Hypothesizing the Higher Hypothesis

Uwe Henke von Parpart notes in Nicolaus of Cusa: Hypothesizing the Higher Hypothesis, an article written for LaRouche’s New Solidarity paper in 1984:

“…Any notion of positive knowledge asserted and not questioned, becomes a matter of doctrine and becomes in fact a way of fixing our own knowledge in such a way as to lead into all of the problems generally associated with doctrinal assertions—and in fact, as Cusa points out, becomes the basis for cultish theology. There is a very strong and precise assertion in the Docta Ignorantia where Cusa says, “The cult in every religion is necessarily developed by affirmative theology.” By “affirmative theology” he means any form of theology in which we single out, for example, any particular predicate of God, whatever it may be, and stick to that as a positive assertion and characterization of what God is. Or if you refer this back to the discussion of Plato, what this amounts to is saying, if we strive for the Good, and we reach a certain level of hypothesis and we stand still at that level of hypothesis, in the form of positive assertion of that hypothesis as doctrine and theory, then precisely to that extent the process of knowledge itself has stopped. And we have prevented ourselves from truly attaining the Good because the Good does not lie at any one level of achievement of perfection, but only lies in the on-going process of perfection, as indicated by method of hypothesizing the higher hypothesis.”

This is very good stuff. Look around, cultism is everywhere because people are attempting to fix their compasses instead of using them to navigate.