Difference and knowledge

Nicholas of Cusa broke with traditional Aristotelian views of uniform substance and motion.  No two things are ever exactly the same: ”two or more objects cannot be so similar and equal that they could not still be more similar ad infinitum . Consequently, however equal the measured and the measured thing may be, they will always remain different.”

Thus, difference is the universal reality of the creation.  ”Wherefore it follows, that, except for God, all positable things differ.”

And this in turn means that all measures of things are imprecise:

“one motion cannot be equal to another; nor can one motion be the measure of another, since, necessarily, the measure, and the thing measured differ. Although these points will be of use to you regarding an infinite number of things, nevertheless, if you transfer them to astronomy, you will recognize that the art of calculating lacks precision, since it presupposes that the motion of all the other planets can be measured by reference to the motion of the sun . . . . And since no two places agree precisely in time and setting, it is evident that judgments about the stars are, in their specificity, far from precise . . . ”

Universal differentiation might seem to produce skepticism.  Where’s the stable self-same that can ground our knowledge?  Nowhere, Cusa says.

But this doesn’t mean that knowledge is impossible.  On the contrary, it’s difference that makes knowledge possible.  We know only by relation, by similarity of this to that and that to this.  If this and that are similar, they are also, necessarily different from one another.  If they were perfectly identical, they could not be similar but identical.  But if they were perfectly identical, I couldn’t tell them apart and therefore I couldn’t know either one.

Of course, if difference is univocally the truth about everything, we don’t have knowledge either.  Then we have only the undifferentiation of absolute difference, which is just the underside of absolute sameness.  Analogy is the model.