Bernardino Telesio

Telesio, Bernardino (1509–88)

Bernardino Telesio was a philosopher from southern Italy. He was one of the Renaissance philosophers who developed a new philosophy of nature: his most important book was called De rerum natura iuxta propria principia (On the Nature of Things According to Their Own Principles). Telesio approached natural philosophy empirically, and regarded it as a separate field of study from theology and metaphysics. He believed that all natural beings were animate; and, by arguing that the two general principles of heat and cold affected the whole universe, he resisted the Aristotelian division between the corruptible earth and the eternal heavens. However, despite his apparent anti-Aristotelianism and his sympathy for the Presocratics, Telesio owed much to Aristotle, and tried to transform rather than destroy Aristotle’s work. Telesio became the head of a Calabrian school, and was influential and widely discussed in his own time. Francesco Patrizi criticized him, but with respect; Tommaso Campanella followed him in his early works; and Thomas Hobbes drew inspiration from him.

1 Life

Not much is known about the circumstances of Telesio’s life, the ‘man of one book’ who was entirely devoted to the development of a new philosophy of nature and who died when he had completed his task. He was born at Cosenza in southern Italy, the first of eight children in a poor but noble family. At an early age he followed his uncle and teacher Antonio Telesio to the north, where his uncle taught Latin and Greek (first in Milan and then in Venice). He attended the University of Padua, which was well known throughout Europe, studying mathematics with Federico Delfino and philosophy with the Aristotelian Vincenzo Maggi (or Madius). He probably received his doctorate in 1535, after which he returned to his native province and retired to a monastery to work on his own philosophical projects. In 1552 he married a noble widow, who died eight years later. In 1565 Pope Pius IV offered Telesio the archbishopric of Cosenza, but he refused, and in 1576 he also refused Pope Gregory XIII’s invitation to teach his philosophy in Rome. Despite his reluctance to enter public life, from 1547 on he made it known that he was working on a philosophy which would destroy the tyranny of Aristotle. In 1563 he travelled to Brescia, to discuss his ideas with his old friend and teacher, Maggi. With Maggi’s approval, he published the first version of his natural philosophy, De natura iuxta propria principia (On Nature According to Its Own Principles) in 1565. Five years later, he published a revised second version with the definitive title De rerum natura iuxta propria principia (On the Nature of Things According to their Own Principles), as well as three minor treatises, containing additional material. These works met with the critical approval of Francesco Patrizi, who was to develop his own views in his Nova de universis philosophia (New Philosophy of Universes) (1591). In 1586 Telesio published the final version of his treatise, now enlarged from two books to nine. He founded the Accademia Cosentina in Cosenza in order to promote the study of nature according to Telesio’s principles, and it was in Cosenza that he died in 1588.

2 Approach to nature

Telesio’s initial claim is of fundamental importance for his new philosophy of nature. He said that, in contrast to his predecessors, he would not rely on abstract principles invented by human reason, but would content himself with those concrete aspects of nature which are given in sense perception, and with what can be inferred from their similitudes. He did not wish to make the false claim that he was the first to deal with nature in an empirical manner, nor, contrary to Patrizi’s accusation, did he pretend to be able to philosophize on the basis of mere sense perception. As he makes clear in the ninth and tenth chapters of the first book, he meant that he would refuse to explain what is perceived in nature in terms of what lies beyond the world of sensible experience, and hence is properly a metaphysical concern. Thus from the very beginning he postulated that natural philosophy should be developed as an autonomous science, independent of metaphysics and theology, and that nature itself should be considered as an autonomous structure, rationally designed to preserve itself eternally according to its own principles (iuxta propria principia).

3 The principles and structure of the universe

When Telesio began to determine the first principles of nature itself, he simply said that it is obvious to the senses that heat and cold are the most active general principles which constitute all natural beings, and offered no other justifications for this opinion. Patrizi and many scholars after him objected that these were the principles of Parmenides, so Telesio was not original, nor were his principles based on sense perception. However, one should not forget that for Aristotle natural beings (in so far as they are sensible bodies) are constituted by the most basic sensible, that is tangible, qualities (hot, cold, wet and dry). Of these primary qualities, heat and cold are defined as the active ones. Thus in the basically Aristotelian world of sixteenth-century thought, Telesio’s identification of the first sensible active principles with heat and cold seemed quite natural.

Telesio’s originality lies in his use of the two principles. He did not regard them as being primary qualities or forms of prime matter, but as incorporeal substances which are received by the third passive principle, the corporeal mass (moles) on which they operate through condensation and rarefaction. Heat, since it is white, bright, extremely rarefied and in rapid continuous motion, is concentrated in the sun and the heavens. Cold, on the other hand, since it is black, dark, dense and totally unmoved, is concentrated in the earth. Since both are endowed with the capacity to regenerate and multiply themselves, to spread out in all directions, and to occupy and transform the whole mass according to their own nature, they fight each other. In so doing, they constitute the whole variety of natural beings through a continuous process of self-organization.

This general model of the universe has some interesting consequences from the perspective of the modern concept of nature. By locating the centre of one of the active principles, heat, in the sun and the heavens, Telesio identifies elementary heat, present in fire, with heavenly warmth, operating through the sun. In the Aristotelian tradition these were regarded as being different, and nature, which for centuries had been divided into the corruptible earthly sphere and the eternal heavenly natures, was thus unified by Telesio. Moreover, since it would obviously be difficult to derive space and time from his principles of nature, Telesio taught that time was not identical with the motion of bodies, and that space was not identical with the place (locus) formed by the surface of bodies. Rather, both are absolute entities, presupposed by the operations of the active principles. As a result, there is no doubt that a vacuum is possible, even though bodies, thanks to a certain delight in contact with one another, try to avoid it (see Cosmology §1).

4 The soul

When the active principles operate, they do so in order to overthrow their opposite and to preserve themselves. In order to be able to do this, they need the capacity to perceive both favourable and unfavourable operations, and to discriminate between them. Thus sense perception is as basic as the active principles themselves, for without it the whole process of interaction and self-organization would not work. If sense perception is linked to having a soul, as in the Aristotelian tradition, the active principles must be animate, and as a result all natural beings that are constituted by these principles and that are active in self-preservation must also be animate.

Thanks to the general animation of natural beings in so far as they are natural, even the lowest natural entities are raised to the dignity of sense perception and discrimination; and indeed the whole cosmos seems to be regarded as a living being. The capacities of sense perception and discrimination come to be seen as the most basic and most common natural qualities, which provide the general conditions for any natural process as such, even the most simple and mechanical ones such as rarefaction and condensation through heat and cold. However, when we arrive at more sophisticated organizations in the hierarchy of natural beings, such as those of plants, animals and human beings, it is only natural that their powers of perception and discrimination are also more sophisticated. Sense perception, cognition and judgment as found in human beings differ from the faculties of the souls of other natural beings only in their higher perfection, and it is tempting to suggest that for Telesio the very development of a philosophy of nature is just the natural operation of the most perfect natural being in its striving for self-preservation (see Soul, nature and immortality of the).

5 The immortal intellect of human beings

The soul which enables human beings, the most perfect of natural beings, to fulfil their specific operations, is diffused through their bodies in the form of spirits (spiritus) or highly rarefied matter, and since human spirits differ from animal spirits only in the degree of rarefaction, the perfection of human beings is based on this difference alone. As a result it seems puzzling that in his eighth book, Telesio introduces a second type of intellect which is immaterial and immortal. This intellect is created by God and infused into human beings so that they can contemplate and know divine and eternal objects in addition to sense objects, and so that they can strive for the preservation of their supernatural, incorporeal self. It has been supposed that this divine intellect, which seems inconsistent with Telesio’s pure natural philosophy, was merely a prudent sign of submission to the church, or else a proof that Telesio was conscious of the indispensability of metaphysics. However, before the general separation of physics and metaphysics developed in sixteenth-century Aristotelianism, the autonomy of natural philosophy was not thought to be affected by the admission of such metaphysical notions as an intellect that enters the body from outside (the so-called nous thyrathen) or of a second end for human beings (as discussed in Aristotelian ethics) beyond the purely natural one of self-preservation. Telesio may well have placed himself in this tradition.