Unity And The Yearn For It

Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. VI., tr. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (New York, 1982), pt. 1, ch. I., The Man of Today and Religion, pp. 3-4:

Man has an infinitely profound yearning for unity. And rightly so. This is why he is always in danger of oversimplifying, in danger of wanting to design everything in his life from one single angle and of wanting to determine everything as a function of one single, definite entity which is familiar to him and controllable by him. This is true not only in the theoretical sphere but also in the realm of practical action. Thus contemporary man is in danger of wanting to be nothing but a man of today. What, for instance, we call the «manager type», is not from a more profound point of view the person who works himself to death, for there has always been this type of person either of necessity or by choice. At a closer look, one will find the «manager» in an existentially ontological and really ethical sense wherever someone can no longer think of anything in his life except as a derived function of his enterprises, whenever he simply identifies his life and his enterprises. This must inevitably lead to a perversion of the remaining realisations of his life, even when they are still present in a material sense and even when there still remains everything belonging to the life of man. Thus, for example, marriage, art, even religion, friendship and everything else in the life of man can become the means of the representational forms of an enterpriser's existence; they can be lived, consciously or not, as the continuation of business life as such; the person can become quite blind to the meaning of these other realities of human existence and all these other realisations can come to bear no more pregnant and justifying meaning in themselves than the limits of what they signify for business and its undertakings. When this happens and when it is really true that an individual «lived completely for his business»—as is often stated in death notices in this or some such stupid phrase—then there occurs a narrowing, a disappearance of the meaning of human life which becomes fatal for man. To be sure life today, constructed as it is through and through in a technological and scientific way, can presumably provide more in terms of total human fulfilment of existence than was possible in many occupations in the past; for it demands more in total human realisation—in other words, more in the creative, artistic and political fields, wider horizons, more understanding for new research—than most previous occupations. Yet it remains true that man precisely as he is today and man as such cannot be simply equated. The courage necessary to put up with this pluralism and to accept it quite naturally, the courage not to think (in the words of an old mystic) that one can attain everything «in one go»—this belongs to the basic conditions of an authentic and healthy human existence. Since the part always lives by the whole and yet never is the whole, the modernity of a man always exists by reason of the total human fulfilment of life. In this way, the will or the desire to be nothing but precisely a man of today and tomorrow, is not only truly inhuman but actually—whatever may be the judgement of short-sighted experience—harms a man's authentic «being-a-man-of-today.» It is simply a characteristic of the mysteries of a finite existence that every part of it is different from every other and yet cannot exist without the other and remains dependent on it.