Tommaso Campanella (Italian: Tommaso Campanella, at baptism received the name Giovanni Domenico, Italian: Giovanni Domenico) Born September 5, 1568. Date of death May 21, 1639, Paris. Italian philosopher and writer, one of the first representatives of utopian socialism.

Life
Born in Calabria into the family of a shoemaker, there was no money for education in the family, and Giovanni, drawn by a thirst for knowledge in his early youth, entered the Dominican Order, where at the age of 15 he took the name Tommaso (Thomas — in honor of Thomas Aquinas). He reads a lot, studies the works of ancient and medieval philosophers. He himself writes works on philosophical topics. While still a young man, he spoke brilliantly at theological debates. However, within the walls of the monastery for the first time he encounters denunciations from envious people. A case was fabricated against him for using the monastery library without permission, he was arrested and sent to Rome. And although he is soon released, suspicions remain. The time of wandering has begun: Florence (Medici Library), Bologna, Padua, Venice. This time can be characterized as the period of its formation.

In his travels, he encounters oppression and suffering of the people. He comes to the conclusion that he is called upon to change the existing order, and organizes a conspiracy to liberate Calabria from the Spanish yoke. He convinces the priests of the monastery of this, and they support him. He is also supported by the local nobility. More than a thousand people joined this movement. However, Campanella’s plans to create a free republic were not destined to come true. Betrayal disrupts his plans, and in 1599 Campanella is arrested on charges of conspiring to overthrow the Spaniards and the entire existing system with the aim of proclaiming a republic. The abundance of sins saves him from the death penalty. For he is not only a criminal, but also a heretic, and this is no longer the competence of the Spanish authorities, but of the church tribunal. They spare Campanella’s life and condemn him to prolonged torment. Subjected to repeated torture, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by an Inquisitorial tribunal in 1602 and spent 27 years in prison until, thanks to the intervention of Pope Urban VIII, he was released in 1626. Despite the harsh conditions of detention in those gloomy dungeons, this gifted and versatile man retained his inherent clarity of mind and wrote many of his wonderful works, including the famous City of the Sun.

In recent years, Campanella lived in France, where Cardinal Richelieu granted him a pension. Campanella’s last work was a Latin poem in honor of the birth of the Dauphin, the future Louis XIV.

Creation
Most of Campanella’s works were written by him in prison and subsequently published through the efforts of his student, Tobias Adami (German: Tobias Adami). Campanella sets out his political and economic views in “Civitas solis”, “Questiones sull’ optima republica” and “Philosophia realis”. Their distinctive feature is a mixture of a fantastic element with a common sense, real idea of ​​​​life. «Civitas solis» depicts in the form of a novel an ideal country — the city of the Sun.

City of Sun

The population of this city-state leads a “philosophical life in communism,” that is, they have everything in common, not excluding their wives. With the destruction of property, many vices are destroyed in the city of the Sun, all pride disappears and love for the community develops. The people are governed by a supreme high priest, who is called the Metaphysician and is chosen from among the wisest and most learned citizens. To assist him, a triumvirate of Power, Wisdom and Love was established — a council of three leaders of the entire political and social life of the country subordinate to the Metaphysician. Power is in charge of matters of war and peace, Wisdom guides science and education, Love takes care of education, agriculture, food, as well as the arrangement of marriages in which “the best children would be born.” Campanella finds it strange that people care so much about the offspring of horses and dogs, without thinking at all about the “human offspring,” and considers a strict choice of marriage partners necessary for the perfection of the generation. In the city of the Sun, this is in charge of the priests, who precisely determine who is obliged to temporarily unite with whom in marriage to produce children, and overweight women are united with thin men, etc.

Those women who are infertile become common wives. Equally despotically, but in accordance with the abilities of each, work is distributed among the inhabitants; It is considered commendable to participate in many different works. Remuneration for work is determined by the bosses, and no one can be deprived of what is necessary. The length of the working day is determined at 4 hours and can be further reduced with further technical improvements that Campanella foresaw in the future: for example, he predicted the appearance of ships that would move without sails or oars, using an internal mechanism. The religion of the inhabitants of the city of the Sun is, in all likelihood, the religion of Campanella himself: deism, religious metaphysics, mystical contemplation; all rituals and forms have been eliminated. Campanella wanted to see the whole world like the city of the Sun and predicted a “world state” in the future. It seemed to him that Spain and the Spanish king were called to this world political domination, side by side with which the world domination of the Pope should be strengthened (a thought developed by him in the essay “De Monarchia Messiae” and appearing again in the history of socialism in the teachings of the Saint-Simonists).

Philosophy
Campanella’s worldview amazingly combines all three main directions of the new philosophy — empirical, rationalistic and mystical, which appeared separately in his younger contemporaries Bacon, Descartes and Jacob Boehme. (Bacon was born somewhat earlier than Campanella, but Campanella’s first philosophical work (“Lectiones physicae, logicae et animasticae”) was published in 1588, and Bacon’s first work only in 1605).

Like Bacon, Campanella sets out to “restore the sciences” (instauratio scientiarum, cf. Bacon’s Instauratio Magna), that is, the creation of a new universal science on the ruins of medieval scholasticism. He recognizes external experience, internal meaning and revelation as the sources of true philosophy. The starting point of knowledge is sensation. The brain traces of sensations stored by memory and reproduced by the imagination provide material to the mind, which puts them in order according to logical rules and draws general conclusions from particular data through induction, thus creating experience — the basis of any “worldly” science (cf. Bacon).

However, knowledge based on sensations in itself is insufficient and unreliable:

it is not enough because we do not recognize in it objects as they really are, but only their appearance for us, that is, the way they act on our feelings (cf. Kant);
unreliable because sensations in themselves do not represent any criterion of truth, even in the sense of sensory-phenomenal reality: in dreams and in crazy delirium we have vivid sensations and ideas that are accepted as reality and then rejected as deception; limiting ourselves to sensations alone, we can never be sure whether we are in a dream or in delirium (cf. Descartes).
But if our sensations and all sensory experience based on them do not testify to the actual existence of the objects given in it, which may be dreams or hallucinations, then even in this case (that is, even as a delusion), it testifies to the real existence of the deluded one. Deceptive sensations and false thoughts nevertheless prove the existence of a sentient and a thinking person (cf. Descartes’ cogito — ergo sum). Thus, directly in our own soul or in the inner feeling we find reliable knowledge about real being, based on which we, by analogy, conclude about the existence of other beings (cf. Schopenhauer).

The inner feeling, testifying to our existence, at the same time reveals to us the basic definitions or methods of all being. We feel ourselves: 1) as force, or power, 2) as thought, or knowledge, and 3) as will, or love. These three positive definitions of being are, to varying degrees, characteristic of everything that exists, and they exhaust the entire internal content of being. However, both in ourselves and in the beings of the external world, being is connected with non-existence, or nothingness, since each given being is this and is not another, is here and is not there, is now and is not after or before. This negative point also extends to the internal content, or quality, of all being in its three main forms; for we not only have strength, but also weakness, we not only know, but we are also ignorant, we not only love, but also hate. But if in experience we see only a mixture of being and non-existence, then our mind has a negative attitude towards such confusion and affirms the idea of ​​a completely positive being, or an absolute being, in which power is only omnipotence, knowledge is only omniscience, or wisdom, will is only perfect Love. This idea of ​​the Divine, which we could not extract either from external or internal experience, is an inspiration, or revelation, of the Divine itself (cf. Descartes).

From the idea of ​​God the further content of philosophy is then derived. All things, insofar as they have positive being in the form of power, knowledge and love, come directly from the Godhead in his three respective determinations; the negative side of everything that exists, or an admixture of non-existence in the form of weakness, ignorance and malice, is allowed by the Divine as a condition for the fullest manifestation of its positive qualities. In relation to the chaotic multiplicity of mixed being, these three qualities manifest themselves in the world as three creative influences (influxus):

1) as absolute necessity (necessitas), to which everything is equally subordinate,

2) as the highest fate, or fate (fatum), to which all things and events are connected in a certain way, and

3) as a universal harmony, by which everything is consistent, or brought to internal unity.

With their external phenomenal separateness, all things in their inner essence, or metaphysically, participate in the unity of God, and through it they are in inextricable secret communication with each other. This “sympathetic” connection of things, or natural magic, presupposes at the basis of all creation a single world soul — God’s universal instrument in the creation and management of the world. For Campanella, space, heat, attraction and repulsion served as intermediary natural philosophical categories between the world soul and the given world of phenomena. In the natural world, metaphysical communication of creatures with God and among themselves manifests itself unconsciously or instinctively; a person in religion consciously and freely strives for union with the Divine. This upward movement of man corresponds to the descent of the Divine towards him, completed by the incarnation of divine Wisdom in Christ.

The application of a religious-mystical point of view to humanity as a social whole led Campanella to his theocratic communism in his youth.

Campanella was not sufficiently appreciated as a representative of the philosophy of the New Age, because his ideas were distasteful from different sides to people of very different directions. Some were frightened by his teaching about the participation of everything that exists in God, which could seem downright pantheistic; others were repulsed by his communism, others were disgusted by his religious beliefs and theocratic ideals. In addition to his philosophical significance, Campanella was the “vanguard fighter” of contemporary positive science and firmly defended Galileo, which Descartes did not dare to do after him.

Works

Philosophia sensibus demonstrata, 1591

Monarchia Messiae, 1605

Prodromus philosophiae instaurandae, 1617

Apologia pro Galileo (in Latin). Frankfurt am Main: Gottfried Tampach. 1622.

La città del sole, 1602 (Latin Civitas solis, 1623)

Atheismus triumphatus, 1631, Paris 1636

Medicinalium libri (in Latin). Lugduni: ex officina Ioannis Pillehotte : sumptibus Ioannis Caffin, & Francisci Plaignard. 1635.

Metaphysica (in Latin). Vol. 1. Paris. 1638.
Metaphysica (in Latin). Vol. 2. Paris. 1638.
Metaphysica (in Latin). Vol. 3. Paris. 1638.

Poesie. Bari: Laterza. 1915.