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Mawrtyr2008's picture

Tillich's "Ultimate Concern" & Rorty's "Unwobbling Pivot"

Submitted by Mawrtyr2008 on Wed, 07/25/2007 - 2:48pm.
Paul Tillich said in Dynamics of Faith that we all have ultimate concerns (similar in some ways to Rorty's unwobbling pivots) but that we can never actually know what they are. We can't name them and we can't really describe them (though perhaps that's the objective of the arts!) but they shape our behavior nonetheless. The state of what he terms "faith" therefore is the state of being "ultimately concerned" and each ultimate concern can be thought of as each person's interpretation of god.

It's possible to search for unwobbling pivots fully conscious that you'll never arrive at any one preconceived destination, but rather that you're continually creating the path you take to get to this illusive destination. The path is the big deal, not the place, or, as Gertrude Stein would phrase it, "when you get there, there isn't any there there."

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