Education and the Cultivation of the Early Modern Self: Cultura Animi as Self-Care in Juan Luis Vives (2023)
Vermeir, Koen (Author)
Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period
Volume: 28
Issue: 1
Pages: 63-94
Does the modern self still need self-care? Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault and others suggested that self-care mostly disappeared with the advent of modernity. How this happened, or whether self-care instead took on new forms, is still not well understood. This article examines the Renaissance appropriation of the concept of a “culture of the soul” (cultura animi) as a marker for how self-care was adapted to modernity. After detailing how Cicero used cultura animi as a metaphor for self-care, I study the appropriation of this concept by the humanist Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540), who made it into a central notion for his educational reform. I argue that, for Vives, self-care does not consist in the following of rules, precepts or “technologies of the self”; it is not a philosophical “art of living”. Instead, “culture” stands for an organic way of learning, a practice of absorbing multifarious experience, especially though the study of historical literature. Accordingly, the “self” to be cultivated is not one’s individual ego or transcendent soul, but one’s practical judgment. Education, centered on the cultivation of practical wisdom, is essential for self-care and for the flourishing of community.
...MoreArticle Steven Vanden Broecke; Jonathan Regier (2023) Special Issue Introduction: Individuality, Self-Care, and Self-Preservation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Science. Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period (pp. 1-7).
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