Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 368 - Boundless Enthusiasm - Giordano Bruno.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilocity.net. Today's episode, Boundless Enthusiasm, Giordano Bruno. There seems to be a widespread assumption that it was humbling for humankind to abandon the old cosmology of Aristotle and Ptolemy and accept the new astronomy of Copernicus. No longer do we find ourselves at the literal center of attention on an Earth which sits unmoving at the midpoint of a finite spherical universe. Instead, we are moving around the Sun which has usurped the Earth's place. In fact, we now realize our whole solar system takes up only a tiny part of a vast universe. There's no doubt that this shift of perspective did upset many people and many preconceptions about people and their role in the cosmos. But it's worth remembering that in the ancient and medieval worldview, the Earth was never seen as the best part of the universe. The middle of everything was also the bottom of everything, with the celestial bodies above being seen as far superior, even divine in some sense. As we saw over the last couple of episodes, these heavenly bodies were typically assumed to influence, if not completely determine, events down here on Earth. Well, we cannot influence them at all. They are the instruments of God, steered by angels, free of decay, imperfection, and the thousand natural shocks that our flesh is heir to, as people were saying at about the same time over in England. In light of this, being moved away from the center of the cosmos could be seen as a promotion. But neither did the Copernican Revolution simply reverse the older view, with the Sun occupying the new down and the previously static Earth catapulted into the heavens, now moving at the thrilling speeds previously reserved for planets and stars. His discoveries did not so much turn the universe upside down, as show that the universe has no up and down at all. That at least was the lesson drawn by Giornano Bruno. In several treatises beginning with The Ash Wednesday Supper, a dialogue published in 1584 in London, he presented a mind-boggling vision of the universe, infinite in extent and containing an infinity of worlds. Our cosmos is just one of those worlds, and has the Sun at its center with the Earth revolving around it. Not everyone was impressed. The vice-chancellor of Oxford University, where Bruno presented his ideas, mocked him as that little Italian with a name longer than his body, referring to the philosopher's full and rather splendid moniker, Philoteus Jordanus Brunus Nolanus. The chancellor summarized Bruno's performance like this. He undertook, among very many other matters, to set on foot the opinion of Copernicus, that the Earth did go round and the heavens did stand still, whereas in truth, it was his own head which rather did run round. Then as now, Oxford was a unique place, but not by virtue of producing hostility towards Bruno. In his itinerant career, which brought him from Italy to cities including Paris, Toulouse, Geneva, Paris, London, and Wittenberg, he made plenty of enemies. He has, as one scholar has noted, the distinction of being the only known 16th century philosopher to have been excommunicated from all three major confessions, Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran. During his wanderings, he wrote prolifically, managing in one decade to produce a body of work that makes him one of the most important thinkers of the Renaissance. But he made the mistake of returning to Italy and making one more particularly decisive enemy. He came to Venice in 1591 to stay with Giovanni Mocenigo, who passed word of Bruno's unorthodox teachings to the Inquisition. In a further stroke of bad luck, the case came to the attention of the papal authorities in Rome, triggering a lengthy legal process that ended with Bruno's execution on February 17th, 1600 by being burnt at the stake. As the length of the trial suggests, Bruno's persecution was highly bureaucratic, deliberate, and in the minds of its perpetrators, even fair-minded and cautious. He was given repeated chances to explain himself, and Bruno himself clearly believed at least initially that doing so would get him out of trouble. At his first interrogation, he said that he had always perceived the threat of Inquisition as a joke because he knew he could defend his teachings. Even when his ultimate fate became clear, he said defiantly to his accusers, you passed your sentence on me with greater fear than I feel in receiving it. Evidently, he thought that they would have misgivings, even after their painstaking inquiry into his orthodoxy. This notwithstanding, the commission condemned his views on a variety of topics. These included aspects of his cosmology and also theological issues like the Trinity and Incarnation. On this score, Bruno admitted to having private doubts, but not to having put forth his skepticism publicly. Besides, he was only ever speaking as a philosopher. It was in this sense that he was skeptical regarding, for instance, the applicability of the word person to the Holy Trinity while accepting on philosophical grounds a Trinitarian distinction between God the Father, his intellect, and his own love. This suggests that Bruno was imagining that scholars like himself would be allowed the freedom in philosophizing also envisioned by Campanella. Like Campanella, he was wrong to think that such freedom was on offer around the turn of the 17th century. One idea that the Inquisition deemed unacceptable was genuinely central to Bruno's thought. To put it in the terms of one of his favorite sayings, there is nothing new under the sun. Or to put it in more philosophical terms, there is in Bruno's universe no creation or destruction. Instead, there is only alteration in the accidental properties of a single infinite substance. Bruno was thus rejecting the concept of substantial forms, which we also saw being put under pressure by Tilesio. In Aristotelian philosophy, substances are composites of matter and form, and they are the primary beings that populate the world, like the poor elements, plants, animals, and people. Bruno retains the form-matter analysis, but only at the level of the entire universe. This universe is a single great, indeed infinite, substance, which is constantly changing, but only with respect to the superficial accidental features that are the manifestations of its unbounded nature. And, like an animal, Aristotelian metaphysics, the universe is an organism. It has a single soul, the world soul, which completely pervades the infinity of matter. As Bruno puts it in a treatise called Cause, Principle, and Unity, the world soul is the act of everything and the potency of everything and is present in its entirety in everything, whence it follows that, even if there exist innumerable individuals, all things are one. While this is obviously a boldly original theory, it can also be seen as a fusion of ideas from Aristotelianism and Platonism. The world soul is familiar from Plato's Timaeus, and as already mentioned the idea of substance as a composite of matter and form is Aristotelian. But for his conception of matter, Bruno also looks to other sources. He knows that his belief in the material basis of all things was anticipated by the medieval Jewish philosopher Ibn Gabirol, called in Latin avicebron. When he comes to explain the nature of matter, Bruno adopts a radically un-Aristotelian view. Just as there is a one dimensional minimum, the point, and a two dimensional minimum, the line, so there is a minimal three dimensional body from which all other bodies are compounded. This atomic minimum has no parts, only limits at which it can contact other atoms. Obviously this is reminiscent of ancient atomism. Bruno is drawing on the Epicurean physical theories that had been made available through the rediscovery of Lucretius' poem, which he likes to quote, even as he anticipates the corpuscularian physics of the 17th century. Furthermore, in ancient atomism, the atoms move in a void or vacuum. But Bruno agrees with Aristotle that there is no actually empty space. Unlike Aristotle, he does have an abstract notion of space, which is in itself simply a three dimensional extension. Still though, he thinks that this space is always full of bodies, and can be distinguished from bodies, not in fact, but only by reason, as he puts it. What fills the space not currently occupied by atoms is an unlimited fluid medium through which atoms and bodies composed from atoms can move. In that dialogue, the Ash Wednesday Supper, he describes this medium as a single airy, ethereal, spiritual, and liquid body, a capacious place of motion and quiet, which reaches out into the immensity of infinity. Bruno assumes that the infinite power of God must have an infinite expression. Otherwise, he would be like a musician who knows how to play an instrument but sits idle without using it. Therefore, the universe is infinitely extended and is full of an infinite number of worlds, more or less like ours. Those other globes are Earths, he says, in no way different in species from this one, except in so far as they are larger or smaller. Bruno breaks crucially with one final presupposition of the classical atomists, namely that atoms have weight or a tendency to move downwards. In Bruno's universe, there is no down, precisely because of the aforementioned immensity of infinity. The Aristotelian cosmos is spherical, and so has a midpoint, which is where we find the center of the Earth. Thus, we can define downward motion as motion towards that point, upward motion as motion away from it. By contrast, as Bruno observes, an infinite universe has no central reference point, and so there can be no motion towards or away from naturally defined places. Or, as he elsewhere says, nothing moves to or around the universe but only within it. Brief reflection will show that he cannot accept the Aristotelian idea of natural place, for instance that earthy bodies try by nature to move towards the center of the cosmos. For there are an infinity of worlds, and clearly in those other worlds, Earth moves naturally towards the center of that world, and not ours. Otherwise, rocks dropped by the people of other worlds would come hurtling through the infinite space and towards our Earth, which sounds not only ridiculous but extremely dangerous. Why then do we see bodies performing natural motions, as when rocks fall down in air, or what is down from our point of view, and air bubbles percolate up in water? His answer is that this can be explained only with reference to the animating power of the world soul. It is present in the Earth, in the stars, and in the sun, and since these bodies are all ensouled, they perform voluntary motions, just like animals do. In the case of the motions performed by the Earth as a whole, this is providentially ordained. The Earth's daily rotation about its own axis causes night and day, while its rotation around the sun gives us the cycle of seasons. Which brings us back to the contentious claim taken from Copernicus that the Earth is in fact rotating around its own axis and moving around the sun. When Bruno defended this proposition at Oxford, he was greeted with incredulity and disdain. He took it hard, complaining that in England, there reigns a constellation of pedantic and obstinate ignorance and arrogance, mixed with rustic incivility which would try the patience of Job. As far as he was concerned, the schoolmen had inherited all of Aristotle's ignorance and none of his wisdom. Not, by the way, a judgment he applied only to Englishmen, since he later said that the Dominican friars who trained him in Italy were all asses and ignoramuses. In general, he thinks, doctors come as cheaply as sardines, since they are made, found, and hooked, with little trouble. This invective is good fun, but we should not overlook the possibility that, as Renaissance scholar Charles Schmitt put it, Bruno was a self-centered bigot who was obviously peaked because the men of Oxford did not consider him to be as brilliant as he considered himself to be. At any rate, Bruno got over his humiliation at Oxford by writing the dialogue Ash Wednesday Supper in defense of the Copernican theory. He rejects the comforting thought, which may have been put forward at Oxford before his appearance there by a scholar named Henri Saville, that Copernican heliocentrism is just a matter of mathematical convenience, a model for calculation rather than a description of the world's actual physical arrangement. No, says Bruno, the earth really is moving at incredible speed. How is it then that we don't notice this? For instance, when we drop something, shouldn't it move laterally across the landscape as it is no longer connected to the rotating earth? No, says Bruno again, giving the powerful analogy of a fast moving ship. If someone drops a stone from the top of the mast of the ship, the stone will fall to the bottom of the mast, not further towards the back of the boat. This is because the stone retains a power impressed in it by the motion of the ship, so that it keeps a motion coordinated with that of the ship even as it is falling down. Bruno insists that he is not just following the authority of Copernicus here, he sees through his own eyes. Still, he credits Copernicus with having unearthed an ancient and true philosophy buried for so many centuries in the dark caverns of a blind, malign, insolent, and envious ignorance. Of course, by this point in the Renaissance, nothing is more familiar than claiming to overthrow familiar ideas by unearthing long-lost ancient wisdom. Bruno gives Aristotle a decidedly mixed review, sometimes calling him a sophist, despite finding him far preferable to his later interpreters, but he's full of admiration for other figures of ancient thought and claims agreement with them. His insight about the unity of matter was already put forward by Plotinus, while various pre-Socratics had taught the Brunian doctrine that natural things are brought forth by being separated from matter, which contains them all in its infinite power. Actually, Bruno thinks he can find this idea in the Bible too. He refers to the line from Genesis, let the earth bring forth its animals, let the waters bring forth living creatures, even though in his view, scripture does not offer philosophical demonstrations or speculation concerning natural things. Broadly speaking, Bruno's intellectual heroes are the ones admired by Marsilio Ficino, who influenced him greatly. In fact, one accusation made against Bruno at Oxford was that his lectures there plagiarized from Ficino's book on magical therapies, On Life. Whatever the truth of this, Ficino's ideas about magic resonate powerfully in Bruno's own writings on the subject. Like Ficino, he distinguishes between natural magic and the invocation of wicked demons. The latter is despicable, whereas natural magic is morally neutral, like a sword that can be used in either a just or unjust cause. As for explaining how magic works, we've already seen how, for Bruno as for Ficino, the world soul animates the entire universe. The result is that, everything has access to everything else, as Bruno puts it. The bonds between things can be manipulated by the magician, or rather, the magician's own soul, whose powers are not limited to controlling his own body. Ficino's On Life encouraged the use of magic specifically for medical purposes, and Bruno likewise thinks this is how it should be applied, alongside other non-magical methods. The best healer should in fact be not only physician, but also alchemist and astrologer. This despite the fact that Bruno was rather skeptical about the claims of astrology, in part because he did not think that astral emotions are as exact as the astronomical models we use to represent them. Like all natural phenomena, the heavens are mere shadows or images of the ideas conceived in the mind of the world soul. But if this gives Bruno reason to doubt astrology, it encourages him to believe in magic. The symbols used by the magician are analogous to the images used by nature itself. The study of magic is thus natural in the most literal sense, namely that it teaches us how to produce effects in the same way the soul of the cosmos does. This is why Bruno says that, to obtain the absolute and perfect art, you should be coupled to the world soul and act in connection to it. One of the most disputed questions concerning Bruno's philosophy has to do with the magical manipulation of images. His writing career began with the first of several works on the art of memory. Bruno explains a complicated method for inventing mnemonic devices, using several diagrams shaped like wheels, with letters from the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew alphabets inscribed on the wheels. The letters are associated with symbolic imagery, the idea being that you can call to mind a certain word by connecting it to the sequence of images dictated by the diagrams. All scholars agree that Bruno is here taking up the ideas of Ramon Lull, an unconventional medieval thinker whom I once upon a time described as a forerunner of the Renaissance, in part because of his influence on Bruno. But scholars emphatically do not agree about the significance of Bruno's mnemonic art. A now classic but controversial study by Francis Yates, published in 1964, posited that his writings on memory express ideas taken from a corpus of magical writings, ascribed to the Greek divinity Hermes, alongside concepts from the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition whose influence also made itself felt in the works of Pico della Mirandola. Yates was even convinced that Bruno's execution was in large part provoked by his interest in magic, though this does not seem to be borne out by the documentation of the trial. A diametrically opposed reading was proposed by Rita Solese, for whom the symbols of the wheels might look magical in character, but actually are simply convenient and memorable instruments. For her, Bruno's art of memory is no more magical than it would be if you, say, studied for a test on Renaissance philosophy by associating various thinkers with characters from your favorite TV shows. Will Smith, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, would be a good choice for Pico della Mirandola, and for Bruno himself I'm thinking of Walter White from Breaking Bad. Even on this purely pragmatic reading, there could still be a philosophical basis for the mnemonic theory. Bruno quotes Aristotle's claim that we cannot think without images to explain why this technique of imaginative logic is so effective, a striking contrast with Pomponazzi who quoted the same passage to show that the mind cannot operate without being linked to a body. And more recently, a kind of compromised view has been put forward by Manuel Mertens. As he observes, Bruno himself says that the memory writings are not works on magic, even though they are full of magical terminology and imagery. To resolve this contradiction, Mertens suggests that the mnemonic technique is, apart from its own usefulness, an ideal preparation for the magician. Just as with my examples of television characters, images are not chosen randomly, but have some kind of symbolic resonance with the target of memorization. As Mertens says, the disciple in Bruno's art of memory, well-instructed in the natural language of forms and figures, would be a good candidate for becoming a magical binder. In other words, the two disciplines do call for similar skills and training, but they are not the same art. Even though Bruno's mnemonic theory depends on the notion of thinking with imagery, he does not believe that the true philosopher should stop at the level of images. This is clear from one final famous treatise called On the Heroic Frenzies. It again calls to mind themes familiar from Ficino and from other Renaissance authors who wrote about love, the Frenzies of the title being a reference to the ecstatic transport that can befall the lover. Like several other explorations of love written in the Renaissance, The Heroic Frenzies is a dialogue, but in this case, as in a typical episode of Breaking Bad, there's a twist. Namely that the characters are commenting on poems written by Bruno himself, in what may be an echo of the poetic self-commentary of Dante. Bruno has some fun with this literary conceit, for instance by having the main spokesman admit that he's not entirely sure what Bruno the poet had in mind. But the main thrust of the dialogue is clear. True erotic heroes pursue a love more exalted than the concerns of physical pleasure, and can no more sink to the level of common and natural loves than dolphins can be seen in the trees of the forest. The highest love of contemplation takes the hero beyond this natural world of images and likenesses in which we see divinity as if reflected in a mirror. As we know from Bruno's other works, the universe is an infinite expression of God's limitless power so it will inevitably outstrip the capacity of the human mind. But in a way this is good news, since it means the potential for new knowledge and taking pleasure in the acquisition of that knowledge is likewise infinite. As is abundantly clear from Bruno's inventive, witty, and diverse writings, he himself took great delight in this endless philosophical exploration until he met his own untimely end. With that, we've nearly come to an end of our own, finishing off our coverage of philosophy in Renaissance Italy. After all, I've said that I'm treating the time period of the Renaissance, as always somewhat arbitrarily, as ending in 1600, the very year that Bruno was executed. But there is one more figure I want to cover, in part because his story and ideas are so reminiscent of Bruni's. He too was a devotee of the new Copernican cosmology, and he too was persecuted by the papacy, though not to the point of being killed. Though he expressly denied that the world revolved around him, he was a pretty important guy. In fact, one of the most important scientists in history, Galileo Galilei. We'll be asking how his epoch-making ideas grew out of the epoch that was just coming to an end by relating the themes of this series to the methods he used in making his scientific discoveries. That's next time here, on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.