Giordano Bruno and present-day philosophy

I’ve dug out Bruno’s Cause, Principle, and Unity again. It’s always a special treat of literature and of comedy. But reading Bruno immediately after reading Iain Grant and Alberto Toscano and Simondon really sets off bells. (And Grant openly makes the link.)

It can always sound a bit pedantic to point to some past figure, not so widely read, as key to a present-day debate. But Bruno really is a key figure to be considered as numerous present-day ontologies appeal to matter, a pre-individual realm, the non-existence of substantial forms until they are actualized, the existence of a one that is not just a one since it is laden with all sorts of unactualized potentials, and other such concepts. And of course the present-day vague hostility toward Aristotle, mentioned in a post earlier today, can be found in buckets in Bruno, enough so that he nearly had a fistfight with a prominent Aristotelian in Paris and was forced to recant humiliatingly in order to save himself. (He did that several times earlier in life, but then refused to recant before the Inquisition, eventually costing him his life.)

Much is made, obviously rightly, of Bruno’s inheritance from Nicholas of Cusa. But an even earlier ancestor is Anaxagoras.

I’ll also continue to call Bruno the third most talented literary figure in the history of philosophy (after Nietzsche and Plato, in that order) and surely the most colorful character in our discipline since Empedocles. Until the advent of Zizek, Bruno was the last significant philosopher who could have made a career in stand-up comedy if necessary. (Even physics has had more of those lately: Feynman, Pauli…)