Cusanus, on Learned Igorance-17Z8dxd

On Learned Ignorance Harries 1 Karsten Harries Nicholas of Cusa On Learned Ignorance Seminar Notes Fall Semester 2015 Yale University Copyright Karsten Harries On Learned Ignorance Harries 2 Contents 1. Introduction 3 Book One 2. Learned Ignorance 17 3. The Coincidence of Opposites 30 4. The Threat of Pantheism 47 5. The Power of Mathematics 61 6. Naming God 76 Book Two 7. The Shape of the Universe 90 8. Matter and Becoming 105 9. The Condition of the Earth 118 Book Three 10. The Need for Christ 131 11. Death and Resurrection 146 12. Faith and Understanding 162 13. Death, Damnation, and the Church 176 On Learned Ignorance Harries 3 1. Introduction 1 Many philosophers today have become uneasy about what philosophy has become and where it has led us. Nietzsche and Heidegger, Derrida and Rorty are just a few names. Their uneasiness mirrors widespread concern about the shape of our modern culture. As more and more begin to suspect that the road on which we have been travelling may be a dead end, attempt are made to retrace steps taken; a search begins for missed turns and for those who may have misled us. Among these Descartes has long occupied a special place as the thinker whose understanding of proper method helped found modern philosophy, science, and indeed the shape of our technological world. It is thus to be expected that attempts to question modernity, to confront it, in order perhaps to take a step beyond it, should have often taken the form of attempts to confront Descartes or Cartesian rationality. Think of Heidegger. I, too, attempt something of the sort in the Descartes seminar I am teaching this term, although I think it is far more difficult to get around Descartes than Heidegger did. What I attempt in the present seminar is part of a related effort. It here takes the form of an attempt to take a step back from the mathesis universalis of Descartes to the docta ignorantia of Cusanus. In the last hundred years the significance of Cusanus has been increasingly recognized, especially due to the efforts of the Neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer, who found in Cusanus provocative anticipations of Kant. Others have found in him anticipations of Leibniz, and of Hegel. Such anticipations might seem reason enough to spend some time on him. But my interest in Cusanus is not just or even primarily historical. His doctrine of learned ignorance, I feel, despite the many ways in which what Cusanus has to say must seem dated, still provides us with a continuing challenge. Inseparable from this doctrine is an insight into the radical transcendence of reality, so different from the ontology implied by Descartes' insistence on the primacy of clear and distinct ideas. When someone uses the term “transcendence” we should ask just what is being transcended. With Cusanus it is the reach of our reason. Being and reason are thought to be finally incommensurable. With Cusanus this thought intertwines with his On Learned Ignorance Harries 4 understanding of the infinite transcendence of God, which has to elude all our attempts to comprehend it. 2 But why should all this be of more than historical interest? Let me express here a personal conviction: I think it is impossible to do philosophy well without also doing the history of philosophy. That is to claim that philosophy stands in a different relationship to its history than, say, physics. And this, as will become clear, must mean also that it stands in a different relationship to truth. I am quite aware that much recent philosophy has been quite ahistorical in orientation. Descartes may be cited in support of such an approach. Or consider Wittgenstein's explanation, in the Preface to the Tractatus, of his failure to give his readers an adequate accounting of his sources. He there declares it a matter of indifference to him, whether what he has thought was thought before him by another. By now, of course, the Tractatus, too, has been placed in its historical context and commentators have provided many of the missing footnotes. But why should these matter to the philosopher? What is it to read and interpret a philosophical text? How does it differ from reading, say, a physics text? A poem? In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations we find the following remark: 531: We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than a musical theme can be replaced by another.) In the one case the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences, in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions. Where do philosophical texts stand on this spectrum? Is it clear that there is only one answer to this question? We may want to range philosophical texts with science. This is indeed what our Cartesian inheritance would have us do. To do so we do not have to deny that every philosopher has to express himself in a particular philosophical language, rooted in a particular tradition. Learning a philosopher's sources can be likened to learning a language. But should we not still distinguish, as Wittgenstein tries to do in On Learned Ignorance Harries 5 the Tractatus, what is being thought from the way it is being expressed? In the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein is quite willing to grant that he may not have succeeded in expressing his thoughts as clearly as possible "Here I am conscious that I have fallen far short of the possible." One is reminded of Kant's willingness to admit in the prefaces to both the first and the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that his manner of representation left room for considerable improvement. So understood the pursuit of truth demands a certain indifference to expression. It demands objectivity. What has been understood in this sense can be translated, can be put differently. Is the young Wittgenstein then not right: given the philosopher's concern for truth, the history of its discovery (and with it the question of originality) should have no philosophical importance? Does philosophy, like science, then not demand a certain indifference to history? That matters are not quite so simple is suggested by the fact that in that same preface Wittgenstein is not willing to claim that the truth of what he has asserted is unassailable, but only that what he has asserted seems true to him. But what seems true to us will depend on our historical situation. The pursuit of truth would therefore seem to demand reflection on the possible distortions bound up with that situation. Reflection, we might say, on Wittgenstein’s fundamentally Cartesian prejudice concerning the possibility of coming to a clear and distinct understanding of reality. As we know, Wittgenstein soon was to change his mind. But how are we to distinguish between the truth and what seems to us to be the truth? Think of Descartes' vain attempt to think free of the burden of past prejudice. The more carefully we reflect on what Descartes has written, the more entangled intuition and reliance on the words of others become. Historical reflection, I would like to suggest, helps to cure the philosopher's hubris. This is why it is important to place Wittgenstein and Descartes in their historical context. Such historical awareness lets the philosopher become learned not only about his or her, but about our own ignorance. And as we shall see, there is a connection between such reflection and Cusanus' doctrine of Learned Ignorance, although the latter has a much wider scope. But, one may want to ask in reply, can philosophy survive this cure? Does historical reflection of this sort, or more generally the doctrine of learned ignorance, i.e. reflection on the conditions that prevent human beings from ever gaining free access to On Learned Ignorance Harries 6 what is to be thought, from ever seizing the truth, not bring with it something like the suicide of science, and more especially of philosophy? John Wenck will raise a somewhat related objection to the doctrine of learned ignorance: that it destroys the very foundations of knowledge, of responsible thinking. 3 Can philosophy secure these foundations, as Descartes had hoped? What is philosophy? In the first book of the Metaphysics Aristotle claims that: it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at obvious difficulties, then advanced, little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe.1 Philosophy has its origin in dislocation, in a leave-taking from what is ready to hand, from the everyday world and its concerns. This leave-taking must render philosophy problematic. Thus in Plato's Theaetetus we have the anecdote about the Thracian servant-girl, who mocks Thales for falling into a well while gazing at the mysteries of the sky. Socrates tells this story about the founder of philosophy to illustrate that only the outer form of the philosopher is in the city: the mind, disdaining all littlenesses and nothingnesses of human things, is 'flying all abroad' as Pindar says, measuring earth and heaven, and the things which are under and on the earth and above the heaven, interrogating the whole nature of each and all in their entirety, but not condescending to anything which is within reach.2 Philosophy reaches for what is beyond our reach.

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