Infinity Hurts Your Brain, Ctd

by Zoë Pollock

Mark Goldblatt elaborates on infinity with the ideas of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). To understand the "infinite nature of God" Cusa uses a geometric metaphor. Imagine a square inside a circle. While it doesn't quite fit, the more sides you add to the square (from pentagon to octagon to dodecagon), the more it resembles the circle:

The act of adding sides to a plane figure brings you closer to both an infinite number of sides and to zero sides. Infinity, therefore, is the unachievable, inconceivable moment at which contradictory extremes are unified. The moment at which the greatest number and the least number become one and the same. That’s also, according to Cusa, how the finite human mind glimpses, but does not grasp, the infinite nature of God. Rational thought and language fail at infinity because contradictories become identities.

Earlier discussions of infinity here, here, here and here.