Finitude

An Eternal Problem

An appreciation for human limits, and for limits, in general, is often associated with a cluster of concepts: religion, tradition, conservatism, antiquity.

Meanwhile, a desire to go beyond, or even abolish (human) limits altogether, is often associated with a cluster of opposite terms: secularism, progress, empowerment, modernity.

Of course, religion is more complex than just “pro-limitation.” Most religious people use technology and benefit from modern medicine.

Soloveitchik

Rav Soloveitchik is one (modern) Jewish thinker who believes that it is a religious imperative to innovate and to create and not simply to submit and accept. Nonetheless, Soloveitchik does believe that human creativity and innovation need to be kept in check. For him, Jewish law contains two dimensions—mishpat and chok; law that is universal and rational and law that is not. Chok, law which is not rational and not universal, is important because it appeals to the fact that human life requires boundaries, that human consciousness is fragile and bounded, not infinite.

Heidegger

What makes Heidegger an interesting thinker is in part that he rejects traditional religion and traditional metaphysics, but makes human finitude and limitation the cornerstone of his thought. Humans are finite—not relative to an infinite God, but simply by virtue of the structure of temporality.

Foucault

Foucault goes further than Heidegger in describing subjectivity and personality as a byproduct of social life and “power.” The human being is not first a self and then a social creature; the human being is first “thrown” into existence and only secondarily a being with a sense of autonomy. (Foucault had a complicated relationship to Catholicism throughout his life. Heidegger’s father was a sexton who made a living ringing the church bell in his local Bavarian town.) Both Foucault and Heidegger get that life is about chok. Foucault goes so far that in a sense he reduces mishpat to chok. Even rationality is a fiction. All patterns of thought are a “regime”; none has intrinsic truth. Foucault and Heidegger offer a picture of fundamental human limitation without requiring it to be grounded in God.

In fact, they both would argue that much religious life is not actually about accepting limits at all; rather, the very claims that religion makes are claims that exceed human limitation. To say with certainty that the Afterlife exists is a violation of the limits of human consciousness, just as it is a violation of the limits of human consciousness to try to explain the Creation of the world. True acceptance of limits would require one to say “I don’t know,” rather than that there is or isn’t a life after death or that the laws of nature are or are not suspendable by divine fiat.

The problem with religion—from the post-Kantian perspective—is not that it accepts limits, but that it pretends to.

The Ineffable

Heidegger and Foucault are “methodological atheists.” That is, they don’t think God doesn’t exist; rather, they think that we must operate philosophically from the starting point that everything we say is an expression of finitude. There is no Platonic possibility of escaping the cave of shadows. Mystical experience, even if real, becomes falsified as soon as it is represented in language. We can’t talk about transcendence without falling into self-contradiction. The critique of religion offered from Heidegger’s and Foucault’s point of view is that it bites off more than it can chew; the problem with secularism is that it remains just as religious, maybe even more so, than what it rejects.

The Circularity of Skepticism

But one can respond to Heidegger and Foucault that their methodological skepticism is self-defeating. Shouldn’t they doubt their doubt? What if religious experience is true in some sense, and what if religious language, however imperfect, is good enough at describing what it discovers? To be methodologically atheist is a choice, but there is no reason to accept this choice as authoritative or definitive.

Conclusions

Despite the fact that we associate finitude with religiosity (think of the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac as paradigmatic of a kind of suspension of human will and rationality) the realization that we are finite cuts in many different directions. Not only that, but a total insistence on finitude abolishes the possibility of transcendent experience, altogether. The Kantian argument that our thoughts are constructed or the Foucauldian one that our thoughts are implanted in us by the workings of power or the Heideggerian one that we are thrown into heritages and lineages we can’t unchoose are arguments that can be bolstered in favor of or in opposition to religion.

Montaigne was a skeptic who found his way to a conservative case for Catholic Church. Kierkegaard was a skeptic who found his way to a progressive case for existentialist Christianity. Nietzsche was a skeptic who found his way to a critique of commonsense morality (a skepticism that has been influential on both the political right and left).

The difference between ancients and moderns is not about limits, then. Thinkers across ages and cultures accept the fundamentality of human limits. The debate is about whether limits open us out to transcendence or close in to immanence; whether a limit is the end of the sentence or the start of the sentence.

Mysticism can never be foreclosed because skepticism is self-canceling. If limits are good, then so are limits on limits. The ineffable can appear as an escape from finitude, but also as an intensification of it: the finitude of finitude.