Posted on 12/08/2002 12:25:26 PM PST by betty boop
In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists – whether communists or intellectuals of a persuasion closer to home. And we have all discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence – with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God. Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called the Second Reality. The argument could not achieve results, it had to falter and peter out, as it became increasingly clear that not argument was pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate their lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.
Corollary: The difficulties of debate concern the fundamentals of existence. Debate with ideologists is quite possible in the areas of the natural sciences and of logic. The possibility of debate in these areas, which are peripheral to the sphere of the person, however, must not be taken as presaging the possibility in the future that areas central to the person…will also move into the zone of debate…. While such a possibility should not be flatly denied, it also should be realized that there is no empirical evidence on which such an expectation could be based….
The Second Realities which cause the breakdown of rational discourse are a comparatively recent phenomenon. They have grown during the modern centuries, roughly since 1500, until they have reached, in our own time, the proportions of a social and political force which in more gloomy moments may look strong enough to extinguish our civilization – unless, your course, you are an ideologist yourself and identify civilization with the victory of Second Reality. In order to distinguish the nature of the new growth, as well as to understand its consequences, we must go a little further back in time, to a period in which the universe of rational discourse was still intact because the first reality of existence was yet unquestioned. Only if we know, for the purpose of comparison, what the conditions of rational discourse are, shall we find our bearings in the contemporary clash with Second Realities. The best point of departure for the comparative analysis of the problem will be St. Thomas’ Summa contra Gentiles. The work was written as an exposition and defense of the truth of Christianity against the pagans, in particular against the Mohammedans. It was written in a period of intellectual turmoil through the contacts with Islam and Aristotelian philosophy, comparable in many respects to our own, with the important difference that a rational debate with the opponent was still possible or – we should say more cautiously – seemed still possible to Aquinas….
Truth about the constitution of being, of which human existence is a part, is not achieved in an intellectual vacuum, but in the permanent struggle with preanalytical notions of existence, as well as with erroneous analytical conceptions. The situation of debate thus is understood as an essential dimension of the existence that we recognize as ours; to one part, the quest for truth is the perpetual task if disengaging it from error, of refining its expression in contest with the inexhaustible ingenuity of error. Philosophy, as a consequence, is not a solitary but a social enterprise….
Aquinas, following Aristotle, considers it the task of the philosopher to consider the highest causes of all being…. There is talk about a first mover of the universe – who must be assumed to be an intellect – from whom emanates somehow an order of being that is at the same time an order of truth. Why should we be concerned with a prime mover and his properties? – you will ask. And does the matter really improve when Aquinas identifies the prime mover as a demonstration of the existence of God? At the risk of arousing the indignation of convinced Aristotelians and Thomists I must say that I consider such questions quite pertinent. The questions must be raised, for we do no longer live, as did Aristotle and Aquinas, at the center of a cosmos…. We can no longer express the truth of existence in the language of men who believed in such a cosmos, moved with all its content by a prime mover, with a chain of aitia, of causes, extending from existent to existent down to the most lowly ones. The symbolism of the closed cosmos, which informs the fundamental concepts of classic and scholastic metaphysics, has been superseded by the universe of modern physics and astronomy.
Nevertheless, if we admit all this, does it follow that Aristotelian and Thomist metaphysics must be thrown on the scrap heap of symbolisms that once had their moment of truth but now have become useless?
You will have anticipated that the answer will be negative. To be sure, a large part of the symbolism has become obsolete, but there is a solid core of truth in it that can be, and must be, salvaged by means of some surgery….
[I]f we remove…everything that smacks of cosmological symbolism, there remains as a piece de resistance the argument that a universe which contains intelligent beings cannot originate with a prima causa [first cause, prime mover] that is less than intelligent]….
The second operation must extend to the prime mover itself. We must distinguish between the symbolic construction and the reality to which it refers; and we must be aware of the curious relations between the firmness of conviction that such a reality exists and the credibility of the construct. If the motivating experiences are known to the reader and shared by him, the construct will appear satisfactory and credible; if the experiences are not shared…the construct will become incredible…. Aristotle could indulge in his construction with assurance because the experiences which motivate the symbolism were taken for granted by everybody without close scrutiny; and Aquinas, in addition to living in the same uncritical safety of experience, could as a Christian theologian blend the truth of the prime mover into the truth of revelation. Today the validity of the symbol, and with its validity the reality to which it refers, is in doubt, because the experiences which motivated its creation for their adequate expression have slipped from the public consciousness….
The immediate experiences presupposed in Aristotelian metaphysics are not difficult to find in the classic sources…. [W]e find ourselves referred back to nothing more formidable than the experiences of finiteness and creatureliness in our existence, of being creatures of a day as the poets call man, of being born and bound to die, of dissatisfaction with a state experienced as imperfect, of apprehension of a perfection that is not of this world but is the privilege of the gods, of possible fulfillment in a state beyond this world…. [W]e can see philosophy emerging from the immediate experiences as an attempt to illuminate existence….
Human existence, it appears, is not opaque to itself, but illuminated by intellect (Aquinas) or nous (Aristotle). This intellect is as much part of human existence as it is the instrument of its interpretation. In the exegesis of existence intellect discovers itself in the structure of existence; ontologically speaking, human existence has noetic structure. The intellect discovers itself, furthermore, as a force transcending its own existence; by virtue of the intellect, existence not only is not opaque, but actually reaches out beyond itself in various directions in search of knowledge. Aristotle opens his Metaphysics with the sentence: “All men by nature desire to know.”…
With regard to things, the desire to know raises the questions of their origin, both with regard to their existence…and their essence [nature]. In both respects, Aristotle’s etiological demonstration arrives ultimately at the eternal, immaterial prima causa as the origin of existing things. If we now shift the accent back from the construct of doubtful validity to the experiences that motivated its construction, and search for a modern terminology of greater adequacy, we find it offering itself in the two great metaphysical questions formulated by Leibnitz in his Principes de la nature et de la grace, in the questions: (1) Why is there something, why not nothing? and (2) Why is something as it is, and not different? These two questions are, in my opinion, the core of true experience which motivates metaphysical constructions of the Aristotelian and Thomist type. However, since obviously no answer to these questions will be capable of verification or falsification, the philosopher will be less interested in this or that symbolism pretending to furnish the “true” answer than in the questions themselves. For the questions arise authentically when reason is applied to the experiential confrontation of man with existent things in this world; and it is the questions that the philosopher must keep alive in order to guard the truth of his own existence and well as that of his fellowmen against the construction of a Second Reality which disregards this fundamental structure of existence and pretends that the questions are illegitimate or illusionary….
Man discovers his existence as illuminated from with by Intellect or Nous. Intellect is the instrument of self-interpretation as much as it is part of the structure interpreted. It furthermore turned out that Intellect can transcend existence in various directions in search of knowledge…. By virtue of the noetic structure of his existence…man discovers himself as being not a world unto himself, but an existent among others; he experiences a field of existents of which he is a part. Moreover, in discovering himself in his limitation as part in a field of existents, he discovers himself as not being the maker of this field of existents or any part of it. Experience acquires its poignant meaning through the experience of not being self-generated but having its origin outside itself. Through illumination and transcendence, understood as properties of the Intellect…human existence thus finds itself in the situation from which the questions concerning origin and end of existence will arise….
But where is the origin and end of existence to be found? As a preliminary to the answer we must interpret the phenomenon of questioning itself; and for this purpose we must add to illumination and transcendence two further properties of the Intellect,…ideation and reasoning. Through illumination and transcendence existence has come into view as an existent thing in a field of existent things. Through the ideational property of the Intellect it is possible to generalize the discovered characteristics of existence into a nature of existence, to create an idea of existence, and to arrive at a proposition that origin and end of existence are to be found in one existent thing no more than in another. To be not the origin and end of itself is generically the nature of existent things. With this proposition we have reached the experiential basis for extensive demonstrations of both Aristotle and Aquinas that the infinite regress in search of an origin can have no valid result; the postulate of the peras, of the limit, is the symbolism by which both thinkers acknowledge the truth that origin and end of existence is not to be found by ranging indefinitely over the field of existent things. But if it is not to be found in the field of existent things, where is it to be found? To this question, Intellect, by virtue of its reasoning power, will answer that it is to be found in something beyond the field of existent things, in something to which the predicate of existence is applied by courtesy of analogy.…
To what purpose should an understanding of existence be expanded into the symbolic forms of metaphysics of the Aristotelian or Thomist type? What purpose could be served by the prime mover, converted by Aquinas into proofs for the existence of God, especially since they prove nothing that is not known before the proof is undertaken? I have tried to show that the knowledge of the something that “exists” beyond existence is inherent to the noetic structure of existence. And this result is confirmed by Aristotelian and Thomist demonstrations in which the postulate of the peras, whenever it is formulated, is richly studded with the suspicious adverbial expressions of evidently, obviously, clearly, which indicate that the premise of the argument is not derived from any demonstration, but that the prime mover which emerges from the demonstration has in fact been smuggled in with the unproven premise…. [T]here seems to suggest itself the possiblity that demonstrations of this type are a myth of the Logos offered by the Intellect as a gift of veneration to the constitution of being….
I have…used the expression truth of existence. We can now define it as the awareness of the fundamental structure of existence together with the willingness to accept it as the conditio humana [human condition]. Correspondingly we shall define untruth of existence as a revolt against the conditio humana and the attempt to overlay its reality by the construction of a Second Reality….
We have traced the problem of truth in reality as it appears in the strange-sounding formulations of Aquinas and Aristotle to its origin in the noetic structure of existence. We shall now resume the problem of debate as it presented itself to Aquinas.
The Summa contra Gentiles defends the truth of faith against the pagans. But how can one do that, if the prospective partner to the debate will not accept the argument from Scripture?… It is difficult to argue the truth of faith against the Gentiles, [Aquinas] admits, because they do not agree with us in accepting the authority of any Scripture by whiich they may be convinced of their error. And then he continues: “Thus, against the Jews we were able to argue by means of the Old Testament, while against heretics we are able to argue by means of the New Testament. But the Mohammedans and pagans accept neither the one nor the other. We must, therefore, have recourse to natural reason, to which all men are forced to give their assent.”…
The passage formulates succinctly the problem of debate in the thirteenth century and, together with it, by implication the profound difference which characterizes the situation of debate in our own time. For every debate concerning the truth of specific propositions presupposes a background of unquestioned topoi held in common by the partners to debate…. In a debate with the Jews the unquestioned topoi are furnished by the Old Testament; in a debate with heretics, by the New Testament. But where do we find them in a debate with the Gentiles? It seems to me no accident when in the answer to this question Aquinas shifts from the earlier language of Intellect to the language of Reason, without further explaining the shift…. If Aquinas believes that he can rely on the power of Reason to force the assent of the Gentiles, he tacitly assumes that the reasoning of the Gentiles will operate within the same noetic structure of existence as his own – a quite justified assumption in view of the fact that the Mohammedan thinkers were the very transmitters of Aristotle to the Westerners. For obviously – that is, obviously to us – the logical operations of Intellect qua Reason will arrive at widely different results, if Reason has cut loose from the condicio humana. The unquestioned topoi which Thomas has in common with the Gentiles of his time, to whom he addresses his argument, so unquestioned that he does not even formulate them but can just take them for granted, are the topoi of existence. He can justly assume that his opponents are just as much interested as he is in the why and how of existence, in the questions of the nature of man, of divine nature, of the orientation of man towards his end, of just order in the actions of man and society, and so forth.
These however are precisely the assumptions that we can no longer make in the situation of debate in our time. Going over again the list of Aquinas, we must say that we cannot argue by the Old Testament, nor by the New Testament, nor by Reason. Not even by Reason, because rational argument presupposes the community of true existence; we are forced one step further down to cope with the opponent (even the word debate is difficult to apply) on the level of existential truth. The speculations of classic and scholastic metaphysics are edifices of reason erected on the experiential basis of existence in truth; they are useless in a meeting with edifices of reason erected on a different experiential basis. Nevertheless, we cannot withdraw into these edifices and let the world go by, for in that case we would be remiss in our duty of “debate.” The “debate” has, therefore, to assume the forms of (1) a careful analysis of the noetic structure of existence and (2) an analysis of Second Realities with regard to both their constructs and the motivating structure of existence in untruth. “Debate” in this form is hardly a matter of reasoning (though it remains one of the Intellect), but rather of the analysis of existence preceding rational constructions; it is medical in character in that it has to diagnose the syndromes of untrue existence and by their noetic structure to initiate, if possible, a healing process.
What Voegelin hopes to show you -- or reveal to you -- is the experience of human beings down the millennia, as they have attempted to grapple with the human condition which is still our own condition. Invariably, intellect and transcendence (plus ideation and reason) have been the sources of human understanding of man, his place in the world, and his relations to his fellow men.
Once upon a time, before the concept of radical individualism seized the modern imagination, people understood they were participants in a community of being that had its Source outside the physical universe. Now you may wish to argue that this is a silly superstition. But I would not agree with you. For I have so far been unable to locate reasonable explanations that answer Leibnitz's two famous questions anywhere in the physical world. If we insist the explanation is "there" (which strikes me as a kind of "faith statement"), then neither I nor 6 millennia of human generations have yet to find it. If it's really not "there," then with all our ingenuity, we won't find it "there," no matter how much we want to/"need" to....
Still, reason tells me it must be somewhere. And so if the answer to the questions "Why is there something, why not nothing? and "Why are things the way they are and not some other way?" cannot be found here in physical reality, where can they be found?
Anyone can do the Voegelin cha-cha - it's easy. Just jump right in ;)
Well, which is it, faith or reason that tells you that the answers exist? Why should deep answers to those questions A) exist, and; B) be accessible to us? These would hardly be the first questions, after all, that are fundamentally unanswerable, either because there is no answer or because the answer is inaccessible to us. Of course, pragmatist that I am, I can't help but point out that an inaccessible answer is equivalent, for all practical purposes, to no answer at all.
What if the only tenable answer to the question of "why is there something rather than nothing?" is "How else would you have it be?" Which may seem trivial and unsatisfying to some, but I don't worry about that. In the grand scheme of things, BB, we are small. And it is a curious sort of egoism for small creatures like us to insist that everything in the universe and beyond be accessible and satisfactory.
Voegelin spends much time asking questions that don't have answers, in the hopes that answers can be teased out of the fabric of reality and spirit - of course, he would disagree that there are no satisfactory answers for Leibniz, I think. But recognizing that some questions don't have answers for us is the beginning of developing a sense of perspective, and an understanding of the place we occupy. Carrying on as though the universe can cough up an answer to why there is something rather than nothing is a way of arrogating to ourselves a place we cannot claim, and a perspective we cannot have.
Some things are mysteries to us. Some things will always be mysteries to us. This is the nature of what it means to be human.
It should be pretty clear what Socrates and Aristotle thought about that as well. The connection without gets lost with Kant and Hegel.
Is this a cartesian mediation?
For others, it is the beginning of "Second Realities."
It is! It is! It's a cartesian mediation! It's the cartesian cha-cha!
If there is one, of course. My opinion of Kant tends to vary, based on how foul of a mood I'm in on a given day, but I have no use for Hegelianism, whether right or left....
Close. It's a Cartesian intervention. Don't worry - I'm here to help ;)
While I agree with you to a certain extent that "doctrinal thinking" is limited to our finitude I would contend that revelation is necessarily 'knowledge possessed'.
Isn't the real problem our limitations of analysis?
Both, general_re. For I have it both by “faith” and “reason” that the universe is intelligible; and I seem to be intelligent in some degree. Therefore, there’s something for reason to do….
Why should deep answers to those questions A) exist, and; B) be accessible to us? These would hardly be the first questions, after all, that are fundamentally unanswerable, either because there is no answer or because the answer is inaccessible to us.
These questions may be “unanswerable,” in the sense of not being answerable in the sense of establishing certainty. But because we have no certainty, does that mean the questions ought not to be raised? Our own human experience forces these kinds of questions on us. And for millennia, men have been asking them, and coming up with the best “answers” of which they were capable. There is no “final” answer; for the point is, these are open questions. They are the very questions that human beings ask, and have been asking, apparently ever since there have been human beings.
Perhaps we ask them because of our own perceived sense of “smallness” (a relative term), our sense of finitude, our sense of contingency: “[W]e find ourselves referred back to nothing more formidable than the experiences of finiteness and creatureliness in our existence, of being creatures of a day as the poets call man, of being born and bound to die, of dissatisfaction with a state experienced as imperfect, of apprehension of a perfection that is not of this world … of possible fulfillment in a state beyond this world…. [W]e can see philosophy emerging from the immediate experiences as an attempt to illuminate existence”….
An attempt. Men try. And men fail. But for all that, it seems to be man’s irrepressible nature to try, even at the risk of failure. To try against the background of existential uncertainty seems to be a mark of man.
Where do men get this idea of “perfection” not attained or attainable “in this world?” Where does such a notion come from? For that matter, where did we get the idea that there is such a thing as truth – be it knowable or unknowable?
Of course, pragmatist that I am, I can’t help but point out that an inaccessible answer is equivalent, for all practical purposes, to no answer at all.
Forgive me, general_re, but IMHO, this is a thoroughly “smart-*ss” take on your part. The point is, men act as if there were answers to be had, that all answers are potentially accessible. We might not get them “now”; but we’ll get them “sometime.” If this weren’t so about man, human progress would cease, and mankind would sink into pure animality.
And it is a curious sort of egoism for small creatures like us to insist that everything in the universe and beyond be accessible and satisfactory.
Well, go figure, general_re, that such a small thing as man feels himself up to the challenge of understanding his world. I can’t speak for others; but for myself, I don’t insist that everything be “accessible” to me – for I know that is impossible, for reasons of my own insufficiency, and the sheer size of the problem. And I don’t require the universe to be “satisfactory” to me – in the sense that I believe I can “constitute it” better, that is along lines more congenial to me personally. To try to see the world truthfully as it is, for what it is -- that is enough of a challenge for me.
Personally, I’d prefer a world in which people could be kind to each other, to live in liberty and justice and peace and beauty and goodness and all of that. But I know it ain’t gonna happen – absent divine intervention. And Christian Revelation tells us that’s exactly what’s going to happen some day. I cannot “perfect” the world (though I can try to work on me, recalcitrant material that I am….); if the world is “perfectible” at all, I’m pretty sure that sort of thing is beyond the powers of human kind.
Voegelin spends much time asking questions that don’t have answers, in the hopes that answers can be teased out of the fabric of reality and spirit -- of course, he would disagree that there are no satisfactory answers for Leibniz, I think.
There are no answers if we can’t “tease them out of the fabric of reality and spirit.” There wouldn’t even be questions without that fabric.
Truth, you might say, is a “work in progress.” I don’t think Voegelin puts himself in the position of deciding whether various answers to Leibnitz’s questions are “satisfactory” or otherwise “up to snuff.” The fascination for him is how human beings of different times and cultures answer these questions. He’s fascinated with the ubiquity of the questions themselves – it seems to signify a kind of “property” (if we can call it that) of the human spirit that man perennially engages precisely these questions. In a certain strict sense, there are no “right” or “wrong” answers – the search for truth is a quest, never a final possession.
Some things are mysteries to us. Some things will always be mysteries to us. This is the nature of what it means to be human.
No disagreement here, general_re. Thanks for writing.
For the person who "gets it," I'd say, yes, definitely -- that is valid "knowledge possessed." But we only possess it because it is a free gift to us from its Source -- God. We can't "do it" all on our own. We can't "take heaven by storm." And the Spirit moves where it wilt....
And I have a fairly confident feeling at this point in my spiritual development that God tends to judge man precisely in terms of the kinds of judgments that man renders against his neighbor.... Of course, you do not believe in God. And so this entire conversation is not merely superfluous, but utterly devoid of meaning to you.... (If I had to guess....)
You are guessing betty, - obviously. Just as you are also desperate to find some way to discredit my observation that V. is an intellectual sham. #55 - tpaine.
Now, when I see you make this comment to our general_re:
"Forgive me, general_re, but IMHO, this is a thoroughly "smart-*ss" take on your part."
-- I realise I should have made the same type of retort to you.
Perhaps you should look in the mirror to find the sanctimonious smart ass on this thread.
- "Thanks for writing" -
Is that so, g_r?
Hey, I could be wrong. I'm not exactly making these pronouncements with a high degree of certitude - maybe the answers you seek are out there. I tend to think not, but then again, I don't know for sure. And the uncertainty doesn't particularly bother me.
Our own human experience forces these kinds of questions on us. And for millennia, men have been asking them, and coming up with the best “answers” of which they were capable. There is no “final” answer; for the point is, these are open questions. They are the very questions that human beings ask, and have been asking, apparently ever since there have been human beings.
Really? Most people go their entire lives, wondering only briefly about such things, if they bother to wonder at all. We are born, we live, and we die, and the world continues to turn and the sun continues to rise, regardless of our notions of "truth" and "reality".
We hold up the Kants and Descartes and Voegelins of the world because they think about things most people don't, and so we assume they know things that the rest of us don't, and have discovered things that the rest of us haven't. Lately, I've come to the conclusion that this is exactly backwards - actually, what is happening is that the rest of the world knows things that the Kants and Voegelins don't. Or that they've forgotten. And so, off they go, the Voegelins of the world, looking for answers that are as plain as day to everyone else - namely, that the world is out there, not in here.
But the Voegelins don't know that, or they can't see that - he, being a rather complicated fellow, imagines the universe to be a rather complicated place. But what you end up with is an endless nightmare of reification, where your abstract thought-things are somehow taken to be an accurate representation of how abstract world-things actually are. Which, of course, you have absolutely no way of knowing, because they were immaterial and not formally representable to begin with, and now you have abstractions of abstractions. And every layer of abstraction you introduce divorces you that much more from the true nature of things. So you end up spending all your time trying to cram the entire world into your head, instead of keeping your head in the world.
Well, who needs that? Life is lived, not imagined. The universe exists as it is, in spite of our attempts to impose order on it and make it conform to our desires for "truth" or "reality". It's like looking through a hundred panes of glass, and thinking that you'll be able to see clearly if only you can jigger them into the right order. If only we can find the right combination of abstractions, we'll be able to see clearly the nature of "truth" and "reality". But the real solution is to toss them all out, and start from there, only pulling them out one at a time, as needed, on an ad hoc basis. You want to know "truth" and "reality"? Let's start with what we know is.
An attempt. Men try. And men fail.
They all fail. All of them. All of them fail to answer the question of "why something instead of nothing?" You may see the value of asking the question, but frankly, I don't. Existence is. Like everything else we try to understand, some things have to be taken axiomatically, as a brick wall beyond which the "truth", if any, is unknowable. Why existence? Why this existence, and not some other? Even if you stumble on the "truth" of those questions, how will you know it?
I used to ask myself those questions. But then I realized that life is inherently uncertain. Uncertainty is our lot in so very many ways. Navel-gazing leads you one of two places - nowhere, or unwarranted certitude. And so I have abandoned it is favor of a simple life of hedonism and debauchery. If there is a "right" answer, odds are that my answer is the "wrong" answer also, but you places your bet, and you takes your chances. There are no guarantees.
Where do men get this idea of “perfection” not attained or attainable “in this world?” Where does such a notion come from? For that matter, where did we get the idea that there is such a thing as truth – be it knowable or unknowable?
What difference does it make? Suppose for a moment that you had those answers, with absolute certainty. And suppose that those answers corresponded exactly with what you already believe to be true - that those concepts came to Man directly from God (or whatever the precise details might be for you). What would you do differently if you had that answer? Now suppose that you had the answer to those questions, again with absolute certainty, but it turned out that you were completely wrong about everything - those concepts simply arose by random chance, in an entirely random universe, just as you yourself did. Given that answer, what would you do tomorrow that you didn't do today?
Forgive me, general_re, but IMHO, this is a thoroughly “smart-*ss” take on your part. The point is, men act as if there were answers to be had, that all answers are potentially accessible.
LOL. Smart it may be, but is it true? Are there unanswerable questions? If there are, what would you call someone who insists on acting based upon how they want things to be, rather than as they actually are?
but for myself, I don’t insist that everything be “accessible” to me – for I know that is impossible, for reasons of my own insufficiency, and the sheer size of the problem.
Goodness, BB - you're off on an exploration of God, life, the universe, truth, and reality. Given that, what on earth do you think is beyond your ken to understand? If you think some things might be beyond you, perhaps you should start with more mundane mysteries to test your limits a bit. Explain to me why hot dogs come in packages of ten, while buns come in packages of eight, and I'll put your penetrating insight up against EV any day of the week ;)
To try to see the world truthfully as it is, for what it is -- that is enough of a challenge for me.
And if the hidden details turn out to be ugly and annoying?
Truth, you might say, is a “work in progress.” I don’t think Voegelin puts himself in the position of deciding whether various answers to Leibnitz’s questions are “satisfactory” or otherwise “up to snuff.”
But he thinks there is an answer. I don't.
In a certain strict sense, there are no “right” or “wrong” answers – the search for truth is a quest, never a final possession.
The truth is an asymptote. The harder you try, the closer you can get, although you can never fully get there. Unfortunately, in some things, nobody seems to agree on just where that asymptote should theoretically be. Everyone seems to have a different conception of the God-truth they are approaching-without-ever-reaching. Which leads one to ask, is there really only one God-truth after all? If so, how do we know which one it is?
I like this approach: Ethical Monotheism.
Best.
What I think of revelation? Too deus ex machina for my tastes. Besides, revelations seem to be rather unevenly distributed, and I prefer not to have God get bogged down in the details of distributional justice and equality. ;)
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