I can dig it. Although there's a fair amount of funkiness when it comes to the notion of infinity. From the Levinas on my bookshelf: 
. Non-meta-physicists (i.e. physicists) work with infinity all the time (even some of the weirder infinitary stuff, cf. Feynman Integrals) without touching the 'meta' baggage (because if they did, they wouldn't be physicists).
When I bring math into these sorts of discussions, I normally tell a joking story that starts with the angle Cantor took, and how he managed to work with infinities in a way that made them circumscribed, tame, etc. The punchline is more or less that the metaphysicians' notion of infinity seems to strike back when we look at whether the ordinals to form a set or have a cardinality associated with them. And so we have concessions like the notions of a proper class, etc. This, I assume, is at least somewhat related to your bringing up ordinals earlier.
Bleh! So much recap! Anyway, my point boils down to something like this:
In 'Totality and Infinity', Section A.5, Emmanuel Levinas Wrote:...To be sure, things, mathematical and moral notions are also, according to Descartes, presented to us through their ideas, and are distinct from them. But the idea of infinity is exceptional in that its ideatum surpasses its idea, whereas for the things the total coincidence of their "objective" and "formal" realities is not precluded... ...The distance that separates ideatum and idea here constitutes the content of the ideatum itself. Infinity is characteristic of a transcendent being as transcendent; the infinite is the absolutely other. The transcendent is the sole ideatum of which there can be only an idea in us; it is infinitely removed from its idea, that is, exterior, because it is infinite...I'm sure you see the problem here: if the 'metaphysical' notion of infinity is defined by its 'surpassing' instantiated things, 'actual infinity' is an immediate contradiction. Which, of course, is the reason why it has this status as a properly meta-physical concept
. Non-meta-physicists (i.e. physicists) work with infinity all the time (even some of the weirder infinitary stuff, cf. Feynman Integrals) without touching the 'meta' baggage (because if they did, they wouldn't be physicists).When I bring math into these sorts of discussions, I normally tell a joking story that starts with the angle Cantor took, and how he managed to work with infinities in a way that made them circumscribed, tame, etc. The punchline is more or less that the metaphysicians' notion of infinity seems to strike back when we look at whether the ordinals to form a set or have a cardinality associated with them. And so we have concessions like the notions of a proper class, etc. This, I assume, is at least somewhat related to your bringing up ordinals earlier.
Bleh! So much recap! Anyway, my point boils down to something like this:
- There are both 'meta' and 'non-meta' practices in the way people discuss infinity
- If we're discussing 'actual infinity' with the metaphysical baggage included, we need to disrupt the delimitations surrounding both types of practices
- We may or may not have our work cut out for us
