 From the time of his first publication to that of his last, 1582 and 1591 respectively, only 10 years had passed, though in this short span of time Bruno had managed to produce an astonishing 42 works ranging in topic from cosmology and physics to magic in the occult. Here in this video we will discuss his cosmology and physics only as far as is necessary for the understanding of his metaphysical doctrine. Likewise, we will not hear discuss the happenings of his life as we have already covered them in a separate video. If you would like to know of Bruno the Man, then this video here would be a better use. His philosophy was unique for the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian dominated era during which it was conceived. Its uniqueness derives from its ability to combine metaphysics, physics, psychology and ethics into a philosophy that, while presented in an unsystematic and at times seemingly disjointed way, manages to shine with an inner coherence. He would come to call this his new philosophy and set out to prove that the Aristotelian, Neoplatonic and Christian systems which were so widely believed were misguided and but the perversions of a more ancient knowledge. He bestowed upon Aristotle the title of stupidest of all philosophers, quite at odds with most of the middle ages who named him the philosopher, meaning he embodied all that a philosopher should aspire to be. It was absurd to believe that one school of thought held exclusive rights to truth and Bruno was audacious, perhaps even reckless enough, to challenge any authority who dared to force feed the people this pernicious lie. Though he called it his new philosophy, it can be said that Bruno believed that we needed no new philosophy, but only the courage to live up to the oldest and the best. The ancients from which all subsequent knowledge was adapted, including that adapted by Plato, Aristotle and exegetes of old, originated with Hermes Trismegistus, an early Egyptian sage, Zoroaster of Persia, as well as many Greek names such as Pythagoras, Parmenides and Empedocles. It might be said that Bruno, while not exceptionally original in his thought, carried within him the gift of synthesis. All of this is not to say that he did not employ the aid of other schools in trends of thought, such as the Stoics, Epicureans, Scholastics and those of Arabic descent, when it suited his purposes. Though however many sources he pulled from, it was all in the service of but one goal, to restore the true ancient philosophy and the wisdom contained within, and to reveal the pure adulteration of this knowledge perpetrated by Aristotle and the subsequent generations of Aristotelians. A philosophy which brings about the perfection of the human intellect most easily and imminently, and most closely corresponds to the truth of nature, is what Bruno wished to synthesize for humanity. In 1584, Bruno published The Ash Wednesday Supper, wherein he endeavored to interpret and improve upon Copernicus's heliocentric view of the cosmos. Where he believed Copernicus's interpretation fell short, and what he wished to see rectified, was in his failure to recognize and propagate the obvious conclusion, that what he had discovered disproved the notion of a finite universe put forth by the Scholastic and Aristotelian minds which hitherto dominated the academic hive mind. Bruno believed, quite contrary to the Scholastic minds that preceded him, that the universe was infinite, homogeneous, and it was home to countless bodies and solar systems quite like our own. Strangely enough, he had no qualms about invoking scripture to back up his hypotheses. The earth, the stars, and all the myriad principal bodies which he would come to call them, floated endlessly through an infinite receptacle of ether. Their movements were defined by their souls, indeed these bodies were animate, and moved about not by rational decision-making, but according to the unique ends which their souls necessitated. Besides the absence of rational decision-making and their duration, principal bodies were like all other beings. These principal bodies all had the capacity, when the proper circumstances were present, to house all manner of life. They have no less virtue, nor a nature different from that of our own earth. Most interestingly of these lifeforms were so-called demons. They were beings made of pure ether, or ether mixed with air, water, or earth. Troglodytes, stone-throwing demons, nymphs, and many others whose diversity far exceeded that of human beings. These demons were also said to have rational natures, and could only form from a process Bruno referred to as spontaneous generation. To conclude this section of this video concerned with Bruno's cosmological beliefs, we will review briefly his theory of the elements, which, like most of his views, took heavily from past schools of thought, namely Pythagoreanism, Atomism, and various ideas from Nicholas of Cusa. Things which we would deem corporeal in nature are made up of both material and immaterial principles. Materially, there is earth and water, we might approximate earth to the atom, and water is that which earth moves through and is bonded by. The immaterial principles, soul and spirit, acted in much the same way, with soul being the principle of motion which determined how atoms would form to create a body, while spirit was the medium by which the process could occur. In short, atoms were incorporeal spheres with spatial locations, which were then joined together by soul through the intermediary of spirit to form a corporeal body. In an early work titled The Shadows of Ideas, Bruno lays down the purpose of nemotechnic, referred to otherwise as the art of memory. Memory in Bruno's opinion is something which can be trained and not, as was traditionally imagined, a subjective experience of remembering wholly aloof from our direct intervention. If memory as he believed was the process of creating an internal script which mirrored the external ideas present in the external world, then this script acted as a sort of shadow for its counterpart. The script which we create internally is not less real than those ideas which it is derived from, it is the shadow of the absolute ideas. He tells us in a metaphor to imagine these shadows as not made of darkness, but instead as the vestige of light. It is only through these shadowy vestiges that we can learn objective truth. These shadows must be mediated, and memory will be our mediator, whose task it is to connect ideas which seem superficially to be independent of one another. In essence, memory is derived from the life-giving principle of the world, and thus it orders, understands, and senses reality. He gives us an example taken from Nicholas of Cusa, wherein a rectangular line is erected upon a basis. When the line inclines towards the basis, it is not only making the angle acute, it creates at the same time an obtuse angle, so that both imply each other mutually, and in that sense the different is equal. In the traditional sense which Bruno upheld, Pneumotechnic aided the individual by developing a mechanism by which he can memorize information in a sort of mechanical way. It does so by constructing concentric wheels populated by various symbols. These symbols correspond to, or are representative of, external realities which we should call archetypes. It is the act of linking the external archetypes with the internal symbols coherently and sequentially, which makes up the basis for the art of memory. Something integral to Bruno's epistemology and metaphysics of memory, the basis by which it functions, is the concept of conversion. Each symbol within the concentric circle may be converted into an external absolute idea or archetype. When our mind recognizes the shadow linked to the external object, it then recalls many connecting aspects of the object which the symbol represents. It is through this recognition and conversion that the individual comes to contain within himself a litany of interconnected information which, when followed through to completion, transitions from the plurality of the things to the unity that they suggest. Outside of Pneumotechnic's basic function as a tool to accurately recall large quantities of information, it also served as the gateway by which the mind can understand the divine. It is by the mirroring of archetypes that one harmonizes himself with God, an important step because the similar is understandable only to the similar. The universe, or nature according to Bruno, consisted of what he called the universal soul in universal matter. The universal soul was similar to the all and all described 2,000 years earlier by the Greek philosopher Annexagoras, meaning that it resided within all things, and is the principle which animates them. We may take an analogy from Plotinus, comparing it to a single voice reaching each member of the audience, no matter the size of said audience or the room they reside in. Each would hear and experience said sound in accordance with their individual state of being, just as the universal soul will reside in things according to their individual capacity to receive it. Universal matter comes into play as the medium through which the universal soul animates the two corporeal principles. It has no specific qualities to call its own, and has the potential to become all things. It is, essentially, passive in determinate space. The question, how can this be a substance if it has no qualities or dimensions, may come to mind here, but Bruno reassures us by drawing on Aquinas' commentary on Aristotle's physics. Here he compares universal matter to wood in the sense that wood is a substance in act, because it was that which a bed, stool, or image could be made, not because it was any one of those things. Separately, an operating within universal matter was another concept which is, as Bruno stated, the inner and most essential and characteristic faculty of the universal soul. He called this aspect the universal intellect. Its essential function was to act as the immutable internal craftsman, in other words, as the cause of all ends. Fundamentally, a cause must be outside of the things which it causes, and thus the universal intellect was extrinsic to all things, this in contrast to the universal soul and universal matter, which were imminent in all things. The universal intellect, too, operated in accordance with a final extrinsic cause, this being the perfection of the universe. The universal soul and matter were not opposed to one another. They were two parts of a super substantial substance. It is the nature of this substance to reconcile these two things. Apart from this substance, there were no counterparts, meaning it is full, complete in itself. We may think of this substance as God, one in the same with the God which Hermes and Moses had described long ago. An important doctrine in its metaphysics is one taken primarily from Nicholas of Cusa, the coincidence of opposites. In the fifth dialogue of On the Infinite, Bruno states, our philosophy is by no means opposed to reason. It reduces everything to a single origin, and related everything to a single end, and maketh contraries to coincide, so that there is one primal foundation, both of origin and of end. From this coincidence of contraries, we deduce that ultimately, it is divinely right to say and to hold that contraries are within contraries, wherefore it is not difficult to compass the knowledge that each thing is within every other. In summary, the coincidence of opposites functions to achieve a unity or synthesis of the contraries which occur simultaneously in a single utterly simple and invisible principle, which is truth and being. If you have seen my video on the life of Giordano Bruno, you know well how his life would end. During his trial, he had maintained that God had created all things from the two principles, the world soul and prime matter. They depend with respect to their whole being on God, and they are eternal. Neither through our senses or through our intuition can we know or understand this substance, as its title of super substantial suggests. Though it is not necessary that we understand God, for we receive through his vestige the universe a few certainties. First, that he exists, a fact clear as the fact that a sculptor exist with the recognition of a sculpted work. Second, that there must be a first cause who we cast as God. And third, that God is absolutely simple, the monad of monads, a fact clear from the unity of the universe which is made in his image. All things were accidental modes which gained significance, only in so far as they are parts of God's image. Similarly, in arithmetic, numbers were composed of and therefore accidents of the number one, and physical objects were composed of and therefore accidents of the atom. An important distinction in Bruno's metaphysics was between these two aspects of God. First as the super substantial substance, and second as its vestige, the natural world. The important distinction between God as law giver and God as law is that in the former, all possibilities were at any given moment actualized somewhere. Where in the latter, form and matter, being in existence, act and potentiality were undifferentiated, all possibilities were actualized absolutely without distinctions of time and place. Further, this super substantial substance converted the temporal into ontological priority, the one being God, contained intrinsically the attributes of the universe in a virtual, unexplicated mode. And while remaining undifferentiated in this mode, also determined in a second extrinsic yet still undifferentiated mode, the differentiations of the explicated universe. He was, in essence, a unity or undifferentiated plentitude of ideas existing in him virtually. If you have not studied Bruno's work before, this paragraph seems about as confusing as the geometrical form of exposition that Spinoza produced. Admittedly, this is a hurdle in Bruno as it is in Spinoza, but further investigation will bring, I hope, some clarity to what remains obscure. The super substantial substance of God may be thought of as mind, which contemplates within himself all the ideas present within the universal intellect and corporeal matter. This process, if the process it can be named, occurs contemporaneously and timelessly. Within ourselves too, God as mind is working. Our instincts, and indeed all other cognitive acts, irrespective of what produced it, were instantiations of a single cognitive power driving from the universal intellect, and ultimately, therefore, from God as mind. Its form is determined by the dimensions or bodily composition of that which it inhabits. Human beings and their intelligence, for instance, could be determined quite accurately by their hands, which characteristics Bruno attributed to genius, I am unsure. Each being, human or otherwise, sought to preserve in their own being as far as in them lied according to their individual cognitive capacity. This is equally true for those things deemed inanimate. Existence seems to be the prerequisite for the expression of the single cognitive power, whatever exists in some way, knows in some way. If you are familiar with Spinoza, you may recall the Canatus Principle. It is through the self-preservation of an infinite number of things that we find the glue that anchors the universal soul and intellect, to that which gave it being. It is the very principle of self-preservation, this compulsion to return to God that keeps the universe of things in order. This does beg the question, is Bruno's God pantheistic? Semantics are often involved in this discussion, but general consensus tells us that his God maintained some theistic elements, whether this is as some believe, pandeism, or as some others do, panentheism. The jury is not out and his work speaks differently to different minds. What we can certainly identify is that Bruno's God was removed from all things in the sense that he was present in them in a more exalted mode, and not because he was absent from them. The world soul, where nature was no less than God operating in all things. Bruno's conception of the individual soul was that of an immortal and corporeal center of animation, governing the atoms conglomerating around it as the body grew and flourished. It was immortal in the sense that it too was part of nature, and upon bodily death returned at once to that form which it came. All spirits are from the sea of one spirit, and that all will return to that spirit. Following its return to the spirit diffused throughout space, it underwent, according to the doctrine of metempsychosis, a reincarnation. Though we must not be mistaken in thinking that one's personal identity or personality would return along with one's soul, but we are assured the soul would return, and in a state consistent with its previous incarnation. If one was exceedingly wicked or slovenly, then they may expect their soul to inhabit likewise when reincarnated. Monsenigo, the man responsible for Bruno's later arrest, testified to the inquisition that Bruno had once scolded him for stepping on a spider, for he believed it may have been his reincarnated friend. Is there, though, a proper way to conduct oneself in life, that he may, after death, allow his soul to inhabit a body congenial to his current affections? There is, and for the philosopher, an avenue well within his reach. Our task, then, is to attune the soul's thoughts and deeds to the cemetery of the law inscribed in all things. We must look beyond the shadows which assail us at every turn, to the ideas which lie beneath and behind, and only when our minds can understand the unity of all things is it that we will gain this greatness of soul, this uniformity with divinity. It is not within the power of man to completely understand God, the super substantial substance, but we may come to understand his image. Bruno, quite frequently, set upon the religious authorities of his day with a characteristic irony laced with mockery and contempt. Some of the descriptors he gave the Christian faith were only but the beginning of his sense. A foolish faith, a wretched story, and a worthless pernicious fable were but a few of his mintage. The best he could say for it was that it allowed order amongst the uneducated, for they could not hope to achieve the philosopher's ideal. Moses, he thought, led a band of these uneducated peoples following their liberation, and instilled a moral and civil law buttressed by an almighty God for good measure. As for Christ, he attributed his miracles to mere sleight of hand at best, and communion with the devil at worst. For only after his struggle with the devil in the desert did he begin performing his miracles. Similar to Spinoza, miracles were impossible for Bruno as the universe was God in things and was absolutely perfect. A miracle would indicate that the eternal order of things was mutable. Miracles would not demonstrate God's omnipotence, but his impotence. He found at Erkzum to say the least the many lies propounded by the church. These included the Pauline theme of folly, claims that the light of faith and revelation were superior to human knowledge. Augustine's emphasis on the fallen nature of mankind, particularly the corruption of knowledge innate to it, injunctions to be childlike and meek, and the humility and obedience that the Christian clergy sought to instill among its flock. The philosopher did not need such ideas to guide him toward the moral life, for they understood the divinity within them, for which there was no need of superstitious tales to access. In his search of understanding, he comes to be greater than those gods whom blind commoners worship. We see here that Bruno ex-told the ancient virtue of strength, both in mind and body. He felt no qualms about a pride which was backed by greatness of soul and worldly achievement. Divinity is within each of us, and any doctrine espousing sin and vengeful gods is doing so only for political profit and control. The legacy of Giordano Bruno followed much the same path as that of Spinoza. In fact, it was Spinozism, which in the late 18th century brought Bruno from being one of the most evil men that the earth had ever borne, to a man praised for his heroic defiance of ecclesiastical authority, whose efforts aided in philosophy's long struggles to free itself from the trammels of revealed religion. Libertese philosophica, the right to think, to dream, if you like, to make philosophy. The vision he held of a unified universe, infinitely large, and the enthusiasm by which he espoused it, certainly helped arouse Europe out of its scientific coma and into the modern age. He stands for many today, amongst the great names who adorn the halls of the western philosophic tradition. Thank you for talking philosophy with me. Until next time.