Fruhneuzeitliche Selbsterhaltung: Telesio und die Naturphilosophie der Renasissance. (Reviews).

Martin Mulsow. Fruhneuzeitliche Selbsterhaltung: Telesio und die Naturphilosophie der Renasissance

Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1998. xi + 439 pp. DM 124. ISBN: 3-484-36541-2

In this fine study, Martin Mulsow has two stated goals. First, he wishes to shed light on the development of the early modern idea of self-preservation, which would be so important in the thought of Hobbes, Spinoza, and others in the seventeenth century. Second, he argues that the "new" philosophies of nature in the sixteenth century are less sui generis than they have seemed to some, less offshoots of Renaissance Platonism, but rather can be shown to have evolved from developments internal to the cultures of Renaissance Aristotelianism; along the lines of Kristeller, Schmitt, Lohr and a number of other excellent scholars. Mulsow conceives of Renaissance Aristotelianism broadly, less as a set of doctrines and more a set of practices. Mulsow's study is refreshingly innovative in this latter respect, in that he is concerned to situate Aristotelianism and its representatives in context and follow that trail wherever it may lead. One of the places it leads is to Renaissance medicine because of the close instituti onal proximity of medicine and natural philosophy in Renaissance universities; in fact, a decisive part of Mulsow's overall argument is that the study of both Renaissance medicine and natural philosophy can be enhanced by foregrounding their interrelationship.

There are three phases that this richly annotated and sensibly theorized book delineates. The first Mulsow describes as a period of magic, grace, and rationality, and he ties the achievements of this phase to the generation of 1520-1540; it was in this period that a "defensive modernizing" took place. By this term, Mulsow means that thinkers connected with this period demonstrated a tendency to take the unifying legacy of the Renaissance Platonic tradition -- the notion of sympathia -- naturalize it, and then open it up for empirical observation. That there were universal linkages in the cosmos was accepted, in other words, but accepted in a less mystical way than among the Platonists. During this period, in addition to a focus (perhaps hitherto overestimated, Mulsow suggests) on mechanics spurred on by reevaluation of the Oxford calculators, one also saw, within the broad spectrum of Aristotelianism, a revival and reworking of presocratic styles of monism (material and otherwise) along with the concomitant a ppeals to universal principles. One of these principles, warmth, became the most important one for Bernardino Telesio (1509-88), who was educated during this formative period. At the book's outset, Mulsow presents a biographical sketch of Telesio, and the Cosentine (anti-) Aristotelian philosopher is the centerpiece of much of the book's argument.

Telesio's most famous work was the lengthy treatise that in its final 1586 edition was entitled De rerum natura iuxta propria principia. In it he insisted that the only proper criteria for building an effective natural philosophy were those drawn from sense experience, an enterprise that Telesio believed had been largely forsaken by his Aristotelian, largely university-based contemporaries. In this sense his work represented a denial of traditional metaphysics, conceived to stand at the top of the hierarchy of philosophical subdisciplines. However, in the succeeding generation, that of 1580-1600 -- Mulsow's second major phase -- this very denial became adopted as a form of metaphysics, i.e., as an overarching set of assumptions about the root nature of reality (and thus about the object of philosophical inquiry) which would lead Patrizi, for example, to equate physics with metaphysics. This catalyzed further work among Platonically oriented thinkers, but its disadvantages -- incompatibility with Copernican as tronomy, rejection of mathematics in the realm of physics -- in the short term could not be overcome, given the directions in which contemporary natural philosophy was moving.

But the legacy of Telesio was complex. To return to the idea of self-preservation, conservatio sui: Telesio developed this notion largely in the realm of natural philosophy and specifically with respect to the question of antiperistasis, a word which Aristotle had used to designate a kind of reciprocal replacement, of the sort that occurs, say, when hail forms because a relatively cold cloud sinks to a relatively warmer region, is surrounded by the warmth, contracts, and produces hail. For Telesia, this process of antiperistasis led him to conclude that the warmth and the cold tended naturally to preserve themselves. Conservatio sui, then, became a kind of property or attribute which could be elaborated in any number of ways. This overall argument is deepened by Mulsow's consideration in various chapters of Telesio's notion of the physiology of the senses and emotions, of the warmth essential to life (the calidum innatum) and its medical historical background, and of his overall psychology.

Mulsow's third major phase is located in approximately the years 1640-60. It was during this period that the concept of conservatio sui became a signifier for what Mulsow terms "arelationality" in a number of different areas, which would then be manifested in contemporary or later thinkers. One can find self-preservation, for example, in Leibniz's monads, compelled to interrelate yet ontologically distinct and tending to preserve this distinctness; and one can find self-preservation in Hobbes' human beings, who are led to the social contract defensively -- all wish selfishly and "arelationally" to preserve themselves, but the best way to do this is by existing in relation to one another, in society. Mulsow is not, of course, saying that the later developments that evidence the importance of the idea of self-preservation would not have occurred without Telesio. His project is more sophisticated and, because of this, will be highly satisfying for a broad range of intellectual and cultural historians. In a lengt hy theoretical introductory chapter he argues well for an evolutionary model of the development and elaboration of knowledge. Ultimately, Mulsow is talking (in the tradition of Bachelard and Canguilhem) about how to discuss, not breaks between, but transformations within small communities of intellectuals across generations, and he is situating those transformations in a living culture.