(I put this in GQ rather than GD because I’m looking for the source of this idea, rather than a discussion of its merits.)
Way back in my college Philosophy classes, I remember our professor bringing up the following idea:
Let’s assume a god that is infinite. What is the one thing that an infinite god doesn’t have/understand/experience? The finite. So this god creates the world and fragments itself into innumerable tiny, finite pieces and beings so that the god can experience what it means to be finite, in its myriad forms.
Does this ring a bell with anyone as an idea belonging to a specific philosopher? I had long thought it was Hegel, but I’ll be damned if I can find anything now that would imply that association.
It sounds similar to an argument proposed by Philipp Mainländer; however, according to him, God’s making himself finite, ‘shattering’ himself into all the myriad forms populating the world wasn’t done as a means to experience finitude, but rather, to end his existence. So, the universe after Mainländer is essentially a by-product of God’s suicide. No wonder he wasn’t the most cheerful sort, but at least he took his system to its logical conclusion, hanging himself while standing on a pile of advance copies of his major work, the Philosophie der Erlösung (Philosophy of Redemption).
I am pretty sure no philosopher of any historical significance ever held anything like this. Possibly there is some religious tradition that held something like it, but most likely it wsa just an idea thrown out by your professor to get you thinking.
Possibly it is how you misunderstood the professors account of neoplatonism (there were many neoplatonist philosophers, but the first and most important was Plotinus). Neoplatonists held that the ultimate reality is The One (about which nothing more can be said beyond the fact that there is only one of them), and everything else that seems to exist is somehow just an aspect of The One (and there is an elaborate series of stages by which first other highly abstract, spiritualized things, and eventually the people and things of everyday life, are derived from, and are progressively more imperfect reflections of, The One. Hegel and the other German idealists were certainly much influenced by this, and talked about the unfolding of reality as a matter of The Absolute (something much like The One) trying to understand itself, but they made it more of a historical process rather than a hierarchy of abstraction as it was for the ancient neoplatonists. However, it is not really correct to describe any of this as something infinite dividing itself to become finite.
Really, that idea is incoherent. However many pieces an infinite thing was divided into, at least one, and possibly all, of them would remain infinite. Any philosopher worth his salt, from at lest Aristotle’s time onward, would have understood that.
I am not sure that is an appropriate analogy. We are not considering an infinite number here, but an infinite thing or substance. Remove even an infinity of finite pieces (or whatever) from it and it is at least arguable that you would still be left with something infinite.
Well, infinity is not really something we’re good at grasping intuitively. There’s certainly several ways I could come up with for ‘partitioning’ something infinite into infinitely many pieces of any given size, finite or infinite: if I take away infinitely many finite pieces, there will always be infinitely much remaining; if I halve it infinitely often, since half of infinite is infinite, I’ll have infinitely many infinite pieces left.
But that’s naive, of course, and doesn’t consider the subtleties of infinity as we now understand it. And taking this into account, ultimately what comes out is that what happens when we consider infinite quantities depends a lot on what we’re working with. For instance, with the appropriate notion of ‘sum’, I can make my previous assertion coming out false, and have 1 + 2 + 3 + … equal -1/12 (the notion of ‘sum’ then used is that of analytically continuing the function ‘sum 1/n[sup]s[/sup] over all n’ to the Riemann Zeta function, and then evaluating it for s = -1).
But I don’t think this matters: the argument that you can use infinitely many finite bricks to build an infinitely high brick wall seems to me at least to provide sufficient grounds to consider the possibility that something infinite can indeed be partitioned into infinitely many finite pieces; it’s at any rate logically coherent.
I believe you might be looking for “God’s Debris” from Scott Adams.
The basic idea behind the book is pretty much what the OP remembers from the Prof. An infinite being knows pretty much everything except whether or not it can make itself finite. Big Bang and hilarity ensue.
I have the book. It’s actually a pretty interesting read coming from the guy better known for Dilbert.
I agree it is not intuitive, and that is my point, in a way. Any competent, knowledgeable philosopher* between (being conservative) say Aristotle and Cantor would have known that infinity is a very slippery, ill understood concept, and would have had more sense than to try to build a metaphysical system on their intuitions about how it might be divided. (Zeno was probably the last to try to draw substantive conclusions from such intuitions, and his system, which was presumably really Parmenides’ system, certainly wasn’t the one described in the OP.) Maybe, thanks to modern math, we understand infinity a bit better now, but philosophers no longer go in for building great, quasi-religious metaphysical systems of the relevant sort.
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*Western or Islamic philosopher, anyway, but I don’t think the theory described in the OP sounds much like anything from Chinese philosophy either (from my limited but not non-existent knowledge of that tradition). Maybe it could be something from the Indian, Hindu tradition. I do not know very much about that, but they did like thinking about very large numbers.
I’m kind of in the strange position here of defending an argument where I neither exactly know how it works, nor would be likely to accept it if I knew it in full, so there’s no real point, at least from my side, in continuing this. I merely wanted to point out that your intuition, that an infinite thing could not be divided into finite things, isn’t as obviously right as you seem to think it is, as shown by the example of infinitely many finite numbers adding up to a non-finite quantity.
And in any case, the thread isn’t really about whether any ‘true’ philosopher would or should have proposed such an argument, it’s about the origin of the OP’s recollection. I still think that Mainländer isn’t too bad a fit, and it seems to be close to what panache45 is remembering, as well (though whether Mainländer is a ‘true’ philosopher I’m not qualified to assess; Nietzsche certainly didn’t seem to think very highly of him).
The OP’s quote sounds somewhat similar to this, even including the word “myriad.”
“God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends. This may not be true, but it sounds good, and is no sillier than any other theology.” [Lazarus Long, Time_Enough_for_Love by Robert Heinlein]
Scott Adams’s writing is often interesting. He can be a bit too curmudgeonly, a bit too sanctimonious, and a ton too inclined to vastly oversimplify things, but he’s a smart, funny writer.
Well I am not quite sure what, if anything, we are arguing about any more either. I concede that I put things much too definitely when I said the idea described in the OP was incoherent. What I should have said was something like that I doubt whether any philosopher living in the centuries between Aristotle and Cantor would have been sufficiently confident in its coherence to put it forward as his “system”. I admit that that is not a very strong argument. My main argument, I suppose, is that, as someone reasonably well versed in the history of western philosophy (and with a superficial acquaintance with the Chinese philosophical tradition), I cannot think of anyone who claimed anything like that.
Please! Don’t try to tar me with the “true Scotsman” fallacy! I never said anything about anyone (certainly not Mainländer) not being a “true philosopher.” Nevertheless, toadspittle did say he heard this in a philosophy class, and asked which, if any, “specific philosopher” it could be attributed too, and the word “philosopher” does have a meaning (certainly in the context of college philosophy classes). It does not mean any random person who might have put forth a WAG about the nature of reality. Neither does it mean an entertainer like Scott Adams or Robert Heinlein who might throw out a wacky metaphysical idea as the basis for an entertaining essay or story, but who almost certainly never expected or wanted anyone to take it seriously. From the point of view of a modern college philosophy class “philosopher” means, at a minimum, someone who is, or was, reasonably well versed in, and influenced by, at least some part of the philosophical tradition of their culture (in our case, the tradition descending from classical Greece), and who is prepared to defend their theories by rational argument (rather than justifying them, for instance, as a mystical revelation from on high).
On both those criteria, I think that Mainländer clearly does count as a philosopher. Up to this point, nothing I have said has been attempting to argue against Mainländer being the philosopher the OP is looking for. (My first post was not a reply to yours, which I had not seen until after I posted.) I will now proceed to do so, however. First of all, Mainländer is a very obscure philosopher, to the extent that the chances that his ideas ever being raised in an undergraduate philosophy class are slender to non-existent. Whatever the intrinsic merits or otherwise of his philosophy may be, it has not been very influential, even within its own, now somewhat unfashionable, philosophical genre. Indeed, I would lay odds that a good majority of today’s philosophy professors, unless perhaps they specialize in the history of 19th century German Idealism, have never heard of him. (I have spent quite a good proportion of my life hanging out with academic philosophers, and there are lots of obscure philosophers that most them, even the smartest among them, have never heard of. Down the ages, there have just been too many philosophers, true philosophers, even, in their time, influential philosophers, for any but a tiny proportion to be widely remembered. I freely admit, I do not recall ever having heard of Mainländer before your post in this thread.)
Quite apart from that, though, on your own account of it, Mainländer’s theory differed in major respects from the theory described in the OP. If the professor had been talking about a theory centrally involving God committing suicide, I think toadspittle would have remembered that part! Frankly, when I did see your post I did not understand you to be seriously proposing Mainländer as the answer to the OP’s question. I assumed you were mentioning him somewhat in the same spirit that I mentioned neoplatonism, as a theory which resembles toadspittle’s recollection in some respects (enough to be of interest), but that clearly differs from it in other, crucial ways.
So, to sum up, I withdraw what I said about the obvious incoherence of the theory described by toadspittle, but I am still confident it is not an accurate description of the views of any well known, canonical philosopher of the western tradition, and I think it is very unlikely that it is an account of the views of any obscure western philosopher either. I think it most likely to be something the professor made up (or perhaps cribbed from Heinlein or Scott Adams, or some other literary entertainer) for the sake of provoking discussion and thought. If not that, it may be a garbled recollection of what was probably a very brief and superficial description of neoplatonism, or the of views of one of the better known German Idealists, such as Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, or Schopenhauer.
Christian philosophy and theology has been dealing with this for two millennia with the Incarnation.
In the one person of Jesus (the Christ and Son of God) you have two natures: human and divine being both properly descriptive of the person of Christ without the two natures mixing into something new or being in any way at odds with each other. So, God gets to experience a fully mortal human life… knowing limitation in space and time while at the same time, being the infinite and omnipotent God.
The whole ‘infinite-in-the-finite’ thing troubled philosophers for the whole time, even leading to theological wars regarding the precise formulation of Jesus’s metaphysical identity. Karl Rahner in the 1950’s addressed this by positing that though the human seemed limited, aspects of our nature seem to imply a unactualized potential for the infinite, e.g., our ever increasing ‘horizon’ of our bubble of knowledge or power or desire for feedom show no signs of ever stopping.
This makes humans, then, truly in the image of an infinite God, but in a larval stage, like a caterpillar to a butterfly. Thus, in humanity, the infinite can experience the finite, but one that has a potential for infiniteness.
If it bothers you so much, replace ‘true philosopher’ in my post by ‘philosopher worth his salt’, or ‘philosopher of historical significance’, or ‘competent, knowledgeable philosopher’.
But that’s what infinity is–a number. When people talk about God being infinite, the only meaningful definition is saying that certain qualities are infinite in quantity.
What you are saying amounts to saying that we can’t say that 2 apples plus 2 apples equals 4 apples, because we are dealing with two of a substance, not just the number.
Dividing infinity into infinite groups is the solution for Zeno’s paradox, for example. You are traversing an infinite distance, but in an infinitely small time.