For Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), the heroic frenzy is the human love of divine wisdom: in form a vice, but the vice of a more divine being. The Renaissance philosopher from Nola describes it in 1585 in De gli eroici furori, known in English as The Heroic Frenzies, a work of sonnets and dialogues that appeared in London and is dedicated to the English poet Philip Sidney. It is one of the writings Bruno published in England, fifteen years before the Roman Inquisition had him burned in Rome in 1600. The poems speak of love, and the dialogues interpret them: what is meant is the knower’s desire for the divine true and beautiful. Gwendolin Kirchhoff devoted a symposium lecture to The Heroic Frenzies in 2024, reading from the German edition published by Meiner (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Spinoza & Bruno”, 01:08). For her the book is literally about philosophy, and about a philosophy that is laid down in the human being as its true nature (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Spinoza & Bruno”, 01:59).
#What are the heroic frenzies in Giordano Bruno?
For Bruno the heroic frenzy is a vice in form, but the vice of a more divine being, and that is what sets it apart from all the lower passions. Bruno’s dialogue starts from the teaching that virtue dwells in the middle, where opposites coincide, and vice near the extremes. Of the heroic lover it says that he does not keep this measure: he trembles in icy hopes and burns in scorching desires. The heroic frenzy therefore differs from the other passions not as a virtue differs from a vice, but as a vice in a more divine being differs from a vice in a bestial one; the difference lies in the beings that are seized and in the manner of their being seized (cf. Bruno, 1585, Part I, Dialogue 2).
In her lecture Gwendolin Kirchhoff illustrates the bestial level with hunger: a striving that quickly comes to its end and carries no great movement of knowledge within it (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Spinoza & Bruno”, 26:31). In her words these movements do have their place, and Bruno says so too; at the same time the high and the low are to be distinguished (cf. ibid., 26:46).
#What does the myth of Actaeon mean in Bruno?
Bruno tells the ancient myth of the hunter Actaeon, who sees the goddess Diana bathing naked, is turned into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds, as an image of the knower’s path. In the sonnet at the start of the fourth dialogue of Part I, the young Actaeon unleashes his hounds. The dialogue reads him as the intellect setting out to hunt divine wisdom; the swifter greyhounds stand for the working of the intellect, the stronger mastiffs for that of the will, and the hounds as a whole for the hunter’s thoughts (cf. Bruno, 1585, Part I, Dialogue 4).
If you read Actaeon in this way, as an image of the knower, the usual direction of the hunt is reversed. The second dialogue of Part II completes the image. No one can look at the sun, the absolute light, but one can look at its shadow: Diana, the world, the nature that is in things. Of the many who hunt through this wild forest, very few reach Diana’s spring, and rare indeed is one like Actaeon, who turns from hunter into hunted. The hounds, the thoughts of divine things, devour him. To the crowd he is dead, released from the confusions of the senses, and he becomes all eye for the whole horizon and sees everything as one (cf. Bruno, 1585, Part II, Dialogue 2).
A year earlier, Bruno had already declared the eye the gate of the god of love, in a sonnet from On the Cause, the Principle, and the One: “The eye is my god’s gate” (Bruno, 1584, p. 23).
In her lecture Gwendolin Kirchhoff reads the Actaeon passage aloud and sums up its goal in one sentence: the final goal of the heroic frenzies is “the vision of the whole from out of the heart” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Spinoza & Bruno”, 38:55). For Bruno, she says, this movement is laid down in the human being itself, in its feeling, but it is “a seed that does not always sprout” (ibid., 39:06): feeling can also go slack and drift into blindness.
#Can truth ever be reached?
In her lecture Gwendolin Kirchhoff asks whether truth can ever be reached and gives two answers, no and yes; she grounds both in the fourth dialogue of Part I of Bruno’s work (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Spinoza & Bruno”, 27:57). For the no she reads Bruno: with every form the intellect grasps, the soul judges that a greater one must stand above it: everything it possesses is measured and does not suffice. The infinite can only be pursued without end, in a movement that circles the degrees of perfection (cf. Bruno, 1585, Part I, Dialogue 4). For the yes she reads a later passage of the same dialogue: no one longs for something wholly unknown, for all that is visible lies as a possibility in the power of sight, and all that is intelligible in the power of understanding (cf. ibid.).
Gwendolin Kirchhoff takes up this second answer: knowing, she says, is thereby an act of remembering (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Spinoza & Bruno”, 33:17). What unfolds is what was laid down as a possibility; in that sense, she says, truth is the ground of this movement (cf. ibid., 33:20). The entry on wisdom takes up how knowledge and love belong together in this thought.
#What do the heroic frenzies have to do with philosophy?
For Gwendolin Kirchhoff the heroic frenzy is the passion of philosophy itself, the love of wisdom. In her lecture she places Bruno beside Spinoza, who recounts in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect how he resolved to seek a true good instead of honour, riches and sensual pleasure (cf. Spinoza, 1677). Following Spinoza’s account, she defines philosophy: the love of wisdom is “the irreversible movement of the soul” towards wisdom, which nonetheless needs a conscious decision and practice (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Spinoza & Bruno”, 17:23). Of the passion of deep dissatisfaction and the search for meaning she says: “one can of course also drown it and numb it” (ibid., 17:48).
This leads to the question of whether a person seized by this urge is ill. Kirchhoff raises it with Spinoza as her example: should he not rather distract himself? Her answer: “No, he has been seized by something heroic.” And further: “his suffering has something noble about it” (ibid., 26:17). The essay Meaning Crisis or Depression? deals with the difference between this restlessness and a depression.
By her own account she has also often drawn on Bruno’s image in conversations with clients, when the question is one’s own striving for knowledge and how one stands towards others and in the world (cf. Kirchhoff, interview, 2026-02-23).
#Bruno, Spinoza and following beauty
The entry on Giordano Bruno presents Bruno’s living, infinite cosmos in which this passion has its place, and traces how philosophical modernity took up Bruno, down to Schelling, who in 1802 gave a dialogue of his own Bruno’s name. The cosmic anthropos describes the human being in whom the striving for knowledge that presses towards the absolute is laid down. Gwendolin Kirchhoff formulates the maxim follow beauty in a conversation in which, shortly before, she takes up a thought of Bruno’s: the individual human being becomes everything it can be, one after another, in an infinite succession of transformations (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Durch den Nebel”, 44:51). What philosophizing means beyond thinking is set out in the essay What Is Philosophizing?. What remains open is what Bruno’s image hands back to you: whether you set your nets in the wind and end up with a handful of flies, like most of the hunters in Bruno’s forest, or whether you seek the spring.
#Sources
- Bruno, G. (1585). De gli eroici furori. London. Passages by part and dialogue: Part I, Dialogues 2 and 4; Part II, Dialogue 2.
- English translations under the titles The Heroic Frenzies (tr. Paul Eugene Memmo, University of North Carolina Press) and On the Heroic Frenzies (tr. Ingrid D. Rowland, University of Toronto Press). German editions with Felix Meiner, Hamburg: Von den heroischen Leidenschaften, tr. and ed. Christiane Bacmeister, introduction by Ferdinand Fellmann (Philosophische Bibliothek), and a bilingual Italian-German edition in Giordano Bruno – Werke (vol. 7, series ed. Thomas Leinkauf), with Christiane Bacmeister’s translation substantially revised by Henning Hufnagel and the Italian text edited by Eugenio Canone.
- Bruno, G. (1584). Von der Ursache, dem Princip und dem Einen (On the Cause, the Principle, and the One). German edition Leipzig, 3rd ed. 1902, p. 23 (sonnet “Von der Liebe”); English rendering ours.
- Spinoza, B. de (1677). Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Cited from the German edition, Abhandlung über die Verbesserung des Verstandes, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Spinoza & Bruno – Von den heroischen Leidenschaften – SYMPOSIUM” [Video, in German]. YouTube, 27 June 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gtN5lzxTo4 (quotes 17:23, 17:48, 26:14, 26:17, 38:55, 39:06; English renderings ours).
- Kirchhoff, G. in conversation with L. Dillmann (2026). „Folge der Schönheit“ - Philosophin Gwendolin Kirchhoff über Beziehungen als Weg aus dem Nebel [Video, in German]. Durch den Nebel, YouTube, 30 August 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNxKGk3bXeA (44:51).
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Interview on philosophical practice, 23 February 2026 (unpublished).
