«Profondo inesplorabile mistero». Marianna Florenzi Waddington, Leibniz e la prima edizione italiana della Monadologia (1856)

CONTRIBUTI / 1 / Alessandro Poli /

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«Deep unfathomable mistery». Marianna Florenzi Waddington, Leibniz and the First Italian Edition of Monadology (1856)

In 1856, the Florentine Tipografia Bencini published the first Italian version of Leibniz’s Monadology edited and translated by the Umbrian philosopher Marianna Florenzi Waddington. It is an atypical edition, not concerned with philological problems and characterized by Florenzi’s footnotes and comments. The reprint of Monadology significantly reappears in Waddington’s second edition and translation of Schelling’s Bruno (1859), along with three letters from Schelling to Florenzi. The reprint of Monadology is strictly related to Napolitan Hegelianism and its attempt to connect Schelling’s thought, and the German Idealism, to Italian Renaissance philosophy, especially to Giordano Bruno’s works. Waddington’s interpretation of Leibniz’s Monadology and Schelling’s Bruno mitigates German Idealism through a strong platonic ontology, based on the metaphysical priority of God’s intellect, source of all ideas and thinkable realities, within a relationship between man and nature different from the idealistic one. Leibniz’s conception of a monad is re-thought to fulfil this task, an effort to which Florenzi Waddington addresses her criticism, through Leibniz’s conception of «monad», but Waddington’s interpretation is not neutral. Florenzi’s judgment is not always positive, especially when it concerns Monadology’s alleged systematic concision and its most known, obscure passage (§  7): “Monads have no windows through which anything could come in or go out”. Florenzi appreciates what we can describe as Vitalism or universal animation approaches emerging in Monadology and, above all, she likes that each simple substance has relations which express all other substances and, consequently, that a substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe. How this happens is nonetheless unclear. Florenzi’s comments make Leibniz an idealist, a trade d’union with the previous tradition and an ante-litteram pioneer of 1800s. Nevertheless, in 1856 her interpretation is clearly expressed mainly in relation to Leibniz’s Monadology, and the whole historical and theoretical context where his thought evolved was not explicable as it is today.

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