Jean Fernel: Medecine et philosophie (review)

This new collection of essays devoted to Jean Fernel examines the various interrelationships between his natural philosophy and his physiology. Fernel was one of the most sophisticated medical theoreticians of the Renaissance. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that he was a metaphysician who happened to be a physician, in the same way that he happened to be a mathematician with serious interests in astrology and even alchemy (as Sylvain Matton's essay reminds us). His real preoccupation was speculation on the ultimate nature of life, as any reader of De abditis rerum causis knows well. Because of these speculative concerns, he looked upon birth and death (respectively, the infusion of the soul into, and its departure from, the body) as two crucial episodes in the life of the human body and as the biological events that lay bare the irruption of transcendence in the transient course of material life. In Fernel's view, life so transcends the dispositions of both matter and human understanding that its functions demand a more suitable body than elemental and temperamental matter and a cognitive tool subtler than our sensory perception. He found the suitable carrier in the celestial spirit, and the subtler tool in the inferential strategies of rational knowledge. In a way, we can say that Fernel took very seriously Galen's project of reading Hippocrates in the light of Plato, so much so that he turned out to be even more Platonic than Marsilio Ficino. In his Platonizing reading of Galen, he further reduced the scope of the principle "nature" in favor of the principle "soul."

Very appropriately, Hiroshi Hirai lays particular stress on the Neoplatonic component of Fernel's thought. This is something that has long been recognized, but Hirai has the merit of providing a close and competent textual reading of De abditis rerum causis. Less successful is Vincent Aucante's attempt to show Fernel's tacit adoption of Alexander of Aphrodisias's quasi-pantheistic view of matter. It is true that in De abditis rerum causis Aphrodisias's position is dialectically and dialogically processed through the arguments of Brutus and Philiatros (two of the characters of the dialogue representing, respectively, a layman of liberal culture open to new ideas and a young medical scholar), but this does not mean that they speak in some unambiguous way for Fernel. Aucante takes Fernel's appropriation of the common scholastic view that matter has an original disposition to receive different forms in succession as a proof that the French physician espoused the idea of an alleged self-organizing power of matter, which is something that he never endorsed. Rather, in full agreement with a typically Augustinian tenet, he was simply reiterating the view that God, at the very moment of Creation, provided the material universe with a divinely procreating virtue that never ceases to be effective.

Since the thesis of the transcendence of life was Fernel's ultimate philosophical choice, he was confronted with the extremely delicate task of making such a metaphysico-physiological project applicable in the medical domain. In Danielle Jacquart's essay, she insists on the philosophical dimension of Fernel's physiology: by delineating a new—as it were, post-Avicennan—synthesis of philosophical biology and medical pragmatism, he tried hard to bridge the inevitable methodological gap between theoretical structure and empirical content. Both Roberto Poma and Jean Céard emphasize the significance of meditative aspects in Fernel's physiological project. We might say that the body is first an object of thought, and only secondarily an object of sense observation. And, as Céard's essay indicates, the discipline of memory confirmed once more to Fernel the transience of corporeal images and the precariousness of bodily complexion.