Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 669 N. S. Struever. Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the R~missame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Pp. xiii + 245. Cloth, $32.5o. Struever's introductory chapter, "The Uses of the Present"--in polemical distinction from the more familiar phrase, "uses of the past"--sets out her perhaps unique method of finding areas of mutual interest between modern rhetorical and philosophical analysis on the one hand, and Renaissance ethical thinkers on the other. Working from within a set of unified disciplines--Struever does not wish to separate intellectual history and history of philosophy from "pure" philosophy in this dense study--she is explicidy concerned with "high-culture texts" containing "arguments of intrinsic interest ": principally Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Nicholas of Cusa, Machiavelli, and Montaigne . There are also shorter chapters dealing with matters arising from the main figures. Reviewing diverse standpoints for the modern historian, where does she situate herself in her ethical inquiry? She plumps for "presentism." The past only comes alive in the minds of those living here and now, including historians. So Struever prefers historian of science David Hull (arguing against Kuhn that one cannot pretend ignorance of current scientific knowledge in discussing earlier cosmological theories) to Quentin Skinner, whom she accuses with some virulence of reducing texts to "antiques." "It is trivializing to insist on the radical pastness or isolation of arguments to the point of denying their intrinsic worth," she asserts (x). Rather than historians in the present fudlely reconstituting the past, Struever prefers to speak of the past "glossing" the present. A gloss in her sense "rearranges the pieces of an argument" (x-xi). It is like a kaleidoscope that one turns and turns again: each time one has a new configuration, though the pieces remain the same. While claiming that this avoids condescension towards the past, and the equally-to-be-avoided vice of antiquarianism, Struever does not appear concerned that the model invites distortion (you pick the parts from the past that fit present interests), or--more serious in my view--dismemberment of an articulated text where the part has meaning in relation to the whole. (I shall give examples later.) To be preferred to Skinner as far as fight ethical inquiry is concerned is Bernard Williams, for "his account illuminates the efficiency of Renaissance antiacademic initiatives; it allows us to focus on how their reaction to academic dysfunction in ethics can continue to exploit a rich textual tradition While dismissing academic exploitations" (xi). Struever is one of the few (but fortunately growing band of) scholars to place Renaissance humanists like Petrarch, Nicholas of Cusa, and Valla in the category of serious and innovative thinkers. She reverses the trend promoted by P. O. Kristeller-and still widespread--that humanists were "loose" thinkers, whose chosen genres like the dialogue and letter doomed them to a lackluster afterlife, and that humanism itself is "primarily a rather disheveled literary initiative" (95)- In the case of Petrarch, Struever focusses on the letter (Petrarch wrote hundreds of them) as the "location" for renewing an intimate, reflexive, confessional and tentative approach to ethical inquiry, based on experience. Like Socrates in ancient Athens, Petrarch judged that the proper object of philosophy was not natural science and metaphysics, but basic questions of practical ethics: How should we live? The letter invites and promotes friendship, a 67 ~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3~:4 OCTOBER 1994 dialogue of equals, and "the lived texture of friendship generates ethical insight" (14). Petrarch "glosses" Williams, who says that "practical deliberation is first-personal, radically so" (24). The strongest essays are on Lorenzo VaUa. Like S. Camporeale, whom she acknowledges , she begins her analysis with Valla's D/a/cot/ca, and from there proceeds to his explicitly ethical dialogue, De verofahofue bonc. Valla boldly dismantles Aristotle's Organon, which constituted the foundation ofthe Scholastic grammar, logic, and dialectic , but which had been deformed by centuries of translations, commentaries, and textbooks. Only when these disciplines had been reconstructed did Valla turn to ethics, where "perspicuity and openness, not obscurity and hiddenness are the virtues" (l 13). Valla's insistence on ordinary language usage sanctioned by custom (Quintilian's axiom in his Instiaaes...