Theory of Knowledge: Nicholas of Cusa’s De Docta Ignorantia
One of my favorite works, that is both awe inspiring and completely enlightening. And can leave you pondering it’s simple words for hours and in many different ways:
Human knowledge is a collective and unifying activity; there are three stages in acquiring this knowledge: phantasy, reason, intellect.
Phantasy (sense knowledge) has for its scope the unification into a single representation of the multiple data of the senses.
Reason (meaning abstractive and discursive knowledge) is the faculty which abstracts universal concepts; it never arrives at perfect unity. The knowledge of reason, moreover, is deficient because it represents reality in an improper manner, for it is only founded on individual beings. Hence it follows that concepts result from contradictory notes, for instance, unity and multiplicity, being and non-being. The principle of contradiction, the basis of Aristotelian Scholastic logic, is good within the limits of reason, but it gives us an improper knowledge of reality.
We arrive at the knowledge of the reality (God), and hence of unity and the infinite, only by means of a third activity of the spirit, the faculty of intellect, which is supra-rational understanding, mystical intuition. This faculty, overcoming all differences and multiplicity, presents the reality (God) as perfect unity, in which all differences are reconciled in the infinite life, the “coincidence of opposites.” The principle of coincidence is for Nicholas of Cusa a new one on which logic must be based in order to arrive at the knowledge of reality.
Hence the title of Nicholas’ work De Docta ignorantia, which indicates the limitation of human understanding (reason) as opposed to the knowledge of God that is free of all such limitation (supra-rational). Thus the agnosticism of Nicholas of Cusa is corrected by his fideism, which of course has nothing to do with philosophy.
God is infinite. The infinity of God leads Nicholas of Cusa to affirm the coincidence of opposites. Observing how, in a circumference carried to infinity, the straight and the curved line coincide, he affirms that in the infinity of God all oppositions are identified, all distinctions overcome, and all contrariety fades into nothingness, since the correlative is not to be found. God is the “implicatio” of all opposites. But what in God is “implicatio” and “complicatio,” becomes “explicatio” in the universe, which results from multiplicity, distinction, and opposition.
Source – http://www.radicalacademy.com/philcusa.htm
