Infinity: Where is It?

A worm in the rain: does it occupy infinity?  Is that why birds sing?  To make the incorrigible real.  Life is a two way street.  Infinity Street.  For Finite lives on it too: on Finite Street = this world, which is wholly ordinary.  Infinity … Picture someone with their eyes in bandages, throwing a dart at a dartboard.  Bulls-eye! In either case - someone says - it, the finite, stands on infinity’s foundation - exists on its basis - .  Like a shell on a beach.  After all the infinite must be bigger (much bigger) than the finite, they say; obviously it must contain the finite.

But why that way round especially?  Why not, in the finite, in the mere ordinary object before me, the mere pencil, infinite extension? - why not in its length of eight inches, including the rubber affixed to its end, which is the pencil’s ‘dart flight’, why not the inverse infinity of finitude?  Another world? 

… So - but supposing that, if it is to be seen, infinity requires (like the blindfolded dart-player) some sort of quantum sense, that if it is to be detected it needs a special kind of intuition … isn’t that requirement irrational? - So that we seem obliged to say of whatever is infinite that it is also infinitely incomprehensible - except by occult means.  If infinity is not to be finitely understood, again: what is it?  The ruler does and doesn’t contain its incommensurable length.  We draw a blank.  Yet reason proposes it.  Infinity: “The ruler is not a ruler - but the ruler is a ruler!”   You can’t be wrong without being right.  For neither is neither but both are both - at the same time!  Nothing but Something.  This but That. 

Upstream at downstream.  Front of back.  Forwards in reverse.

… All metaphysical confusion arises as a result of this: that is, the compulsion to think on absolutes confronts us with infinity.

As a child riding on the back seat of the family car, I would shut my eyes and think myself into the sensation that the forward motion was backwards.  Shadows would pass over my closed eyes forwards but I would see them backwards.  Lying on a bed staring at the wardrobe it took only a second to think myself standing upright and the wardrobe sideways …

Metaphysical Objectivity.

What is ‘objectivity’?  Its invocation seems to suggest the world itself, the ‘absolute’.  But if we speak of the absolute as an objective idea, of the world - this seems to be the same thing - how is that absolute?  Well, but oughtn’t there to be an absolute?  When someone says: “That is objectively real”?    When you or I say: “The world is objectively real.”

The language game seems of secondary concern to its thought, so that any admission that this ‘purely’ objective world is a metaphysical illusion generated by supposing that it is not a language game would seem to be quite wrong.  The sense that objectively the world exists only in the terms in which the word means ”true” or “false”, or “real” or “unreal” and so on of a given ordinary instance seems (as it were) the mere shadow of the ideal that we aim at, so is it set it to one side. 

Tags: Infinity, Metaphysics, Objectivity