On the other hand, unanimity among the tenured is more than a curse, it's a downright NUISANCE. For there is no right to be wrong unless there is an obligation to be right. Thus, a progressive relativist is truly obligated to be wrong, which can't be right.
Now, just as there is no one Good but God, nor is there anyone True (or Beautiful). Does this condemn man to subjectivism, relativism, falsehood -- not to mention evil and ugliness?
NO, it just means that truth is a direction, or vector, or tension, so to speak. The moment we imagine we can possess it is the moment we exile ourselves from the garden of WHATEVER and literally sophicate in it.
In short, truth is always an encounter with the (O)THER. To imagine we could ever contain this ALTER EGO (minus the ego) is to imagine we are God: this is megalomania and diabolical narcissism, i.e., an episteaming pile of closure.
Which, it seems, is precisely what the tower builders were attempting to do. Thus, while the consequent scattering may seem like a punishment, it's actually -- like everything else that comes from above -- a gift:
Only in discovering the distance between ourselves and the Eternal... can human beings orient themselves toward that which is genuinely highest.
And guess wut?
The dispersion of the nations is the political analogue to the creation of woman: instituting otherness and opposition, it is the necessary condition for national self-awareness and the possibility of a politics that will hear and hearken to the voice of what is eternal, true, and good (Kass).
This all sounds rather Voegelinish to me. Here are some definitions to help you orient yourselves in our new post-Babel space (taken from the excellent Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History, by Eugene Webb (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/029599438X?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=029599438X):
THE BEYOND: That which is ultimate and is itself indefinable because it surpasses all categories of understanding. The proportionate goal of the fundamental tension of existence.
TENSION: A condition of tending toward a goal... the "tension of existence"... [is] the fundamental experience of longing for transcendental fulfillment, the Beyond.
Conversely, CLOSED EXISTENCE is
the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental. Contrasts with "open existence."
Which is
the mode of existence in which consciousness is consistently and unreservedly oriented toward truth and toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence.
Yes, there is still One Cosmos, but it is of the utmost importance to understand that it encompasses both the immanent and transcendent worlds and the tension between them:
COSMOS: the whole of ordered reality, including animate and inanimate nature. (Not to be confused with the modern conception of "cosmos" as the astrophysical universe.) Encompasses all of reality, including the full range of the tension of existence toward the transcendental. Noetic and pneumatic differentiations of consciousness separate this cosmos into the immanent "world" and the transcendent "divine ground."
The D. of C.? This
especially refers to the development of a sense of the distinction between transcendent and immanent, between truth as such and particular truths...
By the way, what is the QUESTION? It is "Voegelin's term"
for the tension of existence in its aspect as a questioning unrest seeking not simply particular truth, but still more the transcendental pole of truth as such.
There are various pathological deformations of healthy consciousness, and now that I'm thinking about it, the story of Babel certainly conveys one of them, or maybe even all of them. File under GNOSTICISM:
A type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality.
This pathology can take idealistic (transcendental) or immanentizing forms, such as neo-Marxist progressivism.
But you? You are a RACCOON, which means that you live a vertically OPEN EXISTENCE
in which consciousness is consistently and unreservedly oriented toward truth and toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence.
AKA the metaxy, which is
the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. Equivalent to the symbol of "participation of being."
Which, as it so happens, is the only participation trophy worth having. No joke, because Being shades off into love, truth, beauty, and all those other transcendentals that can be endlessly known in an ever-deepening spiral, but never possessed.
The end. Until we meet again in the metaxy.
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