Despair testifies to that loss. Nobody cares if a leaf blows. If the stakes in our lives were as trivial as that, mere chance or determinist, why would we care? If there were no purpose, if nothing mattered, winning and losing would be so much dust, of no more account that yesterday's breakfast.
But despair says that the significance of success or failure in life is greater than the life itself. Some despair that there is any purpose in life, their pain testifying to how important a purpose would be.
Despair doesn't see the whole picture, of course, and so it expedites the very infinite loss that it dreads.
It is a GKC sentiment: If life were meaningless, how would we ever know it?
ReplyDeleteA flattering comparison...
ReplyDeleteInfinity in general is a difficulty in human reflection. On the one hand, it's trivial: every single thing can be infinitely divided, at least conceptually (half, then half again, then half of that...).
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, it's inconceivable. Your mind can't actually do the infinite operations, and infinities of addition are likewise impossible for us.
The status of the infinite is one of the core problems of philosophy. Because people like to analogize the divine to the infinite, also theology. I'm not sure it's appropriate, though; I think the divine is beyond and outside of the infinite as well as the finite. All of those things are features of this world, and not of transcendent eternity.
We can't grasp infinity as a thing, but within some limits we can grasp it as an operation, even if it is an operation we can't personally complete. But we discovered that there are even "bigger" things that can't even be grasped as operations. Once we get away from the integers and things we can map to/from them (like fractions), we're at sea.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't entirely unjustified to think of numbers operationally. You can hold the idea of 3 in your mind easily enough, but even trying to keep track of the digits, much less the factors, of the numbers used in cryptography is beyond your brain. But you can use tools to manage and understand them.