Human Potential
The main object of the Italian philosopher in his Oratio was the excellency of human nature. Something that others cultures value, and is excelling in the age of the Renaissance. Pico employs his wit to drive the attention into a shared field, in an almost Aristotelian way, he starts with a variety of traditional topics to introduce a real meditation about liberty, exercising it in word and thought. The philosopher writes that the human vocation is a mystical one that has to be done following three stages, which comprehends necessarily moral transformation, intellectual research and final perfection in the identity with the absolute reality. He also comments that this paradigm is universal because it can be retraced in every tradition.
To clarify this, Pico explains that what a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God.
Free Will
In the Oration, the man is unique and admired by a characteristic that rise above all, that is freedom. In the text, Pico assumes that the dignity of man relies on the fact that is free to choose, that is because in nature man is the only one that is undefined, incomplete, versatile, undetermined and open to many opportunities. This differs from angels that have been given a form that can’t change. Pico acknowledges that human beings are not from heaven of earth, unethical o mortals but with the freedom to sink into an animal life of rising to divinity.
Free will is, in reality, God’s gift to humanity. In that way, a man can be anything and is capable of choosing his way of life. Pico fundaments are that is a creature without any image predispose and tents to the image of God but as a finality not as his origin. So they can choose to be like plants or tent for the sensual life of animals but if they choose to ration they will be like saints if they get intellectual way will be more like angels. In the end, the human duty is to rise to a higher level, even something that angel can’t do.
New Concept of Man
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola made clear the need to revise and rewrite the myth around which old conceptions of the man he intended to rescue were twisted. For this, it was necessary to rewrite the myth of creation, a key discourse that will legitimize the consolidation of a new vision of man, of his particular nature and its unique position in the world, to make it more in line with the demands of the time.
Pico pretended, with his Oratio, later known as “Speech on the dignity of man”, give way to the dialectic - around the nine hundred theses proposals- from a new horizon, from a vision of the purified, free man of past faults, of old ties, of inherited debts. In this sense, the Adamic myth that Pico della Mirandola rewrites will mean the beginning of the modern on prodigiously fertile land. It represents that previous state that will serve as bed, justification, to the definitive imposition of the law of man about reality, to the further deployment of logos, in this case, modern. The objective of the Florentine thinker is not limited to recovering or defending a certain vision of the man already glimpsed by the tradition, but that insists on founding a new way of being a man, that makes possible the unfolding, the development, of man modern.
Philosophy
The second part of the text we find Pico’s idea that the highest form of existence for a human can be achieved through the help of philosophy. This can explain his inclination and studies, including the papers he planned to write after the Oration. He felt the need to defend the idea that there is not an only philosophy or school of philosophy that we should believe in. For that, he uses argumentations from different sources extending his learning of both Christian and Non-Christian writings. At the end Pico challenges us, the readers to dive into an argument with him as if meeting in a battle to a war trumpet’s noise.
Pico is against the theory that any philosopher may have the only truth. Preferring the idea of the truth as a unity. His position is to attempt to solve the ancient problem of accommodating the great variety and a lot of contradictions of multiples philosophical schools. Ancient intellectuals as well as later ones have tended to accept a relativistic position and to use the idea of philosophical multiplicity to prove there can be no truth or absolute. Pico, in the tradition of the ancient eclectics and neo-Platonists, concludes that opposing philosophical doctrines share error and insight that form universal truth. For him, the truth is an assemblage of true statements drawn from various sources. He observes some error but also some truth in all the contrasting philosophers.
The Rise of Man
In the Oratio, Pico proposes a scale of man towards perfection, that means towards God. In that sense, man is not the end but the means. The philosopher focuses the attention on a transformation facing the spiritual, in which man only change through reason and intelligence, these are the generators of his metamorphosis towards the desired soul that is closest to God. Pico explains this by exemplifying the life of the angels, which is the contemplation of the values that purify the soul and is far away from the passions of earth, that is the way for a really important transition that will give man the peace and personal perfection that the author wrote at the end of the discourse that remarks the death of the body desire towards a life of true spirituality.
