L. William Countryman's Blog, page 4
February 9, 2014
Finitude
I'll start a collection here of thoughts on finitude as basic to the human condition. They may be rather disconnected, which seems appropriate to the subject. What I aim at is not a connected philosophical exploration of the subject, but a collection of perspectives in an effort to illuminate it from more than one angle. Here we go:
The oddity of being human lies in the fact that we are thoroughly finite creatures with a thirst for the infinite. For the most part, we treat our finitude as something to be suffered; only the infinite seems to us worthy of sustained exploration. We focus on the enduring, the universal, the absolute, thinking that, if we can discover these, we will have something certain to hang onto. This despite the fact that whatever we may grasp of them we grasp only to the extent that a very small pot can accommodate the universe. Perhaps there is some sense in which the very little can comprehend the enormous, the unbounded. But it will never really contain it.
What I propose to do in these short reflections is spend a bit of time, thought, and effort trying to comprehend not the infinite, but the finite. The most basic reality of humanity is finitude. It is the water in which, like fish, we swim. What if we had an awareness of it as fine-tuned as a fish's awareness of water—albeit more conscious and more reflective. We are, after all, conscious as well as finite beings, with the added peculiarity that we find ourselves interested in the infinite, in what we are radically not.
The oddity of being human lies in the fact that we are thoroughly finite creatures with a thirst for the infinite. For the most part, we treat our finitude as something to be suffered; only the infinite seems to us worthy of sustained exploration. We focus on the enduring, the universal, the absolute, thinking that, if we can discover these, we will have something certain to hang onto. This despite the fact that whatever we may grasp of them we grasp only to the extent that a very small pot can accommodate the universe. Perhaps there is some sense in which the very little can comprehend the enormous, the unbounded. But it will never really contain it.
What I propose to do in these short reflections is spend a bit of time, thought, and effort trying to comprehend not the infinite, but the finite. The most basic reality of humanity is finitude. It is the water in which, like fish, we swim. What if we had an awareness of it as fine-tuned as a fish's awareness of water—albeit more conscious and more reflective. We are, after all, conscious as well as finite beings, with the added peculiarity that we find ourselves interested in the infinite, in what we are radically not.
