Introduction The Humanities in Deconstruction

Abstract

Burckhardt’s extraordinary essay published in an edition of 1,000 copies was hard to sell and he received no royalties. Nietzsche, who joined Burckhardt at the University of Basel in 1868, greatly admired the work, although they were never friends. It was one of the few modern books Nietzsche recommended. Burckhardt, a conservative antimodernist, emphasized the individual person as the starting point of historical study. For Burckhardt history provided the means to study the relation of contemporary culture to the cultures of the past, and in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy he registers the different ways in which the Renaissance first gave the highest value to individuality. He believed that the early signs of “the modern European Spirit” could be seen in Florence. It was a historical vantage point for him to observe the declining fate of the individual who had become increasingly domesticated and commodified in modern society, thus dimming the creative energies that had first come to fruition in ancient Greece and were rediscovered and extended during the Renaissance. He saw the rise of capitalism, self-interest, and national wars and warned of the coming struggle between freedom and the all-powerful State. Yet though a humanist in the old sense of the word, he was not an idealist in his descriptions of Greek civilization, demonstrating how Athenians were victims of their democracy.

To the discovery of the outward world the Renaissance added a still greater achievement, by first discerning and bringing to light the full, whole nature of man. This period … first gave the highest development to individuality, and then led the individual to the most zealous and thorough study of himself in all forms and under all conditions. Indeed, the development of personality is essentially involved in the recognition of it in oneself and in others. Between these two great processes our narrative has placed the influence of ancient literature because the mode of conceiving and representing both the individual and human nature in general was defined and colored by that influence. But the power of conception and representation lay in the age and in the people.

Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy