Juan Huarte's Naturalistic Humanism

Notes and Discussions JUAN HUARTE'S NATURALISTIC HUMANISM A traditional account of Spanish Renaissance thought is normally restricted to scholastic philosophers and mystical writers, the two groups which seem to fit better with a stereotyped version of the Counter-reformation. Much less celebrated are the classicists, although among them we find such men as the Platonists Leon Hebreo and Fox Morcillo, Aristotelians like Sepfilveda and Prrez de Oliva, eclectics like Vives and G6mez Pereyra. Besides these larger categories, other smaller groups deserve to be mentioned without whom the intriguing complexity of Spain in the sixteenth century would be reduced to a slanted caricature. The most significant are: first, the Lulfists, especially popular in Aragon; second, the stubborn heretics like Miguel Servet and Juan de Valdrs; third, the sceptics, like Francisco S~inchez and Pedro de Valencia; and, finally, an extraordinary and almost forgotten group of physicians, educational reformers, and humanists having in common the same crudely naturalistic approach to the study of man. This article deals with the central figure of this group, the physician Juan Huarte de San Juan. Huarte was born (1529) in a small village of the Pyrenees, but he spent most of his uneventful life as a general practitioner in the Andalusian town of Baeza, where he died in 1588. Huarte wrote only one book, Examen de lngenios (1572), to which he owes his entire reputation. A hundred years after his death, the book had had sixty-five editions and had been translated into French, English, Dutch, Italian, German, and Latin. Its impact upon Spanish literature of the Golden Age can be measured by the constant echo of its thoughts in the works of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Quevedo, Alarcrn, Moreto, and Calder6n. 1 Innumerable details of Don Quijote de la Mancha are dearly inspired by Huarte's tract, z French and German scholars have traced the influence of Huarte's ideas upon such European thinkers as Charron, Montesquieu, and Bacon. Since its 1725 edition, Bayle's Dictionnaire has included a long article on Huarte. Most of the treatises on temperament published in Germany during the eighteenth century mention the Examen with extraordinary praise. Lessing dedicated his doctoral dissertation x I have used the Ribadeneira edition of the Examen in Biblioteca de Autores Espa~oles (Madrid, 1953), LV, 403-520. The quotations give Chapter, Section (if any), and page. The most comprehensive study of Huarte's thought is Mauricio de Iriarte's El Doctor Juan Huarte de San Juan y su Examen de Ingenios (Madrid, 1939). 2 Iriarte, pp. 311-332.See also Rafael Salillas, Un gran inspirador de Cervantes. El Doctor Juan Huarte de San Juan y su Examen de lngenios (Madrid, 1905). Miguel de Unamuno in his book Vida de Don Qui]ote y Sancho (Madrid, 1904) mentions Huarte on several occasions. (See ibid., pp. 15, 17, 126, 127, 233.) SaliUas' book was reviewed by W. W. Cornfort in MLN, XXI, 30-32. See also Harold Weinrich, "Das Ingenium Don Quijotes," Forschungen zur romanischen Philologie (Miinster), I, 1956. [71] 72 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY tO the study of Huarte and translated the Examen into German. In 1820, a German encyclopedia hailed Huarte as one of the few Spaniards whose reputation had crossed the national borders.3 The Examen begins with a colorful description of individual differences in wit, ability, taste, and inclination (I, II; 408-415). Although at times Huarte betrays an intense concern with moral behavior (V; 420-425), his attention is concentrated upon the relationship between specific talents and scholarly disciplines as the basis of professional orientation and performance. Huarte's most original and controversial claim was to insist that such diversity could not adequately be explained in terms of environment and of acquired habits, but was radically grounded upon an inborn trait of the individual (IV; 417-420). Huarte recognized the impact of external circumstances (food and climate), but only as a secondary mutation of this innate individual structure (XVIII, v; 517-519). The inductive proof of these propositions is far from convincing: isolated anecdotes from classical literature and personal observations are a poor substitute for statistical evidence. Huarte's next step was to determine the nature of this hereditary...