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6. The New Paradigm
A relevant epistemological change was to take place in Italy during Humanism. The heraldic world of bestiaries and lapidaries had not fully lost its appeal. Natural sciences were on the verge of becoming more and more quantitatively and mathematically oriented, Aristotle seemed not to have anything more to say, and the new philosophers began exploring a new symbolic forest where living columns whispered, in Baudelarian terms, confused but fascinating words, coming from a Platonism revisited under the influence of the Kabbalah and the Corpus Hermeticum. In this new philosophical milieu the very idea of symbol underwent a profound change.
In order to conceive of a different idea of symbol, as something that sends one back to a mysterious and self-contradictory reality that cannot be conceptually expressed, one needs a "very strong" Neoplatonism. The medieval Neoplatonism was not strong enough because it was emasculatedor made more virileby a strong idea of the divine transcendence. Let us instead call that of the origins "strong Neoplatonism," at least until Proclus, and its Gnostic versions, according to which at the top of the Great Fall of Beings there is a One who is not only unknowable and obscure but who, being independent of any determination, can contain all of them and is consequently the place of all contradictions.
In the framework of a strong Neoplatonism one should consider three basic assumptions, be they explicit or implicit: (i) There is a physical kinship, that is, an emanational continuity between every element of the world and the original One. (ii) The original One is self-contradictory, and in it one can find the coincidentia oppositorum (a Hermetic idea, indeed, but which at the dawn of modern times was reinforced by the philosophical views of Nicholas of Cues and Giordano Bruno). (iii) The One can be expressed only by negation and approximation, so that every possible representation of it cannot but refer to another representation, equally obscure and contradictory.
Then we meet the requirements for the development of a philosophy, of an aesthetics, and of a secret science of symbols as intuitive revelations that can be neither verbalized nor conceptualized.
The main features of the so-called Hermetic tradition that spread from the Renaissance and permeated romantic philosophy and many contemporary theories of artistic interpretation are the following: 2

 
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