Born in France in 1902, Alexandre Kojeve, a philosopher of relative obscurity, once made an intriguing point.  History, he said, is over.  It's over because no longer will people see themselves as the "other," but rather as another individual equal to them.  Previously, as Kojeve saw it, history was the story of Masters and Slaves, the former continuously dominating the latter ad infinitum.  No more:  individuality now reigned supreme.  Each person would see every other person in the exactly the same way:  a fellow human being.

     This insight was of course not extraordinarily new:  most religions and even some political philosophies had long insisted on the value of the same thing.  What makes Kojeve's point somewhat unique is that he did not frame it in the context of any religious perspective.  He was in fact an atheist.  However, he insisted that a spiritual drive was innate in every human being:  we daily tangle, he said, with death.  We are constantly balancing life with its end.  We do so not because we are spiritual beings, but because we seek something greater than who we, at the moment, are.

     In other words, the present is not enough.  On this, I believe almost everyone can agree:  we humans are bent to seek more than what is before us.  Even if it is something as mundane as desiring to eat a meal.  As Kojeve's critics have pointed out, however, if humans are seeking more in themselves and themselves only, they miss a crucial point:  we did not make ourselves to be human beings.

     Above all, we remain the recipients of a life we will never understand apart from acknowledging that which gives life its ultimate point.

     Put another way:  God.