The Infinite Sphere's Image and its Reception in Cusanus in the Light of Peter Sloterdijk?s Spherology

JOSÉ GONZÁLEZ RÍOS

Cusanus Today: Thinking with Nicholas of Cusa Between Philosophy and Theology

Catholic University of America Press

Lugar: Washington D.C.; Año: 2024; p. 1 - 14

This paper presents how the image of the sphere is moved by the Cusan not only from maximum absolute to maximum contracted, but also to every created being, making each one a sphaera occasionata in itself. Hence, contrary to Slotedijk´s opinion, Nicholas of Cusa has shown the relationship between the two systems of spheres that the Liber XXIV philosophorum itself proposed without having offered clarification on the subject. Cusanus himself repeatedly warns that the ultimate elucidation about the relationship between the one (complication) and the many (explicatio) remains incomprehensible to a finite understanding, ?for [the world] will appear as a wheel in a wheel and a sphere in a sphere, having its center and circumference nowhere, as was stated.? Yet Nicholas of Cusa, guided by his docta ignorantia, offers a system of spheres that evidences a life continuum: from the maximum absolute sphere to the maximum contracted sphere, and from this one to the innumerable contracted spheres that are, in their own way, in their singularity, center of the universe that is all in all.