It should be obvious that we must think of infinity here as other than an infinite succession or series. We must think of qualitative inexhaustibility rather than quantitative accumulation and summation. In a sense, such qualitative inexhaustibility is more than humans can think. And yet we can truthfully point to manifestations or images of such inexhaustibility in our human habitation of the middle. We divine it in the greatness of an unsurpassable artist, in the incalculable nobility of ethical heroism, in the measureless profundity of religious holiness. We praise its creative power when we celebrate being itself as agapeic.
-William Desmond, Being and the Between
Dwade,
Whil-ST also reading BatB last night, I happened across an insight that lends credibility to your position pace Dr. Pecknold’s:
(from page 466 – 467) : “AS already suggested, there is operative, in the dynamism of self-transcending, an immediate community of mind and truth. IT is this immediacy that generates the common sense conviction that really there is no question of truth at all. We are so immediately implicated in the embrace of truth that the question of its nature does not arise at all. We live the truth, we live a trust in the truth. Nor is this naive faith in truth wrong; rather it is elemental, given, and unsophisticated…….”
Anyway, as I understand him, Desmond seems to be suggesting that even though we can linguistically expose our immersion in the truth, this immersion is immediate – the immersion, that is our ontological and primordial unity with the truth, which allows us to reflect upon it via linguistic mediation, is fundamentally beyond mediation and thus immediate. That fact that truth can be articulated linguistically may indeed demonstrate that it gives itself over to mediation, but the fact that it cannot be linguistically denied without implicating its presence (“there is not truth” which, if true, implicates what it denies) means that there is in fact an immediacy of mind and being in the truth.
Perhaps you ought to point this passage out to Dr. Pecknold to get his take on it.
Anyway, thought you might find that interesting.
BS
Brendan,
I think that’s right, and is part of my rationale for posting this quote. Desmond has a keen sense for the ineffability at the heart of being as such and experience. Additionally, I think his stuff on existence (particularly the etymological similarity of existere and exstasis) play an important role in thinking about how much we feel like we can draw lines around experience, regardless of how apophatically we do so.
Sounds like Desmond is in-line with Duns Scotus.
Scott, I’m not sure exactly how they’re inline. Could say more about that?
Thanks
Wow. Two great passages!