We dwell and are accustomed to life in the Ocean of lies. Generation after generation glimpses truth is not a lie, recognizes there is not a flatness of truth relative to observers but a height of truth rising out of the Ocean. Like fish we do not challenge ourselves to climb the mountain but swim in schools politely.
Now and then as the lies strangle life in the water fish reluctantly gasp on land moving fins in the mud and on the rock to a puddle of water good and clean. Other fish do not. Some survive. Some reproduce. Some do not.
Betwixt Atomic War and Biological Warfare we do dwell. Our Ocean of lies strangles. Some fish cleverly say O I will make it out.
I have prepared. My materialism provides for me at all times. My toys are the reward of my time alive and I earn these toys by virtue of saying loudly YES PLEASE MASTER and pay my tax, support my team, trust experts to tell me and lead me to happiness like Atomic War and Biological Warfare. A wise fish in a smart school near to a pretty coral reef content in life but discontent with death that removes toys and coral reefs. To keep death at bay I ignore everything except pursuit of my joy. I vote respectable ask few questions rock no boats send my child to die in combat and let my nation arm itself to destroy the world. Why as a fish I can do no more. That I know I cannot control I accept and swim with my school content that others are like me and seem to have toys to help enjoy the time.
Then of course there are fish who jump on land and by magic of determination start to climb. This philosopher is one.
https://www.commentary.org/articles/will-herberg/rosenzweigs-judaism-of-personal-existencea-third-way-between-orthodoxy-and-modernism/
For Franz Rosenzweig, religious thinking is not legalistic argumentation or arbitrary speculation, as it has only too often been in Orthodox circles; nor is it sentimentalizing on the beauties of “ethical monotheism,” with the modernists. It is “life thinking,” existential thinking, which seeks not to discover external facts or to establish universal truths but to “make sense” of existence, of one’s own existence. It is therefore not the kind of thinking that one can engage in “objectively,” as in science or philosophy.
“Objective thinking” is objective in two senses: it treats what it thinks about as an object, and it thinks about it as a spectator, in detachment, with the elimination of the so-called “personal equation.” But this is not the kind of thinking that one can do about human existence. For the self—one’s own or another’s—is not object but subject; to “objectify” the self is simply to destroy it. Nor can existence ever be genuinely thought about from the spectator’s detached point of view. The thinking that is adequate to existence is a thinking of involvement and concern in what is thought about; it is thinking in which a man makes his decision, affirms his commitment, and ventures everything on it. This is what Rosenzweig calls the “new thinking” and he gives it the following formulation:
The idea of ‘making’ truth true (Bewährung) is the basic idea of the new theory of knowledge . . . and the static concept of objectivity is replaced by one that is dynamic. . . . From those unimportant truths, truths of the type ‘twice two equals four,’ to which men lightly assent with the expenditure of no more than a trifle of mind-energy—a little less for the ordinary multiplication table, a little more for the theory of relativity—the way leads to those truths for which man is willing to pay something, on to those which he cannot prove true (bewähren) except with the sacrifice of his life, and finally to those the truth of which can be established only by the staking of the lives of all the generations.
This conception of “making true” (Bewähren) by commitment, decision, and venture is at the heart of the “new thinking.” It is what Emil Brunner means when he speaks of the “knowledge of faith” as being “not theoretical knowledge but ‘existential’ knowledge—that is, knowledge of such a kind that it is only fully realized as practical decision and wholly excludes the attitude of a mere spectator.” The teachings of religion, Rosenzweig constantly repeats, cannot be appropriated merely by the intellect; they must be made part of one’s existence to be truly understood.
Is this “new thinking,” then, simply “subjective” in the bad sense, without discipline or control? Rosenzweig denies it. “A philosophy, if it is to be true,” he explains, “must be philosophized from the actual viewpoint of the philosophizing person. . . . There is no other way of being objective than by honestly starting from one’s own subjectivity. The duty of being objective requires that one retain sight of the entire horizon, not that one look out from a standpoint different from that on which one is standing, or even from ‘no standpoint at all.’ One’s own eyes are certainly no more than one’s own eyes; but it would be foolish to think one had to pluck them out in order to see rightly.”
We have always been at war with lies at the center of the conflict. Truth is the enemy of the lie. Men though lie and say black is white for our side. And go to war with God on our side. You see with Covid how lies prevailed so strongly people abandoned common sense as did legal governance.