What would constitute total, engulfing knowledge? If the knowledge that we reap from science or philosophy is considered in terms of monetary value, then clearly our age can be said to be richer than any previous.
The average person today has come into contact with the inner principles of such a complex miasma of human endeavors that one cannot help but marvel at how easy it all now seems. Science has given us seemingly untold control over our sense of utility.
Realistically, we can say that we have come to know in the first decade of the twenty first century whatever it is that we are capable of knowing. What else is there to knowing, for the moment?
Of course, this is paradoxical. Parmenides said it best when he asserted that all we know is being, and not non-being. How else are we to point out the obvious?
For a time, perhaps even dating back to the ancient Greeks, it seemed that man would come to possess himself in the glare and fullness of self-understanding. No different than a newborn babe looking around its newly found environment and finding itself awed by the sight of its own little hands, man, too, danced around his own existence in the anticipation of closing the field of self-knowledge. The hope was that this would come after the initial discovery of some of the principles that govern physical existence.
However, the physical conditions that govern human beings, we now realize, are only one aspect of the human condition, no matter how hard some radical skeptics try to debunk this common sense understanding. The embrace of scientism does not amount to self-knowledge.
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