumentalist’ or ‘utilitarian’ business logics. The humanist cause has also been undermined by developments within the humanities academy. In 18^th and 19^th century German ‘neo-humanism’ and ‘third humanism’, he argues, the Quattrocento synthesis was pulled apart and otherwise distorted. It was the break-up of the humanitas ideal in these new humanistic studies which made humanism susceptible to now familiar critiques of ‘the human subject’, as entailing rationalist, exclusionary, domineeringly instrumentalist representations of the human. Toussaint subsumes both rentabilité and those critiques under the heading of ‘anti-humanism’. His anti-humanist canon includes Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, ‘Cultural Studies’, and the ‘third humanist’ forebears of the 20^th century German cultural nationalist humanism which segued into the anti-humanist culture of Nazism.
Whilst not ignoring the arguments on the critique of humanism and commodification of higher education, this article mainly addresses Toussaint’s representation of the philosophical kernel of Renaissance humanitas, a claim with a decidedly anti-rhetorical edge. It is in this connection – from the opposing ramparts in the perennial war between ‘first’ philosophy and rhetoric -- that I view Humanismes Antihumanismes through the prism of a seemingly marginal feature of Renaissance thought. In Toussaint’s discussion of the ‘familiar letter’ in which Ficino’s exhortation to ‘keep going in the office of humanity’ occurs, ‘in officiis humanitatis’ is translated ‘au service de l’humanité’ (HA, 54, n.13). The burden of my argument is: why the elision of ‘office’ in Toussaint’s account of Renaissance humanism matters.

II. Office, Rhetoric and Renaissance Philosophy

2. It has been a while since ‘the term “officious” … could be used to commend the proper exercise of authority’.³ In sidestepping office Toussaint is in good company. Study of the language and conceptual frame of office, whether considered as a once ubiquitous part of the ethical landscape or in terms of a continuing more localized pertinence, preoccupies only a petit bande.⁴ Not only does a literal translation of ‘officium’ in Ficino’s letter sound archaic to a modern ear, the very idea of an officium humanitatis sounds wrong.
For today, ethically and philosophically speaking, ‘office’ mostly connotes a public role, to which attach duties incumbent upon the individual -- understood to be possessed of independent subjective agency -- holding the office. Office-holders may incur specialized ‘agent-relative’ obligations or be exempt from some general obligations. But bona fide official obligations or exemptions surely stem from independently justifiable ‘first’ principles.⁵ If these philosophical foundations of official good conduct include variations on respecting persons as human beings, can humanity be just another office?
Yet that is how in the classical source of office-based ethics, Cicero’s De Officiis, humanity was conceived. ‘We have been dressed by nature’ for several personae – meaning enacted orchestrations of dispositions and demeanors oriented to some end. Obligations incurred through homo humanus’s rational endowment sit alongside those incurred by virtue of individual characteristics; circumstantial statuses attaching to birth, familial or civic position; and chosen vocation. There is no universal template of virtue derived from human status which ‘trumps’ other offices.⁶

3. The 16^th and 17^th century reception of Cicero’s multiform view of moral personality includes rhetorically informed English philosophical literature and common law jurisprudence to German statist natural law. In the ‘dialogue of counsel’ it was in terms of conflicting offices that Thomas More’s Utopia staged an unresolved debate around the doubtful effectiveness of philosophers as political counselors versus the moral and philosophical costs of practical engagement in government. The English jurist Lord Nottingham distinguished the judge’s ‘civil and political’ conscience from the ‘natural and inward conscience’ of a Christian believer.⁷ The 17^th century natural lawyer Samuel Pufendorf drew the following office-based lessons from the Westphalian Treaty.
To overcome the disruptions of civil security caused by uses of state power for salvific ends – disruptions intensified by university faculties dominated by neo-Platonic philosophies and their politics of truth -- Pufendorf proposed a civil-prudential ethic, in which state authority was paramount and yet limited to the goals of security and sociability. To this end, the polity was conceived as an assemblage of jurisdictionally circumscribed offices. The soul was one office among others, thereby furnishing officeholders with an ethical basis, in the name of civil peace, for putting aside ‘sacralizing’ imperatives.⁸
Thus early modern conceptions of office, including humanity-as-office, helped create a remarkable antidote to metaphysically honed zealotry: civil conscience. Yet not all early-modern philosophies which disaggregated government into offices opposed a sacred state:⁹ conceptions of office vary. It might also be asked if the only foil to ‘de-sacralizing’ civil-prudential offices, was (the usual suspect) feudal personal-proprietal conceptions of office.¹⁰ Were there distinctly renaissance inflections of office-talk?
Much of the pertinence of office to Renaissance humanism stems from its relation to rhetoric. Acting in official capacities entails cultivating and enacting a persona. Where office-holders make circumstantial judgments in ‘hard cases’, office is inseparable from the unduly discredited conjunction of ethics and rhetoric known as casuistry. Civil conscience requires office-holders to treat ultimate commitments – which they may share but which are ultra vires their jurisdictional responsibilities – as adiaphora, or ‘indifferents’.¹¹ For ethics premised on ‘the whole person’ compartmentalization, subordination, and indifferentism of conscience are a problem. No wonder depreciations of office and rhetoric run parallel.

4. In a seminal contribution to the 18th century chapter in the history of that depreciation, John Pocock distinguishes Gibbon’s historiographical project from the version of Enlightenment favored by his Parisian philosophical interlocutors, especially D’Alembert. The philosophes were perturbed by Gibbon’s indebtedness to the erudition of researchers attached to France’s royal academies -- that is, to offices of monarchical power bound to constrain independent thinking. The philosophes morally disqualified office-holding. The public sphere and public good were redefined as ‘occupied and indeed invented … by those excluded from public office or choosing not to exercise it,’ who represent themselves as free citizen-critics. An emblem of this presumption of ‘a radical divorce between office and critical intelligence’ (in Pocock’s phrase) might be Rousseau’s hyperbolical speculation on the consequences were he to have accepted Louis XV’s offer of a pension --‘Farewell truth, courage, and liberty!’¹²
Having sketched some early modern loci of office and its critics, how does Toussaint’s perspective on Ficino and Pico appear in that light?

III The Kernel of Humanitas: Ficino, Pico

5. A diffuse doxa holds that the intellectual energies of the Renaissance lie in literary fiction, painting, sculpture, architecture, music rather than in philosophy. Think of the absence of ‘Renaissance’ from the curricular rubrics in history of philosophy.¹³ Efforts to address this absence might be located on a spectrum of historiographical revisions of the doxa, on a par, say, with extending study of the architectural renaissance from churches to fortification.¹⁴ Yet notwithstanding Toussaint’s manifest commitment to historical precision, his retrieval of the Quattrocento-Florentine philosophy of humanitas is undertaken in a very different spirit. It figures rather as a moment of annunciation in which the universal manifests itself in time, when humanity ‘in its cultural, psychological and philosophical totality’ was first ‘captured’ in thought (HA, 47).
Investment in the ultimate truth-value of the Florentine philosophy heads Toussaint into a fight with historians who situate Pico and Ficino through ‘the irritating paradox …of humanists before humanism’ (HA, 299). The assumption behind that formulation is that humanism is inseparable from scientific or philosophical ‘anthropological’ studies of the human. Toussaint demonstrates that Renaissance ideas of humanitas precede such anthropologies (HA, 31-41). If his point is that truth-oriented talk of humanity need not have a scientific or systemic cast, fine. But are Quattrocento philosophies not shaped by a moral anthropology? That is (as we’ll see in Pico’s case) by images of human beings, as they mostly are, or might become were they persuaded to undertake the work of self-transformation envisaged in those philosophies?¹⁵
Which brings me to Toussaint’s second foil. He reports himself as extending Eugenio Garin’s reading of Renaissance humanism as a new philosophical movement rising out of philological scholarship (HA, 16-17), turning on a sense of the infinite worth, protean form and hermetic cosmic function of human intelligence. In a much-cited response, Paul Kristeller countered that Renaissance ‘humanism’ was understood by contemporaries as referring primarily to a cultural-educational project centered upon the persona, curriculum and erudition of the University Humanities professor;¹⁶ the distinguishing features of that curriculum being renovation of classical Greek and Roman rhetoric … and the exclusion of logic and metaphysics. Both Kristeller and Garin came to qualify their respective positions, the former conceding that Renaissance humanism, including Pico’s, was infused by a philosophical spirit, the latter acknowledging the occasional meanings of many of Pico’s writings. At times Toussaint argues for striking a balance, acknowledging the place of a humanist rhetoric braced by philosophical ideals (HA, 16-17, 245).

6. Irrespective of the merits or otherwise of such reconciliations, however, Toussaint generally leans towards a militant anti-rhetoric stance. In his critique of theoretic and pedagogic anti-humanisms rhetoric is synonymous with sophistry (HA, 181-4, 242-6). You would never know rhetoric has been a vehicle of non-ideal but nonetheless ethical -- civil -- values.¹⁷ Negativity towards rhetoric is evinced in one of the ways in which Toussaint registers the novelty of Ficinian and Picovian philosophy. Relayed through Vergerio’s (1444) tract on ‘liberal’ education in noble mores for the young, Quattrocento philosophers’ insistence on the moral unity of humankind and the obligation to practice philanthropy is contrasted with what Toussaint calls the ‘Graeco-Latin rhetorical genre’. Whereas for Seneca and Cicero philanthropia remains the privilege of notables, Florentine education for humanitas is conceived as a civic republican ideal suitable for all free men (HA, 132).
However, unlike many philosophical attempts to downplay rhetoric, Toussaint stresses the spiritual and affective as much as rational force of the Quattrocento humanist ideal -- ‘a ratio without rationalism’ (HA, 48). Serving others is inseparable from ‘a sentiment of man’s magical affiliation to the cosmic totality of anthropos’ (HA, 56). Such service is a gift-relation. The Ficinian humanist educator’s vocation (as with any honorable métier), is simultaneously a ‘choice of the soul’ and inspired by the métier’s presiding daemon (HA, 272-84).¹⁸
The teacher’s métier is implicated in an intellectual gift-relation, which ‘obeys the law of a triple exchange between the invisible, inspiration and society.’ He is ‘a connoisseur of aptitudes’. The Ficinian humanist senses whether the daemon watching over a possible future métier converges with that responsible for the student’s scholarly abilities, temperamental and moral dispositions, gifts, talents. (Akin to Fourier’s 19^th century utopian alignment of passional groups and social functions, adds Toussaint.) Also elaborated is the place of the three Graces in the articulation of humanitas, and the complex of giftlike micro/macrocosmic sympathies and resemblances allegorized by these figures. This ‘gracious’ imagery figures in contemporaneous testimony to the affinities between philanthropy and commerce before the advent of ‘industrial slavery’ and profitability (HA, 278, 293-97).

7. Turning next to the ‘humanizing’ purpose of the studia humanitatis, and the related unity of humanity, a feature of Ficino’s letter to Minerbeti is its combination of ordinary and extraordinary language, of the intuitive and the counter-intuitive. It may come naturally to describe Nero’s cruelty as inhuman. Yet this self-evident moral re-description seems to entail counter-intuitive re-descriptions: of those who ‘keep going in the office of humanity’, as the ‘most human of men’; and of those exhibiting any ‘fault in their soul’, as non-human or less-than-human: ‘Why are children crueler than old people? Drunkards more cruel than sages? Idiots than the intelligent? Because the former are so to speak less human than the latter.’ Whence a further (and to us familiar) counter-intuitive characteristic: the teacher’s ‘humanizing’ vocation -- as though it were less than human to be, say, malicious, or interested in making money.

8. The ranks of the less-than-human are further swollen by the demanding love-command on which acceding to the status of the human is contingent: ‘Were [Nero] a man he would have loved other men as members of the same body. For individual men are a single man under a single idea and of the same species’. Toussaint insists that this Quattrocento insight is reflected not only in its anti-aristocratic address to all free men, but also in the cosmopolitan sources on which the Florentine philosophers drew, including Zoroastrianism and Byzantine thought (HA, pp. 48, 56). The contrast-class: neo-humanist and third-humanist restrictions of the studia humanitatis to ‘classics’ -- the language, culture and spirit of Greece and Rome (HA, pp. 107-8).
Finally, supporting the civic and cultural cosmopolitanism of humanitas is the celebrated protean image of humanity propounded in Pico’s (1486) Oratio de hominis dignitate. Toussaint affirms the conventional wisdom that Pico’s words on human dignity as consisting in our freedom to choose our own nature furnishes the philosophical kernel of Renaissance humanitas. Against traditional doctrines of the hierarchy of beings, Pico affirms the impossibility of defining man, a ‘cosmic chamelion’ (‘neither celestial nor earthbound’) by reference to any providential place. However, Toussaint soundly repudiates one orthodox interpretive theme: Promethean interpretations of Picovian mutability, harbinger of modern individualism and the anti-humanist ‘Overman’. The freedom of humanitas is not synonymous with deracination or spiritual indirection. Instead, he underlines Pico’s location of humanity’s infinite worth in its magical, carnal-erotic, and gracious character (HA, 25-26, 43-44, 49).

IV. Renaissance Humanism and the Locality of Philosophy

9. If I am about to emphasize the consequences of Humanismes Antihumanismes’ ignoring the place of office in the history of humanism, it is also worth emphasizing the light it sheds on a significant historical intersection of humanism and office.
Alongside role, sphere, occupation, etc. a key ‘classifier’ of office is vocation.¹⁹ We saw how Toussaint’s construction of the Quattrocento humanist philosopher’s philanthropic vocation emphasized its welding together the exercise of reason and a hermetic ‘gift’. Connecting the modern humanities’ vocation with daemons and the three Graces may not be the most politic way to defend them. Yet connections between Renaissance scholarly culture and the daemonic are a reminder that to focus only on the functional (e.g. protective) responsibilities of public or professional offices is to discount often their arcane, guild-like rites of passage and sources of esprit de corps, mutual trust, or senses of purpose only partly aligned with official ends.
In the case of higher education you might miss certain gift-like aspects of professional collegiality (in the Anglophone ethical sense),²⁰ and of dedication to students beyond the call of duty. One might question whether all non-exchange-based ‘relations of circulation’ in education – not necessarily reciprocal – can be captured in Toussaint’s notion of the (intellectual) gift.²¹ But this debating-point should not detract from the value of his reconstruction of humanitas as a philanthropic vocation, which suggests the history of public office-based cultures has to find a place for Renaissance hermeticism.

10. Whilst nodding towards the plurality of Renaissance philosophies (HA, 28), Humanismes Antihumanismes nowhere contemplates how opposing views to those of Pico or Ficino might muddy the waters of his story of humanitas’s decline and fall. Needless to say, not all Renaissance humanists follow Ficino in identifying the human per se with perfectionist ideals, and hence in withholding fully human status to the mentally impaired. Compare Montaigne’s sense of ‘how imperceptible are divisions separating madness from the spiritual alacrity of a soul set free or from actions arising from extraordinary virtue’. In keeping with this sense for the affinities of madness and reason is the fellow-feeling for the mad which Montaigne displays in his account of his visits with the poet Tasso in his last years, during the latter’s descent into a madness which Montaigne linked to the very precision, agility, and intensity of Tasso’s mind. As distinct from Ficino’s or Pico’s sense of humanity’s unity and capacity, that of Montaigne’s is linked to his insistence on the vanity of conceiving humanity as capable of becoming astral beings (‘bringing the very heaven under his feet’), thereby disavowing our lodgment ‘among the mire and shit of the world’.²²

11. Implications of this exclusionary characteristic of Ficino’s concept of humanitas (Pico’s too) run forwards and backwards. In this regard their conception of humanitas is no less ‘restrictive’ than that of the ancient stoics (HA, 53 n). In respect to modern conceptions of the human it so happens that Montaigne’s humanization of mental incapacity was invoked by a bête noire of Humanismes Antihumanismes, Michel Foucault, as part of the Renaissance prelude to the story of the subsequent exclusions and normatizations of ‘unreason’ recounted in his Histoire de la Folie.²³ Whilst this story includes the part played by a humanist ethic, his evident warmth towards Montaigne’s outlook on madness casts a critical shadow on Toussaint’s depiction of Foucault as anti-humanist tout court.
The humanist-anti-humanist symbioses traced in the book are of great interest e.g. that involving the late-19^th century source of the Heideggerian theme of the post-Renaissance ‘death of man’. My uptake on that symbiotic hypothesis concerns Toussaint’s claim that critique of humanism’s exclusionary implications only became thinkable when the Quattrocento ‘s integral ‘triple humanity’ was split – as when neo-humanist ‘classics’ education competed with the educational tendency known as Philanthropinismus, which stressed dropping the humanist curriculum in favor of popular education in practical, employment assisting ‘vocational’ subjects (HA, 66-106).
A better-known illustration of this tendency within humanism to disrespect its erstwhile erudite book-learning component is Rousseau. Also flowing out of his identification of the human with an ideal of transparent human interaction, and central to his critique of civilized society, we encounter a further Rousseauesque instantiation of the philosophes’ moral disqualification of office: moral re-descriptions of monarchs and nobles, anyone whose conduct is circumscribed by roles, as ‘not human’.²⁴ Why is Pico’s exemplification of this tendency less illustrative of the exclusionary moral limits of humanist discourse than Rousseau’s?

12. Toussaint’s suggestion of discontinuity between antique Greco-Latin rhetorical and Renaissance philosophical conceptions of humanitas might be contested on various office-related grounds. What of medieval debates about non-estate-based loci of ‘true nobility’, or Saint Paul’s image of human liberation transcending worldly roles and statuses?²⁵ Still another ground for querying the terms of Toussaint’s contrast emerges when it is viewed through the optic of the office of counsel.
Undoubtedly, antique invocations of humanitas typically consisted in rhetorically inflected advice to the powerful. However, recalling Thomas More’s staging of the debate over the office of counsel, Toussaint’s Antique-rhetorical/Quattrocento-philosophical contrast begins to resemble a more general conflict between (crudely) idealist and realist stances towards politics. The power-relation between contemporary civil servant advisers’ striving to bend government policy in socially beneficial directions and their democratically elected political masters is no less hierarchical than that between Roman emperor and notables, and justifiably so. The ‘office’ of the political adviser is to engage with existing power relations. Conversely, a politics based upon anti-hierarchical universalist humanist ideals may be morally re-describable -- as have been the anti-official programs of the 18^th philosophes and freemasons -- as a charter for a ‘clean hands’ refusal of political responsibility, addressed, moreover, to moral-intellectual enclaves.²⁶ Might the ‘universal’ address of the Picovian/Ficinian ‘office of humanity’ have a similarly circumscribed audience and entail self-exclusion from the power to do good on a wider canvass than that of personal philanthropy?

13. Concerning this ‘locality of the universal’ hypothesis, a case to this effect has been made in William Craven’s critical anatomy of reigning constructions of Pico as symbolizing the Renaissance era and inaugurating the modern concept of the free person in the Oratio’s protean image of man. Seeing this image as the key to Pico’s work overall, argues Craven, involves a mythopoeic interpolation; the figure of Proteus does not even dominate most of the Oratio. Craven challenges the pattern in Renaissance studies – including Toussaint’s mentor, Garin -- of representing weighty evidence against canonical interpretative themes as marginal qualifications that leave faith in them intact.²⁷
For my purposes Craven’s study repays study. Toussaint cleaves to (most of) these interpretive themes, treating the Oratio as a known quantity -- whence the frequent yet fleeting citations. Moreover, Craven’s iconoclastic assault on these interpretations is sustained by Renaissance presuppositions of office - though as I’ll show, the Oratio justifies making more than Craven does of the lexicon of office.
Displaying virtuoso erudition across five languages, the Oratio was written when Pico was twenty-four, six years before falling fatally ill on the eve of becoming a barefooted wandering Christian evangelist. Originally entitled Oratio elegantissima (in the first edition of his collected works, it was an exultantly written prelude to a disputatio which was banned following ecclesiastical criticism. The stuff of legend! Yet as Craven reminds us, contemporaries hailed him not as the representative figure depicted in modern Renaissance studies, but as a prodigious exception.²⁸
Craven’s case against seeing the Oratio as entirely staked on the dignity of Protean man opens by investigating its titular implication. A work of ‘occasional oratory’, it is patterned on the medieval scholastic eulogy to the lecturer’s field of study delivered at the start of the academic year. A declamatory opening section was followed by an account of the impending program of academic studies. Grandiloquence and inflated claims were expected.²⁹
True to this generic format, following the eulogy to protean man, the Oratio (prefiguring his impending disputation) outlines a graduated program of studies in the service of spiritual transformation. To read a heterodox and original philosophy of humanitas into the text is to ignore their orthodox scholastic character. The presentation takes the dramatic form of a curricular Jacob’s Ladder, involving three degrees of mystical ascent. The steps themselves are less exotic: from moral philosophy the student passes through dialectic and natural philosophy, finally acceding to ‘the queen of the sciences, most holy theology’, whose ‘office’ is to assure us of angelic perfection and unshakeable peace. In its inclusion of higher philosophy and exclusion of rhetoric Pico’s program is hardly humanist, whilst the metaphor of the adept’s supervised spiritual ascent of Jacob’s Ladder, rung by pre-ordained rung, is hardly Protean.³⁰

14. Equally discrepant with the protean image is Pico’s location of man, elsewhere in his writings, in a hierarchy of being, to which man is passively tethered in accordance with the correspondences (sympathies, analogies, etc.) of microcosm and macrocosm. No effort is made to reconcile protean and microcosmic images of man. On the strength of the Picovian texts the nature of human freedom is not a philosophical topos for Pico.³¹
So what more local purpose did Pico intend the Oratio to serve? Resonating with his allusion to the office of theology is his reference to persons seeking salvation as seeking ‘ministery’ in ‘the holy offices of philosophy’.³² These references to office resonate with Craven’s analysis of Pico’s evolving stance (drawing on his correspondence) in the newly intensified quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy swirling around him. The Oratio’s aim, argues Craven, was to affirm – against the humanist movement -- the superiority of a life of Christian-philosophical contemplation.
How does Pico’s image of protean man fit into this advertisement for philosophy? It is a rhetorically inflated moral-philosophical metaphor for the divine gift of free will. Talk of choosing our nature evokes infinite possibilities, yet subsequent references to man’s mutability restrict his choice to three pre-ordained levels of moral existence. Do we choose to become like a plant, as do the greedy? Or like an animal, as does the sensualist? Or do we eschew these degrading deviations – made possible by free will – from man’s true vocation? This is epitomized in the image of the philosopher, ‘judging all things according to the rule of reason’ in the hope of becoming ‘a pure contemplator’. He alone is to be venerated as worthy of the title of human (Oratio, 10-11). Pace Toussaint, is this play of contrasting images not a crucial vehicle for the moral anthropology bracing the Oratio’s philosophical purpose?

15. As Craven emphasizes, to underscore its rhetorical dimensions is not to imply it is only a piece of oratory. Rather, against those who spurn philosophy, or pursue it for profit, the Oratio’s earnest theme (reflecting a personal spiritual struggle) ‘is not the dignity of man but the dignity of philosophy’.³³ Philosophy’s dignitas consists in its representing the royal road to meeting the requirements and gaining the felicitous spiritual rewards of the vocation of humanity, through its program of preparation for the luminous angelic life.
No doubt Pico specialists will want to question aspects of Craven’s reading (where’s the carnality of Pico’s angelic humans?) (HA, 20-21). Still, it suggests that treating Renaissance humanitas as office presents Toussaint with a challenge. I’ll conclude by flagging how this challenge might play out as regards Toussaint’s claims about the humanism-anti-humanism relation and the impacts of rentabilité on the Humanities.

V. Office and the Limits of Humanism

16. One could argue with the breadth of his conception of anti-humanism. Toussaint’s critique of ‘post-structuralism’ seems to conflate accounts of unedifying or explanation-begging uses of humanist ethical categories (consistent with a ‘chastened’ recuperation) with views that humanist ethics as such has inherent limits; he then equate both approaches with anti-humanism. Taking Foucault as an example, earlier I had cause to note a humanistic impulse in his History of Madness. This is not an anomaly in his work, yet Toussaint’s tendency to presentation Foucault’s diverse projects as all emanating from some lines about the coming ‘death of man’ unreservedly consigns him to the anti-humanist cause. There may be echoes of Heidegger in Foucault, e.g. in the latter’s depiction of ‘the’ Renaissance episteme but no equivalent to Heidegger’s critique of modernity’s oblivious, destructive, ultra-instrumentalizing attitude to ‘being’ – as manifest partly in humanist ethical ‘values’.³⁴ To qualify as a Heideggerian anti-humanist the eclipse of ‘man’ – at least the category -- must be devoutly wished for.
But is characterizing humanist discourse as subject to inherent limits necessarily a mark of an anti-humanist attitude? I’ve suggested that humanist outlooks which are based in idealizations of the human – Ficino’s no less than Rousseau’s, or contemporary advocates of ‘humanizing’ as an educational objective -- carry an antinomous, ‘de-humanizing’ implication. How might an office-inflected view of the ethical help us see why that suggestion does not portend generalized opposition to humanism? It has been argued that ‘to evaluate a moral system is to determine the sacrifice of values one must make in order to adopt it’.³⁵ Humanism is no exception. If at one edge it evinces a presumption of pre-eminence or limited sympathy in respect to non-human species, well, so be it. Humanness does not have to dictate the totality of our attitudes. If you care to, you may challenge that pre-eminence in other terms (deep ecology being probably one of the largest founts of contemporary theoretic anti-humanist outlooks); or accept humanity’s species domination as a fact rather than value and seek to make it more benevolent, refraining from setting the moral bar too high. Arguments on species egalitarianism seem as prone to absurdity as justifications of humanity’s superiority over other species.³⁶

17. The history of civil polities teaches the folly of predicating the legitimacy of political rule on approximate compliance with moral absolutes (philosophically rational or otherwise). Part of a Weberian ‘ethic of responsibility’, an historical mark of political civility has been an ethical capacity in some circumstances to set aside ethical convictions in favor of non-principled (but not always unethical) stances – think of the relation between Abraham Lincoln’s presidential policies and personal convictions vis-á-vis slavery. This way of ‘being as’ -- to be a person who is the terminal of more than one ethical capacity and compass -- is what the frame of office calls for.
To further illustrate this point I turn now to Toussaint’s critique of rentabilité and its impact on the Humanities. ‘What else is capital’, asks Toussaint, ‘but the selling of self’ -- la vente de soi (HA, 254n)? The anti-official connotation of that formulation comes through in light of historical scholarship challenging depictions of capitalism as driven only by desire to amass profit. It is not to deny capitalist development’s record of destructive and dispiriting effects, if one also recognizes its benign effects and how much its development has been driven by something other than profit-seeking: namely, problems associated with securing credit. A reason these problems were so pressing in the early modern era: the extensive time-frames and other uncertainties of circulation and exchange imposed by slow and dangerous transportation. These uncertainties placed a premium upon trust: no credit without trust, then, and no trust without civility.
Whence the significance of the powerful eighteenth century historical consciousness of the civilizing role of commerce, insofar as it fostered for example learning how not to see strangers as enemies.³⁷ Doubling the division of ethical labor associated with offices, commerce in this perspective partly hinges on the cultivation of an art of living which itself contributes to unifying humanity, not by fostering a sense of our essential humanness, but by encouraging a partial distancing from ethnic identity: a salutary dose of ‘alienation’. Perhaps then capitalism has depended on a culture of non-integral selfhood, but in a good way, by extending people’s range of interests and activities, by adding to their repertoires of personae. Humanities-based discourses often lack ethically mottled understandings of capitalism. Thinking in terms of office may assist us to develop non-redemptive boundaries of capitalist calculation. These bounds need not be premised on capitalism’s transcendence, or on quarantining domains from its influence, as for example where Toussaint’s account of academic gift relations is indexed as a ‘properly anti-utilitarian’ expression of the scholarly creativity which has been sacrificed on the altars of audit and student ‘employability’ (HA, 277).³⁸

18. If ‘de-sacralized’ limits to capitalist calculation can be set, it should be equally possible to challenge some curricular re-orientations or ‘re-brandings’ aimed at enhancing student employability without implying that government policy ought to altogether ignore relations between education and employment. A starting point for de-sacralizing the conscience of colleagues in the Humanities discontented with University reforms is the conflict between the terms of critique animating the sub-genre of ‘defence of the Humanities’ and the results of Humanities-based historical research into its history. Certainly historical arguments undermining the supposition of a golden age of non-instrumentalist liberal humanities university education have been around for some time. From the early modern era to the present statist and economic objectives have never been absent from the ‘offices’ of educational practice and its administration, alongside and in constant exchanges with civic and pastoral ones.³⁹ This is why office-based thinking might conduce both to justifying and limiting the place for consideration of economic and employment-related educational outcomes.
The history of concepts of office may also offer a reason to listen to Toussaint’s attention to the ‘gift’ dimension of the university educator’s vocation. There are grounds for wariness, and not just utilitarian ones. Must it be seen as a mystery, indescribable in a letter of recommendation for promotion? Although he links the humanities educator’s gift of connoisseurship of student aptitudes to a Renaissance civic republican ethos, personally it brings back sour memories of God-professors’ exercising favoritism in finalizing grades. That said, flat non-recognition of the collegial ethos is depressing, especially if Toussaint (HA,168-9) is mistaken in supposing total non-compossibility between recognition of teacherly gift-relations (= ‘intelligence’, ‘humanity’) and measures to enhance faculty accountability or graduates’ employability (= ‘power of profitability’).

19. Humanism like any ethic carries moral costs, yet its limits (especially on a philosophical register) need not be seen as crippling limitations. Some are enabling, beneficial, even delightful. Recent ethical advice by Donna Haraway and Michael Pollan to delight in eating animal flesh, in moderation, and when ‘humanely’ and organically reared, illustrates one such set of limits. Carnivorousness entails asymmetrical human-animal power-relations -- though these don’t preclude companionable or even in a mildly demented way worshipful relations (the cat as domestic deity). Without imagining that ethics of transcendence should or one day will be transcended, an office-based understanding of humanitas might contribute to an art of living with limits.

Notes

¹ Henceforth cited in-text as HA.

² Marsilio Ficino, De Humanitate, in Lettere, Epistularum Familiarum Liber I, ed. S Gentile, cited HA, 23.

³ Conan Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: the Presuppositions of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres) 2006, p. 24; same, ‘The persona of the philosopher and the rhetorics of office in early modern England’, in Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter, eds. The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: the Nature of a Contested Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

⁴ In addition to Condren, current Anglophone writing in this ‘official’ vein includes: Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); J. Patrick Dobel, Public Integrity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999); Andrew Sabl, Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) John Rohr, Public Servic, Ethics, and Constitutional Practice (Laurence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Paul Du Gay, In Defence of Bureaucracy (London: Sage, 2000); Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); David Saunders, Anti-lawyers: and the Critics of Law and State (London: Routledge, 1998).

⁵ Arthur Applbaum, Ethics for Adversaries: the Morality of Roles in Public and Professional Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), a systematic Kantian critique of office-based ethics.

⁶ David Burchell, "Civic Personae: Macintyre, Cicero, and Moral Personality," History of Political Thought 19, 1 (1998), 101-18. Cicero’s affirmation of Plato’s view that the office of philosopher includes clarification of all offices does not detract from the general point (Condren, Argument, 15-19).

⁷ On More see Condren, Argument, 123; David Saunders, Anti-Lawyers, 26; see also his ‘The judicial persona in historical context’, in Condren et al eds. The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe, 140-59.

⁸ Samuel Pufendorf, De Jurae Naturam et Gentium Libri Octo, Transl. C.H. Oldfather and W.A. Oldfather Buffalo (NY: William Hein and Co, 1995); Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments,148-96.

⁹ For example, Johannes Althusius, Politica (1614), transl. Frederick Carney (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995). On the role of offices see Robert von Friedeburg, ‘Person and office: Althusius on the formation of magistrates and counsellors’, in Conan Condren, et. al. The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe, 160-181.

¹⁰ Blandine Kriegel, L’État et les Esclaves: Reflexions pour l’Histoire des États (Paris: Editions Payot, 1989).

¹¹ Casuistry also comprehends the rhetorical language game of paradiastole, or rival ‘moral re-descriptions’ aimed at raising or lowering estimations of character and action. See Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 142-53. In a way this article is an exercise in paradiastole.

¹² J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion I: the Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 147-8; J-J Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, transl. J.M.Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 354.

¹³ As testified in the editorial preface to Jill Kraye, ed. Cambridge Translations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, Vol. I, Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xiii-iv.

¹⁴ Paul Q. Hirst, Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 163-66; 179-97. On renaissance humanist philologists’ recovery -- and organization for ready retrieval -- of numerous ‘ politico-technical’ knowledges, see Gerhardt Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State transl. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1, 77-78. On Boccaccio’s non-literary (royal genealogical) writing see Stephen Orgel, ‘The example of Hercules’, in Walther Killy, ed., Mythographie der frühen Neuzeit: Ihre Anwendung in den Künsten (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1984), 25-47.

¹⁵ This historical way of seeing philosophy is evidently indebted to Peter Brown, Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot.

¹⁶ Paul Kristeller, ‘Studies on Renaissance Humanism during the last twenty years’, Studies in the Renaissance, 9 (1962), 16; HA, 18-19.

¹⁷ See e.g. David Burchell, ‘Burkhardt redidivius: renaissance pedagogy as self-formation’, Renaissance Studies, 13, 3 (1999), 283-302 (contra Lisa Jardine); Peter Brown, ‘The limits of intolerance’, in his Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27-54 (the role of local notables’ rhetorical formation in sustaining toleration of pagan rites across the Christianized Roman empire).

¹⁸ Focusing on correspondence over Ficinian thought between Aby Warburg and Max Weber, Toussaint argues for the Ficinian rather than Nietzschean sources of Weber’s references to the daemonic vis-a-vis vocation.

¹⁹ Condren, Argument and Authority, 25.

²⁰ Toussaint makes no mention of ‘collegiality’ in the Anglophone ethical sense (mentoring younger colleagues, etc.). I am uncertain of its French conceptual equivalent given that ‘collegialité’ denotes a structure of organization and authority.

²¹ See on the Maussian gift Francois Flahault, Le Paradox de Robinson: Capitalisme et Société (Paris: Editions Milles et Une Nuits, 2003), 92-99.

²² Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, ed. and transl. M.A. Screech, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 505, 548.

²³ Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, transl. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalpha (London: Routledge, 2006), 32-34.

²⁴ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, I: ‘Why are kings without pity for their subjects? Because they never expect to be human’. Cited Tracy Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the Politics of the Ordinary (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 122.

²⁵ Quentin Skinner, ‘Thomas More’s Utopia and the virtue of true nobility’, in his Visions of Politics, Vol II: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200), 213-44; Galatians, 3, 28 (‘There is neither Jew nor Greek …bond nor free … for ye are all one in Christ)’.

²⁶ Reinhart Kosselleck, Critique and Crisis: the Pathogenesis of Enlightenment (Oxford: Berg, 1988).

²⁷ William Craven, Pico della Mirandola: Symbol of His Age: Modern Interpretations of a Renaissance Philosopher (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1981), 160-64.

²⁸ Craven, Pico, 1. My citations from the Oratio use a popular American edition: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, transl. A Robert Caponigri (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1956).

²⁹ Craven, Pico, 37-38.

³⁰ Pico, Oration, 21; Craven, Pico, 36.

³¹ Pico, Oration, 21; Craven, Pico, 29-31 (on Pico’s embrace of a microcosmic image of man in the Heptaplus); 35 (‘not a serious philosophical statement about man’).

³² Pico, Oration, 24.

³³ Craven, Pico, 36, emphasis added.

³⁴ Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on humanism’, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited and transl. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993).

³⁵ Kriegel, The State, 53.

³⁶ Anselm Turmeda, ‘Disputation of the donkey’ (1417), Kraye, Renaissance Philosophical Texts, 3-16. The donkey defeats every argument for the superiority of ‘the sons of Adam’ over the animals but one: God chose to appear on earth in human form.

³⁷ See classically Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

³⁸ Partly floating free of Utilitarianism qua moral philosophy (in all its variety), the epithet ‘utilitarian’ -- conjointly with ‘instrumentalism’, the ancient aristocratic and later Protestant sources of which Toussaint ignores -- works to shape a blanket conscientious alienation from ‘bureaucratic’ institutions. Such categorizations do not sit well with Toussaint’s (often illuminating) efforts to make understanding of humanitas historically precise. Can the spirit of Nazism be briskly summed up as utilitarian (HA ,163) given scholarly contra-indications of its character as messianic ‘political religion’? See e.g. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: a New History (NY: Hill and Wang, 2000, 1-23).

³⁹ See e.g. Oestreich, Neostoicism, 162; Ian Hunter, ‘Personality as a vocation: the political rationality of the humanities’, in Mike Gaine and Terry Johnson, eds. Foucault’s New Domains (London: Routledge, 1993), 153-192; Anthony Grafton, ‘Teacher, text and classroom: a case study from a Parisian college’, History of Universities, I (1981), 37-70.