Balance Of Power Essay Research Paper The — страница 3

together to create an ethico-religious capacity. This gives us the principles upon which we base our lives and our existence. These capacities, of thinking, passion, reason, and ethico-religious, are the most important of all capacities. They are those that are essential to human flourishing. All other capacities stem from these. They are connected. They are bound together, because they all come from inside us. However, we cannot expect our humanity to flourish once they are found. These capacities are like infants. They need to be trained, nurtured, and educated in order to reach their full potential. But what is their full potential? What does it truly mean to reach human flourishing? Throughout the course of describing these capacities, there has been a connection that has

surfaced between all of them. Because of this connection, one of these capacities alone cannot bring us to the end which makes us whole. Each one has its strengths, but it also has its weaknesses. One can destroy the other, and the next can destroy that one. Take the connection between our inside and outside world (i.e. faith and knowledge). As Underhill says, “The human mind’s thirst for more and more breadth has obscured the human heart’s craving for more and more depth.”(3-p.97) However, Underhill also says that both are necessary to be whole. “How are we going to reconcile the sort of truth declared in The Mysterious Universe with the sort of truth declared in ‘Hark! the herald angels sing.’ One series belongs to life’s outside – the other series belongs to

life’s inside. And to be a complete human being means to be in touch with both those worlds.”(3-p.97) This is true of all of these capacities. The common theme that has shown itself when talking about all of these capacities, is that there needs to be a balance to reach that highest level. One can’t control the other. Instead they need to coexist and find a way to work together to reach that goal. We need to find that balance between passion and reason, between objective and subjective thinking, between man’s need for God and man’s thirst for knowledge. We must be able to form a democracy inside ourselves. We need our capacities to fit the democratic dispositions that Jean Elshtain describes in Democracy on Trial. “Preparedness to work with others different from

oneself toward a shared end; a combination of strong conviction with the readiness to compromise in the recognition that one can’t always get what one wants; and a sense of individuality and a commitment to civic goods that are not the possession of one person or of a small group alone.”(4-p.2) Once we find this balance, this democracy, our capacities can begin to grow together and search for the highest level of human flourishing, to find the ‘truth’. There is a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson called “Ullyses” that talks about what the truth really is. “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades forever and forever when I move.” We spend all of our lives obsessing over the question of what really is the ‘truth’.

The answer lies in that “untraveled world” that always seems to disappear right when we are about to reach it. So what reason do we have for thinking about these capacities if we can never reach the truth? When we set forth on that journey to find the truth, we realize that it is not the end which we need. The journey’s the thing. The journey is what trains and educates and nurtures these capacities. Each day we struggle to reach the balance which is needed to flourish and to find the ‘truth’. That struggle is what makes us who we are and shows us how to live our lives. The answer to what the truth is? Stop worrying about the question and set forth on you’re own journey to become those things which make us truly human. 327