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

the decline of the christian infinite 273at once to spiritualize history and to idealize the Trinity, making God and history amutually sustaining process.8. What Hegel could not tolerate was the notion either of a God who possesses inhimself difference, determinacy, plenitude, and perfection independent of any world orof a world thus left devoid of meaning in the ultimate speculative sense of “necessity”and so reduced to the status of something needless, something thoroughly aesthetic,not accomplishing – but merely expressing – a love God enjoys in utter self-sufficiency.Divine infinity, conceived as Trinitarian, always infinitely “determined” toward another,does not require time’s tragic probations and determining negations; all created beingis an unnecessary, excessive display of God’s glory, and thus the world of things is setfree in its “aimless” particularity. The Christian infinite is its own “exteriority,” withoutneed of another, negative exteriority to bring it to fruition. And without the majesticmythology of necessity governing the realm of the absolute, philosophy enjoys no sureauthority over the contingent.9. When one takes into account Hegel’s distinction between the bad infinite andthe “pleromatic” infinite of synthesis (which makes the true – the philosophical –concept of the infinite a “finite infinity,” so to speak), one realizes that, even for him,the infinite is no longer a properly ontological category. It is either indeterminacy ortotality (although a totality from which a certain kind of “mere particularity” has beenexcluded), but it is not convertible with the indeterminate “that it is” of the whole; it isnot that transcendent act of being that imparts being out of its fullness, ever “absolved”of the finite.10. Nor is this any less the case for any of modernity’s or postmodernity’s “postmetaphysical”forms of philosophy. The most radically anti-idealist thinkers, fromNietzsche to Derrida, tend to possess an inflexible conviction that being is finite, thatwhat is must be, that death is the possibility of life and absence the possibility ofpresence, and that the world’s most terrible limits are being’s indispensable conditions.Of course, at the level of finite act and finite potentiality, this is undeniably the case;but it is no longer possible, it seems – or no longer conceivable – for the philosopherto abstract from the finite priority of possibility over actuality to the necessary priorityof pure act over becoming. Heidegger, especially, insists on the limitation of being’sevent, its necessary confinement within the dispensations of its epochal sending, itsfinitude. Being must be thus: manifestation as obscuration, truth as duplicity, mission as“errance.” Of course, Heidegger must approach ontology this way, as he is convincedthat the philosopher must confine himself to the immanent.11. Furthermore, in all its manifestations, the “higher nihilism” of contemporarycontinental thought consists in an unyielding insistence on the finite economy of being,the “nihilation” of being in beings, the passage from nothingness to nothingness that“eventuates” in the world of finitude. Jean-Luc Nancy, for instance, refuses to speakof the limitless that lies beyond figuration, but will speak only of the “movement ofunlimitation,” which is another name for the passage of beings from the nothing andback to the nothing, without transcendent source.12. The story of the infinite as a metaphysical concept can be brought to an endhere. More could be said, but it is perhaps enough to make two final observations. Thefirst is that, speaking in the broadest and most impressionistic terms, the course of thishistory could be described almost as a kind of palindrome: both beginning and ending