Elizabeth Brient

Thinking the Float Tank – Friday, August 25, 2023 (Day 2)

The Infinite Sphere as Think Tank: Suspension (of the finite/ in the infinite/ of the infinite in the finite) as Meditative Praxis

Speaker Bio:

Elizabeth Brient grew up in the deserts of the Southwest United States and received her PhD in philosophy from Yale University, taught at Yale and Boston College, and is currently an associate professor in the philosophy department at the University of Georgia.  She is the author of The Immanence of the Infinite: Hans Blumenberg and the Threshold to Modernity (2002) and has written articles on late medieval Neoplatonism (Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa), the epochal transition to modernity with particular emphasis on the thought of Hans Blumenberg, and Hannah Arendt, the problem of new beginnings, metaphysics of the infinite, and infinity and metaphor.

Abstract:

The infinite sphere has long been used as a metaphor for God: “God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” It is a peculiar sort of metaphor that operates by exploding the very definition of a sphere: a figure whose every surface-point is equidistant from a fixed center. The infinite sphere metaphor is a koan. It is spirit’s dynamite. In the experience of the explosion, we are propelled beyond patterns of thought, forms of reason, and sense experience that rely on distinguishing one finite thing from another, grounded in the understanding that “this is not that,” and “here is not there,” and “now is not then.” When we think/ experience the infinite sphere, opposites coincide, and our finite consciousness is suspended in the infinite. We are suspended in the infinite sphere. This is the infinite sphere as think tank.