Allow me to take a stroll down memory lane.
Originally, "The Unbounded One" was a radio show and personality: my show, my personality on WERW 1570 AM and Internet Radio and later WAER 88.3 FM, Syracuse, and WHPK 88.5, Chicago.
I invented the moniker and intended it from the first to have a double significance, to refer to me, given my dedication to world music, and also to the immanent one, the totality of the world itself.
Immanence is a concept referring to presence manifested within, contained within, and intermingling with. In philosophy a mental act is immanent if it stays within the mind; if it passes through the mental barrier to make an external effect, it is transeunt. In religion, the deity is immanent, as opposed to transcendent, if it is indwelling in the universe, time, life, etc.
So the show featured two Unbounded Ones fused into one: me and a global omnium gatherum, each inherent to the limitless and immanent world.
A most perfect and mysterious thing to which I assign considerable credence seems to be the entire universe. A most unperfect and not-too mysterious thing is the human being. How to make the human being more like the universe without spreading its substance thin across the void?
As far as we know - which may not be very far - everything is constrained. Except for figments: infinity, utopia, the deity, the ideal, perhaps the imagination. If perfection is somewhere manifested, its form and substance are beyond human apprehension.
So neither I nor the world are limitless, unboundedness is a fallacy and a trap, and the term is subject to criticism. At least in principle, it's wrong, deceptive, disingenuous, dangerous. How might the fallacy of the unbounded cause trouble?
Dr. Johnson put it nicely: "A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything." One may eternally dabble, be a career itinerant, a multi-pronged and many-purposed dilettante, an impotent jack of a trades, an under-realized, half-cocked, lost lemming loser (to be polemical about it).
More specifically, if it is the case that constraints are unconstrained, if they are everywhere, there's an acute danger of over-exertion. The results can be imagined: strain, cognitive dissonance, and failure, and then--this is where things really sour--in response to failure, instead of focus and dedication and obliteration of obstacles, a dodge or re-orientation.
An objection to this uncorroborated trail of thought might be as follows: Who's really to tell the difference between over-extension and well-rounded Renaissance?
Zuckerman et al. call these two sides of the same coin "robust identity" and "non-entity" in their study of type casting in the feature film labor market" (2003). They hold that professional lives should be shaped like trees: straight and narrow and streamlined at the bottom or sapling stage, with abundant, dappled foliage appearing at the top or maturation stage.
Narrowness, focus, and simplicity helps then hinders; breadth, complexity, multivalence of identity hinders then helps. In short, bind and then unbind. It is striking that one of their main claims is that in many labor markets "boundarylessenss" may be a significant liability.
This post is as biographical and conceptual footnote in the fabrication of a fictional world: The Unbounded Microverse. But the implications run and strike deeply. Insofar as all striving (ambitious) individuals strategize, they do so by answering the following questions: what constraints, how constrained, and what to do about it?
Originally, "The Unbounded One" was a radio show and personality: my show, my personality on WERW 1570 AM and Internet Radio and later WAER 88.3 FM, Syracuse, and WHPK 88.5, Chicago.
I invented the moniker and intended it from the first to have a double significance, to refer to me, given my dedication to world music, and also to the immanent one, the totality of the world itself.
Immanence is a concept referring to presence manifested within, contained within, and intermingling with. In philosophy a mental act is immanent if it stays within the mind; if it passes through the mental barrier to make an external effect, it is transeunt. In religion, the deity is immanent, as opposed to transcendent, if it is indwelling in the universe, time, life, etc.
So the show featured two Unbounded Ones fused into one: me and a global omnium gatherum, each inherent to the limitless and immanent world.
A most perfect and mysterious thing to which I assign considerable credence seems to be the entire universe. A most unperfect and not-too mysterious thing is the human being. How to make the human being more like the universe without spreading its substance thin across the void?
As far as we know - which may not be very far - everything is constrained. Except for figments: infinity, utopia, the deity, the ideal, perhaps the imagination. If perfection is somewhere manifested, its form and substance are beyond human apprehension.
So neither I nor the world are limitless, unboundedness is a fallacy and a trap, and the term is subject to criticism. At least in principle, it's wrong, deceptive, disingenuous, dangerous. How might the fallacy of the unbounded cause trouble?
Dr. Johnson put it nicely: "A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything." One may eternally dabble, be a career itinerant, a multi-pronged and many-purposed dilettante, an impotent jack of a trades, an under-realized, half-cocked, lost lemming loser (to be polemical about it).
More specifically, if it is the case that constraints are unconstrained, if they are everywhere, there's an acute danger of over-exertion. The results can be imagined: strain, cognitive dissonance, and failure, and then--this is where things really sour--in response to failure, instead of focus and dedication and obliteration of obstacles, a dodge or re-orientation.
An objection to this uncorroborated trail of thought might be as follows: Who's really to tell the difference between over-extension and well-rounded Renaissance?
Zuckerman et al. call these two sides of the same coin "robust identity" and "non-entity" in their study of type casting in the feature film labor market" (2003). They hold that professional lives should be shaped like trees: straight and narrow and streamlined at the bottom or sapling stage, with abundant, dappled foliage appearing at the top or maturation stage.
Narrowness, focus, and simplicity helps then hinders; breadth, complexity, multivalence of identity hinders then helps. In short, bind and then unbind. It is striking that one of their main claims is that in many labor markets "boundarylessenss" may be a significant liability.
This post is as biographical and conceptual footnote in the fabrication of a fictional world: The Unbounded Microverse. But the implications run and strike deeply. Insofar as all striving (ambitious) individuals strategize, they do so by answering the following questions: what constraints, how constrained, and what to do about it?
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