Wissbegierde

We have an infinite desire   to know  all that is.

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 108

My mother  has ever been fond of retailing an anecdote  to the effect that, at some picturesquely tender age (descending  in the retellings from ca. 8 aet. su. to, say, 4 -- and indeed the exemplum would become ridiculous  were the age, instead of say 8, say, 28), I came weeping to her motherly enclasping arms, and made this plaint.

“What ails thee, child?” quoth she.  (Memories grow more Victorian, the farther back you go.)

“I just” (sobbing, sobbing) “realized that I…”  (Yes dear? Yes dear?) “will never know all that there is to be known.”

Now.  How I so præcociously came to such a conclusion, I have no idea.  The self-certain jingles  that children are exposed to  as summaries and storehouses of received wisdom (even back in those days, before education became a matter, not of teaching in the sense of passing-on actual knowledge, but of pumping-up the wretched little pupils’ “self-esteem”) might rather have suggested otherwise:  surely I had not as yet been confronted with the frigid rigors of algebraic topology, the cause of much later despair (the more keenly felt as, by then, no maternal bosom was available  to stanch the tears).  Be that as it may, the lisping infant instinct was quite on-target.  The ancient philosophers had an inkling of their own ignorance:  but so much was then not even on the table (quarks, for instance) that they  of necessity  rather underestimated the same.  Our contemporary despair is fed, not merely by our cognizance of continued ignorance, of that which baffled our ancestors -- the Meaning of Life, the Mind-Body Problem, a proof of the existence of God -- but by our awareness, that some folks  by now  do know  quite a bit  about such things as  QFT, or the topology of three-manifolds, or Topos Theory:  but that we ourselves, for mere lack of time or inwit, have not mastered these, and probably never shall.

~

I have often been guilty of writing maudlin things like “… Category Theory, which I hope to understand before I die”.  But upon reflection, that is a most artificial terminus ad quem.  I may well have much more free time after I die.  (No more dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles!  Free at last, Lord -- Free at last !!!)

Suddenly the prospect of an afterlife (previously quite hazy) gains robust and brilliant definition.  I behold before me, in mine inner eye, an endless shelf, stocked first with the textbooks I began but failed to finish in this earthly life, and proceeding to those (of signal excellence) written by angels;  and advancing, after incalculable time, and far down the line, to some remarkable new treatises penned by … whoever it is  I shall become (der Hlg. Dawud -- precor te, domine).

~

For kindred post-mortem reflections, click here.