Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at historyofilosophy.net. Today's episode, Opposites Attract, Nicholas of Cousin.

Whatever weaknesses I may have as a historian of philosophy, I would be willing to claim one great strength and ability to work up terrific enthusiasm for whichever philosopher I happen to be reading.

Ask me who my favorite philosopher is, and I'm liable to just tell you that it's the one who I'm covering at the moment in this podcast.

But it doesn't hurt when the figure in question reminds me of my real favorite philosopher, the great insina, known in Latin as Avassana, which has made it especially easy for me to warm to Nicholas of Cousin.

That may seem surprising. What did this 15th century bishop from Germany have in common with a Muslim scientist, doctor, and philosopher of 11th century Persia?

Well, for one thing, the quiet confidence that they had achieved greater heights even than Aristotle. But what I have in mind is something else, the strategy both use in offering their philosophical accounts of God.

It's a strategy that is perhaps more familiar from the medieval Christian philosopher, Anselm, who posited that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived.

On the basis of this single idea, Anselm went on to prove that God exists, this being his famous ontological argument, and then to derive all the usual divine attributes of God.

Similarly, Avassana introduced the idea of God as the necessary existent. After proving that there is indeed a necessary existent, he argued that such an existent would have to be unique, knowing, immaterial, powerful, generous, and so on.

Nicholas of Cousin does the same thing, and repeatedly, in several of his major works, he puts forward a core idea and uses it to help us understand God, or rather to help us realize that we do not understand him.

Let's consider three such attempts from his fairly massive corpus of writings, starting with his most famous treatise on learned ignorance written in 1440.

In this case, his fundamental idea is that God is the absolute maximum, then which nothing can be greater. This is a pretty obvious reminiscent of Anselm, and to some extent Cousin proceeds, as Anselm did, showing that the maximum must be one necessary and eternal.

But he's not just trying to derive a series of epiphets from the notion of maximality, instead he draws out a series of paradoxes, starting with the apparently contradictory claim that the absolute maximum would also be an absolute minimum.

This is because both the absolute maximum and the absolute minimum are everything that they could possibly be, the maximum, because nothing could be greater than it, the minimum, because nothing can be less than it.

For Anselm, God was that then which nothing greater could be conceived. Cousin goes him one better, or worse, God is that then which there is nothing greater and nothing lesser.

The identity of maximum and minimum is a coincidence between opposites, the idea for which Cousin is probably most famous.

His idea is that opposition breaks down at the level of God, the absolute maximum, something he tries to convey using mathematical analogies.

He equates the maximum with the infinite, which is fairly plausible, given that infinity is that then which there can be nothing greater.

He then shows how, at the scale of infinity, apparent oppositions collapse. A minimally curved line becomes indistinguishable from a straight line.

A triangle whose angles are maximally wide, that is 180 degrees, also becomes a straight line.

These analogies help us to see how things we normally take to be different from one another, even contradictory to one another, would come together and achieve identity in the absolute maximum, which is also the absolute minimum.

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