SOURCE: Miller, Clyde Lee. “Perception, Conjecture, and Dialectic in Nicolas of Cusa.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 64, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 35-54.

[In the following essay, Miller explicates Cusanus's theory of perceptual knowledge, particularly as found in De Coniecturis and Idiota de Mente, in order to argue that the idea of multiple perspectives was the foundation of his search for God. Miller describes Cusanus's method as a dialectical approach encompassing both oneness and otherness.]

Nicholas of Cusa's thought has an extraordinary power and resourcefulness still relevant to our contemporary concerns and our own thinking. In this paper I propose to demonstrate his importance by exploring two areas related in his ideas, though not often connected today. In part I, I will discuss perception (and implicitly all knowledge) as conjectural and perspectival—important Cusan doctrines. Particularly his ideas about knowing suggest fruitful ways to take account of partial viewpoints while working beyond them to a unitary if provisional synthesis of the whole. In part II, I turn to the heart of Cusan concerns—philosophical theology—and explore how Nicholas capitalizes on conjectural perspectives, employing them and moving beyond them in his own dialectical quest for the divine.

I

One of Cusanus's central doctrines is his characterization of human knowledge as conjectural. He entitles his second major philosophical work De coniecturis even though it sets forth his ideas in what we would call ontology as much as in epistemology. In this part of the paper I want to focus on what Cusanus says about perception and explain why he characterizes perceptual knowledge as conjectural. Here I take a lead from Cusanus himself, for he introduces his sole description of coniectura with an example from ordinary visual perception. My purpose here is primarily to get Cusanus's doctrine straight in its own terms and in relation to his concerns and his conceptual framework. But I am also hoping that Cusan “conjectural perception” will shed some light on our interests in perceptual knowledge.

I begin with the passage of De coniecturis just mentioned. Nicholas is addressing Cardinal Julian Cesarini, to whom he dedicated the work.

You see now that the positive assertions of the wise are conjectures. For when you look with your clear eyes, Father, upon the face of the supreme pontiff in person …, you conceive a positive statement about it which you affirm as exact in terms of the eye. But when you turn to the root from which sense discrimination issues—to reason, I mean—you understand that the sense of sight participates in that discriminating power in an otherness which is organically limited. For this reason you see the defect of a fall from exactness because you gaze upon his face, not as it is, but in an otherness that corresponds to the angle of your eyes, which is different from that of all the eyes of living men. A conjecture, then, is a positive assertion which participates in the truth as it is, but in otherness.

(I,c.11; h 57)¹

In discussing this example Nicholas clearly does not separate perception from discrimination and articulation in thought and language. In his words, one “conceives a positive assertion” about what one looks at. His implicit assumption is that language and thought do not distort what we perceive, however much our cultural and linguistic practices, not to mention our memories and personal histories, shape what we pick out and identify within the visual field. So Cardinal Julian has no real problem finding the pope's face in that group of oddly dressed male clerics. Cusanus says explicitly that reason and sensation operate inseparably in our perceptual experience. Our eyes take in what is visible from their angle of vision but in conjunction with reason's discriminating power.

And there is no doubt that Nicholas believed that perception is paradigmatically perception of something independently visible or audible or tangible. In his later treatise, De beryllo, for instance, he writes:

So you see how the things which cannot be made through our art exist more truly in sensibles than in our intellect, as fire has truer being in its sensible substance than in our intellect where it exists in a confused concept without its natural truth. So with all things.

(c.32 h 57)

To term perceptual judgments “conjectural,” then, does not make them merely the product of fanciful guess or subjective whim or insufficient evidence, whatever their limitations. No less than his medieval predecessors, Cusanus took for granted that the independent world of nature and culture was contacted and to some extent captured in perception. Later in the same passage of De beryllo he speaks of the “sensible qualities” of fire, “which we sense in it.” Thus he is not opposing perceptual conjecture to perceptual knowledge.

In the passage about looking at the pope, Nicholas points out why the resulting perceptual judgment is conjectural or inexact. There is a two-fold otherness or alteritas that conditions and limits visual and all sensory perception. What this amounts to is that perception occurs between extended or bodily things. The first result is that what reason can discriminate in a particular visual field is limited to what organic eyes can see, the otherness Nicholas describes as “organic limitation” (alteritas organice contracta). The second outcome is that human eyes like human bodies have but one location at a time and thus but one standpoint or viewpoint. The cardinal does not see all of the pope's face but only the profile visible from where he looks. This limitation Nicholas terms “the otherness corresponding to your angle of vision” (alteritas secundum angulum tui oculi). In our terms, then, Cusanus believes that bodily perception is always and necessarily perspectival.

Nicholas also points out that this limiting otherness is something we can recognize ourselves upon reflection (dum autem te convertis). This means that even as we make perceptual jugments we are at least implicitly aware of their limitations. Yet his subsequent definition of coniectura makes it clear that perception delivers valid knowledge. In his Neoplatonic jargon, such perceptual assertions as “There's the pope!” “participate in truth as it is,” but in a recognizably limited way, that is, “in otherness.” What we see will never be identical with all that could be seen of a given visible thing. As Nicholas later wrote in Complementum theologicum, “the visible as it is visible is not attained exactly by any eye.” (c. xi, p. 98v)²

A comment or two should be made about the Neoplatonic technical language. Nicholas's ontology opposes the oneness of God to the otherness and multiplicity of creatures; what God is in infinite and absolute or unconstrained oneness each creature reflects in attenuated or “contracted” oneness. Nicholas uses the quasi-metaphorical couple complicatio/explicatio (enfolding/unfolding) as an attempt to capture the relation between God and creatures. As enfolded in the divine oneness and infinity creatures are indistinguishable from God; as unfolded in creation and the cosmos creatures are limited images of their unitary divine source. Behind the oppositions of oneness/manyness, absolute/contracted, original/image, enfolding/unfolding we can spy the familiar exitus/reditus theme which medieval thinkers inherited from their Neoplatonic forebears and shaped to their own speculative needs.³

When Cusanus turns to discuss human knowledge, in familiar medieval fashion he imports the same technical terms he uses in ontology. This establishes correspondences between the conceptual realm fashioned by the human mind and the natural realm created by God. Apart from the content of knowledge, Nicholas even frames the human capacities of sensing, imagining, and reasoning as unfolded images of the oneness of our vis intellectiva; each relates to the next interior power as otherness to oneness. So far we have explored how the bodily basis of perceiving means that it limits what reason can do from the side of the perceiver. But Cusanus has further reasons for saying that our perceptual conjectures “participate in the truth as it is, but in otherness.”

To understand further why perception is conjectural, that is, partial and inexact even when not mistaken, we must explore another sort of otherness or constraint on perception besides that consequent upon our being bodily. Cusanus points as well to the limited and contracted state of the perceptible or sensible things which we perceive—the otherness of the perceived object, so to speak. In the Idiota de sapientia, for example, the dialogue's interlocutors agree that the human face cannot be an adequate measure of its painted portraits because of its extended and changeable character. The only adequate measure would be the absolute face, one conceived as free from change and imperfection and thus utterly exact. In the example of the pope's face mentioned before, this would mean that perceptual judgments about the papal visage would be conjectural because anything extended cannot at one and the same time show all that can be seen of itself to a single other bodily viewer. Otherness or limitation due to bodily estate is not limited to the viewer but ingredient in the viewed as well. Nicholas concludes in Idiota de sapientia (II, h p.34), “For in a world lacking exactness no adequate measure and likeness is possible”—either in portraiture or in perception.

Since we do our knowing and perceiving “in a world lacking exactness” we cannot expect our conjectures to be more than approximations, however correct. Nicholas styles all our cognition mensuratio, measuring, as well as assimilatio, likening. Assimilation or active likening refers wholly to the changes going on in the perceivers. Looking and listening do not change what is seen or heard. In perceiving we become like those sensible aspects of things which our limited perceptual “takes” encounter and capture. But mensuratio is reciprocal between knower and known in perception. Neither perceiver nor perceived can stand as a determinate, exact measure for the meaning and validity of perceptual judgments. Nicholas describes this situation as follows in his Idiota de mente:

For the activity of reason is about the things which fall under sense, and reason makes distinctions, likenesses and differences among them so that nothing may be in reason which was not before in sense. So in this way reason imposes names and is moved to give this name to one thing and another to a second. But since the form is not found in its truth in the things with which reason deals, reason then settles for conjecture and opinion.

(c.2 h pp. 52-53)

“Conjecture and opinion” are not here contrasted with true or valid knowledge, but with exact or perfect knowledge. To put Cusanus's point in our terms, we should say that in perceiving we are not totally transparent to ourselves and that the things we perceive are hardly pellucid as well.⁴

What is this reciprocity of measuring between thing and knower in perception? On one side, the sensible thing which exists independently must function as a measure since it is presumably what perception is about. If we could not contact and reach sensible things themselves to some degree, perceptual knowledge and judgment would lose reference to anything beyond consciousness and language. Perception would simply be about the perceiver, not the perceived. Only if the perceived things function as at least partial norms can perception and the knowledge based on it retain some objectivity.

On the other side, for Cusanus just what we know about the perceptible things is a matter of our own active measuring (already qualified as in principle incomplete and perspectival). Even in perception this measuring is done through the linguistic and conceptual tools we bring to bear for dealing with sensible things. Such measures are themselves more or less apt for dealing with the world and hardly duplicate even its contracted intelligibility. As the layman (in Idiota de mente) responds when the philosopher asks how the human mind makes itself “an adequate measure for such diverse things,”

Notice that the mind is a kind of absolute measure which cannot be greater or smaller since it is not restricted to quantity. When you note that the mind is a living measure that measures by itself (as if a living compass were to measure by itself), then you grasp how it makes itself a notion, measure or exemplar in order to reach itself in everything.

(c.9 h p.89)

Nicholas's compass simile reminds us that to call the human mind and its knowledge a “measure” is itself a metaphor. But the same simile also illustrates just how the mind's measuring is different from typical cases of measurement. One might use the compass to measure, for example, a coin's diameter. But in so doing one has independent perceptual access to both the calibrated instrument and to the coin of unknown diameter. But “a living compass” which “measures by itself” could have no access to the things to be measured apart from its actual measuring.

In perception as in cognition generally, Nicholas views the mind as a non-quantitative oneness, an exemplar reflected in the oneness of the conceptual and linguistic measures it employs to judge the perceptible world. Even though in the paradigm case of measurement we can single out and distinguish mensura from mensurandum before we proceed with mensuratio, in perceptual knowledge we use measures fashioned after the mind's own likeness and judge or measure perceptible things without any independent access to them. Not only are the deliverances of perception conjectural because they are cognitive likenesses of created likenesses—similitudines similitudinum, but they are also inexact because they are couched in the linguistic and conceptual measures we fashion to reach and make sense of what we perceive.⁵

This point leads naturally to the third source of inexactness or otherness in our perceptual knowledge. Not only does the corporeal character of the perceiver and the perceived limit perception because, as Nicholas writes in De docta ignorantia, “all perceptible things are in a state of continual instability because of the material possibility abounding in them” (I,11 h 31, Hopkins, p.61). There is also the otherness or alteritas of the signs and images and symbols we employ as our only cognitive access to what we perceive. Such linguistic and conceptual media are precisely different from and other than the kind of sensible reality that mind-independent things have outside our knowledge. In his late treatise entitled Compendium Nicholas wrote about this matter as follows:

Then it cannot be denied that by nature a thing exists before it can be known. Therefore neither sense nor imagination nor intellect grasp its ways of being, since the latter precedes them all. But all things which are grasped by whatever mode of knowing signify only that prior way of being. And hence they are not the thing itself, but its likenesses, images or signs. Therefore there is no knowledge of the way of being, even though it is seen with utter certainty that there is such a way of being.

(c.1 h1)

Here then is another way to understand the conjectural character of our perceptual judgments. They are inexact, incomplete, and perspectival because the very terms in which they are made reflect the broader history and interests of the perceiver and his or her community no less than what is in principle intelligible or perceptible about extramental things.

What this exposition underlines is just how perception is limited and partial and approximative for Nicholas of Cusa. To use his language about conjectural knowledge, it is not hard to see why perceptual judgments are characterized by “otherness”—what is difficult perhaps is to see why he believes they “participate in truth as it is.” Given the strictures and constraints on perception we may wonder whether the contents of perceptual knowledge can be likened to and measured by perceptible things. The reason this was no problem for Nicholas is particularly intriguing, for it shows the distance we must travel to enter his theoretical concerns, as well as their divergence from our own interests. Cusanus was convinced that our status as images of the divine mind's oneness secured the likeness between our knowledge and the world, even if that likeness in perception and conception was imperfect and approximate. What the divine exemplar brought into existence in the natural cosmos, we humans as second gods and images of divinity can reproduce reliably in the conjectural world we fashion as knowers. Nicholas writes:

So, since the exemplar of all things [God] is reflected in the mind as truth in its images, [the mind] has in itself that to which it refers and in accord with which it passes judgment on things outside. Just so, if a written law were alive, it would read in itself, because it is alive, what judgments should be made.

(Idiota de mente c.5 h p.65)

The positive assertions that issue from the human power of judgment “participate in truth as it is” because the human mind is the image of the divine where all things are known as they are in their identity with God's infinite oneness.

All this may be perfectly fine for Cusanus; evidently his ontological exemplarism is inseparable from the way he secures our perceptual and other knowledge as truthful. But we need not either acknowledge this systemic undergirding and turn away or accept it and become Cusan Neoplatonists ourselves. Nicholas of Cusa himself provides us another option with his doctrine of conjectural knowledge. For it is not just perception that is conjectural—in the very passage first quoted above where he defines coniectura Nicholas began with the assertion that “all the positive statements of wise men are conjectures.” Can we not turn this against his own paralleling of the divine and human mind as exemplar and image? If all knowledge is conjectural, Nicholas's own conceptual scheme fares no better than the doctrines and assertions to which that scheme affords coherence and systematic placement.

We need not accept Cusanus's version of Christian exemplarism in order to extract what seems useful and worth preserving about his remarks on perception. Obviously much that he said needs correction and/or filling out. But his emphasis on the limitations of perceptual knowledge as stemming from the bodily nature of both perceiver and item perceived is surely correct and valuable, even though bodiliness has different evaluative resonances in Neoplatonic thought than it generally does for us. His labeling perceptual judgments “conjectural” can remind us of their partial character in both senses. Not only is perception able to be extended but perceivers occupy viewpoints, both physical and mental, that limit what they can and do see. As adult perceivers we typically employ perception to forward our projects by attending to the features of our surroundings most relevant to our purposes. Here we may agree with Nicholas that reason functions conjointly with sensation to discriminate among the features of the perceptual field—overlooking some and concentrating on others. This is the very work that Nicholas, like Plato long before him, believed paradigmatic for ratio.

What is not so clear in Cusanus is exactly how much the content of our perceptual knowledge (not just its reference) is dependent on the determinate perceptible features of the extramental world, however “clouded by the changeableness of matter” (Idiota de mente c.7 h p.76). Here Cusan practice suggests that Nicholas should believe that perception is discovery, not just invention, even when his explicit words on the matter waver to some extent. Sometimes he speaks as if our linguistic and conceptual measures are the sole sources of intelligibility even though his examples show that we understand directly what we see and hear. Part of this may be due to the sketchiness of his remarks and his not clearly distinguishing causal and epistemic accounts of conjectural knowledge. But partly his wavering may suggest that he combines in an unexpected way the tradition that says that reality is what we make it out to be as knowers and the tradition that insists that reality is what it is and that as knowers we had best discover that. When we attempt to go beyond this in our own terms, we may let Cusanus remind us that perception is ineluctably interpretative.

But if ordinary perception is interpretative, this can extend Cusan “conjecture” in a direction compatible with his own ideas about perception being in principle a partial affair while sharing in the truth of things. Our perceptual judgments are always open to revision and correction and in problematic situations we may want to propose new interpretative frameworks to provide leads or clues to the meaning of what we see, given the purpose of our looking. Of course, sometimes we may simply want to look again more carefully or listen more closely or touch more gingerly. Our situation as perceivers, even couched in terms of Cusan “otherness,” is not rigidly limited by the constraints of perspectivity and incompleteness or totally in thrall to our favorite ideological hobbyhorses. Even as perceivers we can imagine other perspectives on the same scene. We should find it useful to recall Nicholas of Cusa's point that perception is conjectural. After all, acting as perceivers in rather varied situations we are helped by recalling that there is always more to get perceptually than what we see, particularly when we make no mistakes in looking.

II

In this part of the paper I will explore examples from three of Cusanus's works that again display his awareness of the perspectival character of human cognition. But these examples, I suggest, do more than emphasize the fact that human knowing is inexorably conjectural and so perspectival. What Nicholas attempts is further insight in philosophical theology, the real project of all his theorizing. Here he will capitalize on our ability to employ, reflect on, and understand differing perspectives. Just the perspectival character of human knowledge lets it serve as constant starting-point and way-station in the Cusan dialectical search for what transcends our human estate. Just our ability to recognize and switch perspectives, to attempt to combine perspectives, to qualify one by another, to move beyond any particular perspective, even to imagine and attempt to attain a-perspectival knowledge lets us perform in thought the dialectical moves that witness to how we can in part transcend cognitive constraints even as they remind us that we remain in ignorantia, however docta.

I will begin with the remarkable passage in chapter 12 of De docta ignorantia, book 2. There Nicholas reflects on the fact that a person in a boat might consider either the shore fixed and the boat moving in relation to it or imagine the boat fixed and take the shore as in motion. How one perceives and experiences the situation is a matter of deciding to make one reference point stationary and the other mobile. The example seems a perfectly ordinary reference to our ability to exchange standpoints and switch perspectives on the same visual scene.

But Nicholas extrapolates and transfers this consideration to the larger physical cosmos. As a result, we can take the earth in the traditional way as a fixed center but no more so than any other standpoint, whether some other star or planet or the poles of the heavens. Any one of these might serve as a fixed center from which to view everything else—no one place is privileged; and this is a further corollary of the fact that the physical universe is without fixed center or physical boundaries, a point Nicholas proposed on more metaphysical grounds in the previous chapter.

Nicholas's own words in that previous chapter deserve quoting:

If we consider the various movements of the spheres, [we will see that] it is not possible for the world-machine to have, as a fixed and immoveable center, either our perceptible earth or air or fire or any other thing. For, with regard to motion, we do not come to an unqualifiedly minimum—i.e., to a fixed center. For the minimum must coincide with the maximum; therefore, the center of the world coincides with the circumference. Hence, the world does not have a circumference. … Therefore, since it is not possible for the world to be enclosed between a physical center and circumference, the world—of which God is the center and the circumference—is not understood. And although the world is not infinite, it cannot be conceived as finite, because it lacks boundaries within which it is enclosed.

(II,c.11 h 156, Hopkins p.114)

Nicholas's conclusion later in Book II, c.12 is worth noting. The machina mundi, he writes, “will have its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere, so to speak; for God who is everywhere and no where, is its circumference and center” (h 162, Hopkins p.117). This conclusion “leaps” from the interchangeability and relativity of the center and poles of the universe to the hermetic metaphor for God, for Nicholas had already pointed toward that metaphor in chapter 11. There he argued it was impossible to reach the absolute by beginning from anything relative and created—in his language we are tied to the realm of more and less and we cannot attain the maximum in any genus. So we are unable to find a fixed point of absolute rest in a universe characterized by change and motion. Since only God is the absolute maximum in ontological terms, only God is center and only God sets metaphysical limits to a physical universe whose extension is boundless and unlimited. But as both finite and boundless the physical universe is the maximum contractum, the first best created image of God.⁶

Nicholas's physical universe still contains the earth and the planets, their spheres and the sphere of fixed stars. But now the cosmic center is not the center of earth, nor is the earth stationary, any more than the other planets and stars, no matter how it seems from our standpoint on earth. The shapes approximate the spherical, the motions approximate the circular—all are imperfect because all are “contracted” or limited as befits the realm of the more and less, the relative and finite.

Since the whole physical universe constitutes that relative realm, there is no reason to evaluate any star or planet, let alone the earth, as “lowest or lowliest.” No less than the other heavenly bodies, the earth is a “noble star,” itself different, distinct, but no less imperfect than the others. Cusanus has us traverse the universe in imagination so we may discover that the equivalence of viewpoints, whatever our location within the cosmic whole, presses us to discard the traditional “up” and “down,” center and zenith, not just in physical, but in evaluative terms. The hierarchical cosmos from less perfect earth to more perfect fixed stars is to be discarded precisely as hierarchical. What we see from earth will be the same celestial panorama as people saw before Nicholas. What is now clear is that how we evaluate the sight is our own construction, not the way things are and must be.

But return to the metaphor of the infinite sphere. How are we to imagine and conceptualize a universe whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere? Nicholas's precise instructions are worth some comment. He writes:

if with regard to what has now been said you want truly to understand something about the motion of the universe, you must merge (complices) the center and the poles, aiding yourself as best you can by your imagination.

(II, c. 11; h 161, Hopkins, p.116)

And again,

Therefore merge (complica) these different imaginative pictures so that the center is the zenith and vice versa. Thereupon you will see—through the intellect, to which only learned ignorance is of help—that the world and its motion and shape cannot be apprehended.

(Ibid).

The Latin phrases to notice are “complices te cum imaginatione iuvando” and “complica igitur istas diversas imaginationes.” Hopkins translates complicare as “merge” here, as does Heron; Wilpert's German uses “verschraenken” instead of his more usual “einfalten.”⁷ But complicare is Cusanus's semi-technical term for enfolding; often it is contrasted with explicare or unfolding, as explained above. For Cusanus, everything is enfolded or embraced by God's oneness as identical with God. Here the term gets extended to the human mind's work in attempting to think cosmic center and poles together only to realize that the universe cannot be understood as an exact whole after the manner of mathematical conceptions. We propose metaphors as ways of working to the insight that our real status regarding the physical universe is one of not-knowing or ignorance, but now learned or realized ignorance.

The metaphor of the infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere lets us attempt to think infinity and extension together, as it were. We might imagine ourselves located “outside” the physical universe as we may stand “outside” a model of the solar system or gaze at a chart mapping stars in the night sky. But to do this is merely to choose a perspective or standpoint for some view of the whole—a whole without fixed center apart from that assigned by the standpoint. The center can be everywhere, that is, anywhere we decide. Any imaginative or physical model will be misleading if it suggests we do not remain within the very universe we are attempting to comprehend and circumscribe in imagination. The circumference is nowhere because the whole is without an outside, so to speak.

Our discovery that we cannot construct such a physical or imaginative model of the universe should lead us more readily to “fold together” or “merge” or think together both center and poles even if such an attempt frustrates our readiness to do picture thinking. We cannot resolve the paradox or contrariety in the metaphor or in Nicholas's directions to fold together the extremes. At most we can exchange or switch perspectives in imagination, we can attempt to hold both opposing viewpoints or contrary poles together in thought. Then we realize that the opposition cannot be resolved and that this is precisely part of the insight the metaphor of the infinite sphere helps us achieve. The metaphor generates opposed perspectives which we are to enter and think through—it is the frustration of contrariety confronted and held before us that is to yield some glimpse of what might be beyond, precisely as enfolding what to us are irreconcilably opposed perspectives.

But we must remember that the metaphor is first invoked by Nicholas as a way of envisioning God's relation to the physical universe. As omnipresent spirit God is precisely center and circumference of the whole, just as God is center and circumference of each created thing. It is worth noticing that by undercutting the hierarchical order of the Ptolemaic universe Cusanus stresses anew God's equipresence to all created things in their totality and in their individuality. God's transcendence is now not the top rung of a ladder of perfection or beyond it in some analogous but conceivable way. Rather God's presence to each contracted and limited thing is at once God's transcendence as unlimited. An infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere becomes a Cusan aenigma or symbol for God's transcendent infinity and total presence-as-otherness. If we have difficulty thinking about the universe's unboundedness and lack of a fixed center, we can envisage the barriers in coping with God in cognitive terms—such reflections lead to our achieving learned ignorance.⁸

Another Cusan treatise, his work on mystical theology, De visione Dei, again employs the perspectival character of human vision and imagination to move us beyond the ordinary world we so comfortably inhabit.⁹ Nicholas begins the work by proposing an exercise in visual thinking; its purpose is to force discursive thought to account for what appears in terms of what we realize by reflecting is in fact the case in the perceptual exercise Nicholas proposes.

The title of the work, The Vision of God, stresses that we can see God only because God sees us. The all-seeing portrait whose depicted eyes follow the gaze of each person who looks at it is meant to be a metaphor for both God's all-encompassing gaze and our attempts to catch some sight of the divine.

We need to analyze this metaphor carefully. As we place ourselves before the portrait Nicholas sent the monks at Tegernsee we recognize that in fact we measure the apparent vision of the eyes in the portrait. They do not actually see, but the painted eyes seem to be omnivoyant so long as we look at them. Our gaze lets them apparently move with us as we change position; we have to view the portrait to find the painted eyes looking into ours, no matter what position we take within sight of the painting. What is more, it is not just our looking that is normative here.¹⁰ Rather our reflective discursive thought about the perceptual situation is able to discern what is occurring and to generalize as follows: whenever eyes in a portrait or painting are portrayed as looking out of the picture plane, those eyes will appear omnivoyant, no less than in Cusanus's icon. Here we note the dialectical movement in our own thought from looking to reflecting and generalizing. A parallel progression takes place when we take the object lesson with the icon as a metaphor for God's vision.

Cusanus is dramatically eloquent about the parallels between viewing the icon and that situation where, so to speak, our seeing encounters God's seeing. Now it is God's seeing, not ours, which is the measure of what takes place. For there would be no finite vision in any sense if God's seeing were not identical with God's sustaining of all that is not divine. Nicholas puts it this way:

Sight that is freed from all contractedness—as being the most adequate measure and true exemplar of all acts of seeing—encompasses at one and the same time each and every mode of seeing.

(c.2, h 8, Hopkins p.121)¹¹

When we change viewpoints or perspectives from God's seeing to our own, the portrait or icon can symbolize God's face. But the divine face is the original or exemplar of all faces and so one will find one's own face in the divine, not a mirror image or just an apparent face, but the very truth of one's face or self. Again Nicholas moves us from our vision to God's vision, from ourselves as seen by God to the portrait's face we see, from the sight of the portrait as the object of normal visual perception to its symbolic meaning for our relationship to God. Encompassed by God's actual vision we are expected to recognize that, were we to see God, we would find the divine original or measure for who and what we are—contracted or attenuated images sustained by the one who encompasses us.

But Nicholas is not satisfied; he would have us go further. He writes:

In all faces the Face of faces is seen in a veiled and symbolic manner. But it is not seen in an unveiled manner as long as the seeker does not enter, above all faces, into a certain secret and hidden silence wherein there is no knowledge or concept of a face. For this obscuring-mist, haze, darkness or ignorance into which one seeking your face enters when he passes beyond all knowledge and conception is that beneath which your face can be found only in a veiled manner. Yet the obscuring mist reveals that your face is there, above everything beveiling.

(c.6, h 22, Hopkins p. 139)

Once again we see the path Nicholas uses to direct us. Taking the icon as image of God's face is no different from taking any human face as a symbolism for God, “the Face of faces.” But images and symbols are not a place to stop; they point beyond themselves—“super omnes facies.” In this beyond the normal sense of “face” falls away just because knowledge and conception (scientia et conceptus) find no purchase on “facies” or anything else. Discursive thought falls silent in order to learn because of and in spite of conceptual ignorance, the latter symbolized by the mist and darkness. In that silent darkness God's face itself is disclosed or revealed—“supra omnia velamenta.”

Nicholas employs metaphors at two levels here. One corresponds to ordinary perception and normal discursive thought. Thus we speak of the omnivoyant icon and the exercise in visual thinking which Cusanus proposes. At this level God's face is available only through metaphors—velate et in aenigmate. The unveiling or revelatio may occur at the second level which Nicholas symbolizes by silent mist and darkness. They stand for the obscuring of our ordinary powers of seeing.

This sets up a paradoxical but hardly unfamiliar impasse in Cusan thought. What usually counts as physical or mental seeing is in fact obscured or powerless when it comes to sighting God. This is the categoreal blindness of the finite. Yet what is obscure or impervious to normal perception or insight now becomes the sole occasion of disclosure of the divine. “Seeing” thus is equivalent to not-seeing; not-seeing yields seeing or vision. The Cusan symbols move us through human visio and ratio at the first level to learned ignorance and beyond at the second. Through the whole movement God's own seeing has priority, for God is present in our aspiration even as God is to be disclosed beyond human metaphors and symbols. Our attempt to think the “in” and the “beyond” at the same time takes us to the point where thinking is frustrated and we leave thought behind—in darkness at the wall of paradise.¹²

The powerful metaphor of the wall symbolizes the frustration of discursive thought and language. The wall symbolizes the moment in the mystical quest where contradictories coincide, while beyond it lies the garden of divinity. In chapter 11 of De visione Dei Cusanus pauses at the wall to give us further direction. Once again he uses his favorite metaphorical couple of enfolding and unfolding, complicatio et explicatio, but now termed “coincident.” Once again this symbol is employed to express what is an essential dialectical movement. We are bid to picture the movement of thought and language as simultaneously proceeding from God to creatures and from creatures toward God.

“At one and the same time,” Nicholas writes, “I go in creatures and out through the door of your Word and Concept.” (c.11 h 47, Hopkins p.171) We are to think the going in and going out, the explicatio and complicatio, as occurring “at one and the same time.” Otherwise our thought will not be adequate to the coincidence of enfolding and unfolding and to what lies beyond. In Nicholas' words,

For creation's going out from You is creation's going in unto You: and unfolding is enfolding. And when I see You-Who-Are-God in Paradise which this wall of coincidence of opposites surrounds, I see that You neither unfold nor enfold whether separately or together. For both separating and conjoining are the wall of coincidence, beyond which You dwell, free from whatever can be spoken or thought of.

(Ibid.)

One and the same God is identically the coincidence of creation's outflow and return and of that One who is ab-solutus or utterly other because God transcends all our talk and thought and symbols which attempt to reach the divine. Parallel to the dialectic in our attempts with God's help to move toward sighting God, Nicholas also recalls that dialectic of coincidence and transcendence, as we may call it, which he understands as most proper to God's reality and relatedness to what God creates. So God is Deus complicans just because he is Deus explicans and vice versa—so too God is the coincidence of unfolding and enfolding just insofar as he is neither but beyond them both. Or better, it is just because God is beyond and absolutus that God is the coincidence of unfolding and enfolding. God's involvement with creatures is at the same time the effect and the manifestation of his infinite otherness.

Chapter 13 of De visione Dei restates this insight about God's otherness in more abstruse form.¹³ Here Nicholas leaves all visible and imaginable symbols behind and is content with the oxymorons of paradoxical language. The incongruities in the linguistic expressions he employs are designed to liberate our thinking and talking from their usual discursive competence in dealing with the finite things of human experience. Paradoxical language has us join at least two contrary cognitive perspectives. We are to think the perspectives together in the hope of release from or dissolution of what seems incompatible. No wonder Nicholas puts it in the form of a prayer!

O Lord, you tell me that just as in oneness otherness is present without otherness, because in oneness otherness is oneness, so in Infinity contradiction is present without contradiction because in Infinity contradiction is Infinite. … The oppositeness of opposites is oppositeness without oppositeness, just as the End of finite things is an End without an end. You, then, O God, are the Oppositeness of opposites, because you are infinite.

(c. 13; h 55 Hopkins p.180)

Cusanus's tangled rehetoric and paradoxical oppositions in this passage are designed to clear some space, as it were, so we can point to God without confusing or conflating God with things that are not divine. Opposites—all differentiated and distinct created things—are such by God's creative act, but God is not just another thing alongside them. Rather God's oppositeness is so totally different from the oppositions among creatures that just by his very extra-categoreal opposedness or total difference from creatures God is present to them and maintains them in being as different among themselves. God's oppositio is without internal contradiction because of the divine simpleness and oneness. As Nicholas writes, “in simplicity otherness is present without otherness, because in simplicity otherness is simplicity itself.” (Ibid.) Besides, as infinite otherness God is responsible for the opposition among creatures—he is the oppositio oppositorum—just by being oppositio sine oppositione.

In his later work De li non aliud Cusanus again describes God as oppositio oppositorum and attributes the point to Pseudo-Dionysius in contradistinction to Aristotle.¹⁴ But to think of God as Non Aliud (the Not-Other) is again to employ a rather abstruse linguistic metaphor for designating and characterizing God's otherness or opposedness to all that is not God. It is not surprising that this linguistic coining becomes a verbal symbol for God that forces us to change and exchange cognitive perspectives if we are to penetrate its meaning.

Look at Nicholas's own characterization in chapter 6 of De li non aliud.

Not-other is not other; nor is it other than other, nor is it other in an other. [This is so] for no other reason than that [Not-other is] Not-other, which cannot in any way be other—as if something were lacking to it, as to an other. Because what is other is other than something, it lacks that than which it is other. But because Not-other is not other than anything, it does not lack anything, nor can anything exist outside it. Accordingly in itself it is seen antecedently and as absolutely no other than itself; and in another it is seen as no other than this other.

(c.6 h 20, Hopkins, p. 49)

To grasp what Cusanus is doing in this passage and indeed in a good part of De li non aliud we can return to our ordinary experience of material things. We take for granted the habitual recognition that one thing is not another. The limited things of experience differ at least in number and often in kind as well. When we think about our assumptions here, we notice that each separate thing maintains its own identity through time as distinct from other things which differ from or (in Cusan terms) are “other than” it. This is the realm of finite things we are most familar with, the realm of otherness and plurality, to put it more abstractly. Nicholas referred to such things when he wrote, “Because what is other is other than something, it lacks that than which it is other.” (Ibid.)

Nicholas's use of Non-Aliud to characterize what is distinctive about the deity is designed to avoid our constant temptation to think and speak about God as just one more thing among the realities we already sort and differentiate. Making God just another thing trims God to creatures' size, to being one of the others whose otherness manifests its lack or finite status. To avoid such distortions and to preserve and stress God's difference from creatures, Nicholas asserts that Non-Aliud is not such an other. As he wrote above, Non-Aliud is not “other than other; nor is it other in an other.” Indeed, because God is Non-Aliud, God “is not other than anything, does not lack anything, nor can anything exist outside of” God.

Thinking of God as Non-Aliud forces us to move beyond our usual ways of dealing with identity and difference, whether in technical or ordinary discourse. In one way, to name God Non-Aliud is hardly strange for it amounts to asserting that God is nothing other than God in the divine self-identity. In Nicholas's words, “In itself [Not-Other] is seen antecedently and as absolutely no other than itself.” But the power of Nicholas's proposal comes to light when he writes about the things we are to keep in the realm of creatures and differentiated from God as from the One who exists totaliter aliter. For the divine Non-Aliud turns out also to be not other than creatures. As Nicholas says, “in another [Not-Other] is seen as no other than that other.” As Eckhart stressed before Cusanus, the distinction between God and creatures and, in fact, the distinctions we make between creatures both rest on God's not being other, on nothing existing outside of God.¹⁵ God's relation to what depends on God is just unlike the relationships between the dependent things themselves.

And again characterizing God as Non-Aliud employs our ability to move back and forth between conceptual perspectives—in this case, between types of otherness. Unless we grasp and think through the dialectical relation of God and creatures implicit in Non-Aliud as a name for God, we either collapse creatures into God or make created things divine. But if we are able to grasp that God's independence and transcendence of created things are at the heart of God's connection with them, if we come to see that it is precisely not as a created other that God is not other than and thus intimate to though not identical with other created things, then we can understand how the divine otherness and created otherness are both distinct and related. Eckhart's proposal is relevant here, for it embodies the same dialectical relation of divine and not-divine: God is distinct from created things by his indistinction from them and indistinct from them by his distinction.¹⁶ In Cusan terms, then, in being Non-Aliud and thus not other than God, God is not other than creatures; by being not other than creatures God is not other than God. God remains not other than the infinite Non-Aliud just in being involved with and not other than finite things. What it is to be God's unique oneness and at the same time infinite otherness provides the basis for God's intimacy and oneness with all that is not God: the divine oneness is “not other” than everything else that exists.

Each example examined and discussed in this second part of the paper has capitalized on the notion of perception as conjectural and perspectival explained in part one. In broadening his cognitive scope to include the realm of imagination and conception, Cusanus employs varying perspectives in a dialectical movement. While his unvarying purpose is to take us in a “hunt for wisdom” on the trail of quarry no less than divine, his understanding of the reach and limits of human knowledge leaves us finally with no more than learned ignorance. But the infinite sphere, the all-seeing icon, the wall and the darkness, even the verbal play with oppositio and non-aliud are exemplary not simply as symbols and metaphors for the particular points Cusanus makes when he employs them. They are also exemplary because thinking through each of them involves recognition of their conjectural or provisional character and of the varying perspectives they attempt to combine. A dialectical use of Cusan symbols and neologisms is required to do them justice.

The upshot is that by setting the limited perspectives of human reason and imagination in opposition, Cusanus establishes that paradoxical and even ironic theoretical locus in thought where we stretch beyond the limits of reason even as we realize that we cannot fill out positively or grasp what we are reaching toward. The point of such dialectical thinking for human thinkers who reach no truth detached from a perspective is to exploit conjectural and perspectival thinking to approach the God who encompasses the whole but remains ever unencompassed. The project Cusanus pursues is to relate encompassed to unencompassed without betraying either and without distorting the connection between them. Only by a dialectical use of symbols which involve varying perspectives does his conjectural philosophical theology accomplish this task.

Notes

1. Translations are my own unless I quote a Cusan work translated by Jasper Hopkins; then I cite his name and the page number of his translation. I refer to the Latin text of the Heidelberg Academy critical edition of Nicholas of Cusa's works by using “h” followed by the section or page number, to the Paris edition by “p” followed by page number. Heidelberg Academy edition: Nicolai de Cusa Opera Omnia (Leipzig/Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1932 ff.). Paris edition of 1514 (New reprinting in three volumes. Frankfurt/Main: Minerva, 1962.). Jasper Hopkins's translations: Nicholas of Cusa's Dialectical Mysticism (1985) for De visione Dei; Nicholas of Cusa on God as Not-Other (1983) for De li non aliud; Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance (1981) for De docta ignorantia. All are published by Arthur J. Banning Press in Minneapolis.

   Three German works are essential for penetrating Cusanus's De coniecturis: J. Koch, Die ars coniecturalis des Nikolaus von Kues (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1956); S. Oide, “Ueber die Grundlagen der cusanischen Konjekturenlehre,” Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeitraege der Cusanus-Gesellschaft 8 (1970): 147-78; P. Hirt, “Vom Wesen der konjekturalen Logik nach Nikolaus von Kues,” ibid.: 179-98.

2. For a different analysis of this passage, see E. Fraenktzki, Nikolaus von Kues und das Problem der absoluten Subjektivitaet (Meisenheim am Glan: A. Hain, 1972), 104-6. For overviews of Nicholas's epistemology, see T. Van Velthoven, Gottesschau und Menschlische Kreativitaet (Leiden: Brill, 1977), and, more briefly, K. Kremer, “Erkennen bei Nikolaus von Kues. Apriorismus-Assimilation-Abstraktion,” MFCG 13 (1978): 23-57.

3. On complicatio-explicatio see T. McTighe, “The Meaning of the Couple, ‘Complicatio-Explicatio’ in the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 32 (1958): 206-214; J. Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance, Introduction, 12-13, 19-22.

4. I discuss the contrast between measuring and likening in the Introduction to my translation of Nicholas de Cusa, Idiota de mente/The Layman: About Mind (N.Y.: Abaris Books, 1979), 17-35.

5. I owe my understanding of this point to Karsten Harries. See his “Cusanus and the Platonic Idea,” The New Scholasticism 37 (1963): 188-203.

6. On these passages, see also Hopkins, Learned Ignorance, Introduction, 27-30, and K. Harries, “The Infinite Sphere. Comments on the History of a Metaphor,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 13 (1975): 5-15.

7. Of Learned Ignorance. Trans. by Germaine Heron with an introduction by D. J. B. Hawkins (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), 110; De docta ignorantia. Die belehrte Unwissenheit. Book II, ed. and trans. by Paul Wilpert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1967), 93.

8. I touch on some of these issues in my article “Nicholas of Cusa's De ludo globi. Symbolic Roundness and Eccentric Life Paths,” Text and Image, Acta 10 (1983), esp. 139-42.

9. For a general discussion of this treatise, see my “Nicholas of Cusa's The Vision of God,” in P. Szarmach (ed.), An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 293-313. The present paper takes up from some remarks about these passages in “A Road Not Taken: Nicholas of Cusa and Today's Intellectual World,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 57 (1983): 68-77.

10. Kurt Flasch makes similar points; see “Der Mensch als Mass Gottes,” in N. Kutschki (ed.) Gott Heute: Fuenfzehn Beitraege zur Gottesfrage (Mainz: M. Gruenewald, 1967), 20-30.

11. Jasper Hopkins explicates the various meanings of “seeing God” in Cusanus's writings in Nicholas of Cusa's Dialectical Mysticism, 19-31. See also Werner Beierwaltes, Visio Facialis: Sehen ins Angesicht (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1988).

12. Hopkins has some illuminating comments on the use of paradox, dialectic and metaphor in these passages: ibid., 35-44.

13. Cf. W. Beierwaltes, “Visio absoluta: Reflexion als Grundzug des goettlichen Prinzips bei Nicholaus Cusanus,” Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften (1978): 5-33; “Deus Oppositio Oppositorum (Nicholaus Cusanus De visione dei xiii),” Salzburger Jahrbuch fuer Philosophie 8 (1964): 175-85.

14. De li non aliud c. 19 h 89, Hopkins, 117. My view of this Cusan treatise is heavily indebted to Egil Wyller, “Zum Begriff ‘non aliud’ bei Cusanus” in Nicolo Cusano agli inizi del mondo moderno (Florence: Sansoni, 1970), 419-43.

15. On the relation of Cusan ideas to Eckhart, see Rudolf Haubst, “Nikolaus von Kues als Interpret und Verteidiger Meister Eckharts,” in Udo Kern (ed.), Freiheit und Gelassenheit: Meister Eckhart Heute (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1980), 75-96.

16. See, for instance, Eckhart's Commentary on the Book of Wisdom, n. 144, Lateinische Werke II, ed. J. Koch, (Stuttgart and Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1936ff.), 482.