Lecture II

GA 326/1922-12-25/p038 ·1922-12-25 · English MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
Record: unknown. How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.

About a hundred years after the Docta Ignorantia appeared in 1440, the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium appeared in 1543. one century later, Copernicus, with his mathematical mind, took hold of the other side, the external side of what Cusanus could not fully grasp, not even symbolically, with mathematics. Today, we see how in fact the application of this mathematical mind to nature becomes possible the moment that nature vanishes from man's immediate experience. This can be traced even in the history of language since “Nature” refers to something that is related to “being born,” whereas what we consider as nature today is only the corporeal world in which everything is dead. I mean that it is dead for us since, of course, nature contains life and spirit. But it has become lifeless for us and the most certain of conceptual systems, namely, the mathematical, is regarded as the best way to grasp it.

Read this passage in another edition
ENEnglish
Raw JSON: /v1/steiner/en/ga/326/1922-12-25/p038.json
Cite: GA 326/1922-12-25/p038 · edition English