- Dites-moi, dit-elle, quel est le signe annonciateur de la fin dâun grand amour ? - Que rien, apparemment, ne lâempĂȘche de durer toujours [...]
(trans. AV Miller, George Allen, Unwin, 1969)
Chapter 2: Quantum                (a) Its notion
Remark 1: The High Repute of the Progress to Infinity
The spurious infinite, especially in the form of the quantitative progress to infinity which continually surmounts the limit it is powerless to remove, and perpetually falls back into it, is commonly held to be something sublime and a kind of divine worship, while in philosophy it has been regarded as ultimate. This progression has often been the theme of tirades which have been admired as sublime productions. As a matter of fact, however, this modern sublimity does not magnify the object â rather does this take flight â but only the subject which assimilates such vast quantities. The hollowness of this exaltation, which in scaling the ladder of the quantitative still remains subjective, finds expression in its own admission of the futility of its efforts to get nearer to the infinite goal, the attainment of which must, indeed, be achieved by a quite different method.
In the following tirades of this kind it is also stated what becomes of such exaltation and how it finishes. Kant, for example, at the close of the Critique of Practical Reason, represents it as sublime 'when the subject raises himself in thought above the place he occupies in the world of sense, reaching out to infinity, to stars beyond stars, worlds beyond worlds, systems beyond systems, and then also to the limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and duration. Imagination fails before this progress into the infinitely remote, where beyond the most distant world there is a still more distant one, and the past, however remote, has a still remoter past behind it, the future, however distant, a still more distant future beyond it; thought fails in the face of this conception of the immeasurable, just as a dream, in which one goes on and on down a corridor which stretches away endlessly out of sight, finishes with falling or fainting.'
This exposition, besides giving a concise yet rich description of such quantitative exaltation, deserves praise mainly on account of the truthfulness with which it states how it fares finally with this exaltation: thought succumbs, the end is falling and faintness. What makes thought succumb, what causes falling and faintness, is nothing else but the wearisome repetition which makes a limit vanish, reappear, and then vanish again, so that there is a perpetual arising and passing away of the one after the other and of the one in the other, of the beyond in the here and now, and of the here and now in the beyond, giving only the feeling of the impotence of this infinite or this ought-to-be, which would be master of the finite and cannot.
Also Haller's description of eternity, called by Kant terrifying, is usually specially admired, but often just not for that very reason which constitutes its true merit:
'I heap up monstrous numbers,
Pile millions upon millions,
I put aeon upon aeon and world upon world,
And when from that awful height
Reeling, again I seek thee,
All the might of number increased a thousandfold
Is still not a fragment of thee.
I remove them and thou nest wholly before me.'
When this heaping and piling up of numbers is regarded as what is valuable in a description of eternity, it is overlooked that the poet himself declares this so-called terrifying journey into the beyond to be futile and empty, and that he closes by saying that only by giving up this empty, infinite progression can the genuine infinite itself become present to him.
