Paul Richard Blum

To explain the interaction of stillness and motion of thought, Nicholas Cusanus formulated his renowned comparison with a cosmographer, which through five gateways, corresponding to the five senses, receives information about the world in the form of messages. What follows therefrom is not directly an analysis of the world but of the Creator, whom the philosopher mirrors in himself as a creator of scientific symbols.Cusanus was repeatedly suspected of Pantheism. What is crucial, however, for the critique of reasonning is the parallelism, that God's omnipresence in his creation corresponds to a universal capacity of the human mind to perceive everything by means of a hypothetical otherness . Therefrom proceeds the general projection that everything can be seen in mathematical terms. Mathematical calculating, working with figures, reducing to units, leads Cusanus to God's creative power as much as to the functioning of the intellect.However, his renowned mental experiments on the minimum and maximum were purely in pursuit of the goal of describing the fluid frontiers of defined thought. This is also true of his cosmology. Cusanus argued mathematically in order to prove the non-mathematical and the non-realistic

The history of philosophy has to understand the problems to which past theories are intended as answers,rather than taking the latter as sets of doctrines, which may be correct or mistaken. Examples from theRenaissance are Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino, Bernardino Telesio, Girolamo Cardano, and BenedictusPererius: they show that Renaissance thinkers sought for principles of nature in terms of active powers.Whoever denies the validity of such ideas has the burden of proof that alternative theories solve the sameproblems