Nicolaus Cusanus Unbound: An Investigation into Parallels between his Liberal Philosophy and Object-Oriented Ontology

Abstract

This paper intends to reexamine the idiosyncratic thoughts of Nicholaus Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa), a fifteenth-century German theologian-cum-philosopher who has generally been considered to be just a transitional figure to the succeeding, modern thinkers. The chief argument of this essay is that his conception of God as both immanent and transcendent has a number of interesting parallels with contemporary, de- anthropocentric philosophies, especially with Graham Harman‘s object-oriented ontology (OOO), and in fact can be regarded as a prescient harbinger to OOO in that Nicholas evidently urges one to assume a more liberal worldview while simultaneously equipping his own theory with a logic intelligible to others. In the closing section, the author of this paper poses a few proposals drawn from the investigation both to the discipline of philosophy and to the general public.