Infinity

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani defines the infinite as that which has no limit, and he connects the Greek word horos, limit, to the horizon, which always recedes1. For him, the Greek world is the world of peras, of limit. There the infinite is left to the gods, and laying claim to it would be hubris. At Cape Sounion he points to three infinities, the sky, the sea and the wind, and he judges infinity to be the most anti-Hellenic value23. The moderns, Christians and Romantics, seek the infinite instead. He sees a sign of this in "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven" and in the cathedral, which expresses the infinite of transcendence. He also sees it in the blurring of outlines among the Impressionists, an indeterminacy he calls Christian infinitude4. He returns several times to the formula that the finite is annihilated before the infinite: every finite thing, however gigantic, amounts to zero. Man, limited by his body and by death, is nothing5. He distinguishes the infinite from the "very large". In 2023 he presents indefiniteness as a threat, and impurity as giving oneself over to an infinity that does not belong to the human order.

1. 1La maladie, le malheur, le mal20 Sept 2024 · 19:33
2. 2X comme Xanthippe7 Jan 2015 · 9:33
3. 3#5.2 L’Odyssée du philosophe : La pensée révolutionnaire21 Nov 2018 · 12:46
4. 4#3.3 D'Ulysse à Dédale1 Aug 2017 · 1:45:30
5. 5#5 Bien-et Mé-faits de l'amnésie...19 Nov 2020 · 54:33

Summary produced automatically from 13 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.