Giordano Bruno Teaches Aristotle

Blum's work is based on two methodological assumptions: Bruno's critical use of the philosophical tradition and his capacity to distinguish clearly between Aristotle and his later followers, including the Scholastic tradition. In the 1980 foreword (of the original Aristoteles bei Giordano Bruno, Studien zur philosophischen Rezeption [1980], of which this is a translation), Blum states that it has become a commonplace to stress that Giordano Bruno's works are inundated with views, statements, and ideas taken from earlier authors. Thus, reading Bruno's works critically runs the risk of reducing his intellectual work to spheres of influence or of atomizing through identifying the sources. Blum, by contrast, argues that Bruno deliberately used the philosophers of the past for the sake of developing his own original positions. Blum further underlines that the focus of bis study is Aristotle, as he intends to show that Bruno had indeed a very precise knowledge of Aristotle's works, and his philosophy can be presented as an attempt to overcorne Aristotelian aporetic solutions. Blum structures Bruno's reception of Aristotle according to thematic groups: logic (in particular his paraphrase of Topics), cosmology, principles ot nature, and the relation between unity and rnultiplicity. Blum's study has a remarkably Kantian undertone, as he holds that Bruno "is especially interested in the possibility of subjective construction of scientific systems whose coherence with the scientific objects would be guaranteed by an a priori pre-structure of the human intellect" (25). Thus, in the first section on logic, Blum shows that Bruno does not distinguish between "pure" and object-oriented logic, and that he intends to suggest a transcendental logic, although not based on an analysis of consciousness. Rather, Bruno "elaborates the possibility of rationally constructing scientifc systems in order to present ever new approaches towards the intelligibility of extramental reality that is purportedly based on metaphysics" (66). In his cosmology (section 2) Blurn traces the same intention: Bruno's dialogue De la causa, principio et uno is not an explicitly anti-Aristotelian academic treatise, but a further step in the methodological development of his own thought, in this case a fresh elaboration of the principles of nature, detaching himself from an ontological approach to nature. Thus, in the analysis of matter and the world soul (form) in section 3, Blum argues that Bruno's conception of "absolute matter" is necessary for the conceivability of the existence of beings (191). Indeed, the unity of bodily and incorporeal matter grounds the real presence of the principle in the principiata, and therefore the relation between "natural" matter and "absolute" matter is presented as a scale of being, each level containing all ontological and epistemological antagonisms in such a way that the higher level resolves the opposites and contradictions of the lower level (193). Bruno emphasizes Aristotle's substratum aspect of matter, but in its substantial unity with form. Both are Iabeled "nature": the world soul has an immanent operation and it is matter that "releases" the forrns from its womb. Discussing Bruno's elaboration of Aristotle's unmoved mover, Blum rightly refutes the interpretation that reduces God to the structure of (natural) reality, entertained in the 1960s by Nicola Badaloni and at the end of the century by Michele Ciliberto. Blum convincingly argues that although God is designed as immanent to nature, he does not resolve into the structure of the universe. Quite paradoxically, Bruno maintained the transcendence of the absolute by stressing its "absolute immanence": God is more internal within the things than they are within themselves (244). In conclusion Blum rephrases his claim formulated in section 1: in Bruno's philosophy "the thinking subject substantiates and establishes self-referential subjectivity, as each form of cognition is a release of cognitive power." Thus, with due care for historical reasons, we may conclude that Bruno attempts to obtain a transcendental substantiation of cognition (267).