Frühneuzeitliche Selbsterhaltung: Telesio und die Naturphilosophie der Renaissance (review)

Martin Mulsow. Frühneuzeitliche Selbsterhaltung: Telesio und die Naturphilosophie der Renaissance. Frühe Neuzeit, no. 41. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer, 1998. x + 439 pp. DM 124.00; öS 905.00; Sw. Fr. 110.00.

This very detailed study of the sixteenth-century (anti-)Aristotelian philosopher Bernardino Telesio demonstrates the institutional and conceptual proximity of philosophy and medicine in that period. For instance, the ancient dietary controversy over whether it is better to drink hot or cold fluids erupts anew because what in Aristotelian tradition had been the basic notion "fire is dry" is reversed in the Telesian tradition to "fire is humid" (Telesio considers heat the single primal force). But this dense study of Telesio, of the works he drew on (and deliberately failed to name), and of the currents of important but brief influence he stimulated would be misrepresented as a string of such medico-philosophical nuggets; rather, it is a highly successful contextualization of a branch of philosophy that meant to be natural rather than metaphysical, but that essentially disappeared during the early modern period--not only because it was suppressed by the Counter-Reformation, but because it was nonmathematical and, in spite of itself, too speculative within the Aristotelian tradition.

Why is the anti-Aristotelian Ramus still a household name among students of the Renaissance, while Telesio is not? I suppose this is because Ramus rearranged the fit between logic and rhetoric--but Telesio reinterpreted, as Martin Mulsow shows with exemplary clarity and extraordinary detail, semiphysical concepts. An example is Aristotelian antiperistasis (to which Galen also recurs), the notion that hail happens not because an air current might lift a cloud to some higher and colder region, but because a colder cloud might sink to some warmer region, become surrounded by warmer air, and (in reaction or overreaction to the surrounding warmth) contract, thus forming kernels of ice. For Telesio, for whom warmth is the most powerful elemental quality and endowed with a sensus, antiperistasis demonstrates that warmth and coldness strive to preserve themselves; it is this kind of self-preservation or conservatio sui that Mulsow names with the German word Selbsterhaltung in his title.

This book does not make for easy reading, even though most (but not all!) quotations from Italian and Latin are translated, with the originals conveniently given in footnotes on the same page. But demanding as it is, it is unusually rewarding in its use of present-day sociocultural concepts: it has a wealth of detailed studies in miniature using such terms as Bourdieu's "symbolic capital," applied to Aristotelianism in the Renaissance; (semi-Freudian) "denial" of metaphysics among Telesio's successors; "frames" (derived from the sociologist Erving Goffman), here the philosophical-cultural context that changes the meaning in the latter years of the Telesian "movement"; and a "colonization" of explanatory fields (following Pörksen and Canguilhem)--that is, a transference of models and concepts from one field to another.

Winfried Schleiner
University of California, Davis

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