“I’m so tired,” says Steven Wright, “I was up all night trying to round off infinity.” He is not the only one. Is there a single definition of infinity? Can infinity be conceptualized, or does it transcend human understanding? Are physical objects bound to finitude? For thousands of years, philosophers have puzzled over these questions. But, like much of modern thought, this debate has not gone untouched by consumerism. Olive Garden, flexing its intellectual muscle over the likes of Aristotle, claims that it can supply consumers with unlimited breadsticks. This suggests an infinity that not only exists in the physical sense, but is tangible for human beings. Where, then, does this new school derive its thought, and what do its findings mean for us? This investigation will work to answer those questions, considering the different realms of infinity as they relate to the breadstick as well as the resulting existential implications.
In trademark corporate fashion, the Olive-Gardenian school of thought swats away at metaphysical ambiguities by making bold statements about their capacity to produce breadsticks. Yet when asked whether their supply is truly unlimited, they cannot escape the great intellectual mantra: yes, but also no.
The term, “unlimited,” has a number of definitions that hearken to debates surrounding the infinite. The interpretation that Olive Garden seems to rest its case upon (though, due to the unmarketability of ambiguity, they have not specified any definition) takes “unlimited” to mean boundless in individual quantity, able to be “pulled from thin air,” so to speak. In philosophical terms, this translates to a potential infinity, a process which proceeds without bound, ever approaching but unable to reach a conclusion. Olive Garden can bake batch after batch of breadsticks, but to keep to their pledge of potential infinity, they would have to bake without end. From a metaphysical standpoint, it is difficult to say whether this is viable. To produce something without limit requires an unlimited quantity of matter to go with it, and it is impossible to say with any certainty whether matter is finite even in the observable universe, as the totality of it remains immeasurable. But the important question is whether Olive Garden has access to an unlimited amount of matter in the form of breadsticks. And, from a financial standpoint (the only one that matters), there is no reason to suppose this is possible.
While it may be implausible for Olive Garden to provide a potentially infinite quantity of breadsticks, this does not necessarily disprove their philosophy. In contrast to potential infinity, an incomplete process, actual infinity refers to something which is not sequential but already contains all possibilities. Take a range of numbers, for example. There are an infinite number of decimals between one and two. Yet this infinity is not boundless, but contained between two integers. The breadstick can be viewed the same way, being separable into infinitesimally smaller pieces without any foreseeable end. Therefore, every breadstick is unlimited in a sense, and Olive Garden’s promise is fulfilled.
So why do these semantical debates concern us? Does the difference between potential and actual infinity have any practical application? For academics and advertisers, certainly. But the larger implications for everyone else are existential ones. All of us are eventually forced to reconcile with the fact that our lives are not potentially infinite. Any attempt to seek a boundless existence is only flailing in death’s grip. But this does not preclude finding meaning in the life we are given. In fact, finitude makes the struggle for meaning all the more dire. The years we live may have a measure, but the moments have only the joy and pain which encompasses them. Thus, our existential quest is to embrace this actual infinity of moments between our beginning and end and make them our own. Every breadstick we savor is a part of this endeavor to fill our moments with meaning.
