Earlier this year, I resolved to investigate a little studied domain of epistemology that Nicholas of Cusa had developed in the spirit of Plato and with the help of a few Pythagoreans; that is, the domain of incommensurable proportionalities in the coincidence of opposites. The proportion I am putting under scrutiny here is as follows:
The polyhedron is to the sphere as the polygon is to the circle in the same proportion as the human mind is to God’s Mind.
Of all of the Platonists throughout history, it is Nicholas of Cusa who best understood the epistemological necessity of relating the human mind to such incommensurable opposite realities as God’s Mind, in proportion to the human mind. And, what he conceived within such a proportion, he applied to a new conception of music and of time, a conception that he identified as a modality of “timeless time.”
