The Renaissance: A New View of Politics, Physics and Nature.

One of the characteristics of the Renaissance was a concentration on the particular, on the individual -- something that had been neglected during the Middle Ages, since the Middle Ages were entirely preoccupied with the universal and the transcendental.

The study of history, in so far as history signifies the science of effective, concrete and individual reality, had remained outside -- though not opposed to -- the concern of medieval thinkers. Earlier thinkers, such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, had begun with the particular, not to remain with it, but to surpass and transcend it. For them, only that which was universal and transcended phenomenal reality had value.

During the Renaissance, on the other hand, study was made of phenomena, of concrete reality, not as a means of rising to absolute values, but in order to remain with the ambit of concreteness. Philosophers sought to explain the individual through the individual, phenomena through phenomena, and fell into the habit of not giving due attention to what transcend such effective reality.

This love and study of detail and of the individual, passed on to later ages, ha given origin to history and to natural science (physics), which represent the real achievements of modern thought.

The error of the modern age rests not in these achievements, but in the attempt to replace traditional realistic metaphysics with history and physics. This trend is characteristic of all modern thought. Once a thinker begins with the presupposition that he is not to concern himself with any transcendental reality and that study should be limited to the search for the laws of phenomenal reality alone, there remains for him nothing else but to proclaim these laws as the last and ultimate data of human thought, and hence to put physics in the place of traditional metaphysics.

Thus we have a harmful inversion, no less damaging than the inversion of decadent Scholasticism, which held that the scientific writings of Aristotle, and especially of his physics, were so connected with metaphysics that the destruction of one meant the ruin of the other. This unjustified prejudice was the cause of many errors, such as the trial of Galileo. At present the opposite prejudice is held; sciences take the role of metaphysics.

To avoid these evils it is necessary that metaphysics and the natural sciences take note of their limits. The sciences have for their object the study of phenomena and the laws relative to these phenomena. The proper object of philosophy is the reality which transcends the phenomena, that is, the absolute, the universal, the ultimate cause and end.

On the one hand metaphysics, concerned with universal knowledge, has no contact with the particular as such, and therefore cannot dictate the laws which regulate phenomenal reality. On the other hand, physical science, limited to the study of phenomena, has no right to dictate metaphysical laws pertaining to philosophy.

In a word, philosophy is not the science of the particular, and physical science is not philosophy. Given their proper scope, one is not opposed to the other; indeed they complement each other.

The most representative exponents of the new science during the period of the Renaissance are Machiavelli and Galileo. Neither was a philosopher, notwithstanding the pretensions of both to be such, but both were theorists of reality as it presents itself to experience: Machiavelli for history applied to politics, and Galileo for mathematics as applied to physics.

Background: The New Consideration of Nature

The Renaissance, as an age of transition, was not conducive to the building of great philosophical systems. It contained, in germinal form, the directive ideas of modern times, but under the guise of the past. Thinkers preferred to write in ancient Latin, and the style of their writing is also archaic. Under this external aspect, which smacks of antiquity, are hidden the signs of the next age.

The greatest representatives of thought, in the order of time, are Nicholas of Cusa, Telesio, Bruno, and Campanella; the most important is Bruno. In the thought of all these men there is a new view of nature, in which nature is considered immanently, according to the forces inherent in it, and is accessible to experience and reason. These forces are considered as living ones, vital spirits, demons; everything is animate; the physical world has a soul.

It is necessary to investigate these animate forces, for it is on the basis of their activity that all events can be explained. It is because of this desire to bring into subjection the occult forces of nature that during the Renaissance we find so widely diffused the science of "magic," which professes to know the good and evil spirits of nature, and to make them allies in good and evil enterprises.

Also characteristic are alchemy, with its objective of discovering the philosophical stone which can change everything into gold; and medicine, with its hope of finding the panacea of evil by uncovering the common animating force of the universe. This is a charlatan school, to be sure, but it indicates the tendency of some of the chief exponents of the age to explain nature through the forces imbedded in it.

Hence we see Neo-Platonic tendencies, and the Neo-Platonic thinkers mentioned above. Although Neo-Platonism, logically developed, leads to pantheism, the thinkers of the Renaissance, with the exception of Bruno, are not pantheists. Without any logical foundation they still affirm transcendency, but this more from faith than from conviction.