Saying the Jesus Prayer on the subway to work one morning, on some repetition of the name, some inhale, some exhale, it suddenly opened up for me--or, more accurately, caved in: The sounds folded in on themselves creating an
infinite regress, a vortex that at first felt like a vacuum but then took on overwhelming fullness and light of being itself.
To do that, the dismissed question comes to the fore, and the best answer to that question is a necessary being (to avoid a vicious
infinite regress) with libertarian agency (to explain contingency).
There is
infinite regress in this practice, although the numbering in the titling of the artist's works describes a topology without end: 1-Manifold, 11-Manifold, ?-Manifold, all 2017, and so on.
Our supposition is that the
infinite regress that the principle of sufficient reason seems to produce does not lead to an absurdity.
An astute commentator on a previous draft observed that universal partial ownership of individuals by other individuals might imply an
infinite regress. (7) Consider a society of three individuals: [beta], [theta], and [eta] Assume that [beta] has a share of ownership in himself equal to 0 < n < 1 while [eta] and [theta] each own (1 - n)/ 2 share of [beta].
Moreover [C.sub.1] must be a necessary being, otherwise its own individuality will need to be explained and an
infinite regress of causation is impossible.
For the author, Borges's use of
infinite regress, which Diaz calls "nesting" or "fractal" (13), relates directly to Borges's distortion of Idealism into conspiratorial theory.
It was like reading in a math book about the "Droste effect," a mathematician's term for
infinite regress, and remembering the old Droste cocoa tin you once owned and loved when you lived in another city.
So now we need deductively sound arguments for the premisses, and we are off on an
infinite regress. The non-deductive approach avoids this by permitting the introduction of such devices as fields, loci, audience, and background assumptions (Gilbert, 2010; Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969; Toulmin, 1958).
But trying to justify everything threatens to generate an
infinite regress, and the only way of halting the looming regress is an appeal to something self-justifying--Platonic forms, God, self-evident principles, or the immediately given in experience.
As I learned, however, peering through the prism of its ironies unfolds "Borges and I" into a complex space of contradiction and
infinite regress. In his Rhetoric of Irony, Wayne Booth classifies ironies using several factors, including whether an irony is stable (it does invite the reader to perpetually subvert the text) and finite (it comments on things within a defined discourse).