Renaissance and Extra-University Philosophy

Names and Achievements of Renaissance Philosophy

Dante Alighieri (1265—1321), author of the Divine Comedy, was the first to proclaim that military force alone is insufficient for the political unification of Italy, for the ultimate judge of history is God, and no earthly ruler can take God's place. However, a path to divinization is open to humanity—a path of virtue and a "courtly language," a refined vernacular through which noble intentions can and should be articulated. According to Dante, Latin should yield to the popular Italian tongue, as not all in Italy comprehend the learned language, and the goodwill and benevolence essential for divinization require that knowledge be accessible to all.

Francesco Petrarch (1304—1374) held a different view regarding language. He believed that literature necessitates a degree of monumentality; thus, he wrote significant works, such as the poem Africa, in Latin. Petrarch harbored a disdain for scholasticism, seeing it primarily as a linguistic narrowness: people accept familiar concepts as reality and, due to the breadth of scholastic inquiries, begin to theorize about numerous matters with which they have no experiential acquaintance. He called for experiential contemplation, the only means to learn sound and serene reasoning that is generous towards the interlocutor.

Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401—1464) was the first to suggest that any positive assertions we make about the surrounding world may be contested. The laws of logic are formulated as generalizations of those operations accessible to us, whereas discourse concerning God, eternity, or the cosmos cannot be generalized. Thus, we can only rely on our own understanding of signs, for instance, reasoning about God based on manifestations of a higher meaning, and contemplating the world on the basis of certain inherent properties of our existence therein. Ultimately, it becomes evident that we do not truly know even what is at hand, for we cannot generalize it either; each time we discover something new within the familiar. Hence, our "learned ignorance" will be the sole position from which we can comprehend universal laws that directly affect us: we love things, yearn for immortality, understand one another, and thus can grasp the meanings of specific concepts and entities.

The Roman philologist Lorenzo Valla (1407—1457) boldly became the first to systematically challenge the authority of Aristotle. He posited that Aristotle, with his notion of the "golden mean," which calls for the avoidance of extremes, was overly timid and indecisive, while the new era required heroes. Therefore, Valla asserted that many concepts inherited from antiquity and the Middle Ages needed to be reinterpreted positively; for example, to understand greed as frugality and extravagance as generosity. By rectifying the system of concepts, we would also correct human morals, a task Aristotle failed to achieve as he relied on the prejudices of established usages.

Lorenzo Valla maintained that words are, firstly, polysemous (each word possesses multiple dictionary meanings) and, secondly, that phenomena invariably exceed words. We often designate directly opposite things with the same word: we may say "this person is brave" either in approval or condemnation, or "this person is famous" in a good or bad sense. The world becomes ever more unknowable, and thus, Valla contended, we should not multiply words but rather limit ourselves to a small number, simultaneously developing the imagination, which held moral significance for Valla. For it enables one to perceive the best in habitual behavior and teaches one to follow this best.

Valla's contemporary, Gianozzo Manetti (1396—1459), shared his sentiments. Most renowned is his Speech on the Dignity of Man, which glorifies humanity as the pinnacle of creation, capable of crafting both tangible things and abstract concepts. By elevating humanity, Manetti also called for a creative reassessment of all prior concepts for the triumph of virtue. He engaged, at Valla's suggestion, in correcting the translation of the New Testament, arguing that Jerome, living in an era of moral and political decline, failed to convey all necessary meanings, presenting some too crookedly and primitively.

For instance, in his translation of the Second Epistle of Peter, where Jerome uses the term "abstinence" (abstinentia), Manetti replaces it with "restraint" (continentia), thereby substituting the ascetic demand for secular politeness. Where Jerome writes "inspired" (inspirati), Manetti uses "captivated" (delati) by the Spirit, transforming an action of indefinite aim into one with a clear beginning, middle, and end, an action of which we can ascertain its actual reality. Instead of "deny" (negant), he employs "renouncing" (abnegantes), and instead of "condemned to suffer" (damnavit), he uses "delivered to suffer" (condonasset), again describing an action with all its parameters rather than a mere relationship, a simple gesture of rejection. Instead of "liars" (mendaces), he designates "false" (falsi) teachers, thereby addressing not the particulars of character but the specifics of action. Clouds are raised not by "whirlwinds" (turbinibus) but by "tempests" (tempestatis), and Lot escapes not from "luxurious company" but from "revolving amidst luxury," making the images older yet more vivid and textured, albeit perhaps less biting than Jerome's.

The rediscovery of Plato during the Renaissance was not merely an acquaintance with the legacy of an eminent philosopher but an awakening to the mystical tension and ambitions of ancient religion. While one could assert that Aristotle concerned himself with scientific and earthly matters, only touching upon celestial affairs as far as they are accessible to earthly beings, such cannot be said of Plato: he spoke of the inaccessibility and unknowability of the celestial but demanded that our minds turn towards that which is beyond reach. Plato, much like Moses with biblical wisdom, embodied all ancient wisdom: he was both a divinely inspired mystic and a lawgiver of thought.

Marsilio Ficino (1433—1499) established the first academy in modern Europe, a modest circle that convened to engage in discussions modeled after Plato's dialogues. Ficino was a priest, a translator from Greek, and an advocate of natural magic; he believed that the same laws operate in nature, music, and books, and that by skillfully selecting sounds or aromas, one could enhance health and even influence political events.

The enthusiasm for Plato was carried from Greece to Italy by Georgius Gemistus (1360—1452), who translated his surname, literally meaning "The Filled," into a more ancient Greek form, resulting in Plethon—a name that delighted him due to its similarity to Plato. Plethon argued that Aristotle rendered Plato’s teachings overly simplistic by placing all virtues on the same level and declaring that, for instance, honesty, justice, and insight are equally important to a courageous man. For Plato, however, there exists a ladder of ascent through virtues, rising from the corporeal to the spiritual and celestial. Plethon asserted that the West had entered a dead end due to Aristotle, squabbling over increasingly vacuous concepts and engaging in petty distinctions. Eventually, Plethon even regarded Christianity as too uniform, having abandoned fantasies of a multitude of gods.

Ficino, however, had no intention of renouncing Christianity; thus, unlike Plethon, whose reasoning progressed from the ground upwards and sought to discern various gods and diverse lofty virtues, he proceeded from the top down, from the singular God to the manifold phenomena. According to Ficino, God is perfect, yet perfection must be infinite not only in degree, as it pertains to the senses, but also in number, as it pertains to the intellect. Therefore, as soon as God conceived the creation of the world, an infinite multitude of angels emerged from His thought, forming a perfect intelligible world. Then God realized it was time to engage in action, and thus the soul arose, as the nexus between word and deed. Since God is directly involved in action, even if He calls upon angels for assistance, He ultimately decides everything Himself, so the soul retains the image of the Trinity, dividing into intellect, born of it, wrath (the will to act), and desire (affection and love) that emanates from them. Moreover, in order for the soul to comprehend what must be done, the qualities of things arise, such as their form, temperature, or softness. Ultimately, material things come into existence to serve as monuments of God's perfect deeds, and the soul becomes incarnate in the body. Jesus, God incarnate, saved humanity not merely by assuming flesh but by transcending the limitations of the qualities of things, transforming water into wine or bread into His body, thereby enabling humanity to partake not only in material objects but also in the Trinity within their souls.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463—1494) advanced the discourse further by asserting that God did not create the world in a mere six days but is continually creating it; thus, other religions are also true as they are involuntary witnesses to this ongoing creation. Mirandola reasoned that the six days serve merely as a schematic framework to correlate the participation of the angelic, celestial, and elemental realms in the creation of the world. On the first and fourth days, angels establish the world’s fundamental structure; on the second and fifth days, the heavens introduce diversity; and on the third and sixth days, material elements manifest, ultimately culminating in the creation of corporeal humanity. Since none of the participants in creation have disappeared, this act continues, especially as new religions emerge that can theoretically comprehend it. The superiority of Christianity over other faiths lies solely in its capacity to appreciate this creation, whereas other religions hastily seek to admire it, leading them to fabricate their own deities.

Francesco Patrizi (1529—1597), a consistent Platonist of Croatian-Bosnian descent who taught in Ferrara and Rome, contended that Aristotle, in introducing the concept of the Prime Mover, obscured Plato’s doctrine, wherein the light of reason is dependent upon divine light, and the essence of the universe rests not in motion but in the experience of light. Since light illuminates all things indiscriminately, Patrizi concluded that all entities possess a soul. In his view, Aristotle had narrowed the notion of the soul by limiting it to specific functions, such as growth or, in the case of humans, reason, whereas the soul is the capacity of a thing to be more than itself, to be vibrant—what we might term ’vibrating’—to bring joy to humans and please itself and other entities, finding its place among them. Enlightenment materialists later referenced Patrizi.

Professor Pietro Pomponazzi (1462—1525) of the University of Bologna sought to revive the medieval authority of Aristotle and even his Arabic commentator Averroes, condemned by Thomas Aquinas. According to Pomponazzi, since immortality pertains to intellectual contemplation, only that soul will attain immortality which has achieved intellect at the level of angels; otherwise, it remains mortal, confined to mortal categories, including the body as a mortal category. In this sense, Pomponazzi argued, all humans possess, rather, a mortal soul, as a significant number of its reactions are conditioned by the body rather than by the content of intellectual knowledge. Furthermore, the belief in an immortal soul is, in Pomponazzi's view, immoral, as it leads individuals to perform good deeds solely in anticipation of posthumous rewards, thus acting selfishly and greedily. While for medieval thinkers the afterlife was a subject of contemplation, for Pomponazzi, it became a matter of evaluation and comparison.

At the same time, Pomponazzi permitted both the immortality of the soul and the immortality of the cosmos, but only on the condition that God possesses none of the attributes we might ascribe to Him, that He transcends both cataphatic and apophatic theology, being some force or principle to which no mind can oppose. Only such an abstract force operates in a manner that no data from the mortal body, from which the human soul cannot escape, would impede immortality. However, until we are able to reason about such a God, we should humbly regard our souls as mortal.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469—1527) constructed an entire political theory based on the amalgamation of ethical and scientific understandings of ’virtù’ (often translated as ’virtue’ but more accurately as ’excellence’), which remains influential even today. In his treatise The Prince (often inaccurately translated as "The Prince" or "The Duke," as Machiavelli discusses a republican leader without privileges by birth, achieving everything through his own efforts), he elaborates that virtù is a quality enabling a man to realize what Fortune has already devised for him, a fortuitous confluence of circumstances, and to become as much a pretender as nature itself, which is deceptive, given its masks of fortune and misfortune. Machiavelli is sometimes regarded as the first preacher of immorality in politics, but in truth, he merely believed that people often misjudge circumstances and that the road to hell is paved with good intentions; thus, it is preferable for a strong leader to arise who clarifies his desires to all. Of course, such a leader may become a tyrant, but fate will then befall him, as he will lose the trust of the people, prompting him to act rashly.

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473—1543), a Polish cleric, first established the rotation of the Earth both on its axis and around the sun, asserting that modeling all movements in the cosmos is best achieved through mechanical and mathematical calculations, rather than through the amalgamation of celestial contemplation, physics, and individual calculations as practiced in ancient philosophy and scholasticism. The shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric system continued to captivate minds for centuries. Indeed, Kant, in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, likened himself to Copernicus, suggesting that he based his philosophy not on general premises accepted as axioms (what he termed ’speculative theology,’ or contemplation of seemingly already systematized premises of existence), but rather on the capacity of reason to engage with any premises and ascertain not only their validity (as found throughout the new philosophy) but also the undeniable limitations of reason itself.

Philipp Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, adopting the pseudonym Paracelsus (literally, "one who disagrees with Celsus," a model of ancient medicine), like most natural philosophers of the Renaissance, posited that man is a microcosm, broadly mirroring the universe as a macrocosm. However, for him, the microcosm and macrocosm are linked not through a system of analogies, wherein, for instance, bodily organs correspond to planets, but through a principle of mobility and transformation, which he identified with Mercury, the most fluid of metals. Hence, health may be attained not through harmonizing the functions of the organism with those of the cosmos, as had been the practice in preceding natural philosophies, but rather through the influence of something more provocative and acute—specifically, poison. Paracelsus was the first to elucidate that any medicine is a poison; only the correct dosage allows one to triumph over illness. Consequently, although many of Paracelsus's constructions may appear fantastical and peculiar to us, he is always placed in the gallery of great medical scholars.

Gerolamo Cardano (1501—1576), an engineer and astrologer, believed that since many things in nature are probable, eventually all probabilities converge into some whole, some common significance, thereby fulfilling God’s will in nature. Such a philosophy was later criticized by Tommaso Campanella (1568—1639), a utopian philosopher, who contended that this philosophy places God’s will in dependence upon particular events, whereas we ought to think the other way around: God renders the incredible probable. Consequently, the correct philosophy would be one that explains the incredible within our thinking, indicating which categories therein are most fantastical and strange, and imbues them with meaning.

Bernardino Telesio (1509—1588) established his own academy near Naples. Telesio believed that philosophy could be distilled into the study of nature, and in his works, he found himself closest to the pre-Socratic natural philosophers of antiquity, such as Empedocles. For him, Aristotle was a logician, who, albeit inadvertently, multiplied the number of concepts, most of which lay deadweight in the system and do not improve human life. Telesio proposed that it would be better to introduce a single category—temperature—into which he would incorporate two concepts: cold and heat, and from these notions derive processes, such as expansion and contraction, perceiving in them entities like spirit, understood as a very subtle matter, or event, or love, and others.