“TURBA” ROH INSANI

Tentang Epistemologi Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464)1

Abstract

Treating the possibilities and limitations of human knowledge, Cusanus shows how each kind of knowledge (by senses, reason, intellect and spiritual intuition) is conditioned by the next higher kind that constitutes its “presupposition” or “higher cause”. So he affirms God himself as most fundamental a priori of human thinking. Awareness of the plural, different and oppositional material things is conditioned by the unity of the senses, and supposed by it. But the senses would not be able to be aware of the plurality of “sensibilia”, if there was no higher unity, i.e. rational thinking. The activity of reason in the senses enables them to discern the “phantasmata”, to determine them as “this” or “that”, and –by doing so– to produce awareness. But in order to build abstract concepts and to judge its own reasoning, the reason –in turn– presupposes illumination by the intellect that is trans-rational in itself, both as eidetic vision of the essence of beings and as the incomprehensible vision of essentiality as such. What by the “ratio” must be separated disjunctively as incompatible opposites, is copulatively and coincidently seen by the “intellectus” as gathered in the unity of the necessary coherence of essences. This kind of intellectual knowledge is called “disciplina” by Cusanus, whereas the other, higher kind is called “intelligentia”; the latter means a moment of absoluteness in human knowledge: the knowledge of the divine.