Infinity and Perspective (review)

Philosophical historians like Ernst Cassirer and Hans Blumenberg have done good work on the late-medieval and Renaissance prehistory of modern science. Like them, Harries is fascinated by the slowly changing views a century before Copernicus (1473-1543). Nicholas of Cusa, a prince of the church, led the way in epistemological speculation on the implications of an infinite universe. One implication is the inevitability of perspective. "Copernican revolution" would come to mean any boon in objectivity that results from a counterintuitive change of perspective—in the case of the first such revolution (Copernicus's), under the guidance not of vision but of mathematics. Eventually, though, we became too adept at perspectives, lost confidence in their objectivity; and what began as a discipline for the attainment of higher truth dead-ended in nihilism. Is there no common measure, no perspective that is not exclusionary? Harries hints at the possibility of "an altogether new postmodern geocentrism," grounded in a common understanding of a common plight on a common planet, the ultimate ecological context of all human life.