Bene dixit Aristoteles, non tamen tam bene intellexit. Bruno, Aristotele e la materia.

This thesis’ purpose is to analyse Giordano Bruno’s notion of matter and discover how much of Aristotelian physics survived in it. The Nolan’s education was based on Stagirite’s texts, learnt through Averroes’ and Thomas Aquinas’ commentaria. We will at first compare Aristotle’s and his two most important interpreters’ works with the commentaria that Bruno himself wrote on them with the aim of clarifying how he understood them; then in order to point out the terms of Bruno’s refusal, we’ll analyse his criticisms towards Aristotle’s doctrines; finally we’ll examine the works in which Bruno explained his own physical doctrines to evaluate which Aristotelian aspects had been assimilated in it. We’ll analyse three aspects of the notion of matter: its role as universal substratum, its elementary structure and its relation with the universal soul. The first chapter deals with the notion of privation to examine matter’s role as substratum from an original viewpoint. This concept is introduced in Aristotle’s Physica as the opposite of form to explain the Becoming and to overcome Zeno’s aporias and it’s is assimilated by Bruno in the radicalized form elaborated by Averroes, who interpreted it as prime matter’s form. The Nolan, in his Lampas triginta statuarum, places privation between the principles of Being and its explication, as their logical and ontological condition of possibility. The receptacle receiving everything can’t be but the void, infinite and deprived of any kind of determinations so that nothing could be repelled as its contrary. The triggering factor of Being’s explication must be an absolute desire which, caused by the most radical lack, indifferently aims to everything and can never be satiated. Finally, the substratum receiving One’s infinite manifestations is prime matter, that combines itself with particular forms and can’t be separated from them, but it’s never totally formed because privation is part of its nature, thus assuring Becoming’s eternity. At the same time, form too must be considered in a radical way: there aren’t infinite particular forms (that are only fleeting matter’s dispositions), but one and only formal principle, which is absolute privation’s contrary and, though different by nature, it’s intrinsic to matter so that they can be distinguished only on a logical level. Aristotle was right, as Bruno maintains in De la causa, principio et uno, in proposing the theory of privation, but he wasn’t able to understand the necessary bond between substratum’s total absence of determination and formal principle’s absolute plenitude of Being. After having analysed the interaction between Becoming’s three principles, Aristotle deals with the simplest bodies deriving from them, namely the four elements. Many aspects of the Aristotelian doctrine of elements are strongly related to his cosmology: for example, their finite number, their natural places and movements derive from the finite structure of universe and from the influence of heavenly bodies. Given his refusal of Aristotelian cosmology, Bruno’s theory of elements, exposed in the second chapter, starts from different premises. First of all, elements don’t derive from the same undifferentiated and abstract substratum and don’t mutually transform into one another because they must be ungenerable, incorruptible and unalterable, being the first and simplest components of bodies. These four distinct kinds of matter are brought to unity thanks to the Aristotelian principle of their necessary simultaneous presence in all bodies. The Nolan’s elements are: spiritus aëreus, a subtle, insensible and active substance which is the medium between body and soul; light, a material substance visible through a diaphanous substratum and producing the true fire, that is the vital warmth (what we call fire is actually a flame, i.e. an humid combustible burned up by an excessive heat); water, a humid substance which agglutinates the atoms, the smallest, solid, impenetrable bodies which constitute earth. Bruno explains element’s motions through the actions of the universal soul which, thanks to the mediation of the spiritus (that often swaps its role with the soul and sometimes fades into it), operates in a radial direction, from the centre to the periphery and vice versa, so that all the simple bodies acquire a circular movement. In Bruno’s theory, nevertheless, we can find some Aristotelian aspects: the non-elemental nature of empiric fire, the existence of two locally distinct kinds of air-spiritus, the corpuscular structure of earth and the binding function of water were already maintained by the Stagirite (mostly in Averroes’ interpretation). Bruno openly recognises his debts towards him and, under a neo-platonic and hermetic rhetorical surface, keeps all the aspects compatible with his own original cosmology. In the third chapter we’ll deal with Bruno’s classification of indivisible natures in De triplici minimo et mensura, where Bruno associates universal soul and atoms because of their indivisibility: the former is negative atoma, i.e. a nature that can’t be divided and has no relation with divisibility; the latter is natura privative atoma, i.e. an undivided nature that can be divided or has a relation with divisibility. The natura negative atoma’s substantial aspect is represented by the universal soul, which generates a hierarchy of other souls with an increasing degree of individuality: this doesn’t imply its fragmentation because the multiplicity of actions doesn’t affect the agent’s unity. The accidental aspect is represented by the emission and reception of sensorial data, which are consequences of soul’s enlivening function. Atoms are classified in the heterogeneous group of naturae privative atomae: they actually are indivisible, but they compose bodies together with the other three kinds of continuous matter and with the soul, which gives an identity to the compounds and makes them organic beings. The bodies, however, can be divided, so that atoms have an indirect relation with divisibility and are therefore only privative indivisible. Among naturae privative atomae there are also minima naturalia, minima sensibilia, points, instants, mathematical unities, i.e. a large number of indivisibles which belong to Aristotelian tradition. The very distinction between negative and privative indivisible foreshadows Aristotle’s distinction between actual and potential indivisibility. Though he rejected the existence of mathematical indivisible entities, the Stagirite stated that there must be some kind of indivisibility in the field of qualities. Bruno never quotes Aristotle, but he seems to borrow a conceptual background from him and that’s why his classification of atomae naturae is a general reflection on the concept of indivisibility, overcoming atomists’ materialism. We can conclude that, as regards the “logical-ontological principles”, Bruno agrees with Aristotle on the general premises and openly recognize his influence, but he criticizes him for not being able to draw the right conclusions. As regards the “chemical principles” of matter, he overturns the Aristotelian cosmological view, but keeps every particular aspect that can be coherently included in his own physical system. Finally he uses just a faint peripatetic conceptual background in his classification of indivisible entities. The weakening of Aristotelian influence is due to the progressive approach to Bruno’s philosophy’s key point, that is vitalism: only the universal soul can take the role of the one and only formal-efficient principle, but Aristotle failed to see this because he had been unfaithful to his own premises. Bruno’s strategy is therefore to develop these to their extreme consequences and to make the peripatetic physics implode, thus demonstrating that Aristotle bene dixit, non tamen tam bene intellexit.