An Analysis of Finitude — Part One

Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,

Now steals along upon the Moon’s meek shine

In even monochrome and curving line

Of imperturbable serenity.

How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry

With the torn troubled form I know as thine,

That profile, placid as a brow divine,

With continents of moil and misery?

And can immense Mortality but throw

So small a shade, and Heaven’s high human scheme

Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?

Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show,

Nation at war with nation, brains that teem,

Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?

- ‘At a Lunar Eclipse’, Thomas Hardy (1840–1928).

Brian Aldiss, (1925–2017), in his short story, ‘The Moment of Eclipse’, recounts the exploits of an unnamed Danish film director, interested in producing a revolutionary kind of drama based upon Hardy’s sonnet ‘At a Lunar Eclipse’. He explains his motivation for the project:

‘To synopsize a poem is absurd; but the content of this sonnet was to me as profound as its grave and dignified style. Briefly, the poet watches the curved shadow of Earth steal over the moon’s surface; he sees that mild profile and is at a loss to link it with the continents full of trouble which he knows the shadow represents; he wonders how the whole vast scene of human affairs can come to throw so small a shade; and he asks himself if this is not the true gauge, by any outside standard of measurements, of all man’s hopes and desires? So truly did this correspond with my own life-long self-questionings, so nobly was it cast, that the sonnet came to represent one of the most precious things I knew; for this reason I wished to destroy it and reassemble it into a series of visual images that would convey precisely the same shade of beauty and terror allied as did the poem’.

At one point in the story, the narrator is watching the sun set over the sea, eventually flickering out at the onset of evening: ‘That sun was flinging, like a negative of itself, our shadow far out into space; an eternal blackness trailing after the globe, never vanquished, a blackness parasitic, claiming half of man’s nature!’ Such thoughts as these upon the meaning of an eclipse and the casting of shadows, invoke certain philosophical issues associated with our finitude; the shadows that we cast, so to speak, over the sphere of our knowledge; such knowledge coming forth out of obscurity and into enlightenment. From the perspective of empirical science we are limited beings, operated upon by sundry historical forces, be they natural, societal, even the very language that we use. And yet, as such limited empirical beings, by some means we must also be the source of the representations through which we have knowledge of the empirical world, including ourselves as empirical beings.

Theories abound, especially in our modern era, concerning what it is that constitutes being human; and the implication of many of them is that being human is most certainly not being in a state of self-sufficiency. René Descartes, (1596–1650), was mistaken in supposing the mind to be completely transparent; that is to say, if the mind has a thought or a sensation or some other kind of mental state or process, the mind knows that it has that thought or sensation or other kind of mental state or process. According to much current thinking the mind is not at all transparent to itself; it is not completely present to itself, but is composed of various kinds of forces, be they social, or genetic, or whatever, that are not of its making and that it is not aware of. There are diverse kinds of activities that are going on behind its back, so to speak, out of sight. If you think of yourself as a specimen of the one kind of creature in the animal realm that is endowed with a consciousness that can reflect, then think again.

How is it possible, then, in the light of this, for mind to be both an empirical object of representation, and a transcendental (that which is presupposed and necessary to experience) source of representations? Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), rather muddies the waters on this issue. It is clear enough that mind is not simply a passive observer of phenomena; it is very much active as it obtrudes upon the raw data it receives, organizing such data to match its requirements; thus the phenomenon in question, that which appears, is a combination of the raw data of sensation, and of the interpretation imposed upon such data by mind; an organizing and interpreting function of mind that is called constitution (not a term Kant himself used however); a function performed by a transcendental ego that does not merely passively observe but actively constitutes phenomena.

But what is there behind the phenomena? For Kant the most general categories by means of which mind interprets the world, causation, existence, attribute, and so on, derive from mind, that is, are imposed by mind upon the data. And further, such categories do not apply to the things behind phenomena, the noumena; most certainly representations of mind do not accurately represent noumena. The ‘’I think’ must be capable of accompanying all our representations’, as Kant put it; and what this amounts to is that whenever I describe phenomena, no matter what terms I may apply, or what concepts I may employ, all my descriptions are implicitly from my own perspective; indeed, it is only possible for me to have any experience at all if the concepts I employ, and the phenomena they describe, carry with them an implicit reference to myself and my perspective, whereas the noumena carry no such reference. This is not merely to imply that I always see things from my own point of view, that I am always biased, but rather, given that the categories do not apply to noumena, we cannot say a noumenon is the cause of any raw data of cognition in us; nor can we even so much as say the noumenon exists. Indeed, we cannot say anything at all about it without contradiction; with regard to noumena this is one area we most certainly should heed the suggestion of Ludwig Wittgenstein, (1889–1951), ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’.

Nothing daunted, Edmund Husserl, (1859–1938), argued that the self of a person is to be understood as the location wherein personality is situated and capable of being known as an object by means of reflective awareness, in contrast with the transcendental ego which is always an experiencing subject. For Michel Foucault, (1926–1984), however, it is not possible that mind is both an empirical object of representation and the transcendental source of representations. And such an historically realized impossibility means the very collapse of the modern episteme (the historical a priori (prior to experience) grounds for knowledge; and, being historical, from a transcendental point of view, that is, with regard to the conditions of their possibility, such conditions are dependent upon the particular epoch within which they obtain):

‘In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice’.

Through an ‘analytic of finitude’ Foucault outlines that which he considers to be an historical justification for such a conclusion, scrutinising the primary endeavours, which taken together constitute the core of contemporary philosophy, that are undertaken to deliver a solution to the problem. The dilemma confronting the modern self or subject, according to Foucault, is that the identity of such a self is constituted by a distance that at the same time is interior to it.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, (1908–2009), had proposed a structural anthropology, a basic tenet of which is that there are universal laws regulating every region of human thinking; as far as a social order is concerned, for instance, in the case of families, rather than examining the contents of such relationships, attention is to be directed towards the logical structures that underlie them; there are some things that are of the nature of irreducible facts and from which the structures of human thought are the effects; such forms of thought being common to all human beings, such structures underlying both the primitive mind and the more advanced; and the consequence of which are human characteristics everywhere the same. And yet, though such overarching structures are responsible for the imposition of particular cultural forms, they are, supposedly, never present to consciousness, to the people engaging with the practices of that culture…

Including the scholars and philosophers of that culture, and so, leaving aside the thorny issue of how they thereby come to know about them, such inquiry may be regarded as analytical in that such an analysis is of our own finitude, determining the dark, occluded places within our spheres of knowledge.

Foucault terms this the ‘ontology of the unthought’. We are unable to portray ourselves as composed and structured in terms of the episteme without simultaneously disclosing an aspect of such darkness; an unthought which the episteme incorporates completely, an episteme in turn entangled within the unthought. Examples of such may be found in Freudian psychology; the Oedipal Complex, for instance, that which it has been suggested that Hamlet suffered from, if we may be permitted to speak of fictional characters in this way; but one can see an indication of it as Ophelia expresses herself in her madness:

‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts’.

(‘Hamlet’, Act 4, Scene 5).

‘Pansies’, from the French, pensées, thoughts.

Thoughts about what?

To be continued ………