mentalblog.com comments:
do you not recognize the mathaphisical core of the longing for the end of history as the desire to invest history with meaning, disavoval of the absurdity and impotence of human existence? I think this longing has to be properly appreciated.
We seemingly do live in times when this eschatological sentiment has withered, at least here in America.
The last Hegelian attempt was Francis Fukuyama's book "End of history and the last man". His moshiach was not Menachem, classless society, but liberal democracy. The events of the nieneties, Islamism specifically, undermined his theory. Now we are over it.
Is it healthier? If you have enough money, for sure it is.
If you don't, you still might need some meaning somwhere. People like Freud taught us that life without meaning or sense of purpose will end cause all sorts of psychological "problems". not in my experience though.
Freud and "meaning and sense of purpose"? Are you sure you are not confusing your references?
There are ideas and ideas as they become "culture", as in everyone says it as it is self evident.
yes im sure.
how do you see the present state ceasation of messianic expectations, history going nowhere?
hippies where in the 60st and then it all stooped. Did ideas disappear? No, but people just stopped obsessing about it. It is not where the history goes, it is how we interpret history. And Now we say there is no end to history.
Im not sure what u want with the hippies. ceratin amount of obsession is, i think, necessary when dealing with ideas. in fact, that's where the line beteen the West and the east lies, in the manner ideas are thought of. isaiah Berlin said that when he was trying to popularize the Russian thinkers in The West, the common reaction he met was that any sort of passionate commitment to ideas is a sign of mental or moral disorder.
he might have been right, too.
I appreciate your New England Anglicanism.
Ahh, Isaiah Berlin. Once a Schneerson always a Schneerson.
given that russia is demographically challenged and in 100 years will be either a vast expanse of uninhabited land or a muslim republic, it may not be that far fetched after all........
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