What we need to emphasize then is that our universal claims to spiritual reality are better housed within our aspirations and moral ideals than as housed by any so-called objective descriptions which we have come to doubt as neither objective nor descriptive.
If you are going to argue with someone, you have to see them as rational; otherwise, arguing can’t reach them. You have to try to understand them on their own terms if you are going to give reasons that they see as reasons.
Arguments matter because we live an embedded life in which reality determines moral life, and moral life determines reality. In other words, is it not only true but also legitimate?
Let’s say you and a random social media user, disagree over abortion.... The answer to this question matters greatly. It’s not like a dispute over our particular tastes in food which can remain unresolved without jeopardizing our relationship – it must be settled.
If common sense and superstition are two extremes on a knowledge spectrum, then a hard distinction contained in the folkish idea of speakers and doers is cozying up to superstition.
For Arendt, politics was the back-and-forth interplay between regular people in a democracy. Politics is the realm of freedom (The Human Condition) and will not only combat hyper-partisanship and raw power plays, but may even help us thrive even in the face of great collective challenges.
"It turns out that the concept of common goods is constitutive of pursuing one’s interests."
Now I sometimes say that I’m religiously bisexual because when I found Buddhist meditation, I felt more Christian than ever.
Little did she know that reading would be her competitor, my new mistress.
"... Development itself constantly changes the self’s possibilities such that what would count as one’s ‘best’ transforms in ways that are at once real and out of view."
Raymond Klassen - Ideals and Identities 