I have posted in the past snippets of writings by the Orthodox theologian/philosopher David Bentley Hart. Occasionally you run into written word that expresses an idea or thought that has been bouncing around in your head, but that you have not had the opportunity or the words to express it. It may be the case that you have made an attempt to verbalize an idea and then you come across that same idea as stated by someone else in a much more succinct expression. Such is the case with the following idea taken from an article in the February issue of First Things written by David Bentley Hart. The article is about the writings of the philosopher, Martin Heidegger.
Quoting the article:
Modernity, for Heidegger, is simply the time of realized nihilism, the age in which the will to power has become the ground of all our values; as a consequence it is all but impossible for humanity to dwell in the world as anything other than its master. As a cultural reality it is the perilous situation of a people that has thoroughly -- one might even say systematically -- forgotten the mystery of being, or forgotten the mystery of the difference between beings and being as such. Nihilism is a way of seeing the world that acknowledges no truth other than what the human intellect can impose on things, according to an excruciatingly limited calculus of utility, or of the barest mechanical laws of cause and effect. It is a "rationality" of the narrowest kind, so obsessed with what things are and how they might be used that it is no longer seized by wonder when it stands in the light of the dazzling truth that things are. It is a rationality that no longer knows how to hesitate before this greater mystery, or even to see that it is there, and thus is a rationality that cannot truly think.
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