Pico della Mirandola

“Somewhere, a place for us, a time and place for us!” (West Side Story) First came Caesar (we have no king but…), then came God (I am what am), and now the Age of Infernal Machines. Where do we fit in? When is it our time?

The Good News: Every dog has its day! The bad news: We’ve apparently already had ours. Sorry you missed it. You’re only 550 years late to the party. Humanism, the celebration of You, thrives in the border regions separating the Middle Ages from the Renaissance (e.g. 1450 – 1500 CE in Florence). 

Fortunately, however, we can relive those halcyon days in Northern Italy through the writings of its chief philosopher-chronologer, Pico della Mirandola (1463 - 1494). PdM was perhaps the first philosopher since the original trio (Peter, Paul and John) to understand correctly the nature and status of human beings.

We are not the slaves of despots nor the puppets of divine caprice; nor are we merely prototypes of future machines. We are us and we occupy a special, if not unique, place in cosmic ontology…a place that Mirandola ‘nosed out’, like a wild boar foraging the Italian countryside for its precious truffles.

You doubt me! Then consider this: “He (homo sapiens) is the interpreter of nature, set midway between timeless unchanging and the flux of time; the living union (as the Persians say), the very marriage hymn of the world.” (Oration on the Dignity of Man) 

In contemporary ontology, the border region between chaos and order is the realm of ‘complexity’ and we humans are nothing if not complex. I mean, members of what other species spend tens of thousands of dollars ‘to find themselves’? Only we get psychoanalyzed, walk the 200 mile Camino de Santiago, or go on lengthy prayer retreats.    

“Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man (sic) to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be!” 

Here PDM anticipates the 20^th century existentialist meme: “I know who I am, and I know I can be whoever/whatever I want to be.”

In fact, there is direct line of philosophical descent from PdM to JPS (Jean-Paul Sartre): 

“(God) set the infernal dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life… (Then) he bethought himself of bringing forth man (sic). Truth is, there remained no archetype according to which he might fashion a new offspring… All space was already filled… (So) this creature (human), to whom he could give nothing wholly his own, should have a share in the particular endowment of every other creature…

“…Upon man, at the moment of creation, God bestowed seeds, pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life… because he (man)…assumes the characteristic power of every form of life.”

Unlike God, whose essence is hardwired and precedes even his existence, human beings have no essence, other than what we choose for ourselves. We have within us ‘the seeds’, the potential for every possible realization. 

Like Sartre, PdM understood Being (etre) as compact and dense: a solid. Human beings are the neant (nothingness) that creates space for free choice and agency. 

“We have given you, Oh Adam, no visage (image) proper to yourself, nor any endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts, you may with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision…in order that you may, as free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer…

“This is why Evantes the Persian…writes that man has no inborn and proper semblance, but many that are extraneous and adventitious… We have been born into this condition of being what we choose to be…since if we will, we can…

“Know thyself invites and exhorts us to study the whole of nature of which the nature of man is the connecting link.” 

Mirandola presents a view of homo sapiens that projects us half a millennium into the future as it simultaneously reached back almost 2500 years, to the time of King David: “You have made them (humans) a little lower than the angels…you made them rulers over the works of your hands, you put everything under their feet.” (Psalm 8)

The evolution of modern human beings did not end with the emergence of homo sapiens. It continued through the more rapidly adaptive medium of culture. In less than 100,000 years we emerged from being merely ‘a primate among primates’ to being ‘the apex primate’. 

We distinguished ourselves by impressive advances in technology (our use of tools), arithmetic (our ability to compute) and language (our ability to communicate using symbols). Just as importantly, we began to ask new questions culminating in 1966 with "What's it all about, Alfie?” followed in 1968 by Yellow Submarine which hazarded an answer.   

Nor did we fail to turn the spotlight of inquiry onto ourselves: Are some acts ‘right’ and others ‘wrong’ and which are which? We found that the emergence of personal morality (e.g. the 10 Commandments) had consequences for our conception of social order (e.g. the 250 year period of Theocracy in Israel following the Exodus). 

Regardless of its cosmological bona fides, the Bible gets its anthropology right. It brilliantly encapsulates the evolution of the human community from abject, virtually anonymous, slavery under ‘Pharaoh’ to the concept of self-rule…and back again. 

In a famous chapter (8) from the First Book of Samuel, the Israelites trade their God-given right of self-rule for the yoke of monarchy. Fast forward 500 years, Israel has been conquered by a series of foreign invaders and its leading citizens have been reduced to the status of slaves in Babylon: “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.”

YHWH gave the people of Israel dignity and liberty; they consciously traded that great gift for what turned out to be occupation and slavery. Surely Bible literate humans would never make that mistake again! Or would they? 

Fast forward 2000 years, leap-frogging Jesus and the Caesars: “riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation…” (Finnegan’s Wake) to Florence and Environs. 

First in philosophy (PdM), then in theology (Savonarola), then in the arts (Davinci, Michaelangelo, etc.), the election lights fell on humanity. Suddenly, once again, “Man is the measure of all things.” (Protagoras, c. 450 BCE) But not for long…

It’s 1500 now and Machiavelli is on the move! At first glance, his instrumental ethics seem fairly innocuous. After all, don’t we teach our children that actions have consequences? Well, as Job found out to his dismay, sometimes they do…and sometimes they don’t.

Newly ‘enlightened’, our post-humanist culture traded a distinctly human ‘right for right’s sake’ ethos (virtue is its own reward) for one more conducive to enslavement (ends justify means). It no longer matters what we do as long as it works. 

By this logic, the development and deployment of nuclear weapons during WW II was ethical because it hastened the fall of Japan and helped bring a terrible war to a close. The 200,000 civilian deaths were just so much collateral damage.

Doctrinaire Marxism notwithstanding, we no longer need Pharaoh, or a ruling elite, to keep us in line. We have willingly subordinated our birthright, our existential liberty, to an exo-culture of mechanization. Productivity and efficiency are the new values by which we measure our lives.

You painted a masterpiece that hangs in the Louvre. I developed technology that increases the speed of assembly line processes by 0.2%. Which of us has had the most impactful, the most consequential, life? Which of us has made the most important contribution to the welfare of our species? And which of us is ‘the better person’ as a result? 

It’s been a half-century since Machiavelli presented the Medici with a blueprint for the industrial enslavement of the human race. Once again, as in 1000 BCE, 500 BCE, and 1500 CE, we find ourselves at a fork in the road.

Artificial intelligence will either complete the mechanization of human culture once and for all…or it will liberate us from the tyranny of machines altogether. It’s yesterday once more. We hold our future in our hands. What path will we choose this time?

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Image: Umberto Boccioni — The City Rises (1910), oil on canvas

Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910) is a blazing vision of urban construction and energy, capturing the spirit of early twentieth-century industrial progress. Workers, horses, and scaffolding swirl together in a rush of color and motion, symbolizing humanity’s drive to build a modern world. Yet the same intensity that celebrates innovation also hints at chaos and struggle, revealing both the exhilaration and the turmoil of industrial growth.