THE SINGULARITY OF THE HERO AND THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

The theoretical figure of Gracián's1 work is singular. Indeed, an heir in several of its aspects to Renaissance treatises on the courtier and on the prince and a participant in the theoretico-cultural context of the Counter-Reformation, it shows the traits of a hero who will remain on the margins of the conception of man that organises the dominant currents of moral and political thought in the seventeenth century. We thus cannot fail to be struck by the contrast in the conception of the individual singularity – which subtends the heroic type – to the new notion of the individual that philosophers and moralists elaborate from before the middle of the seventeenth century, and who, precisely, efface that singularity in order to promote a universalisable image of man. This new notion of the individual implies a reinterpretation of the primacy, superiority and excellence that define the hero, a reinterpretation that transforms it into a fiction, the content of which is no longer real but imaginary. Gracián's hero gives way to an antiheroic conception of the individual.

It is this contrast that I would like to interrogate insofar as we cannot bring it back to a pure and simple opposition. Indeed, many of the constitutive elements of the world within which Gracián's hero lives are found again in the anthropological doctrines of authors like Hobbes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, etc. as principles that preside over its conduct. On the side of the social world, we again find the distinction, even the separation, between being and appearing, the idea of an inversion of values, the conception of a language and of ciphered conduct that it is essential to decode. On the side of human conduct, we again find that necessity of staying in the background in relation to others, of governing its appearance in order to be placed in a superior situation. Yet Gracián's hero is no longer there. Therefore, it must be that something happened, that the essential determinations of the hero had disappeared and that others were substituted for it. The rules that Gracián conceived within the framework of an instruction manual for the hero's exceptional qualities and capacities are from now on found integrated within the analysis of the behaviour of an individual who is no longer in any way heroic.