Baltasar Gracian Research Articles

La création du moi chez Gracián : entre être et paraître

Baltasar Gracian is an author eminently baroque. At the centre of his interrogations, we can find the construction of the individual that must become a person (concept that he uses to designate an accomplished man), in a reflection between politics and aesthetics. He studies the fragmentation of the self within a duality between being and appearing, within a differentiation that is not a breaking point, and that is built dialoguing with alterity. Thanks to the notions of adornment, of juicio or ingenio, Gracian reflects on the construction of the self with at its heart a multiplicity, a transformation, between shadow and light, playing with the concept of chiaroscuro.

El naufragio y la aventura intelectual: paralelismos significativos entre El Criticón y Robinson Crusoe

Este artículo estudia la relación entre el motivo del naufragio y el proceso de adquisición del lenguaje en El Criticón de Baltasar Gracián y Robinson Crusoe de Daniel Defoe. El argumento es que el naufragio se configura como un núcleo del relato propicio para desarrollar la aventura intelectual. El análisis de paralelismos entre estos textos, centrado en cuatro elementos —la intención edificante de las obras, el tratamiento del naufragio, el encuentro de los personajes y el proceso de adquisición del lenguaje—, revela una concepción peculiar de la aventura, en la cual el componente intelectual es importante para desarrollar el enfrentamiento de los personajes con sus realidades. El objetivo del estudio consiste en plantear una reflexión en torno a las inquietudes de estos autores sobre el conocimiento como parte de la aventura literaria.

Apuntes sobre el conceptismo sacro en algunos villancicos de Joan Pau Pujol (1570 - 1626)

Pujol (*1570-✝︎1626), por Mariano Lambea. En el artículo se observan los rasgos fundamentales del estilo literario denominado «conceptismo sacro» y se aplican a los textos anónimos de algunos villancicos puestos en música por el compositor mataronés Joan Pau Pujol (*1570 - ✝︎1626). Por una parte, se intenta realizar una lectura y exegesis plausible de esos textos de temática eucarística y, por otra, se establece una confrontación con los de poetas coetáneos como Alonso de Ledesma (*c.l562 - ✝︎1633) y José de Valdivielso (*1560 - ✝︎1638). Evidentemente, se tiene en cuenta la obra cumbre de la estética conceptista, como es la Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1642) de Baltasar Gracián (*1601 - ✝︎1658), que, aunque posterior a los textos analizados, representa el punto culminante de un proceso anterior perfectamente asimilado desde poetas como el ya citado Alonso de Ledesma.

Baltasar Gracián: El concepto de interés propio como guía de la acción humana

La obra de Baltasar Gracián, uno de grandes autores del siglo de oro español, ha interesado a filólogos, a filósofos morales y a teóricos políticos pero ha suscitado escasa atención a los economistas. Este papel indaga en la obra de este gran autor de barroco para resaltar el análisis de la naturaleza humana que se extrae de su obra, una noción de hombre muy similar a la de otros coetáneos españoles y que posee muchos de los atributos del homo oeconomicus, esa abstracción del hombre que iban a utilizar más tarde los economistas.

La escritura en los tratados de Baltasar Gracián


 
 
 La voz y la letra son dos vectores fundamentales de la obra de Baltasar Gracián. Al análisis de la segunda en sus tratados se dedica este estudio del que se desprenden muchos de los caracteres que la escritura es y simboliza en El Criticón. Gracián y tipografía, página y libro son arte y parte de la é´tica y la estética del jesuita, quien se preocupó, al igual que Marcial, del acto físico de la palabra escrita. Adelantándose a los presupuestos de la gramatología actual, Gracián funde fondo y forma hasta constituir la cifra que el lector debe saber desvelar para mejor entender y vivir.
 
 

Quevedo dentro del pensamiento político hispánico del Barroco

Taking account of his strictly political works, the development of Quevedo’s thought can be split into two stages —1606-1630, and 1632 onwards— with his translation into Spanish of Virgilio Malvezzi’s Il Romulo providing the dividing mark. Whereas, in the first stage, we find a Providentialist thinker, after reading Malvezzi’s political writings he becomes more complex, influenced by Machiavelli and capable of taking on his teachings, especially in his Marco Bruto, which can be read as his answer to political realism, written in the light of Malvezzi’s Il Tarquinio superbo (1632). It is in Marco Bruto that Quevedo faces up to Machiavellian ideas, combining Fortune and Providence in a way that anticipates the political biographies of Diego de Saavedra and Baltasar Gracian.

«Glosar la intención»: Baltasar Gracián, el secreto de estado y la agudeza en el historiador

From Lodovico Castelvetro to Alonso Lopez Pinciano, the scholarly tradition of Aristotelian poetics laid down a contrast between poet and historian according to which the former was granted the privilege (and the responsibility) of showing acuity of wit through the invention of plots capable of awaking wonder in the audience. In contrast, the historian was tied to facts that effectively took place, and therefore would be denied the possibility of arousing admiration through invention. However, historiographical trends inspired in Tacitus’ works and popularized in the late sixteenth century gave rise to a reinterpretation of the historian’s duty (culminating in Baltasar Gracian’s 1648 Agudeza y arte de ingenio), which opened for the latter a space for invention, and therefore for the exercise of acuity of wit through the task of «unveiling» or inventing «secrets of state» and intentions that the princes had been able to «dissimulate».

La alegoría absoluta en "El Criticón": un diálogo con Benjamin

In his Trauerspiel study, Benjamin analyses the role of the baroque allegorist in an age in which his word is the expression of the melancholic gaze of an abandoned subject handed over to an absolute immanence. But the allegorist makes a move through which he achieves to go from immanence to God, allegorizing the concept of evil that he himself has produced. Even when he meets the characteristics of those allegorists, Baltasar Gracian does not make, in our judgement, this kind of betrayal to his own logos , surrendering completely to the consequences of natural history , the immanence and the allegorical saying.

Ibn Tufayl e l'eredità del filosofo autodidatta / Ibn Tufail and the Autodidact Philosopher’s Heredity

The essence of the work of the autodidact philosopher Ibn Tufail is briefly presented here, both to emphasize how it influenced other thinkers in the way they edited their manuscripts —particularly how Baltasar Gracian edited his El Criticon— and to highlight his influence on later philosophical thought.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño: Philosophical Crossroads ed. by Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech

Pedro Calderon de la Barca's La vida es sueno: Philosophical Crossroads. Ed. Andres Lema-Hincapie and Conxita Domenech. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2014. 191 ppTheeditors' introduction to this collection of essays lays out the ambitious project of challenging the entrenched perception that rberia's Catholic orthodoxy and geographic isolation prevented the modern philosophical currents of Western Europe from taking root on the peninsula. To confront this contention, an eclectic group of philosophers and Hispanists demonstrates the interaction of philosophy with one symbolic Spanish text, La vida es sueno. As a point of departure, the focus on this play unifies what might otherwise be an incongruent volume in its consideration of philosophy written both on and off the peninsula before, during, and after the time of Calderon.Philosophers will find of great interest those essays that employ the play as a test case to examine modern philosophical arguments. The choice of this emblematic work of literature to evaluate Iberian philosophy immediately engages the book with a question answered valiantly by philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia: Is La vida es sueno philosophy or literature? (65). His answer (spoiler alert: it is literature) relies on demonstrating the difficulty of adequately translating literary works, exemplified by La vida es sueno. Along similar lines, philosopher C. Ulises Moulines uses Segismundo and his fabricated dream experience as a thought experiment to answer the twentieth-century philosophical question of realism, that is, whether the external world is real (21). While the literary scholar may wish for greater attention to the established body of critical theory, these philosophical studies expand the interpretative possibilities of the play, giving ample food for thought as to its early modern and even modern philosophical undercurrents.The literary scholar will feel more at home in the chapters in which works of post-Calderon philosophy are used in more traditional hermeneutic analysis of the work. Philosopher Daniele Letocha demonstrates that a Hegelian reading of Segismundo distinguishes his character from the oft-compared Don Rodrigue from contemporary French playwright Pierre Corneille's Le Cid. Literary scholar Nelson R. Orringer drawls a comparison between the self-perception of Segismundo and the personal reality of Miguel de Unamuno, both of whom increasingly came to view their lives as dreams.Of particular note are those chapters that examine the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophical underpinnings that may have influenced the composition of the play. Andres Lema-Hincapie, versant in both literary studies and philosophy, investigates the similarities between Calderon's and Descartes's theories of doubt and sleep/wakefulness. Hispanists Conxita Domenech and Jennifer Brady interpret Segismundo as neither the ideal Christian nor the pure Machiavellian ruler, but the perfect Baroque prince according to the ideas of contemporary essayists, among them Baltasar Gracian. …

Paradoxes of Emancipation

This paper relates the concepts of servitude, censorship and emancipation, the point of contact between them being the idea of the necessary consent of the subject and his paradoxical wish not to be free. Etienne de la Boetie, in the middle of the sixteenth century, called it “voluntary servitude”, and claimed that the master’s supremacy does not lie in his power, but in the legitimacy conferred on it by the consent of the servant. During the seventeenth century, the censorship of the Holy Office took the place of the master and regulated free thought and the editing of books. Baltasar Gracian was one writer who confronted this difficulty with ingenuity. A century later, the ideal of emancipation reverts to Etienne de La Boetie’s proposal in the sense of pointing out that the cause of not abandoning the old doctrinal tutelage does not ascribe to an external reality. One response to this paradox was the collective project of the Encyclopedie , led by Denis Diderot.

El poder de la verdad: política y religión en el pensamiento político del siglo XVII

In this paper, I propose an interpretation of the works of Pedro Ribadeneyra, Baltasar Alamos de Barrientos, Pedro Barbosa Homen, Diego Saavedra Fajardo, Baltasar Gracian and José Alfonso Lancina. In the first part I argue that Ribadeneyra and Alamos are the two poles between which the Spanish political thought moves. Both defend the monarchical system and understand that politics is spiritually subordinated to religion. However, they differ because Ribadeneyra proposes an orthodox re-articulation of politics to moral and religious obligations, while Álamos clearly assumes political realism and gives full autonomy to the reason of state. In the second and the third part I intend to demonstrate that Barbosa, Saavedra and Gracian take as their starting point ideas similar to that of Ribadeneyra, but they propose a progressive autonomy and secularization of politics. In that vein, Lancina finally separates politics from morality, but without abandoning the spiritual subordination to God. In the last part, I analyze the opinions of the authors on the links between the State and the Church. Based on this question, I conclude that the Spanish political thought is a way to reflect and strengthen the Habsburg monarchy.

<i>Gustus Spiritualis</i>: Remarks on the Emergence of Modern Aesthetics

The article considers the concept of gustus spiritualis, in particular its possible historical connection with (aesthetic) taste in the seventeenth century. By ‘aesthetic’, I mean a radically modern phenomenon, attitude, sensibility, and so forth, that is, a new type of experience. Its discourse has many keywords; one of them is taste, an inner faculty by which its possessor is able to make sharp and proper distinctions, and simultaneously to enjoy fine delights. Here, I am obliged to confine myself to the interpretation of some Jesuit authors within the wide tradition of gustus spiritualis: St Ignatius of Loyola, St Francis de Sales, Baltasar Gracian, and Dominique Bouhours in sequence. The latter two are usually treated in the historical narratives of aesthetics, which, however, usually take gustus/gusto/gout as if it were a purely secular (moral, political) notion in the seventeenth century, while its theological roots are ignored. Exploring the role of gustus spiritualis in the evolution of (aesthetic) taste can cast light, on the one hand, on the important fact that this entails volition, that is, the determination and enchantment of human desire and hope without constraint; and, on the other, on the historical process of the emergence of a new type of ‘beholder’ with a sensitive attitude to transcendence, and, in the same manner, to his or her worldly life as well; moreover, it is a process in which, simultaneously, the nature of transcendence is transformed into a tastable one.

"El Criticón" de Baltasar Gracián como ontología alegórica

The article provides a reading of Baltasar Gracian El Criticón in the key of an allegorical ontology that has its central focus in an immanent anthropogenesis. On the basis of the classic monograph of H. Jansen on Gracian’s fundamental concepts, we appraise that a theory based on the search for a solid glory, on the honest exercise of virtue and on the meditation motivated by disillusion, draw the boundaries of the ethical discourse held in El Criticón. According to this author, history confirms the loss of the paradigm of order that nature embodies, but also provides the opportunity to develop human prudence and to generate dispositives of community free from the dialectic of appearance. The central task for Gracián is to overcome the tribulation where man is aware to be worldly embedded, after having been imposed upon him. And to get it, only the direction of heroic virtue and value can be taken in order to obtain the esteem of others and to achieve immortality to eyes of an aesthetic community.

La voz alcándara en el Cantar de Mío Cid: cetrería hispanoárabe en la literatura española

The Cantar de Mio Cid gathers in his beginning the word alcandara, defined by Ramon Menendez Pidal as “Hanger to hang the clothes or to put the birds of hunt”. This definition has been little discussed. The aim of this research, conceived as an etymological note, is to profound into the meaning and use of this Arabic root term related to the Spanish tradition of falconry and without parallel in other languages. From the methodological point of view have been examined various historical documentary sources that gather the word alcandara, attending principally to his antiquity nature and authority. The examined documentation allows to confirm the position of Nelson (1974) in opposite of Hook (1979) and the followers of Menendez Pidal, proposing that the meaning of alcandara in the Cantar refers to a specific element of the practice of falconry. Of the various arguments in favour of Nelson is enhanced the notably fidelity that has kept the Spanish literature to the falconry meaning of the word from the Cid Poem to the 19th century, as this prove El libro del Caballero Zifar or La Celestina and authors as Cervantes, Gongora, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Baltasar Gracian and Duque de Rivas, among others.

Schopenhauer y Gracián: Arte de prudencia y sabiduría mundana

El propósito de este trabajo es explicar algunos aspectos de la relación entre Arthur Schopenhauer y Baltasar Gracián. En primer lugar, muestro el desarrollo de la sabiduría mundana en la obra de Schopenhauer y el vínculo con el Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia de Gracián, traducido por Schopenhauer al alemán. En segundo lugar, intento hacer un balance de este vínculo teniendo en cuenta cuatro aspectos: a) la sindéresis y el arte de prudencia, b) la autarquía del individuo, c) la crítica a Maquiavelo y d) la cuestión ontológica. Por último, concluyo con algunas reflexiones sobre el moralismo moderno y su importancia para la filosofía sistemática de Schopenhauer.

O Herói Virtuoso, Prudente e Dissimulado: O Cortesão como Ideal Masculino nas Cortes Ibéricas dos séculos XVI e XVII

Neste artigo, buscamos traçar um perfil do cortesão barroco como personagem que refletia o ideal masculino da nobreza em Espanha e Portugal dos séculos XVI e XVII: homem que deveria ser discreto, prudente, valoroso, honrado e, não menos, dissimulado. E, para reconstruir essa imagem, baseamos-nos em diferentes textos impressos e manuscritos do período, produzidos por cortesãos e tratadistas segundo fórmulas da literatura doutrinária, focando-se principalmente El Héroe, de Baltasar Gracián, a Instrucción, de D. Juan de Silva, e as Memorias Diarias de la Guerra del Brasil, de Duarte de Albuquerque Coelho.

Personhood in El Criticón by Baltasar Gracián: How to Become a Complete Man

El Criticon by Baltasar Gracian is more than just the literary venture of a philosopher; it is the result of the reflections and ideas presented in his prior works. This essay analyses El Criticon in accordance with the theoretical reflections on language and ingenium made in Agudeza y arte de ingenio and shows how the concept of persona emerges from the pages of El Criticon and moves from being the particular story of Andrenio and Critilo to becoming a universal theory of personhood. It studies Gracian's concept of persona in a philosophical perspective and compares it to the Cartesian cogito and Locke's idea of personal identity.

Accept Opportunities When They Present Themselves

Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment. —Baltasar Gracian, 17th century philosopher and writer When former Diabetes Spectrum Editor-in-Chief Davida F. Kruger contacted me more than 3 years ago to ask if I would serve as an associate editor for the journal, I gratefully accepted the new opportunity both to serve the American Diabetes Association in a new role and to be a part of the wonderful team of associate editors under her leadership. Often when we are asked to serve in a new role, we don't immediately see all the possibilities the role may offer. If I had not agreed to be part of the Diabetes Spectrum editorial team, I would not have had the wonderful opportunity to meet and work with new colleagues, increase my knowledge, improve my skills as a health professional, and now, become editor-in-chief of the journal myself. My Diabetes Spectrum experience has brought me considerable intellectual and professional growth. Many thanks to Davida for asking me to get involved, for her leadership of the journal, for serving as a mentor to many of us during the …

Baltasar Gracián y la vidriosa amistad, ventajosa felicidad de la vida

In the Baltasar Gracian works, friendship represents a very important, decisive, role. The false and adulating friends’ criticisms run along with an enthusiastic view of true friendship. The concept is often found in the Oraculo manual and in the El Discreto , but it is in the Criticon that the Jesuit makes a passionate song to friendship and the relationship between both main characters, Critilo and Andrenio —well-worn use of the amicus alter ego — becomes the ideal tale of two friends in a disgusting world. Within the thick weaving of quotes, historical, mentions to many authors, we can find mainly Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca, often transcribed verbatim and, without forgetting the updating of the subject in other styles, Gracian recreates some of the friendship symbols. The many-faced style of the Aragon’s writer, capable of knitting the friendship symbols with those of the caution in order to transform them, seems to direct us, as is the case of the threeheaded Gerion of the well-known prudential tradition, to a wider and forgotten tradition, the one based upon a text by Luciano and a dialogue by Torcuato Tasso, the Toxaris sive amicitia and the Manso overo de l’amicizia .