Word of the Day

Saturday February 27, 2010

finitude [FIN-ih-tood]

noun

We must replace the market's false promise of limitless growth and consumption with an acknowledgment of human finitude, with a little more humility and with some moral limits. And the market's first commandment, "There is never enough," must be replaced by the dictums of God's economy -- namely, there is enough, if we share it.

Jim Wallis, "Let's topple the false idols of Wall Street", The Washington Post, Jan 3, 2010
"For all that humans have wished to live forever," she writes, "for all that our own extinction is, to most, a frightening and unacceptable prospect, for all that, the knowledge of our finitude has been nothing less than the condition of human identity. . . . If we want to make sense of our days, if we want to fill them with something more purposeful than mere existence, if we wrestle with our own significance and insignificance, that is because we are conscious of our own impermanence."

David L. Ulin, "What makes us tick", Los Angeles Times, Nov 22, 2009
We must recognize that our mere selves can never give us ultimate fulfillment or blessedness of soul. Only by losing ourselves in Nature or God can we escape the wretchedness of finitude and find the final completion and salvation of our lives.

Baruch de Spinoza (1632 - 1677) A Dutch philosopher. The Philosophy of Spinoza (1926)

Origin of the Word

Finitude, approximtely 1640, derives from finitus, past participle of finire "to limit, set bounds, end."