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Giordano Bruno: Cause, Principle and Unity: And Essays on Magic (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)

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This book consists of 2 parts. The first part "Cause, Principle and Unity" is about his theory of an infinite universe. While you may either agree or disagree with him on certain points, I think (maybe you, too) will find the idea of a "world-soul" intriguing. This part consists of 5 dialogues.

The other part comprise two essays, one on magic and the other is his treatise on bonding in general. This part presents some ideas which I think would be interesting not just to magicians but anybody who wants to know and wonder, from a philosophical point of view, what magic is and bonding in general.

Any student of philosophy is likely to enjoy this book (either the first or second or both).

Giordano Bruno is not only a writer of marvelous wit and virtuosity, and the only one since Plato to breathe life into the philosophical dialogue, but also a thinker of great consequence, imagination and purity. While he is generally seen to stand at the threshold between the medieval and the modern, cabilistic magic and scientific rationality, it is wrong to regard him merely as an anticipation of Leibniz and Spinoza. In certain respects, indeed, he goes farther in freeing thought from the residues of Scholasticism, and if his understanding of the coincidence of absolute potentiality and absolute actuality as the ground of Being points the way to Schelling, the freer winds of his thinking, with its wondrous openness towards the possibilities of the body as the possibilities of life, make him a kindred spirit of Nietzsche.

Learning about a first cause after Kant became a philosophy homeboy in Germany for his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) demonstrating the antinomies that had been competing to determine the instant at which a universe was created by some transcendental ego is typical of the kind of education which gives students in modernity a series of errors leading to a complete lack of understanding.

Combining a tremendous history of differing knowledge from different civilizations with a knowledge of the nature of scientific revolutions involving paradigm shifts produced by generational communities with different objectives, frequently motivated by the hatred of old men in societies that engage in prolonged warfare, it should be easy for comedy to proclaim:

No person has ever been as brilliant as I have the right to be.

There are some bright spots in Cause, Principle and Unity And Essays on Magic (1998) by Giordano Bruno, who wrote the main set of dialogues in England in 1584-5, but he went to Venice in 1591 and Bruno was denounced there in 1592. In 1593 the Roman Inquisition obtained a transfer of the trial from the Venetian Senate. In 1600 he was condemned for "the infinity of the world, the eternity of the universe, the allegation that Moses and Christ were magicians and impostors, and belief in pre-adamites." (p. xxxiii).

The hatred of old men who have been born with a brain was so common that the church felt death would be far more effective than monetary extraction in protecting people who derived some comfort from belief in a first cause from the terrible thoughts that would be possible if some "internal artificer" (p. 38) had a more confusing way of shaping reality.

My interest in sharing information which is frequently blocked by the institutional thinking of organizations which seek to control time, space, and the concept of cause gave me particular insight into understanding intellect as a cause or principle. As a result of philosophical doctrines about a transcendental ego that Platonists call a "world artificer," (p. 38) Bruno's character Teofilo reveals:

The universal intellect
is the innermost, most
real and most proper faculty
or potential part of the
world soul. It is that one
and the same thing that fills
everything, illuminates the
universe and directs nature
to produce her various species
suitably. (p. 37).

Orpheus calls it the "eye
of the world", because it sees
both the inside and outside of
all natural things, in order that
they may may succeed in producing
and maintaining themselves in their
proper proportions, intrinsically as
well as extrinsically. Empedocles
calls it "the differentiator", since it
never tires of distinguishing the forms
confused within nature's bosom, and
of summoning the generation of one
from the corruption of another. (p. 38).

The first dialogue concerns the ways in which a philosopher may seek to defend himself, and a character called Elitropio compares:

On one hand, a Scythian oaf . . . (p. 24)

On the other hand, a Roman senator
and gentleman would demonstrate
very scarce wisdom in abandoning
the mild banks of the Tiber, even
armed with legitimate complaint
and completely justified reprimand,
to go try the Scythian oafs, who would
seize the occasion to build, at his expense,
towers and Babels of arguments of the
utmost baseness, insolence and infamy,
unleashing popular fury and stoning him
in order to show other nations how much
difference there is between dealing with
human beings and with those who are
merely made in their image and likeness. (p. 25).

In spite of such creatures, in the Fifth Dialogue Teofilo declares:

The universe is, therefore, one,
infinite and immobile.
I say that the absolute possibility
is one, that the act is one;
the form, or soul, is one,
the matter, or body, is one,
the thing is one, being is one.
The maximum, and the optimum,
is one: it cannot be comprehended
and is therefore indeterminable
and not limitable, and hence infinite
and limitless, and consequently
immobile. (p. 87).

Following on this, the character Dicsono mentions Heraclitus, and Teofilo says "Exactly." (p. 93).

Herein lies the level of intelligence,
because the inferior intellects
cannot understand multiplicity
except through many species,
analogies and forms, superior
intellects do better with less,
and the very best do perfectly
with very little. (p. 95).

What explains that a contrary
is the principle of its opposite,
and that, therefore, the transmutations
are circular, if not the existence of
a subject, of a principle, of a term,
and a continuity between the one
and its contrary? (p. 99).

The decade is a unity
in the same way,
but it is more complex;
The hundred is no less
a unity, but it is more
complex. And what I tell
you in arithmetical terms,
you must understand in the
sense of a greater depth
and a greater simplicity
as regards the totality
of things.
The supreme good,
the supreme object of desire,
the supreme perfection,
the supreme beatitude consists
in the unity which embraces
the whole. (p. 101).

Teofilo. Praised be the gods,
and may all living things
magnify the infinite,
perfectly simple,
unique,
highest and absolute cause,
principle and unity. (p. 101).

The final selection in this book, A general account of bonding, (pp. 145-176) includes God among the list of bonding agents, along with:

demons, souls, animals, nature, chance,
luck and, finally, fate. (p. 145).

Those who appreciate art are described as brute animals who "will shower his affections not on God but on His effects." (p. 146). There is a list of thirty topics after the observation:

and a melancholic
and unstable humour
acts like a magnet
on evil spirits. (p. 155).

Plotinus was able to turn back "the evil spells with which a certain Egyptian tried to bind and injure Plotinus" (p. 142) and a cosmic pogo stick hopping back and forth in the fields of religion and philosophy is even more obvious now than it was then.