Nicholas of Cusa's Coincidentia Oppositorum
The English term "coincidence of
opposites" is derived from the Latin term
coincidentia oppositorum,
the fullest exploration of which is attributed to
Nicholas
of Cusa, also called Nicolas Cusanus, whose 1450 Of Learned Ignorance
(De Docta Ignorantia), sets forth a theological and geometrical
justification
for the concept. Like the Romantics
in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, Cusanus in the fifteenth century felt discontent with the
logical
exclusions imposed upon him.
Reacting against a theology that limited the
power of God and the power of man, Cusanus set forth a counter
theory.
Similarly,
reacting against a neo-classicism that limited the power of man,
many Romantics accepted or assumed a theory similar to that of Cusanus. In
response to the limits set by the rational compromises that guided
the
Enlightenment,
Romantic writers sought a way to surpass exclusions by bringing
together forces that neo-classical thought kept separate. Paradoxically, but
appropriately, neo-classical writers also used the coincidence of
opposites as
a way of maintaining the status
quo. But while Pope, the example of
neo-
classicism in this study, poses a mysterious coincidence of opposites
that
keeps man and God separate, Blake, and to a lesser extent the
other Romantics,
pose a coincidence of opposites that radically joins God and man.
Cusanus does not receive much attention
from historians of philosophy;
part of the reason can be found in the destructive nature of his theory,
which
denies a major aspect of the tradition of reason in
philosophy. According to
Pauline
Moffitt Watts, Cusanus's doctrine of learned ignorance
begins at that
very point at which the usual modes of philosophizing
collapse; the root
of "learned ignorance" is the fact that absolute truth
is beyond man's
grasp. For this reason, Cusanus's new
mode of speculation
"undoubtedly
vanquishes all modes of ratiocination of all philosophers."
<1>
Ernst Cassirer puts the issue most succinctly: to reconcile
opposites would
dissolve philosophy itself.
<2>
Because we in the twentieth century are so
accustomed to an empiricist
perspective, the very basis of the coincidence of opposites can easily
elude
us. The difficulty of
acknowledging the concept even when the writer
emphasizes it finds an unexpected example in Northrop Frye's
posthumously
published work The Double
Vision. <3> Even though Frye, probably the best
interpreter of Blake, takes his title from a poem by Blake, he
interprets
Blake's
double vision in a way that gives a priority which Blake does not give
and which the concept of the coincidence of opposites does not give. The
phrase "double vision," occurs in a poem in a letter to
Blake's patron Thomas
Butts:
For double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me:
With my inward eye 'tis an old man grey;
With my outward a thistle
across my way.
(E721)
The
poem goes on to see a living human in every object. In his explanation of
this passage Frye comments, "the conscious subject is not really
perceiving
until it recognizes itself as part of what it
perceives." This comment seems
valid enough; it emphasizes the unity of subject and object,
which is
fundamental to the double vision which sees the coincidence of
opposites.
However,
Frye goes on, "First, there is the world of the thistle, the world of
nature presented directly to us." <4> A more careful reading of the quatrain
reveals that Blake "first" describes the vision of his
"inward eye," which
perceives an old man grey, before he describes the vision of his
"outward"
eye. In a poem that emphasizes the
constancy of his "double vision," Blake
aids us in seeing with that double vision by first mentioning the half of
his
vision that is not ordinary sight, not what we would ordinarily,
naturally
expect to perceive first.
Never, he claims, does he see with the single
vision (later labeled in the poem "
and that Frye wants to put before us.
In Blake's double vision there is no such
thing as "the world of nature
presented directly to us"; such a vision is single vision,
which is always
already based on an ideology--in Blake's day, and in ours, usually
an ideology
of empiricism. Blake insists on
always maintaining a double vision, in which
a man and a thistle are seen at the same time and to the same
extent. To help
us to overcome the limits of single vision, Blake first describes the man
seen
by the inward eye. Despite that
word order, however, and despite Blake's
insistence on permanent double vision, Frye begins by interpreting
the poem in
terms of single vision.
Such single vision seems most "natural" to us; Blake,
and to a lesser extent the other writers considered in this book, fight to
free us from that natural bondage.
Blake's reversal of the ordinary way of
seeing, an ordinary way of seeing that Frye himself falls into,
implies a
coincidence of opposites by its very defiance of common vision. Instead of
interpreting this passage with the priority given by Blake, Frye
interprets it
with the priority given by ordinary vision, the very kind of vision that
Blake
is replacing (or reversing or extending) in his poem. Thus the simplest form
of the coincidence of opposites, a basic reversal in priority between
empirical vision and imaginative vision, becomes impossible to see
with
ordinary vision. Held
prisoner by common sense, Frye over-rides even the most
obvious implication of Blake's insistent message and surprising
word order to
impose the tyranny of single vision over the liberation of double
vision.
These
comments are not meant to denigrate Frye but to illuminate how elusive
the coincidence of opposites can be even to the most perceptive
observer. Our
habitual, limited ways of seeing make Blake either impenetrable or
easily
misconstruable.
With a similar singleness of vision, Leo
Damrosch, one of Blake's finest
interpreters, insists that proponents of the coincidence of opposites
must
accept things as they are.
After explaining similarities between Blake and
Cusanus,
he implicitly consigns the coincidence of opposites to the
conservative side:
In the end Blake cannot truly reconcile
contraries because, like the
Puritans whose moral intensity he shares,
he can only solve the problem
of alienation by
exclusion or casting out: sheep and goats.
A true
acceptance of opposites
demands a skeptical temperament and a commitment
finally to things
as they are. <5>
But how
are things? Damrosch falls into a trap
similar to the one that
Northrop
Frye falls into in The Double Vision: both Frye's "world of nature
directly presented to us" and Damrosch's
"things as they are" imply an
empirical, common sensical seeing with the
eye instead of an imaginative,
Blakean seeing through the eye. "I question not my Corporeal
or Vegetative Eye
any more than I would Question a Window concering
a Sight I look thro it & not
with it." <6>
Damrosch further loads his implicit dismissal of Blakean vision
with the phrase, "true acceptance." What would be a "false" acceptance
of the
coincidence of opposites?
According to Damrosch, Blake's "false" coincidence
of opposites asserts unity by excluding recalcitrant elements. Instead, as I
shall demonstrate in my chapters on Pope and Blake, it is Pope
who excludes by
accepting that there are things that we do not know, things that are
known
only by God. Blake, on the other
hand, by insisting that man, like God, can
know all, produces a "true" coincidence of opposites, one that
does not accept
the ideology of "things as they are."
Furthermore we probably should not look for
Blake to "reconcile"
contraries. When he defines
the Prolific and the Devourer in The Marriage of
Heaven
and Hell, he insists:
These two classes of men are always upon
earth, & they should be
enemies; whoever
tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.
Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the
two.
Note.
Jesus Christ did not wish to unite but to seperate
[sic] them, as
in the Parable of
sheep and goats! & he says I came not to send Peace but
a Sword. <7>
"'To believe in a God,' says
Wittgenstein simply, 'means to see that the
facts of the world are not the end of the matter.'"
<8> Nor are they, in
Blake's vision, even the beginning of the matter.
I do not mean to belittle
Frye or
Damrosch; I adduce these examples to show how easy, how tempting,
indeed how "natural" it is for us to fall into reading
even Blake in
conventional terms, even when he is explicitly, directly urging a
larger
vision upon us.
Both Pope and Blake insist on an identity
between the universal and the
particular, but they insist in very different ways. Pope, more like Cusanus,
uses the coincidence of opposites to justify mystery, to build a negative
theology. Blake, extending
Cusanus's implications, uses the coincidence of
opposites to blast mystery, to build a constructive theology. My chapters on
Pope
and Blake will explore some of the details of this difference. Even
though Pope uses the coincidence of opposites in a very
conservative,
mystifying way and Blake uses it in a very revolutionary, opening
way, both of
them include many strong elements of the opposite view. For example, Pope
insists on the strength of the ruling passion, even though it
apparently works
against reason; Blake insists that the traditional God of Sinai
inspired
As so often in philosophical issues, the
lines of argument in the
coincidence of opposites can be traced back to Aristotle and Plato, or
more
precisely to the traditions promulgated by the followers of
Aristotle and
Plato. In general the position that opposites can
coincide derives from
Plato
and his followers, especially Proclus the
neo-Platonist, who especially
admired Plato's dialogue Parmenides. (Cusanus himself commissioned a
translation of this dialogue.)
According to Ernst Cassirer, Cusanus more
than any other thinker carried on the line of Plato: "Cusanus . . .
was
perhaps the first Western thinker to attain an independent insight
into the
fundamental and essential sources of Platonic doctrine."
<9>
The followers of Plato adhered to the law
of unity: the Many is finally,
ideally the One. This
idealistic monism traditionally has been seen as less
practical than Aristotle's more worldly viewpoint. Raymond Klibansky
quotes
the translator Georgius quoting Pope Nicholas V:
Aristotle's political theory was more
suitable to this life, while that of
Plato was more appropriate to the state of
innocence, had man not sinned
and fallen. <10>
Coleridge
makes a similar distinction between Plato and Aristotle:
Plato's words are preparatory exercises for
the mind. He leads you to see
that propositions
involving in themselves a contradiction in terms are
nevertheless true;
and which, therefore, must belong to a higher logic--
that of
ideas. They are self-contradictory only
in the Aristotelian
logic, which is
the instrument of the understanding.
<11>
4
A
common sense viewpoint, one at home in the real world, refuses its opposite,
an idealistic viewpoint, one at home in some other, better, imagined
world.
Coleridge,
like Blake, sees through ordinary common sense to reverse that
natural viewpoint.
The position that opposites can not
coincide derives from Aristotle and
his followers, who asserted the Law of Contradiction, also known as the
Law
of Non-Contradiction. Certain
pairs of statements necessarily contradict each
other and therefore can not both be true at the same time. This axiom is the
most fundamental axiom of reasonable discourse, its sine qua non. Thus when
Cusanus,
and Pope, and Coleridge, and Mary Shelley, and Percy Bysshe Shelly,
and Blake attack or even simply question the Law of Non-Contradiction,
they
are questioning not only Aristotle, but the very foundation of reason at
its
most necessary and self-evident base.
As Aristotle asserts the axiom:
the most certain
principle of all is that about which one cannot be
mistaken; for such
a principle must be both the most familiar (for it is
about the
unfamiliar that errors are always made), and not based on
hypothesis. For the principle which the student of any
form of Being must
grasp is no
hypothesis; and that which a man must know if he knows
anything, he must
bring with him to his task. Clearly,
then, it is a
principle of this
kind that is the most certain of all principles. Let us
next state what
this principle is. "It is
impossible for the same
attribute at once
to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the
same
relation"; and we must add any further qualifications that may be
necessary to meet
logical objections. This is the most
certain of all
principles, since
it possesses the required definition; for it is
impossible for
anyone to suppose that the same thing is and is not, as
some think Heraclitus says--for what a man says does not necessarily
represent what he
believes. And if it is impossible for
contrary
attributes to belong at the same time to the same subject
(the usual
qualifications
must be added to this premiss also), and an opinion
which
contradicts
another is contrary to it, then clearly it is impossible for
the same man to
suppose at the same time that the same thing is and is
not; for the man
who made this error would entertain two contrary opinions
at the same
time. Hence all men who are
demonstrating anything refer back
to this as an
ultimate belief; for it is by nature the starting-point of
all the other
axioms as well. <12>
Among
the many good explanations of Aristotle's idea is one by John Ferguson:
Aristotle takes as the most certain of all
principles the law of
contradiction:
'the same attribute cannot at the same time and in the
same respect both
belong and not belong to the same subject' (1005b19).
He feels so strongly on the importance of
establishing this that he
offers a series of
proofs of its validity: for example, if all
contradictory
statements are true of the same subject at the same time,
then all things
will be one; the blunt fact is that all men do make some
unqualified
judgments, and Aristotle is content to stick to the common
sense of
that. . . . Aristotle denies that one
opinion is as good as
another, or that
there is truth in appearances. . . .
Those who deny the
law of
contradiction need to be convinced that there is an unchanging
reality, something
which is prior to sensation. . . . the alternative is
a thoroughgoing
relativism, which Aristotle regards as absurd.
(1011b23). <13>
We
begin, then, in Aristotle's Law of Non-Contradiction, from a
bedrock of
common sense, without which the entire universe of human
epistemology would
supposedly collapse. As
Aristotle's ideas were extrapolated and discussed
through the centuries, and as the science of logic developed,
hundreds of
elaborate and intricate schemes, replete with diagrams and the
special
language of the cognoscenti, found their place in the ongoing
discussion.
Here is
a typical example of a twentieth-century textbook exegesis:
Standard-form categorical propositions
having the same subject and
predicate terms
may differ from each other in quality [affirmative or
negative] or in
quantity [all, some, no] or in both.
This kind of
differing was
given the technical name 'opposition' by older logicians,
and certain
important truth relations were correlated with the various
kinds of
opposition. Two propositions are contradictories
if one is the
denial or negation
of the other, that is, if they cannot both be true and
they cannot both
be false. It is clear that
two standard-form
categorical
propositions having the same subject and predicate terms but
differing from
each other both in quantity and in quality are
contradictories. .
. . The traditional or Aristotelian
account of
categorical
propositions held that universal propositions [[1]A[1]
and [1]E[1]]
having
the same subject
and predicate terms but differing in quality were
contraries. . . .
Schematically we may say that the contradictory of "All
S is P" is "Some S is not
P," and the contradictory of "No S is P" is
"Some S is P"; [1]A[1]
and [1]O[1]
are contradictories, as are [1]E[1]
and [1]I[1].
<14>
Whether
contraries or contradictories (we shall meet with some similar, but
more crucial distinctions later in Coleridge and Blake), the principle of
Non-
Contradiction
stands: logically, when contraries or contradictories exist, one
side completely, irrevocably, logically, common sensically
excludes the other.
They
cannot both be true.
So powerful did Aristotle's Law of
Non-Contradiction become in medieval
Christianity
that it limited even the power of God: he could not do anything
that would violate that law. The
general philosophical problem of whether God
could contain logical contradictions sometimes found expression
in one
particular question: can God foresee the future? If he can, then man does not
have free will. It is not possible
for God to foresee something and for it
not to happen. According to the Law
of Non-Contradiction, we cannot have it
both ways at the same time.
Likewise, it would be impossible for God to
foresee that something will not happen and for that thing to
happen. Thus
God's
foreknowledge and man's free will come into philosophical conflict, as a
subsection of the problem of non-contradiction even within the
omnipotence of
God.
Cusanus's coincidence of opposites provides
a way out of that dilemma. One
of his answers expands the concept of possibility:
human nature
embraces both those who are and those who neither are nor
will be, though
they could have been. Consequently, if
even what never
shall be should
come to pass, nothing would be added to divine
for it equally
comprises actual events and those which, though possible,
do not take
place. <15>
Thus
Cusanus's coincidence of opposites includes not only what happens or what
might happen; it includes both what will happen and what will
not happen. We
can have it both ways. In fact, we
must have it both ways. In God's power,
the old Aristotelian Law of Non-Contradiction becomes replaced by the
coincidence of opposites. The
law of limited possibilities is transcended, as
is the law that two things cannot happen at the same time if they are
logically inconsistent. For
in the timeless mind of God, which contains all
of past, present, and future, all possibilities and all non-possibilities
must
exist, including the improbable and the supposedly
impossible.
Cusanus further develops his refutation of
God's limitations that would be
imposed by the Law of Non-Contradiction:
God's infinite
though possible,
shall not happen; and, in much the same way as a genus
contains different
species, it includes things contrary to one another. .
. . What God has foreseen He necessarily
has foreseen, for His Providence
is necessary and
unchangeable; yet He was also able to foresee the
opposite. . . .
Though tomorrow, e.g., I can choose between reading and
not reading, my
choice, whichever it be, is known to
contraries are
among its objects. Therefore, whatever I
shall have
chosen to do will
be done in accordance with divine
<16>
This
kind of double talk clearly does not please the rational philosopher. J.
B.
Hawkins, in his introduction to Germain Heron's
translation of De Docta
Ignorantia,
gently mocks:
There are not many who are likely to take
all this very seriously as an
adumbration of
ultimate mystery. Some will be irresistibly
reminded of
Lewis Carroll, and others may despise what
seems to be no more than
conjuring with
words. <17>
Certainly
Cusanus is conjuring with words, but as a clever conjuror he
produces a magic that joyfully exploits the potential of language
to reveal
and even embody the philosophical abstractions that fall short of
explaining
life.
Cusanus's coincidence of opposites frees
man from the tyranny of the
senses, the tyranny of common sense, the tyranny of logic. By freeing God
from lower logic, Cusanus also frees man into a closer apprehension of his
divinity:
the coincidentia
oppositorum represents more than Cusanus's critique of
scholastic logic
and natural philosophy. Through it,
Cusanus also
transcends the
late scholastic notion of the potentia absoluta of God;
namely that God,
through his absolute power, could do or make anything
provided it did
not violate the law of contradiction.
For Cusanus, the
law of
contradiction itself qualifies God's freedom and omnipotence.
<18>
Thus Cusanus does, as will Blake, use the
coincidence of opposites as a
way of freeing God from human constraints.
Blake, by combining human and
divine, will also free man from such a limited view of the divine
humanity.
Both
Blake and Cusanus see God as more free than tradition allows:
in conceiving of
God as the coincidentia oppositorum, Cusanus went beyond
all of the
scholastics, and established more radical guarantees for the
absolute freedom
and transcendence of the divine.
<19>
Blake
then goes further to establish yet more radical guarantees for the
absolute freedom and transcendence and immanence of the divine
humanity.
Ernst Cassirer,
in very Coleridgean language, puts Cusanus firmly
into the
history of philosophy when he insists on the central role that
Cusanus played
in the Renaissance:
Any study that seeks to view the philosophy
of the Renaissance as a
systematic unity must take as its point of departure the doctrines
of
Nicholas Cusanus. Of all the philosophical movements and
efforts of the
7
Quattrocento,
only his doctrines fulfil Hegel's demand; only they
represent a
'simple focal point' in which the most diverse rays are
gathered. Cusanus is the only thinker of the period to
look at all of the
fundamental
problems of his time from the point of view of one principle
through which he
masters them all. . . . [That principle]
includes the
totality of the
spiritual and physical cosmos.
<20>
As we
shall see later, Coleridge insisted on a similar unified system.
Cusanus's purpose in his coincidentia oppositorum could be said
to be to
justify the ways of God to man, that is, to re-write man's
perspective into
God's perspective. From man's
perspective, from the perspective of
Aristotelian
logic, man and therefore God are both limited.
But from God's
perspective, according to Cusanus and the coincidence of opposites,
God is not
limited. The important
thing for Cusanus is not the coincidence of opposites
per se, but rather the infinity of God.
The coincidence of opposites is a
tool for realizing, or at least accepting, that infinity. Similarly, Blake
will use the coincidence of opposites as a tool for realizing the infinity
and
unity of God and man.
Although Cusanus keeps an infinite distance between man
and God, Blake will bridge that distance.
The path taken by Cusanus to reach his new
concept of the freedom of God
in the coincidentia oppositorum
begins with two opposing, complementary
principles: the principle of expansion and the principle of
limitation. The
principle of expansion states that man, like all created things,
wants to find
his fullest possible self-expression:
We see that God has implanted in all things
a natural desire to exist
with the fullest
measure of existence that is compatible with their
particular
nature. <21>
In his exploration of the
concept of the Great Chain of Being, A. O.
Lovejoy
calls this principle the principle of plenitude. <22> At the same
time, in the opposite direction, this striving toward fullness is limited
by
the particular position of the creature.
In man's case, his inquiry must
begin with and is limited to what he knows. These two opposing forces act as
centripetal and centrifugal forces, at once thrusting man out as far
as he can
go to his potential and at the same time limiting him within his
orbit.
Cusanus thinks that man must begin with
what he knows from his limited
perspective. Beyond what he
knows, he can only analogize: "every inquiry is
comparative and uses the method of analogy." <23> As we shall see,
this
latter principle of limitation is the keystone to Alexander
Pope's whole
theory of man's knowledge of the universe. Here in Cusanus, the two opposing
tendencies work equally.
Cusanus's principle of limitation is based on a
concept of infinity as beyond human understanding and therefore
beyond all
analogizing: "the infinite as infinite is unknown, since it is
away and above
all comparison." <24> Even the greatest possible expansion,
the fulfillment
of man's capacities, no matter how close it might theoretically come, can
not,
by its finite nature, achieve or comprehend the infinite. Man's limitation
must finally over-rule his potential for expansion.
As we shall see later, Blake denies this
inaccessibility of the infinite
to man. In particular in the
tractates he insists that man could not desire
infinity if he did not perceive it:
More!
More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All
cannot satisfy
Man. . . . The desire of Man being Infinite
the possession is Infinite &
himself
Infinite. <25>
Therefore
perception must exist beyond the senses, and by implication beyond
the ordinary limitations as posed by Cusanus and Pope.
Part of man's limitation resides in
language, which embodies the problem
of specificity. Just as we must,
according to Cusanus, rise above our
physical human restrictions, so we must transcend language, which
in its
abstractions allows us to formulate the Law of Non-Contradiction. But in
Blake's
poetry, language is used not only as a trap in the Law of Non-
Contradiction, but also as a means of escape.
Cusanus sees language as an
absolute limit to the potential of man's understanding of God. Language must
therefore be transcended, risen above. Blake's insight is that this kind of
transcendence can be blended with an absolute immanence. Thus language, while
remaining limited by the real world, at the same time is the means
of
transfiguration into the visionary world.
Cusanus wants to deny the potential
of language. He values
"rising above the literal sense of the words . . .
leaving aside what is sensible in them in order to arrive
unimpeded at what is
purely intelligible." <26> Cusanus's method thus sounds like
traditional
Platonism:
"the more we abstract from sensible conditions, the more certain
and solid our knowledge is." <27> Cusanus's method leaves behind the
empirical as a standard. He
is not searching for something material.
He is
rather searching for something beyond the material. To man's understanding
such a goal is nothing because it is not accessible to the senses: "an
understanding of God is not so much an approach towards something as
towards
nothing." <28>
This negative theology, this insistence by
Cusanus on wordlessness, of
believing in a realm beyond articulation even if we can never
experience it
directly, is one of the main streams of his neo-Platonism. The tradition of
Parmenides
always leads to this wordlessness:
In analogy with this movement of the Soul
towards the One, Parmenides
removes at the end
of the discussion, not only all affirmation, but also
all negation and,
indeed, all speech, indicating that all discourse about
the One leads to a
point where language fails. . . . The
last step is to
purge the Soul
from all dialectic activity. Thus, by
negation, Parmenides
removes negation
itself. And silence ends the discourse
of the One. <29>
Of
course such silence would remove all language, all writing, all
literature.
That
which Cusanus and Pope claim to be beyond the realm of language, the
coincidence of opposites, Shelley and Blake will manifest in language.
Cusanus's denial of language is based on
his search for a deeper truth, an
essence. He believes that
there is a bedrock truth, a Platonic Christian God,
whose fundamental nature is by definition unavailable to human
understanding:
"the quiddity of things, which is ontological truth, is
unattainable in its
entirety." <30> Even though the method of attempting
ignorant understanding
of the existence, essence, and ways of God must proceed from the known in
hopes of acknowledging the unknown, ultimately such a goal can
never be
reached: "infiniti ad finitum proportionem non esse." <31>
Man's limited understanding can never grasp
the totality because of its
very nature: "what man observes in nature is absolute incommensurability
. . .
Man's
reason operates only within the realm of inequalities and
contradictions." <32> According to Cusanus, there is no
proportion between
the infinite and finite because any proportion needs similar qualities.
<33>
Man's
limited abilities mean that he can not by reason or understanding alone
reach the ultimate truth: "understanding . . . is
fundamentally unable by any
rational process to reconcile contradictories." <34>
In fact Cusanus even uses man's reason to
link man to the natural level,
the level that he shares with the rest of the material, lower
creation.
Instead
of reason being the highest quality of man, it is rather analogous to
t