Sub specie
January 4, 2008Infinity defines the human condition …
There is the moral principle; we exist in the context of infinity.
As too with the aesthetic: that is infinity’s sensation.
If I act, in what context can I act in but the context of infinity?
Thus moral sense is. Thus meaning. The sensation exists in us that however small it is as an act, it is a world.
“Tell me the truth!”
… Suppose that “nothing matters”. Suppose that “God doesn’t exist.” Suppose that nothing is comprehensible; suppose that in the final analysis it all means nothing. All the death and suffering. Suppose that reason is a kind of human fantasy. Suppose that what we have just disappears. Suppose all this, so that it is only this that we have: how in the end this is what ‘what is’ finishes in. It is all just the moment and like that it goes. As in the moment all is forever past. Nothing is; so nothing will remain of me or you or anyone else; suppose that one day it will be as if the human species never existed. Suppose that love doesn’t survive … In each case I can say, what I am supposing is (in effect) a kind of clock. I am supposing that one day the clock will stop. “It is a clock; the clock will stop.” Why? Because ”Clocks need winding.”
This is a finite view of life but it is the one that we seem to decide on because it seems to answer to reason. But it situates everything inside the space of a wind up device.
Just as in medieval times they thought the sky a broad arch with holes in it through which the rain would come …
Even though a moral act, the act by which we live, defies it …
Even the least, the most infinitesimal sensation …
