Heller M, Woodin W.H. (eds.) Infinity. New research frontiers (CUP, 2011)(ISBN 1107003873)(O)(327s)_MAml_

the decline of the christian infinite 271effectively vanished, definitely, by the time of the birth of modern philosophy, understoodas an autonomous discipline, entirely severed from theology. For Descartes, theidea of the infinite that appears in the ego’s cogitations, but not in its cognitions, is proofof God’s existence, but is no more than that; because Descartes’s “ontology” is more orless entirely confined to his division between thinking and extended substances, thereis nothing in his thought remotely approaching the concern with the difference betweenbeing and beings that first became possible in Christian metaphysics. Thereafter, themore philosophy asserted its autonomy from theology, the more the concept of theinfinite was forced to retreat to its “negative” form.2. One could adduce Spinoza, of course, as evidence to the contrary, and as acounterweight to the more exclusively “transcendental” tradition of modern philosophy.For him, divine infinity – infinite substance expressing itself in infinite and infinitelymany modes – could scarcely be more concrete, dynamic, or actual. And yet, onemust note, the infinite is not really an ontological category at all in Spinoza’s thought;it is, rather, a description of what is, essentially, sheer ontic magnitude. The endlessdiversity of divine modalities, the limitless extension and activity of divine substance,the absolute plenitude of the divine reality – all of this is, at the end of the day, amatter of mere quantity. The infinite as truly absolute – as truly absolved of becoming,as immanent through being transcendent, as that against which the finite is set off –appears nowhere in this philosophy.3. Descartes did not intend to confine thought to an “anti-metaphysical metaphysics”;indeed, he found one of the surest confirmations of the trustworthiness of his perceptionsin this presence within his mind of the thought of the infinite (and of the infinite God),which must, he reasoned, have been placed in him by God, inasmuch as it cannotin any way be abstracted from finite experience, and which must then be a proof ofGod’s existence. But it is just this reduction of the infinite to what is effectively nomore than a suggestively extra-empirical concept that makes it obvious that, fromthe transcendental vantage, immanent and transcendent truth are dialectically ratherthan analogically related; the former concerns a world of substances that exhaust theirmeaning in their very finitude, while the latter can appear among these substancesonly in the form of a paradox – a “knowledge” whose only evidence and condition isitself. God’s infinity, thus conceived, is not truly the infinite; it is not qualitatively otherthan every finite thing precisely by being “not other,” the possibility and “place” of allthings, the unity and fullness of being in which all beings live and move and are; rather,it is merely the negation of finitude, the contrary of limit, found nowhere among myfinite cognitions.4. A new conceptual pattern becomes visible here. This “modern” infinite is notonly beyond finite vision; it is without any analogous mediation – any via eminentiae –within the visible. A world certified by my founding gaze, and then secondarily by God(the postulated causa efficiens et causa sui), can admit the infinite into its calculus onlyas the indivisible naught that embraces every finite quantity, the “not-this” that securesevery “this” in the poverty of its particularity. But the power of such an “infinite” todisrupt the ordered internal universe of the ego, as Descartes thought it must, is anillusion. The distinction between God’s featureless, superempirical infinity and thepalpable limits of the perceiving ego functioned for Descartes as proof that the “I” doesnot constitute its experience in any original way, but rather is itself constituted by thecreative will of an invisible (but presumably undeceiving) God; however, it required