Baltasar Gracian
Spanish writer, philosopher and Jesuit (1601–1658), born in Belmonte, in Aragon, ordained a priest and devoted his whole life to teaching and preaching within the Society of Jesus, despite maintaining a tense and ultimately conflictive relationship with it because of the unauthorised publication of his work under pseudonyms — his superior went so far as to forbid him to write, a punishment Gracián repeatedly disobeyed. Regarded, alongside Francisco de Quevedo, as the foremost exponent of Spanish Baroque literary conceptismo, a style characterised by conceptual density, witty acuity and aphoristic concision, in contrast to the more ornamental culteranismo of Góngora. His central theoretical work, Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1648), systematises the rhetorical mechanisms of conceptist wit, while his most influential and translated work, The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia, 1647), is a compilation of three hundred aphorisms on the art of worldly prudence, self-mastery and social strategy, addressed to a man who must make his way in a court full of appearances and dissimulation — a work Schopenhauer deeply admired and personally translated into German, deeming it 'absolutely unique' in its genre. His allegorical novel El Criticón (1651–1657), published in three parts, narrates the life journey of Critilo and Andrenio, symbols of reason and instinctive nature, through a world full of moral traps, one of the great philosophical allegories of Spanish literature on Baroque disillusionment and the vanity of worldly things. Gracián's thought, centred on prudent dissimulation, self-control and a disenchanted yet not cynical view of human relations, exerted notable influence on Nietzsche, who praised its psychological acuity.