Limits of Understanding

Monday, November 25

Today’s text is from Seneca the Younger’s Natural Questions:

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject… And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them… Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.

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It’s striking to me that, nearly two thousand years later, we are still in the same epistemic position as Seneca.

Or, not the exact same position — as he predicted, we know astonishing things that the Romans couldn’t have dreamed of — but the nature of our epistemic position is the same.

We’re both locked in history, for better or worse, fully aware that we live our lives barrelling down a dark tunnel, slowly glimpsing the growing light — the world outside — at the other end.

But our lives, short as they are, will surely end before we reach the end of that tunnel.

Is this sad? I find it so, and wish that I could know more about the world we live in. But one small consolation is that it seems we’re moving faster and faster, and there is a lot more in store in the years ahead.