Verità e conoscenza nel pensiero di Niccolò Cusano

The major claim of this doctoral dissertation is to explore, through a careful reading of his writings, Cusanus’ theory of knowledge, questioning problems involved in the matter and stressing, at the same time, the novelty of Cusanus’ thinking. Cusanus’ speculation is structured around human investigation of truth, it concerns the problem of man’s search for wisdom and knowledge: how the human mind knows? how it procedes in its search for the truth? Since his first masterpiece, the Docta ignorantia of 1440, Cusanus establishes a new mode of thinking, as Ernst Cassirer as so well understood. The coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum) designates a new “method” by which the inquiring mind may investigate the truth. Cusanus breaks away from the traditional modes of philosophizing and theologizing: scholastic logic, based on discursive reasoning, is no longer an instrument of the speculative doctrine of God. Cusanus contests the method of scholastic philosophy to approach theological problems: the infinite unity of God, in which all opposites coincide, defies any logical treatment based on the Aristotelian principle of contradiction. The law of contradiction, Cusanus says, has validity only for our reason, is true only at the level of ratio, not at the level of intellectus. Cusanus follows previous apophatic tradition, that signifies what God is not, but he rethinks and transmutes it in an original way, developing a new mode of discourse about God. He goes beyond the negative theology of thinkers such as Dionysius the Areopagite, whose thought exercised an important influence on Cusanus’ thinking; he attempts to get an intellectual understanding of God’s infinity through his doctrine of ‘learned ignorance’: if God, which is at once the absolute maximum and the absolute minimum, is beyond all signification, if he transcends both all affirmation and all negation, God can be comprehended only incomprehensibiliter, in an incomprensible way, by means of “docta ignorantia”. Man’s innate desire to know the truth subsides in the thought of “docta ignorantia”: now man knows that he knows nothing, he is aware of his own ignorance. The seeker for knowledge does not know God directly, it knows only its own idea of him. If the human mind can not know what truth is in itself, correspondingly it does not know what the essence of things is. Our mind is is not able of attaining, of grasping the precision of truth: the absoluta praecisio veritatis remains in itself unattainable, inexpressible and immeasurable by the human mind. In his knowing, man proceeds by making comparison between what he knows and what he doesn’t know, establishing proportions between the known and the unknown with the use of number. Since there is no proportion between the finite and the infinite (infiniti ad finitum proportionem non esse), the absolute truth transcends all of human speculations. Moving from the metaphysical disproportion between finite and infinite, Cusanus points out an immeasurable epistemological disjunction between God and man, between truth and human knowledge: the incomprehensible precision of truth remains ultimately hidden from man. But the unattainability of truth, its absolute incommensurability, does not produce a limitation of human knowledege, does not end up in scepticism. Cusanus does not deny that we have knowledge, he states that all our knowledge is only coniectura: our assertions about truth are only approssimations. Since man can never attain absolute truth, that is God, the nature of human knowledge is fundamentally conjectural. Truth can be grasped only simbolically and metaphorically. Cusanus shows the way to an intellectual access to the infinity of God through the symbolic use of mathematics, attempting to exemplify it by means of geometrical illustrations. Mathematics plays an important role in Cusanus’ speculative discourse. Like Pythagoreans and Platonists (in primis Proclus) before him, Cusanus stresses the special efficacy of the mathematics, using it to rise to better understanding of the truth. Cusanus emphasizes the importance of mathematics not only as a symbol for approaching the theological domain but also as an instrument for exploring the empirical domain: our knowledege of truth is possibile only in multitude et magnitude. Cusanus’ emphasis upon mathematics can be linked with Pythagorean and Platonic tradition, but he goes beyond it. What kind of relationship exist between mathematics and truth? Why does Cusanus move from the incorruptible certainty of mathematics (signa mathematicalia are most certain and most firm than signa naturalia) in his search for truth? Mathematical thinking is meaningful because it is a fabrication of human creativity; the use of mathematics leads to a symbolic comprehension of truth because mathematics is a product of our mind, which has been created in the image and likeness of the divine mind. Man creates of his own the conjectural world, that exists in its truth within the human mind, in the same way in which God has created the real world. In doing this, man is acting in the image of God, he is Godlike. Here Cusanus has established a similarity between the process of creating and the process of knowing, between the way in which God creates the real world and the way in which man creates his understanding of the world: like God unfolds the plurality of created being in himself, correspondingly, the human mind unfolds the conjectural world in itself. Human mind is seen as actively creative in the image of the divine mind: in spite of all other forms of being, our mind is not an explication but the image of the divine mind, the living image of God (viva imago Dei). Cusanus here points out the constructive nature of knowledge, he highlights the active role of human mind in knowing the world. In fact it is no longer a mere recipient of sensory data, it is not merely passive and receiving data from the outside world: our mind is a vis creativa, that measures, compares, assimilates, reconstructs, distinguishes. Cusanus stresses the creative power of human mind, which produces not only the conjectural world but also the world of artificial objects. This proved to be very fruitful in the subsequent historical development, the Renaissance. Cusanus is aware of the novelty of his assertions. He has taken the traditional Christian topos of the image and likeness relationship between God and man, developing it in an original way, in the context of a creative conception of man. Creativity becomes the fundamental link between human and divine nature: man is a second god, which measures all things. Cusanus’ takes the dictum of Protagoras that man is the measure of all things, but his interpretation of Protagoras’ statement is entirely of his own and it is dominated by his Christian theology: human mind, in turn, is misured by the divine mind; in fact there is not reciprocity between image and archetype. Cusanus’ conception of human mind moves in the direction of modernity, but the foundations of his thinking lie in medieval tradition: human knowledge is grounded in the Godlike nature of man. In Cusanus’ speculation theology and philosophy are intimately related: the possibility of human knowledge is ultimately based upon the fundamental premise that man is created in the image and likeness of God. Ultimately, what can man arrive to know? If knowing is essentially the process of measuring (cognoscere mensurare est), because of his finite and contingent nature man can never measures anything precisely. The human mind is not able to achieve the absolute knowledge that belongs only to God: man can never know truth in any definitive and adequate way, he can only judge humanly (homo non potest iudicare nisi humaniter).