Aeternitas

THE following essay is essentially metaphysical: it is an \nattempt towards providing a corrective for the phenomenalism which, in one form or another, directly or inversely, prevails \nin our era. Though I am an Englishman, my belief in metaphysics \nas the source of genuine knowledge of the Real is naked and \nunashamed; but metaphysics must not be conceived as remote \nfrom the most fundamental interests of the spirit of m an: the circle \nof human knowledge returns upon itself, and its most remote \npoint is therefore to be found among our most intimate and deeplyfelt concerns. Here as elsewhere it is incompleteness that gives the \nsense of distance; and similarly it is incompleteness in the form \nof an overweening phenomenalism that drives the human mind \nto the pictorial, and therefore inadequate, metaphysics of popular \ntheology and superstition. T o the negations of naturalism the \nspirit must oppose affirmations: if possible, adequate affirmations, \nbut in any case affirmations. Thus where naturalism would confine \nhuman existence to the period between birth and death (and rightly, \ntaking duration to be the sole meaning of existence), the spirit \n(equally rightly) demands something more. But not rightly if it \ntoo accepts the ultimacy of temporal existence, and thence infers \na life after death (and even before birth) conceived as more of a \nsimilar kind. But the affirmation is but an illegitimate form of the \ncorrect refusal to accept a limited period of time as an adequate \nexpression of human reality. Nevertheless it is surely clear that no \none really desires an immortal existence thought of as an infinitely \nextended persistence through time. The dull round of endeavour \nand failure, of trust and deception, of achievement and recurrent \ndissatisfaction, while ‘to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, \ncreeps in this petty pace from day to day’, can only be an intolerable \noppression to the alert imagination. Dusty death itself would be \nbetter than such immortality. ‘T o think of life as passing away is \na sadness, to think of it as past is at least tolerable.’1 Our vaunted \nimmortal hopes are but dallyings with eternity; they cannot slake \n‘the undying thirst that purifies our mortal thought’ ; but even that \nthought, so purified, may become ‘a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters’. Other source of satisfaction for us there is none; \nan immortality of ever-increasing insight and enjoyment may, \nindeed, seem less tantalizing, but that is not the destiny of beings \ncast upon this bank and shoal of time, however it may be in the \nstrong level flight of angelic existence. For us, temporal life is \nlargely repetitive and accumulative, with but few periods of that \ntriumphant consciousness which is our reality and our highest \ngood. And what we really desiderate is always more reality, and \nless of the idle repetition that belongs to mere time, and, with \naccumulation, is still the characteristic even of our duration. Our \ngood is our eternity

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Philosophy · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

• Substance, attributes, and Spinoza's monistic pluralism

  Amihud Gilead•The European Legacy•1998

  Add to list

• Identifying Spinoza’s Immediate Infinite Mode of Extension

  Open Access•THADDEUS S ROBINSON, Thaddeus Robinson•Dialogue•2014

  Add to list

• Is Spinoza a dualist

  Ilgin Aksoy•British Journal for the History…•2025

  Add to list

• Between Realism and Anti-realism

  Open Access•Jeffrey A Bell, Jeffrey Bell•Deleuze Studies•2011

  Add to list