Arte e metafisica in Cusano e Leibniz: prospettive a confronto

In their respective philosophical researches, Nicholas of Cusa and Leibniz share an effort at representation. They both consider metaphysics as a vision science, in which concepts such as ‘distance’, ‘perspective’, ‘angle of view’, acquire an important philosophical meaning. As a consequence, their thinkings can be defined as philosophies of vision, striving for the panopticon – as far as Leibniz is concerned, suffice it to say that the “essences of our souls are certain expressions, imitations or images of the divine essence, divine thought and divine will, including all the ideas which are there contained”. In these philosophies, the human vision is elevated to the status of philosophical methodology, which in Leibniz’s work takes the high-sounding form of theodicy (the justification of evil intended as a particular moment, a mere dissonance dissolving into the all-encompassing whole of the harmonic vision: concinnitas, proportio, consensus partium, where everything is endowed with a degree of perfection compatible with universal harmony). In Cusa’s thinking, on the mystical plane, vision – by means of a conversion process according to which videre and videri coincide – strives for the divine absoluta visio, i. e. the unlimited vision, a 360-degree vision, which leads the human thought to the coincidence of the opposites, and to the acknowledgment of the necessity of a perspective integration, and of an interaction, even between religions (as demonstrated by De concordantia catholica).