The new identity replaces the old one, and, where it does not appear as an amalgam of contradictions and imitations, it puts dimly grasped and highly uncertain possibilities next to moral deprivation: self-realization as self-annihilation in the current epoch, which also cannot be understood except as a product – result as well as aftermath – of another equation in a parallel format.
The eternal crosses infinitely all the way over to us on the finite cross. Even against the definitional and lethal disagreements within and between the Abrahamic faiths on instantiations of eternity, or finitizations of infinity, or mortalities of the immortal, the structure of the central question, as a dichotomy to be resolved into a unity, from incarnation to crucifixion to resurrection, survives all answering exclusions. We can even begin with the atheistic or heretical counter-narratives that insist that indispensable parts of the greatest story were merely story, that the humanly fallible texts amount to a pre-capitalist commodification for “franchising” purposes. Even the falsehood of the tale would precisely on its own level magnify it, as the greatest lie ever believed, in this the only world the closest a disenchanted perspective can approach to miracle.
“Out of the misty sea of myth, questions emerge; chaos arises… Only gradually can all these meanings of the uniqueness of being be developed.”
If Mitt Romney as presidential candidate is driven by a religious – indeed, prophetic and messianic – mission too closely held and too easily misunderstood for public words, then its essential convergence with the politics of the Republican right would be of more than biographical, cultural, or esoteric interest: It amounts to the consolidation of a new theo-political establishment waiting only for a mass-electoral mandate.
you may think you understand but you do not understand you will never understand understanding of this kind is beyond you
There is no Christian, there is no Muslim, there is no American, there is no atheist, there is no Buddhist, there is no Hindu, there is no Sikh, there is no nihilist, there is no anyone else.
Sully wrote: When someone says “A” you look for a reason he may really mean “B”. Absolutely. “A” has no intrinsic meaning. “A” is defined only ever by a “B,” a “C,” a “D” and so on, backwards and forwards,…
From Schopenhauer through Strauss and beyond, the rebels fail to grasp Hegel’s thought on its own terms, or, if they grasp it at all, they soon discard or conceal it. This claim may also seem like a large one, but the most ambitious and unlikely claim of all, it turns out, is not the claim of a complete or comprehensive philosophy, but the claim that the Hegelian is precluded from making: to have created a new philosophy, to have stepped philosophy beyond philosophy’s own shadow.
