The conjectural art as Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of Others: Tradition and innovation

Abstract

In the last chapter of “De coniecturis”, Cusanus exhorts his friend, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, to get to know himself. This classical philosophical topic is revisited by Cusanus here in an original manner. On the one hand, Cusanus’ perspective reveals the strong influence of Proclus, which deserves to be highlighted. On the other, unlike Proclus, Cusanus asserts that self-knowledge is explicitly linked to the topic of the human being as created ad imaginem and that of the world as the sphere of contraction. Cusanus bases both subjective matters on the triune principle. According to him, the Divine Trinity is the exemplar that cannot be reached by an image, and the effort to reach the Trinity constitutes the basic requirement for the conjectural construction of the self. Furthermore, the fact that this understanding of the Trinity implies a distinction in itself makes the Trinity the principle of all difference or otherness in plurality. Cusanus concludes that the image can only be constructed relationally, that it is not possible to attain God without a fundamental knowledge of the self as an image, and that no one knows his own self without knowing others at the same time.