Leitura e transformação: Hume, Hutcheson e a pluralidade moderna ilustrada pela recepção de Cícero

Abstract

In this text, we distinguished two approaches to the Ancients in modernity. The first, contextualist, seeks to restore the original meaning of the classics with conceptual and philological rigor. The second, interventionist, privileges their present relevance, admitting misreadings and transformations guided by contemporary problems. Adopting the latter as our focus, we show how
Hutcheson and Hume appropriate Cícero, or, more specifically, the openness of the concept of honestum for distinct and often opposing ends, thereby revealing the “modernity of Cicero” within the debate between self-esteem and benevolence as motives for moral action. In Hutcheson, the honestum is psychologized. An innate moral sense immediately apprehends benevolence, the foundation of the virtues, democratizing the perception of merit and sustaining a providential framework opposed to self-interest calculation. In Hume, the Ciceronian vocabulary is reclassified and virtues become qualities useful or
agreeable to ourselves and others. Thus, moral judgment is relocated within an economy of sentiments, and sympathy takes center stage, attributing the origin of the virtues to the social body, its practices, and mutual recognitions. The contrast presents reception as a play of light and shadow: selective appropriations, transformations of traditional links, and shifts in foundation
from recta ratio do providence, on the one hand, and to sympathy and convention, on the other.