Good point, Hank. Yet I suppose eventually more will be "seen" as more of the universe is "lit up" when the light from what is the present Hubble horizon eventually gets here. Maybe not by you or me, but by some future generation. So the question isn't really answerable as a flat-out negative, as far as we know.
It has nothing to do with feeling.
Questions like this don't have much to do with "feeling."
Well, that's what's so nice about belonging to the human race. What we cannot do in our generation might well be done in a future generation. The point is the evolution of human consciousness and knowledge does not stop when either you or I do.
I guess to have a "comfort level" WRT such an observation requires, as Eric Voeglin said (quoted above), an experience of transcendence.
For me, the take-away from an experience such as that is the knowledge, seen in the spirit and by the spirit, that there really is -- ontologically speaking -- a human community, there really is a brotherhood of mankind.
To judge by what I see all around me today, human societies become increasingly unlivable in the degree they depart from what the transcendent vision reports as the truthful norm of human being and existence.
Some have put the point more crudely, bluntly: Man is by his nature a "social animal." The point ought to be clear.
Here's where Platonists and Autonomists part ways, even if they agree the point that sends them out onto different roads is true.
The reason I am not drawn to Objectivist or Autonomist perspectives is that neither spends much time or effort elaborating the problem of human society. One even gets the feeling that the main reason O+As want to elaborate a system of laws is to protect them from society.
While I can well understand why and how that is a reasonable concern these days, it does not follow that any body of thought that pretends to be philosophy or science can profit much from an extreme preoccupation with the discrete, individual self. Balance is needed.
Which is not to say that individual people aren't important and loved by other people. And moreover, each person is individually, uniquely, and eternally beloved and sacred to God. To say that balance is needed at the human/social scale is merely to recognize that "parts" have relations to "wholes," whether they want to have them or not.
There have been times -- say, reading Ayn Rand, and contemplating the wonderment of a Dagney Taggert or even Hank Reardon -- when I realized the relentless egocentric self-preoccupation of such characters seemed to border on the monomaniacal. I hardly regard them as "role models" myself.
It was like Romanticism on steroids, of the "Invictus" type. You know the poem I mean: "I am the Master of my Fate, I am the Captain of my Soul." (Or did I get that backwards?) Here we have the romantic picture of the Byronic individualist, manifesting an indominable will to always ACT, to always PREVAIL against ALL ODDS!
Well this would be all well and good, except for the untidy fact that human existence and experience universally includes more than just the ACTION PRINCIPLE!!!
It also includes suffering. The Greeks had a name for this: pathos: Our human feeling for the suffering of other human beings.
Pathos isn't about what a man does; pathos refers to what is "done to" a man. It is passion, in the sense of the experience of "suffering" from causes that one did not create. Examples: the loss of a loved one; the desperation of disease, or unrequited love. Victimizations of the self of multifarious description by unscrupulous, disordered others. And then the "final insult," physical death. You get the picture.
The point is: In a certain sense, pathos is the common feature of universal human existential experience, just as much as the "action principle," which gives impetus to the achievements of human reason and creativity....
Man's fate is that he, as an individual soul, participates in reality through action and passion. This is human nature.
This is also the human condition.
We may say that we have no way of knowing what another person knows or feels in his own consciousness. But do we not know the contents of our own? And make some "reasonable" guesses -- given our common humanity, our common existence -- that would make our (yet unacknowledged) neighbor into our brother?
Does that seem too "idealistic" for you, Hank?
Surely you realize by now that precisely this is the language of God's Call to His faithful.
In every age, I might add.
Good point, Hank. [Thank you!] Yet [I knew it couldn't last] I suppose eventually more will be "seen" as more of the universe is "lit up" when the light from what is the present Hubble horizon eventually gets here. Maybe not by you or me, but by some future generation. So the question isn't really answerable as a flat-out negative, as far as we know.
Yes, of course, but then, we cannot know there will be anyone here to see it when it does arrive, even though we suppose there will.
(You might check something for me. Isn't the Hubble horizon the theoretical point at which all matter is moving away from us at velocities that preclude the light from ever reaching us? I really cannot remember, but believe there is such a theoretical "border," if not the Hubble horizon.)
Hank