Headstrom, Birger

OpenSIUC

THE PHILOSOPHICAL SPECULATIONS OFGIORDANO BRUNOBY BIRGER HKADSTROMOF all the writers of the transition period between medievaland modern philosophy, probably no one represents its generalcharacteristics better than Giordano Pruno. for in his numerousworks, poetical, scientific, philosophical, are reflected all the dis-tinctive features of that period, the revolt against authoritx", thedemolition of the artificial division that existed between thingssacred and secular, human and divine, the exultation of intellectualfreedom and the consequent intellectual unsettlement and unrest,the revival of ancient philosophy, as well as the predilection for theoccult sciences and arts and the despairing tendency to blend thedreams and vagaries of the imagination with the results of rationalinvestigation.Although there is no systematic unit}' to his multifarious writ-ings, expressive of an intellectual enthusiasm and of a mind seekingafter truth }et undisciplined and erratic, full of speculations,theories, conjectures, propounded on the impulse of the moment orunder the varying influence of the circumstances of the atmospherein which he moved, his mind seems to have been dominated by onecentral idea, that of the divinity of nature and man, an idea whichhe constantly sought to explain and defend by means partly ofAristotelian categories and parti}' of Neo-Platonic emanationtheories, for above all else he was profoundly sympathetic with therevolt against the medieval notion of a transcendant God. and asphere of divine things absolutely separated from nature and thesecular life of mankind. During the scholastic period, the courseof religious thought had not only tended to greater obscure theChristian idea of the unity of the divine and human but theecclesiastical conception of God as well had gradually become that88 THE OPEN COURTof a Being above the world, to whom thought can be related onlyas the passive recipient of mysterious dogmas authoritatively re-vealed, and not of a Being who reveals Himself in and to the humanspirit. Such a false exaltation of the idea of God could lead tonothing but the degradation of nature, and the individual and sociallife of man. Obviously, then, for minds in which the divine wasidentified with the supernatural, the observation of nature lost allreligious interest, for to them divine presence was not revealed in thecourse of nature but rather in interferences with its laws. For thesame reason, religious life became one of abstraction from the world,and the secular life of man, its domestic, social, political relations,gradually came to be recognized as outside the sphere of spiritualthings.The reaction to this false separation of the natural and spiritual,the human and the divine, not only reawakened interest in nature, asindicated by the scientific revival of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, but gave rise as well to the pantheistic tendency inphilosophy, so distinctively characteristic of Bruno's speculativewaitings for Bruno was decidedly opposed to the conception of asupramundane God, and a world in whose life and thought nodivine element could be discerned. Instead, he seemed to intuitivelydiscern in the phenomena of the external world in which science hadbegun to perceive an intelligible order and law, and in the innerworld of mind, to whose boundless wealth of thought the conscious-ness of the time was becoming awakened, the immediate expressionof a divine presence and life and not the mere production of adistant omnipotence. "The true philosopher," he says, "differsfrom the theologian in this, that the former seeks the infinite Being,not outside the world, but within it. We must begin, in other words,by recognizing the universal agent in creation, before attemptingto rise to that elevated region in which theology finds the archetypeof created beings."^The means Bruno employed to give a philosophic justification tothe idea of an immanent relation of God to the world consistedpartly of a recurrence to Xeo- Platonic figures and analogies, partlyin a manipulation of the Aristotelian categories of matter and form,and of potentiality and actuality, the former point of view serving asthe basis for his studied exposition of the notion of a "soul of theworld," by which the universe is considered as an infinite, living^ De la causa, Wagner's edit., i. p. 175.PHILOSOPHICAL SPECL'L ATIONS OF GIORDANO BRLTXO 89organism, not created by any outward cause, but having withinitself the principle of all its existences and activities, in other words,being that beyond which nothing exists and in which all things live,move, and have their being; and which principle he furthermorecompared to the principle of life in the root or seed, "which sendsforth from itself shoots, branches, twigs, etc., which disposes andfashions the delicate tissue of leaves, flowers, fruit, and again, bythe same interior energy, recalls the sap to the root." To naturalthings, it is, in one sense, external for it cannot be regarded as itselfa part of the thing it creates, and, in another, internal for it doesnot act on matter or outside of matter, but wholl}' from within, inthe very heart of matter. And again it is represented as an "innerartist" of infinite productiveness, differing from a human artist inthat the latter works on matter which is alread\' living or instinctwith form, whereas no such presupposition is invohed in the case ofthe former. To him, although we may recoil from viewing theuniverse as a living thing, we can no more conceive any form whichis not already, directly or indirectly, the expression of a soul, thanwe can conceive a thing which has absolutely no form. And thoughit would be absurd to regard the productions of human art as livingforms, yet my table, such, though not animate consists not onlv ofmatter taken from nature but is composed as well of materialsalready living. Consequently there is nothing, however, minute orworthless; that does not contain life or soul.-Whereas the human artist works on materials taken from nature,and which as part of nature already have a life and being of theirown. the divine, or inner artist, has no pre-existing materials onwhich to operate ; His art is therefore creative, of the materials aswell as of the infinitely diversified forms into wdiich thev have beenfashioned. In Him creative and formative energ\- are the same;and if lower forms should be changed by Him into higher forms ofexistence they are not taken from a province foreign to Him but arealready innate with His own life, while the latter are merely a newexpression of its inexhaustible energy. This thought finds furtherutterance, in a slightly varied form however, in Bruno's view thatthe ideas of efficient and final cause are inseparable in the divineartist in contrast with the human, for in nature, he contended, theefficient cause cannot be separated from the final as every reasonableact presupposes an end or design, that design being "nothing else2 De la causa, i. p. 241.90 THE OPEN COURTthan the form of the thing to be produced. From which it followsthat an intelligence capable of producing all, and of raising thembv a marvellous art from potentiality into actuality, should containin itself the forms and essences of all things."^ As it is intelligence,or the soul of the world, that creates natural things, it is not possiblefor the formal to be distinct from the efficient cause for the}- mustunite in the inner principle of things.In his conception of the world as a living organism, Brunocarried this latter thought still further, ^^'hereas the conceptionlies outside the materials on which he works in the case of thehuman artist, it is the contrary with the design at work in thecreation of an organized structure, for then the ideal principle, orformative power, accompanies the matter and constitutes its essence,such a principle being considered as having been present from thebeginning, inspiring the first minutest atom with the power of theeventual perfect whole. The inner principle, the life within, is firstcause as well as last ; and when applied to the universe deduces auniverse containing within itself the principle of its own being, avast organism, as it were, in which the least and most insignificantof finite existences presupposes and manifests the end to be realized,and in which the first principle is at once the beginning and end ofall. Unfortunately, Bruno failed to realize all that is contained inthis conception, yet when we trace the course of his procedure fromhis fundamental thought to an explanation of God, and His relationto the world, it is easy to see how, under the limiting influence of thescholastic categories, the inherent wealth of his own idea escapedhim.In an eiTort to determine the nature of the first principle of allthings, Bruno employed the Aristotelian distinction of "form" and"matter" saying in part : "Democritus and the Epicureans hold thatthere is no real existence which is not corporeal ; they regard matteras the sole substance of things, and assert that it is itself the divinenature. These, with the Stoics and others, hold also that forms aresimply the accidental dispositions of matter. ... A closer examina-tion, however, forces us to recognize in nature two kinds of sub-stances, form and matter. If, therefore, there is an active principlewhich is the constitutive principle of all, there is also a subject orpassive principle corresponding to it, a something that is capable of3 Dc la causa, i. p. 237.PHILOSOPHICAL SPECULATIONS OF GIORDANO BRUNO 91being acted on as well as a something that is capable of acting.Human art cannot operate except on the surface of things alreadyformed bv nature ; . . . but nature operates, so to speak, from thecenter of its subject-matter, which is altogether tmformed. There-fore the subject-matter of the arts is manifold, but the subject-matter of natiu'e is one, seeing that all diversity proceeds fromform."'^ What Bruno sought to prove by this passage and similiarothers is that the conceptions of matter and form are correlative, inother words, that neither is apprehensible in abstraction from theother, and that we are compelled by the necessities of thought toconceive of a primal substance which is neither matter nor formalone but rather a unity of the two. And again we arrive at thesame result in considering the distinction of substances corporealand incorporeal. "It is necessary that of all things that subsist thereshould be one principle of subsistence. . . . But all distinguishablethings presuppose something indistinguishable. That indistinguish-able something is a common reason to which the difiference anddistinctive form are added." Furthermore "it is necessar}- that therebe one thing which corresponds to the common reason of both sub-jects. ... a first essence which contains in itself the principle of itsbeing. If body, as is generally agreed, presupposes a matter whichis not body, and which therefore naturally precedes that which wedesignate as properly corporeal, we cannot admit any absolute in-compatibility between matter and the substances which we nameimmaterial. ... If we discern something formal and divine incorporeal substances, on the same principle we must say that thereis something material in divine substances. As Plotinus sa}S. if theintelligible world contains an infinite variety of existences, theremust be in them, along with their characteristics difirerences, some-thing which the}' all have in common, and that common elementtakes the place of matter as the distinctive element takes that ofform. . . . This common basis of things material and immaterial, inso far as it includes a multiplicity of forms, is multiple and any-formed, but in itself it is absolutely simple and indivisible; andbecause it is all, it cannot be itself any one particular being. "-' Suchconsiderations are, however, not suggestive of the idea of anextramundane God but rather "of the soul of the world as the•* De la causa, p. 251.5 De la causa, i. pp. 269, 270, 272.92 THE OPEN COURTactuality of all, the potentiality of all, and everything is one."*'"There is one form or soul, one matter or body, which is the fulfill-ment of all and the perfection of all, which cannot be limited ordetermined, and is therefore vmchangeable.'"^Though Bruno's aim was to attain to a first principle whichshould be the living source and explanation of all finite existences,material and spiritual, the result of his reasoning was far differentto that which he supposed himself to have reached, for the falsemethod by which he proceeded led him to a unity which excludes,rather than comprehends, all determinations—an empty abstraction,and not a being which embraces in its concrete unity the whole in-exhaustible wealth of the finite world. Upon finding that the ideasof matter and form, as well as of corporeal and spiritual, cannot beseparately retained, he failed to rise to a higher unity whichtranscends yet comprehends both ; instead he sought to find hishigher unity in that which matter and form, mind and body, havein common when their differences are eliminated. He erred inthinking, like so many others, that he could explain the differencesand contrarieties of existence by simply eliminating or ignoringthem. xA.nd therefore his first or highest principle (which he identi-fied with God), in which he thought he had reached the origin andend of all things, became nothing more than the abstraction of"Being."If Bruno's idea of God were thus depleted of all reality, his ideaof the finite world fared no better for the same reason. In seekinga first principle, or "soul of the world," in which all finite existencesshould find their being and reality, he could arrive only to a solutionwhich necessarily implied at once the nihility of all finite beingsapart from God, and their reality in God, for his fundamental notionof an organic unity made it necessary for him to explain the universeas an organism in which the parts are simply dead, meaningless frag-ments in separation from the life or vital principle of the whole, aswell as showing that through their relation to that principle theycease to be such unreal abstractions. "In its externality," he says,"nature is nothing more than a shadow, an empty image of the firstprinciple in which potentiality and actuality are one. . . . Thou artnot nearer to the infinite by being man rather than insect, by beingstar rather than sun. And what I say of these I understand of all6 Ibid., p. 275.^ Ibid., p. 280.PHILOSOPHICAL SPECULATIONS OF GIORDANO BRUNO 93things whose subsistence is particular. Now, if all these particularthings are not different in the infinite, they are not really different.Therefore the universe is still one, and immovable. It comi)rehendsall and admits of no difference of being, nor of an\' change withitself or in itself. It is all that can be, and in it is no dift'erence ofpotentiality and actuality.*^ . . . Individuals which continuall\- changedo not take a new existence, but only a new manner of being. It isin this sense that Solomon has said, 'There is nothing new under thesun, but that which is was before." As all things are in the imi\erseand the universe is in all things, as we are in it and it is in us, so allconcur to one perfect unitw which is sole, stable and ever remaining.It is one and eternal. E\ery form of existence, every other thingis vanity, every thing outside of that one is nothing."^ While hismethod enabled him to prove the unreality of all finite existencesapart from the first principle, what he could not prove was thateven in their relation to this "soul of the world" any reality wasleft to them, for viewed as that which is reached by abstraction fromthe limits of finite existences, the first principle annuls rather thanexplains them. Their finitude is their distinction from God ; andthough the withdrawal of their finitude makes them one with Godequall}- as well makes them lost in God.In summation, Bruno sought not only to justify for thought theidea of the absolute unity of all things but to explain the universefrom itself, and in the idea of God endeavored to find the immanentcause or principle of the world. In him, the first jirinciple is theunion of potentiality and actualit}- : and whether considered as aprinciple realizing itself in the actual (God), or as all actuality inrelation to its principle (Nature), it is the same only differentlycontemplated. And finally, he failed to reach the result to whichhe aimed—a concrete unity, simply because he employed a methodthat can yield only an abstract one.^ De la causa, i. p. 281.9 De la causa, i. p. 283.

The Philosophical Speculations of Giordano Bruno.

http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4117&context=ocj

The Philosophical Speculations of Giordano Bruno.

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

OpenSIUC