Paul,

What is overlooked here is the opportunity for philosophy to take a fairly powerful swipe at monotheism. That if one is looking for a spiritual absolute, it would be in the direction of the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell.

That our philosophical tradition hasn’t commented on this conflating the ideal with the absolute does go to show its own shallow roots in reductionism, over contextualization, which permeates the physical sciences as well, as they try to explain everything it terms of extended atomism.

It could be quite logically argued that we are all leaves on some larger/deeper rooted tree, which would certainly go a long way towards giving us a useful tool for explaining our serious herd like behaviors and how they might be better understand, than just having intellectuals assume they can be above the mob, even as they cluster into their own cliques.

I suspect though, this will be a generational process, as our current paradigm descends ever further into reductio ad absurdum and eventually a reaction sets in.

Happy 2020!