Finitude

The four great existential burdens are: finitude, mortality, meaning, and guilt. And every belief system must discharge them as duties. Any belief system that leaves a remainder will generate deep existential dread and confusion even if it otherwise appears stable. And people within it will keep seeking solutions, even if none present themselves. And it is hard to say what will result from that.

Each of these burdens is very distinct, but all are entertained concurrently in our nature. It isn’t always clear to us which we are dealing with. And a collapse of one may bleed into another, just as action in one may bleed into another.

Finitude is the problem of particularity. We aren’t everything, we aren’t a perfect thing. We are one, small, limited, inadequate thing. We are born at a particular time into particular circumstances, and we will all live and die within these limits. We don’t get to choose much of the particulars that really matter either; who our parents are, when and where we will be born, what innate qualities we will possess, what the world that we inhabit and the people and circumstances we have to deal with will be like, what twists and turns of fate and fortune we will encounter. We may be able to influence and choose these matters somewhat for other people, like our children, but cannot do so for the persons closest to us, ourselves. And even our control over them for our children is miniscule compared to the largeness of the world and what we cannot control.

There is an enormous existential burden attached to the foundation factors I’ve mentioned. And finitude is no exception. We find ourselves tossed unceremoniously into the world and then tossed out of it. And even when we’re in it, we are constantly reminded of how small and individual we are. We struggle with it. We strive to stamp our mark on the space around us, to bring it into alignment with our inner world of desirea, so that we should not be so small and so in conflict with everything around us, so in danger of being swallowed up. We search for an identity that will give us some defenses, some stability, some extension. Anything to avoid being a mote in a landslide, carried along, ground down, lost.

Our finitude presents problems on the most basic day-to-day level. In our struggle to find pants that fit right, in the way people don’t respond to us quite the way we would like or don’t easily agree with everything we say, in the thousand tiny compromises that must be made, dues that must be paid, to the fact of our individuality. We need help to reach something on a high shelf, we can’t afford to buy what our neighbor just got, someone scored higher than us on a test, someone else has a job we wish we had got, we buy music because we can’t play it, we buy art because we can’t paint it, we watch athletes compete because we couldn’t keep up, we watch people eat and live and travel somewhere we can’t, we hug other people because we can’t hug ourselves, we pay people to move things and fix things because we can’t.

All of these are tiny humiliations that could breed resentment. They are all reminders of our own inadequacy and distinctness. We are finite. To be an individual is to have limits. To be this and not that. To begin at a certain time and end at a certain time, and no more. To live the life that we have, and no other, to have the body and mind and personality we have, and no other.

Yes, there is room for improvement, yes, with effort we can extend ourselves a little more. But always, always, always within limits and at the cost of something else we must give up or miss. Love itself is a kind of admission of our own inadequacy. We can’t hug ourselves or even hold our own hand, much less propagate ourselves.

Sex is a monument to our finitude and inadequacy. There is no single version of humanity that is sufficient. It is only in compromise and cooperation and tension and conflict with another that we exist. There is no adequate physical pattern for humanity, no sufficient behavioral strategy. The very existence of the other sex defies any argument that ours is complete. As long as they exist, they exist in defiance of our sufficiency, a threat to our autonomy, a reminder of our finitude.

And to the problem of finitude there are two primary reactions. Acceptance and rejection. Rejection can take many forms, but is strangely uniform. Resentment, anger, perhaps a wish to grow to encompass more of the universe, to bring more of it within oneself, or a desire to hide and retreat, to shrink the walls of the world so they no longer press on and offend us. Rersentment seeks to hide the truth. Anger seeks to confront it. Both can give birth to a genocidal instinct, a wish to destroy that which challenges our completeness. Other cultures, other sexes, maybe just other people altogether, as there is more than enough difference between everyone at an individual level to provide all the challenges of finitude even if you have equalized all other factors of race, politics, economics, nationality, generation, belief, and gender.

We hunger for an equality that is the destruction of individuality. We may even come to believe that if we can only eliminate individuality at one key level, that somehow all others will come into harmony and alignment, and we will each finally feel sufficient unto ourselves and not feel the pressure of our finitude upon us. This, I think, is part of the instinct toward socialism, as well as certain kinds of aggressive nationalism. They both seek to take the whole world into themselves so there will only be one thing. And it will be us.

Capitalism, however, acknowledges difference, accepts it, and tries to make use of it, to leverage our differences, our competition, our particularity and selfishness, for our common benefit. And make no mistake, it can be terrible, as finitude and its consequences are often terrible. But it seeks to work with the nature of humanity and individuality, rather than eradicate or remake it. It allows for individual power, because the power that would need to be created and brought to bear to eliminate all difference, all consequences of finitude, would be too great and terrible for any person to wield. And there is simply too much of the world to wield it against. The effort to bring peace would only bring unending suffering, because it is selfhood itself that must be corrected.

I’m not going to sing the praises of capitalism, except to say that it’s a strategy to make the best of an intractable problem. And although we conceive of it in economic terms, something like it has been the basis of all biological productivity for eons. The rainforest itself isn’t a planned economy. It is emergent, as capitalist systems are. They are a function of the emergent intelligence of cooperation and competition between individual species, and even within individual species. And it is beautiful and productive and wasteful and terrible all at once. That’s life.

In life, each species is distinct and has its limits and exists in tension with other species, in a complex interplay of struggle and mutual benefit, and that pattern scales up to the highest level of ecosystems and down to the lowest level of the individual. And it isn’t all a happy exchange. The reproductive capacities of the rabbit are designed around the predatory capacities of the hawk and the coyote. And they would destroy them just as surely as their predators seek to, if they ever lost the murderous contribution of their aggressors. That’s finitude, written all over the daily daliances of the beasts of the field.

We may be bigger, we may be more complex, we may be more aware. But we are no less constrained. We posses the intelligence to outwit and find ways around or alter the conditions of our limits. But to be limited, to be individuals, is in our nature.

Even those powers that we bring to bear to relieve our limits often only serve, in the end, to create new differences. Minimize the pressure of one factor that restrains us and you maximize the ability of our other individual capacities to produce differing outcomes. Instability produces poverty, which promotes equality of wealth as well as equality of destitution. Stability enables productivity, which promotes inequality of wealth, even as it produces greater equality of freedom from destitution. Removing the restraints of instability and destitution allows the individuality of each person to express itself more freely, as differences in ability, resources, fortune, and choices are allowed to maximize their effect.

Even as some factors become more uniform or less important in an environment or society, others are enabled to predominate and become less uniform. Take away the challenges of difference in nationality, so that all people in an area are of one nation, and you maximize differences between regions and towns. Take away differences of sex, so you are in a space such as an all-girls school, dealing only with those of your own gender, and you maximize differences of personality or class or family or physicality. There is always plenty of finitude to go around, plenty of individuality. And equalizing one dimension by force simply shifts it to maximize somewhere else.

This is why the myth of achieving absolute equality is so hopeless for individual creatures such as ourselves. Even changing the overall position of people is insufficient to eliminate the concerns of our finitide. People don’t see the world in absolute values, they see it in relative proportions. People don’t respond innately, in a social sense, to absolute poverty, they respond to relative poverty. Everyone takes for granted that however things are for most people is the norm. And they calculate variation and social responses off of that relative value.

Thus young men respond with crimimality and violence in a society with a high baseline wealth just as they do in a society with a low baseline wealth standard. It doesn’t matter what they have, all that matters is whether others exist who have more or less.

Go spend some time in small towns and you will see how differently the people view their neighbors, despite seeming almost identical to an outsider. Difference is calculated relative to the prevailing conditions, not outside them. Give people pages of colored dots and tell them to find the blue ones, and they will. Reduce the number of blue dots, and they will simply shift their definitions and maximize certain criteria of difference to continue finding them. We don’t calculate relations according to fixed criteria, but rather adapt them to our environment. That allows those abilities, those innate psychological and social mechanisms that are built on an understanding of our innate finitide and difference, to continue functioning across widely differing circumstances.

It allows human societies, very functionally similar societies, to exist in all kinds of places and under all kinds of circumstances, across a vast tapestry of time. And it allows us to find one another intelligible and to recognize our common nature in operation, even across vast gulfs of cultural, temporal, economic, historical, circumstantial, and physical difference. We see individuals, like ourselves. Struggling with their finitude, working it out in their lives and their dealings with the world and with each other. We are united, not by our material or social circumstances, those can never unite us; but by our fixed nature, our shared struggle. This is the shared gift and burden that we bear.

So enough for now about finitude. It’s such a big problem that much of the total activity of humankind is daily devoted to dealing with it, and much of all that has been said in thought has been said in response to it. So I’m not likely to dispose of it in a moment, what has taken all of human history to explore. It’s enough to say that much of everything we do and think is an attempt to deal with this existential burden. And the correct way of dealing with it isn’t exhausted by a single statement or action or ideology and movement.

Mortality, meaning, and guilt still remain to be dealt with. We are, indeed a deeply burdened and laboring species. We work as no other species can, having the awareness of our burdens that other species carry without knowing, having instinct and adaptation, reproduction and death, to carry them through their daily struggle. And even when we do survive and attain some degree of safety and comfort, there is still the problem of meaning to be dealt with, and as security grows it may loom ever larger rather than smaller. And guilt, the last of these hounds, is the dark companion of all humanity, that must live in a world of choices and consequences, with knowledge of the past and power over the future.

These three I will have to deal with at another time and in other ways. Like finitude, each of them has required all the effort and concentrated thought of humanity across the eons to carry.