Unlike Odysseus we must hear the Sirens, those beautiful voices singing infinity and time from a bottomless sea…without crashing our ships in the process…
To think or intrude on the infinite…the outside…is seen by Kant as the perpetual seductive madness of reason that must be resisted by any means necessary. For Kant of the first critique, reason is an island,] but it is always tempted by its own imagination to go beyond the shores of possible experience, the tempestuous sea of the outside - the sirens of infinity and time.
The only thing we can think or experience is our human all too human finite limits. To think beyond the categoricals that Kant so laboriously expounded is not only incoherent,, but sheer madness - the stuff of poets, junkies and DMT psychonauts…not sane philosophers…
Of course to posit a limit is immediately to invite transgression…the speculative madness of German idealism is the product of such attempted transgression. The irony being, that father Kant generated a brat pack of unruly children whose only oedipal cry was: “fuck off… I’ll show you the thing-in-itself”. Fiche, Schelling and Hegel are the speculative “madnesses” that Kant sought to avoid, Leibniz seems critical in comparison….But of course, they were far too bourgeois, far to “pipe and slippers” academics to risk real movement, real transgression, they wanted the power not the danger, they were fakers of the absolute, mere mimics of the infinite…Kant could rest in peace after all.
We had to wait for Nietzsche’s hammer to dynamite the whole finite Kantian edifice to bits, at last the sea opened up, through the experience of the “eternal-return”. But is Nietzsche’s “eternal-return” really the ultimate? Is it the infinite and time of thought and experience? Or is it another ploy for substituting infinity for finitude, time for eternity? being for becoming? While time may be infinite matter/space is finite, hence the recurrence of all possible life combinations again and again….
What if a midnight demon told you that all that you have ever lived and experienced will never recur, never ever again, neither in form or content…never again, ever again, will there be a sun, an earth to revolve around…what would you do then?
