Il presente progetto di ricerca si propone di ripercorrere, attraverso un lavoro di attenta analisi testuale, l’intricata trama del discorso cusaniano sul conoscere, interrogandone i nodi problematici ed evidenziandone, al contempo, le mirabili “scoperte”, che Cusano è andato dispiegando nel corso del suo itinerario speculativo. L’inquisitio cusaniana si sviluppa intorno al problema dell’accesso della mente umana, finita e condizionata, alla verità infinita e assoluta: in che modo l’uomo partecipa dell’unità indivisibile della verità, in quale situazione si trova il ricercatore della verità? Sin dalla sua prima grande opera, il trattato sulla Dotta ignoranza portato a compimento nel 1440, Cusano imposta i problemi in modo nuovo, inaugurando, come ebbe il merito di riconoscere Cassirer, una “nuova maniera di pensare”. La coincidentia oppositorum, asse portante della speculazione cusaniana, indica una nuova via di ricerca rispetto alla via tradizionale, basata sulla logica aristotelica del principio di non contraddizione: la scienza razionale di Dio, che i diversi indirizzi scolastici erano andati edificando nel tentativo di dare una veste scientifica al loro discorso su Dio, si rivela agli occhi di Cusano del tutto inadeguata. Nell’assoluta semplicità divina, ove gli opposti coincidono, le distinzioni della ratio conoscono il loro scacco; solo il vedere dell’intellectus, fondato sulla coincidentia oppositorum, può volgersi all’infinito. Dato il carattere di proporzionalità del suo conoscere, l’uomo, il cui fine non può essere vano, può attingere la verità solo negativamente: la nostra naturale aspirazione al sapere si acquieta nel non sapere. Cusano cammina lungo la via apofatica percorsa dallo Pseudo-Dionigi, le cui opere costituiscono una delle fonti più importanti e costanti del pensiero cusaniano, ma non si arresta alla tradizionale teologia negativa, che si limita a sapere ciò che Dio non è: il Nostro muove all’interminabile ricerca di ciò che è. Dio, ad un tempo massimo e minimo, trascende ogni affermazione e negazione: l’incomprensibile, ci dice Cusano, può essere conosciuto soltanto incomprehensibiliter nella docta ignorantia. Se conoscere non è altro che stabilire una proporzione tra ciò che ci è noto e ciò che ci è ignoto, intorno all’infinito, che in quanto infinito sfugge a qualsivoglia proporzione (infiniti ad finitum proportionem non esse), non è possibile alcuna inquisitio comparativa. Muovendo dall’immisurabile sproporzione metafisica tra finito e infinito, Cusano viene a teorizzare un’insuperabile disgiunzione epistemologica tra piano umano e piano divino: il punto di vista del sapere umano non potrà mai arrivare a coincidere con quello della verità. Ma la tensione tra infinito e finito, assoluto ed umano, non sfocia in un esito scettico: se la precisione della verità è per l’uomo irraggiungibile, la più alta forma di conoscenza umana non potrà che essere coniectura. Data la sproporzione tra finito e infinito, la nostra conoscenza della verità si traduce in un symbolice investigare: il simbolo viene a rappresentare la sola via conoscitiva appropriata per ascendere alle cose divine. Seguendo una via già percorsa prima di lui dai Pitagorici (in primis Proclo) e dai Platonici, Cusano scorge nell’uso simbolico del linguaggio matematico il mezzo più efficace di cui la mente dispone al fine di significare le verità trascendenti il piano razionale. Nel discorso gnoseologico ed epistemologico sviluppato dal Cusano, la matematica viene a svolgere un ruolo di assoluta preminenza: la certezza del sapere matematico diviene il punto di partenza della nostra indagine intorno al vero. Ma il sapere matematico non rappresenta solo la via privilegiata al divino, costituisce anche un valido strumento da impiegare nella conoscenza del mondo: fuori dall’ambito della molteplicità (multitudo) e della grandezza (magnitudo) nessuna cosa risulta conoscibile, afferma Cusano. Il Nostro non si limita a seguire le tracce di chi lo ha preceduto: Cusano si preoccupa di giustificare l’uso dei mathematicalia, interrogandone l’origine, la provenienza. Quale tipo di relazione intrattiene la matematica con la verità? Perché le conoscenze che si realizzano nell’ambito della matematica possono dirsi precise? È questo uno dei nodi teorici fondamentali in cui si avviluppa la speculazione cusaniana, è qui che si annuncia il concetto di conoscenza come costruzione di un cosmo razionale: nella matematica abbiamo a che fare con nozioni da noi stessi create e, quindi, quoad nos dotate di somma certezza. La concezione cusaniana della matematica si iscrive nella filosofia della mens: la mente umana, immagine della mente divina, esplica notionaliter, in un mondo di enti razionali, la sua forza creativa. Il Nostro ha indirizzato il pensiero in una nuova direzione praegnans futuri: nell’impostazione cusaniana del problema gnoseologico, la nostra conoscenza della realtà è garantita non più da una perfetta corrispondenza tra essere e pensiero, per cui le nostre nozioni sarebbero l’esatta riproduzione delle cose, ma si fonda sulla vis creativa innata alla mente umana che, immagine della mente divina, va producendo da sé le sue congetture. Cusano instaura un vero e proprio parallelismo tra la fondazione divina del mondo e il processo conoscitivo umano: la vis creativa dell’uomo, che si esplica in un mondo congetturale, viene accostata all’atto creativo di Dio, che pone in essere il mondo reale. Il paradigma cristiano dell’uomo imago dei viene ripreso e svolto da Cusano in maniera nuova e originale: l’essere immagine della mente umana si traduce nella sua partecipazione alla fecondità della natura creatrice propria della mente infinita divina. L’uomo, secundus deus, diventa il creatore del suo mondo: la nostra conoscenza non si riduce ad un mero processo ricettivo, passivo, di riproduzione di immagini, copie, ma reca in sé il seme della creatività divina. L’uomo si conosce ora come artefice di un universo congetturale fatto non solo di enti di ragione, ma anche di quelle forme artificiali, in cui non si può non scorgere un rimando alla cultura tecnico-artistica dell’incipiente Rinascimento. Cusano fa sua la sentenza protagorea dell’uomo misura di tutte le cose, assegnando alla mente, immagine della complicazione divina e non mera esplicazione, la natura di esemplare cui tutte le cose si commisurano nel processo del conoscere: l’uomo, ci dice Cusano, trova nella sua mente tutte le cose come nel fondamento che le misura. Nella rimarchevole simmetria che il Cusano istituisce tra la mente divina e la mente umana permane, però, un’infinita dissomiglianza: nella relazione archetipo-immagine non può esservi reciprocità. Sarebbe, dunque, un errore di prospettiva storica interpretare l’homo mensura del Cusano nel senso del soggettivismo moderno: la nostra mente non è misura assoluta di verità, in quanto trova il suo fondamento ontologico nella mente divina. Nella speculazione cusaniana filosofia e teologia si compenetrano, fondendosi in un orizzonte comune: la possibilità della conoscenza umana si fonda, in ultima istanza, su una certezza di fede, nel rimando del finito all’infinito; l’intrinseca verità delle nostre conoscenze è garantita ab origine dalla somiglianza della nostra mente con la mente infinita, di cui è immagine. La mente umana, misura di tutte le cose, è a sua volta misurata dalla mente divina: la verità in sé non può essere colta se non dalla verità stessa. Il principio normativo della dotta ignoranza riporta il sapere umano, dimentico del suo essere mera espressione congetturale del vero, alla propria costitutiva finitudine: homo non potest iudicare nisi humaniter. La dirompente novità dell’argomentare del Cardinale consiste proprio in questo, nell’aver saputo magistralmente tematizzare, nella sua poderosa opera, l’humanitas del conoscere dell’uomo, mostrandone al contempo gli insuperabili limiti e le straordinarie possibilità.
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).
Verità e conoscenza nel pensiero di Niccolò Cusano
RAGNO, Tatiana
2011-01-01
Abstract
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).File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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