Learned ignorance: skeptical resignation, regulative ideal, proto-Kantian transcendental, or apophatic mysticism?

Nicholas of Cusa, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Learned ignorance is the structural awareness of the gap between finite knower and infinite known. It is not skeptical resignation: we do know, and the knowing has positive content — we know that the precise truth is incomprehensible to finite intellect, we know how this incomprehension is structured (the polygon-and-circle figure), and we know that the very recognition of finitude presupposes an awareness of the infinite that surpasses it.

It is not the proto-Kantian transcendental that Cassirer and others read back into it; the noumenal-phenomenal distinction belongs to Kant, and my claim is about the structure of finite intellect in relation to absolute truth, not about the conditions of possible experience. It is not, finally, the simple continuation of Pseudo-Dionysian apophatic mysticism, though the apophatic moment is genuinely there and I owe it to Dionysius, to Eckhart, and to Albert.

What learned ignorance adds to the apophatic tradition is the systematic philosophical structure: the polygon-and-circle figure that makes the asymptotic non-arrival of finite knowing into a doctrine with rigorous form.¹ Truth functions as a regulative ideal we approach but never seize; "to approach truth we must in some fashion glimpse it, even though we shall never quite seize it." Learned ignorance is the most perfect knowledge a finite intellect can attain — the knowledge of its own structural incommensurability with the infinite truth it nonetheless presupposes and is drawn toward.²³⁴⁵

Sources

For in the treatise Learned Ignorance I stated that an infinite line (if it could be posited) is the actuality of a line's every possibility— i.e., is the boundary of all things which can be bounded by a line and is the most congruent exemplar of all figures capable of linearity. A similar point must hold for Absolute Being or Absolute Form. For Ab- solute [Being or Form] is boundless and infinite.
De Possest, p. 946
It is self-evident that there is no comparative relation of the infinite to the finite. Therefore, it is most clear that where we find comparative degrees of greatness, we do not arrive at the unqualifiedly Maximum; for things which are comparatively greater and lesser are finite; but, necessarily, such a Maximum is infinite.
De Docta Ignorantia I, p. 8
Hence, I ask that if any of the things which you have read come now to mind, you state [them]." And he: "I confess, 0 Friend, that at the time I received [this] thought from on high I had not examined Dionysius or any of the true theologians. But with eager steps I betook myself to the writings of the teachers, though I found only a revelation expressed in various symbols.
Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae, pp. 467–468
Therefore, it is fitting that we be learned-in-ignorance beyond our understanding [apprehensio], so that (though not grasping the truth precisely as it is) we may at least be led to seeing that there is a precise truth which we cannot now comprehend. This is the goal of my work in this part. May Your Clemency judge this work and find it acceptable.
De Docta Ignorantia II, p. 58
But when he wonders about how it is that (in the case of things which have limits to their magnitude) if a similarity is posited, then a greater similarity can always be posited ad infinitum: let him consider the dividing of a finite line. For in this case we do not come to an indivisible point, even though we seem to approach it through [dividing] the parts of parts.
Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae, pp. 479–480

Where the argument is made

De Docta Ignorantia I.1-3 (the foundational chapters: 'How it is that knowing is not-knowing'
the polygon-and-circle figure at I.3 — 'the intellect is to truth as an inscribed polygon is to the inscribing circle
the more angles the polygon has, the more similar it is to the circle
however, even if the number of its angles is increased ad infinitum, the polygon never becomes equal to the circle unless it is resolved into an identity with the circle')
De Docta Ignorantia I.4 on the absolute Maximum being 'incomprehensibly above human reason'
the principle 'every inquiry is comparative and uses the means of comparative relation' (I.1)
the dictum 'we know that truth is not precisely comprehensible as it is' (I.3). Apologia Doctae Ignorantiae (1449) defending the doctrine against Wenck. De Coniecturis (1442-1443) on the structure of conjectural knowledge. De Visione Dei ch. 9-13 on the wall of paradise as the limit of intellectual approach

How the argument was received

The doctrine of docta ignorantia is the single most-discussed element of the Cusa corpus and the source of the doctrine's name. Cassirer's 1927 reading made the case for the proto-Kantian- transcendental interpretation that influenced much of the twentieth-century reception. Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) read learned ignorance as continuous with medieval Christian Neoplatonism and emphasized the apophatic inheritance. Koyré (1957) read it as the philosophical basis for the revolutionary cosmology. Harries (2001) developed the regulative-structural reading: learned ignorance as the principle of perspective applied to all human knowing, with the polygon- and-circle figure as its central image. McGinn's Harvest of Mysticism (2005) places me in the late medieval mystical- theological tradition. The skeptical-resignation reading has defenders but is the minority view; the live debate is between the regulative-structural reading and the apophatic-mystical reading, with the Kant-anticipating reading as a third option with anachronism risks.