New Philosophy of Human Nature: Neither Known to Nor Attained by the Great Ancient Philosophers, Which Will Improve Human Life and Helath
352
New Philosophy of Human Nature: Neither Known to Nor Attained by the Great Ancient Philosophers, Which Will Improve Human Life and Helath
352eBook
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Overview
Fifty years before Descartes, Sabuco posited a dualism that accounted for mind/body interaction. She was first among the moderns to argue that the brain--not the heart--controls the body. Her account also anticipates the role of cerebrospinal fluid, the relationship between mental and physical health, and the absorption of nutrients through digestion. This extensively annotated translation features an ample introduction demonstrating the work’s importance to the history of science, philosophy of medicine, and women’s studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252092312 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 965 KB |
About the Author
Mary Ellen Waithe is a professor of philosophy at Cleveland State University and the editor of the four-volume series A History of Women Philosophers.Maria Colomer Vintró completed the master of philosophy degree at Cleveland State University. C. Angel Zorita is a retired professor of Spanish and Latin at Cleveland State University.
Read an Excerpt
New Philosophy of Human Nature
Neither Known to nor Attained by the Great Ancient Philosophers, Which Will Improve Human Life and HealthBy OLIVA SABUCO DE NANTES BARRERA
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03111-3
Introduction
The Work and Its Importance
In 1587, Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera published Nueva Filosofía de la Naturaleza del Hombre (New Philosophy of Human Nature) in Madrid. New Philosophy consists of seven separately titled treatises. The first three, Knowledge of One's Self, Composition of the World as It Is, and Things That Will Improve This World and Its Nations, sketch the theoretical outlines and empirical foundation for the next three treatises. Treatments and Remedies of Proper Medicine, Proper Medicine Derived from Human Nature, and Brief Exposition on Human Nature: The Foundations of the Art of Medicine flesh out her theory and apply it to medicine. But Proper Philosophy of the Nature of Composite Things, of Humans, and of the World, Unknown to the Ancients revisits the metaphysics sketched in Composition of the World as It Is and carries it forward in ways that more fully demonstrate the connection between life in the human microcosm and planetary motion in the macrocosm. The first five treatises are written in Castilian; the last two are primarily in Latin.
In 1903, the discovery of the last will and testament of Oliva's father, Miguel Sabuco, in which he claimed authorship of New Philosophy, led to a change of attribution by Spain's Biblioteca Nacional and the U.S. Library of Congress and National Library of Medicine. After considerable archival research resulting in the discovery of some one hundred documents related to the Sabuco family, as well as numerous textual clues to the author's sex, we have concluded that the father's testamentary claim was unfounded. Those results are published in two recent articles, one in English and one in Spanish. Our translation of our established text of Miguel Sabuco's last will and testament is included as appendix 2.
Philosophy during the thirteenth-century Italian Renaissance marked the revival of interest in classical Greek and Latin texts. Over the ensuing three centuries, the Renaissance became synonymous with artistic expression, rapid scientific advances (especially in astronomy), a love of intellectual freedom, and a strong interest in the commonality of human nature across cultures. The introduction of the printing press, the invention of movable type, and, particularly in Spain, the invention of movable presses that traveled and printed books locally resulted in widespread, rapid proliferation of ideas. Astronomers, physicians, and theologians studied the revived classical works of philosophy, particularly the works of Aristotle and Plato, rethinking them in humanist terms. But the developments of the Renaissance penetrated more slowly in Spain than they did in northern Europe or in Italy. Spanish philosophical writing became humanistic with the writings of Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) and Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529-88). Vives emphasized the importance of inductive reasoning in philosophy of medicine. Huarte was a philosopher of medicine who emphasized the importance of relying upon empirical evidence rather than attributing causes of medical conditions to occult forces. Sabuco synthesizes these traditions, disagrees with fundamental aspects of them, and carries them forward in a holistic philosophy of human nature that is part of a larger view of the cosmos and humans' place in it.
Sabuco's objective is to improve the lives of people and nations in part by improving medical practice. In this sense, New Philosophy is one of the earliest works of what is now called "applied philosophy." Sabuco argues that in order to achieve her primary objective, ordinary people as well as physicians need to understand human nature where emotions and passions play a basic role in relation to health and life. Such an understanding cannot be reached without first surveying the theoretical claims of ancient philosophers and naturalists concerning human nature. But to do this, Sabuco claims that we must first consider the human soul and the respects in which it differs from those of animals and plants. Interlaced throughout New Philosophy is an early examination of the mind-body problem, a problem Sabuco thinks she solves. Her analysis is intertwined with plentiful examples: Sabuco's moral philosophy, philosophy of medicine, and philosophy of mind either must fit (or explain away) the then-available empirical evidence. Furthermore, she requires her philosophical views of human nature to be a consistent part of a metaphysics and cosmology that places human nature in the larger scheme of things: the macrocosm.
Sabuco's work is therefore of importance to the history of philosophy and to the history of philosophy of medicine for this if for no other reason: it is one link between Renaissance philosophy and the "modern" rationalist Enlightenment philosophy that René Descartes introduced half a century later. Indeed, he may have been familiar with her work; it was fairly well known in Paris in the early seventeenth century.
In 1604, while Sabuco was still living, Francisco Lopez de Uveda, a physician and poet from Toledo, boasted that a character he created would soon be more famous than the most famous authors and works of recent years: Oliva Sabuco, Al-Farache, Lazarillo, Don Quixote, and Celestina. Lopez de Uveda's copyright was signed on August 22, 1604. Therefore, it is quite evident that by 1604, the name of Oliva Sabuco was so famous that she was proverbial as a sage woman (as famous as Celestina, the most published and imitated work of sixteenth-century Spanish literature) whose literary skill was reputed to have rivaled that of Miguel de Cervantes.
In 1618, another contemporary of Sabuco, the famed French physician Charles le Pois (1563-1633), cited Sabuco's influence on his own views regarding diseases common to both men and women. His particular interest was in hysteria, until then believed to be an exclusively female condition. Le Pois was regent of the medical school at the Pont-à-Mousson, the Jesuit university at Nancy. Sabuco also was known to the seventeenth-century French author Etienne de Clave, who in 1635 referred to "la Docte Dona ... Oliva, philosophe Espagnole" as a critic of Aristotle and Galen.
Sabuco makes her mark in the history of philosophy as an early examiner of the mind-body problem and as a mind-body interactionalist-dualist. Importantly, she offers not merely a theoretical argument but one that she shows to be consistent with empirical scientific (biological) observations. Her knowledge of human anatomy was scientifically accurate by sixteenth-century standards. Her postulations concerning anatomical structure and organic function that is visible only through microscopic examination anticipates later medical discoveries concerning the circulatory, lymphatic, and neurological systems. Quite a few of these postulations still are considered anatomically and functionally accurate by twenty-first-century medical standards.
Translation and Interpretation
Exemplars of the First Edition of New Philosophy
We have identified one previously unreported exemplar and consulted six known exemplars of the first edition of Nueva Filosofía. The previously unreported exemplar of Sabuco's first edition was located at the Biblioteca y Museo de la Historia de la Medicina de Barcelona. Three copies are held at the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid: R 976, U 4166, and R 16267. A fifth exemplar is at the Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona: B-3/5/20/324. A sixth exemplar was examined at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas at the Universitat de Valencia Facultad de Medicina, Instituto de Estudios Documentales e Históricos sobre la Ciencia. We have found minor discrepancies between the Valencia and the Barcelona exemplars, leading us to believe that the Barcelona is the earliest exemplar. The seventh exemplar is the copy at the U.S. Library of Congress National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. We base our translation primarily upon the Barcelona exemplar, but where text was obliterated, we have deferred to the Valencia and Bethesda exemplars.
Methodology and Criteria for Interpreting the Text
Sabuco wrote at a time when Castilian grammar and usage was in the process of becoming standardized. Vocabulary was of course fairly consistent across Castile and other Spanish realms as well. Nevertheless, there were regional and cultural differences, scientific terms, and latinizations. Siglo de Oro literary style encouraged originality of the sort exemplified by Sabuco, the use of the vernacular for academic writing. This was the time of Cervantes, a recently ransomed prisoner of war and promising young writer. It was also the time of the philosopher-rhetorician-grammarian Pedro Simón Abril, an Alcaraz native. A humanist and educator, Simón Abril was the author of the first Latin grammar and the first Greek grammar written in Castilian.
Sabuco wrote during a period of great change in the Spanish language. She uses many Castilian terms that are no longer in common use and terms whose usage has since changed. For example, she uses the term especies in several distinct ways. During Sabuco's time, as today, the term referred to different species of plants and animals. It also referred to what we might now call "lower-order Platonic forms"-for example, love, hate, sorrow-but also forms of material things such as plants, animals, and rocks and their colors, sizes, textures, structures, and the like. But Sabuco mostly uses the term especies to refer to recollection of the Platonic forms. Another equivocal term is etica, sometimes spelled as ética, which meant, during Sabuco's era, both ethics and raging fever. Her estomago rarely means "stomach"; it usually means "digestive system" and sometimes "abdomen." She takes her metaphor "the root" for the brain from Aristotle in De Anima, where he uses the term as a metaphor for the head. For her term harmonía or "harmony," we use "system," a metaphor she does not explicitly acknowledge using until the sixth treatise, Brief Exposition on Human Nature.
Other expressions, such as esperanza del bien, can neither be translated literally nor figuratively if we are to capture Sabuco's full intent. The literal meaning of the term is "hope for the good." One of its figurative meanings prior to Sabuco's time had a strong theological connotation derived in part from the then historical use of el bien as a euphemism for God. The theological connotation of the euphemism esperanza del bien was "hope for salvation."
Similarly, adios literally and historically meant a diós, "to God." However, to ordinary Spaniards of Sabuco's time, independent of any theological context that signaled otherwise, adiós simply meant "good-bye." The theological connotation was there and could be understood and deconstructed by any fluent Spaniard, but its first and primary meaning was "good-bye." During the historical period preceding Sabuco, religious writers such as Fray Luis de Granada use esperanza to indicate an eschatological hope. The religious meaning is further developed in the mystical writings of San Juan de la Cruz (John of the Cross), a late contemporary of Sabuco, who, like Teresa de Jesus (Teresa of Avila), was unknown to Sabuco. But the humanization of esperanza in Spanish literature begins a century earlier in Spain where it is identified as the psychological component of a will to survive. As with the term adiós, to ordinary Spaniards of Sabuco's day, independent of any theological context that signaled otherwise, esperanza del bien did not mean "hope for salvation"; it meant, as Laín Entralgo notes, an optimistic outlook related to survival. We generally translate esperanza del bien as "optimism" partly due to our understanding of Sabuco's dual use of language and partly due to our understanding of her concept of the soul. Both are described more fully below.
Sabuco uses esperanza del bien most commonly to refer to "optimism" as a tool that the rational soul utilizes to preserve the health and longevity of the body. However, especially in the early sections of Knowledge of One's Self, Sabuco uses esperanza del bien in a somewhat ambiguous way that, depending upon the context, could be interpreted also to mean "hope for salvation." For example, in the following passage Sabuco discusses the effect of hopelessness on human health. Her main focus is clearly on the effects that a lack of esperanza del bien has on human health. But at the end of the passage, we see that she ties the absence of esperanza del bien to the loss of salvation. She says:
Hopelessness of achieving the good kills as much as its antithesis, optimism, yields life. Optimism [esperanza del bien] is one of the three pillars that sustain health and human life. Hopelessness, with sadness and lack of will to live, kills some in the long run, for they lose hope of achieving that expected well-being without which they do not want to live. They let go of and throw away their remaining possessions because they miss that so-loved and yearned-for good. Hence, one who loses hope of getting the desired good does not want to live.... The discord between soul and body gradually sends him toward death. Hopelessness operates even more vehemently on others. They abhor life because they have lost optimism [esperanza del bien]. Due to this same harmful cause, they commit suicide when they are alone. Out of doubtful and uncertain fortune, they make real and eternal calamity certain rather than wait for their so-called fortune to change. Neither do they wait for the veiled and hidden changes coming from divine providence.
In our view, "real and eternal calamity" refers to a loss of salvation, a connotation confirmed by the subsequent statement suggesting that things might turn out differently with the intercession of divine providence. We see in this passage, perhaps more than anywhere else in Sabuco's work, a dual meaning of esperanza del bien. If one is "optimistic" and does not commit the sin of suicide, the outcome is that one survives and there is still "hope for salvation."
There is more than just this cause-effect relationship between the two interpretations of the term. The medical and theological connotations of the term are independent, yet they are connected: the virtue of the body is to actively pursue health, just as the virtue of the immortal soul is to pursue salvation. Unfortunately, English lacks such a cleverly nuanced expression as esperanza del bien, and most of Sabuco's examples invoke the theological stance in an even more ambiguous way than the excerpt just cited. Therefore, in the text we translate esperanza del bien as "optimism," interpolating a note wherever we see the dual interpretation as supported by context. "Optimism" connotes an active, cheerful, confident, bright, outgoing, determinedly buoyant outlook on life in general. It is precisely the spirited, unbridled optimism so perfectly captured in Cervantes' Don Quixote that in Sabuco has the power to shore up both physical and mental health.
There are some terms that Sabuco uses ungrammatically, in a more colloquial manner. For example, early in Knowledge of One's Self she refers to enojo y pesar, which literally translates as "anger and grief." She separately discusses other forms of anger, such as wrath, vengeance, ire, rage. But enojo y pesar is always used in singular reference to any given example. Taking our clue from a reference in section 3 to este afecto, "this emotion," we translate enojo y pesar as a singular emotion, "angry grief." It refers to a kind of profound sorrow or depression at the loss or absence of something beloved. In this condition, the person's mind lashes out at the body due to his or her profound grief. In each instance, the person ruins his or her health or dies. There is no cleverly nuanced English term other than "depression" that is the equivalent of angrily turning one's grief inwardly to attack one's own physical and mental health. But the term "depression" now has Freudian connotations that are far more complex than can be supported by Sabuco's theory alone.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Philosophy of Human Nature by OLIVA SABUCO DE NANTES BARRERA Copyright © 2007 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission.
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