Michael Allen Gillespie writes in this 2009 book:
Petrarch asserts unequivocally in The Solitary Life that public life is incompatible with virtue. At the heart of this claim is his conviction that social life is dominated by the opinions and values of the multitude, who are invariably slaves to their passions. Man in society is thus not a free being who seeks his own good but a slave who desires the praise and fears the blame of others and who consequently wants only what others want.
Those engaged in public affairs, are ruled by the power of another man’s nod and learn what they must do from another man’s look. Th ey claim nothing as their own. Their house, their sleep, their food, is not their own, and what is even more serious, their mind is not their own, their countenance not their own. They do not weep and laugh at the promptings of their own nature but discard their own emotions to put on those of another. In sum, they transact another man’s business, think another man’s thoughts, live by another man’s grace.
The multitude thus merely follow one another, which is to say, they are dominated by the lowest desires and turn the satisfaction of these desires into objects of praise. Under such circumstances, virtue is impossible and man necessarily becomes vicious, prey to envy and resentment. The busy man’s heart is wholly fi xed on treachery, and he becomes pernicious, unstable, faithless, inconstant, fierce, and bloody. The intellectual life also disappears in the public sphere, for public life is devoted to the cultivation of estates and not minds. In fact, minds are deadened under such circumstances by the mania for talk, noise, and disturbance. Petrarch admits that there are some saintly active men (such as Scipio), but he believes that they are very few and that they are not happy.
In his view a noble spirit will never find repose save in God or in himself and his private thoughts, or in some intellect united by a close sympathy with his own.
It is only in private life, only in what Petrarch calls solitude or retirement, that man can be true to himself and enjoy his own individuality.
Petrarch does not mean that everyone should simply follow his whims: “Each man must seriously take into account the disposition with which nature has endowed him and the best which by habit or training he has developed.” In the plan to reform our lives, we should be guided not by idle wishes but by our character and predisposition. It is thus necessary for man to be particularly honest and exacting in passing judgment on himself and to avoid temptations of eye and ear. This is only to say that each man should undergo the kind of self-examination undertaken in the My Secret. Once one has come to the bottom of oneself and grasped one’s peculiar nature, warts and all, he or she should follow the path that this nature demands. As Petrarch puts it, “Each person, whether saint, soldier, or philosopher, follows some irresistible call of his nature.” In his view, however, we generally do not do this because we are guided not by our own judgment but by the opinions of the crowd. This distortion of judgment is the great danger that makes the private life, or the life of solitude, necessary. Independence of mind is possible only in solitude, in private away from the crowd, away from politics. Only there is it possible “to live according to your pleasure, to go where you will, to stay where you will . . . to belong to yourself in all seasons and wherever you are to be ever with yourself, far from evil, far from examples of wickedness!”
…the immoderate desire for fame (the unresolved problem of the My Secret) can be satisfied only by withdrawal from active life and the proper use of leisure. Only in private will it be possible to win the war over our passions, “to expel vice from our borders, put our lusts to flight, restrain our illicit propensities, chastise our wantonness, and elevate our mind toward higher objects.” “Let some govern the populous city and others rule the army. Our city is that of our mind, our army that of our thoughts.” Humans in this way remain political but only because they become autarchic cities with laws and customs peculiarly their own.
…Petrarch seldom tells us anything that we don’t already know, and as a result he seems superfluous to us.
