This study examines the various explanations of the deliberative humanity, regarding a new gnoseology in the intellectual contexts of Giordano Bruno and Wang Yangming during the 15th and 16th centuries. In a similar way to Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno for the European Renaissance, Wang Yangming is the enlightener among the representatives of Neo-Confucianism in early modern China. Each of these three takes an individual’s mind as the point of departure. They then modify the traditional theory of gnoseology, in search of the good and principle. Nevertheless, behind these similarities on the surface, the metaphorical and theoretical interpretations follow different directions. Marsilio Ficino translates hierarchic Platonism as a transcendent norm. Giordano Bruno and Wang Yangming, however, seem to liberate the individual’s humanity from the traditional norms of gnoseology. In their methodologies, they both have developed a generative gnoseology that differs from the orthodox pattern of knowledge in their respective traditions.

The iconic praxis plays a vital role in Giordano Bruno’s gnoseological process. Bruno considers the image to be both sensitive and intelligible according to its faculty of Phantasia, which traditionally is condemned as the umbra (shadow) or false reflection of the idea. Through the cognitive practice in the art of memory, Bruno’s shadows symbolically take on those iconic forms and the mental schemas, and then the mnemotechnic shadows become a psychological vehicle, which can raise the human gradually up to the Divine glow. The theological rhythm of ascent and descent is also related to the operations of natural magic that can exert sympathetic links between the micro and the macrocosms. Hence the function of Bruno’s illustrations does not lie in the mechanical interpretation but depends on the private experience of the people who practice them. By means of the interior contractio (contraction) of the soul, Bruno is able to collect the celestial influences with his theurgic xylographs, which make him unique among the Renaissance and early modern philosophers.

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Traditionally, the researchers of Marx ignored the Epicurean roots for the maturation of Marxian thoughts, insisting that Marx was engaged in it only during his writing of the doctoral dissertation of 1841. Indeed, Epicurus played a decisive role in Marx’s subsequent works, although this reality is not explicitly mentioned. Epicurean atomism, through the theory of the declination of the atom, refers to a utilitarian consciousness for realizing human freedom and ethics. From the heretical tradition of humanism, Marx inherited Epicurean materialism as an important source of the “materialism of freedom”, a materialism that may be considered as a philosophy of emancipation. Besides the freedom of nature from which it ultimately derives, this Marxian idea also combines with that of Epicurus in terms of history: Marxian historiography is actually narrating history in the present, by which we can recall our lack of humanity.   Received: 21 September 2021 / Accepted: 24 February 2022 / Published: 5 March 2022

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