Francesca Puccini

The article focuses on a special aspect of Giordano Bruno’s reception in the German culture of the second half of nineteenth century, namely Kurd Lasswitz’s account of Bruno’s atomistic theory of matter contained in his De minimo. In a chapter of his Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton, Lasswitz interprets Bruno’s atomism as an attempt to build a theory of knowledge compatible with the structure of the physical world. The concept of minimum, understood as both the indivisible unity of bodies and the necessary condition of knowledge, leads Bruno to draw conclusions that sometimes turn out to be inconsistent with his physical theory. Although Lasswitz rejects Bruno's conflation of the mathematical and the physical concept of body, together with his extension of the atomic structure to the void, nevertheless, he views Bruno’s critical-gnoseological account of the term ‘atom’ as a substantial contribution to the enhancement of modern science.

The article aims to highlight the metaphysical, epistemological and practical implications of some terms used by Bruno in magical and mnemotechnical works, showing the analogies with the Italian Dialogues. In the Spaccio de la bestia trionfante and in the Cabala del cavallo pegaseo, in particular, the search of the first and true good passes through the moral elevation of the human race, from a semi-feral condition to one of ‘civil conversation’, thanks to the careful use of the arts of Dissimulation and the supernatural intervention of some divinities, to whose personifications Bruno associates a heuristic function, as well as a specific place in the art of memory. Thanks to the wise use of the constellation of images and ‘inner statues’ that populate the mind of the hero in search of the divine, it is possible to raise the gaze of knowledge from the sensitive reality to the supersensible world, until reaching the first Principle of everything, as some passages show in the De vinculis in genere and in the De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione. The first Principle, that Bruno also calls ‘superessential’, represents the culmination of spiritual elevation, and, at the same time, a prefiguration of the Hegelian Absolute.

The author reconstructs the psychological interpretation of Giordano Bruno's personality through the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, who defined him a central figure in the history of modern thought, and who thus contextualized the interpretation of the implicit 'historical problem' in Bruno in the broader frame of the foundation of the humanities according to a 'descriptive and analitical' psychology. The latter scrutinizes through biographical research the link between individual life and historical moment. Now, Bruno's case is an illustrative example of "Lebensverfassung", that is, of a particular "psychical constitution" that explains the links between physical and spiritual worlds, and attributes a superior sense to the very facts of cultural history.

This essay details the reception of Bruno's works in Goethe's unpublished texts, with a special emphasis on the Frankfurt Poems. Puccini analyzes Goethe's interpretation in the light of his studies in the field of natural sciences. In particular, she aims to show how Goethe's research interacts with Bruno's meditations on the unity and infinity of the universe/nature. After a first period (1770-1802) in which Goethe's interest in the Nolan philosopher is dominated by a Neoplatonic reading of Bruno's cosmology, between 1812 and 1829 the scientist-poet's criticism of nineteenth-century scientifìc culture recalls Bruno's attacks against the conformity of the "insani", those intellectuals who passively follow the dominant paradigms. Their interpretation of natural phenomena is irredeemably corrupted by the passive acceptance of wrong hypotheses.

Nel volume si pubblicano le traduzioni di alcuni testi dedicati a Giordano Bruno composti da Hegel e da Dilthey. Pur tenendo conto della diversa incidenza storico-filosofica dell’interpretazione proposta, con tali contributi entrambi i filosofi tedeschi si affermano quali decisivi interpreti ottocenteschi del pensiero di Bruno. Nel volume si pubblicano le versioni disponibili del capitolo riservato al Nolano all’interno delle "Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie" di Hegel e i due articoli dedicati a Bruno da Dilthey, ristampati poi in modo unitario nella raccolta "Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation". A più di sessant’anni di distanza l’uno dall’altro, Hegel e Dilthey individuano nel pensiero del Rinascimento, la cui esuberante e contraddittoria ricchezza secondo loro si trova emblematicamente rappresentata nella filosofia di Bruno, una sorta di anello di congiunzione tra antico e moderno: «come in un crepuscolo mattutino, nel quale le ombre notturne si insinuano ancora nella luce del sole che sorge».