Azorín and the Rhetoric of Humanism. Shape and style of The Politician

Abstract

In the first decade of the twentieth century, between 1901 and 1908, the novelist, essayist and playwright José Martínez Ruíz Azorín wrote a series of works, whose culmination was The Politician, where he developed a true philosophical program of humanistic intention, which he characterized as “ a small philosophy ”, and whose goal was to offer an existentialist path that merged ethics and aesthetics into a single creative impulse, to give meaning to modern life, hopelessly oriented towards the materialistic nihilism that appeared throughout the West with the secularization of traditional moral and cultural values, now replaced by the positivist and scientist programs of systematic rationalism. The proposal of The Politician –a contemporary version of the Renaissance treaties for the education of princes– is to make literary creation, understood as the conscious promotion of a personal style that aspires to discover truth and beauty from philosophical thoughts, the reflection, and also the guidance and impulse, of a lifestyle, which without ever disregarding the social reality of the world in which we live, wishes to reform it, following classical aesthetic and moral values, in order to make it more habitable for the spirit, offering a better option than mere materialism, or than the fruitless rebellion of the Romantics.