Mortal limits

Use in the book

B 2 joins bodily, temporal, and intellectual limitation. Human means of grasping are narrow and distributed through limbs; distracting troubles blunt reflection; each person encounters only a little of life before disappearing like smoke. The failure is not simply that sensations exist, but that limited encounters are mistaken for possession of the whole. The boast of total knowledge is the target of the account.

The invitation to the hearer nevertheless survives. After declaring that these matters cannot straightforwardly be seen, heard, or encompassed by mind, the speaker says the listener will learn, within the reach of mortal intelligence. That turn prevents a simple reading of the fragment as a cancellation of all inquiry. Its precise force remains difficult: the missing context does not tell us whether the promise is a correction, a qualified exception, or the appropriate answer to the preceding diagnosis. B 32 supplies a complementary practice, asking the hearer to employ every faculty according to the clarity available to it.

The religious vocabulary of limitation is equally important. B 32 requests only what it is lawful for creatures of a day to hear and rejects acclaim bought by speaking beyond what is holy. A limit on human knowledge is also a discipline governing the teacher's tongue. B 39 returns to the danger of cosmic pronouncements issued by mouths that have seen little of the All. B 113, by contrast, asks why superiority to much-perishing humans should count as a great achievement. These passages give mortal limitation several rhetorical uses; they should not be forced into one uniform declaration of modesty.

The doctrine of ungenerated roots does not erase this finite standpoint. Human compounds may be made of enduring constituents while human lives and access to evidence remain brief. The poem asks for disciplined enlargement of understanding within that condition.

Places to read

1. B 2.1–9The shortness of life and narrowness of faculties expose claims to know the whole.
2. B 3.1–8Divine teaching is bounded by what short-lived hearers may lawfully receive.
3. B 39Large assertions about earth and aither are contrasted with seeing little of the All.
4. B 113The speaker questions the significance of surpassing perishing humans.

Translation in this edition

The ending of B 2 is translated with “mortal wisdom,” although the introduction distinguishes mētis from wisdom. The limitation belongs to mortal capacity; it need not establish the modern position called scepticism merely because Sextus Empiricus preserves the passage.