Paul David Adkin's Blog, page 2

Caesar Augustus, Trump, and the Authentic Meaning of Life

According to Suetonius[i], on his final day Caesar Augustus put the following question to a group of friends: “Have I played my part in the farce of life creditably enough?” Suetonius assumes the question to be rhetorical, after all Augustus was the leader of the world. It is assumed that the friends would have had no doubt that his life had been of the highest creditability for Rome, as would most Romans, as would most western historians when contemplating the role of the Roman Empire on the history of western civilisation – as far as emperors go, Augustus was one of the better ones. But, what if we step back and consider his life from the point of view of humanity? Was Augustus a creditable figure, contributing positively to the development of humanity as a whole? To answer this we would have to measure what he gave to humanity against what he took away or frustrated in humanity: and what we can be sure of is that he, and all the emperors of Rome, were always operating in the interests of Rome itself, if not totally in the interests of the Caesars and their cronies and their fervent desire to accumulate as much wealth and glory as possible. In fact, there are undoubtedly millions of individuals unrecorded by history who have played a more creditable part in the authentic well-being and development of humanity than any Caesar.

It is interesting that Augustus was honest enough to describe life as a farce, and in that regard at least he displayed an insightful honesty. Life for Augustus, and for most Romans, was absurd. Their economy, their religions, their bellicose political reasons for being, were all anti-natural and nihilistic. And the saddest thing that in the two thousand years since Augustus’ death, none of the farcicality of life has improved. History itself is a farce.

The farcicality is perhaps manifested more clearly than ever by the second coming of Donald Trump to the United States presidency. Trump of course is no Augustus, but he has the same imperialist intentions. He is self-interested and is operating under the self-interest laundering mask of the empire, which is the United States of America. He is also more inclined to the ‘frantic and reckless behaviour’ that Caligula was famous for[ii] rather than Augustus, but on his deathbed he will need to be judged as we all should judge Augustus, by his creditability to the empire on the superficial level, versus his creditability to humanity on the more authentic, meaningful level.

Existence and existences can only be meaningful in the temporal, ephemeral or short-term sense if it lies within the flowing multiformity of intentionality, moving towards intentional horizons. But this temporal meaningfulness is subject to the greater problem of continuation and preservation which is the ultimate intention of Meaning in the universe. Without a fully meaningful resolution of intentions of Meaning existence is rendered ultimately meaningless again. This is the ultimate great resolve, and responsibility, that we have in our existential partnership with the universe.

We are here for the universe.

This idea implies that we have duties toward the universe – but what could such duties be?

To respect the universe we must respect the possibilities of the eternal. We deduce the importance of these elements by considering the essential nature of Being. For Being to be authentic it must always be, and this eternal being is the eternal negation of non-Being.

Physics tells us, however, that the universe is destined to perish, and that a dark force pushing it onward to an infinite expansion will eventually push all reality into such distant positional states that everything will freeze, the stars will go out, and all life will perish. Being will return to a state of non-Being again. Yet, before this thesis was elaborated, the universe was headed toward an imminent collapse: the Big Crunch. So, we should never take the negative ultimatum as sacrosanct, we still have very much to learn about the physical complexity of everything and the expansion of that knowledge is one of the basic and authentic meanings we have for being here.

Learning implies expansion. And it is our human duty to be expansive, but in a way that opens up existence via our knowledge of that existence and through the creative contributions we can make to existence. To be expansionist at the individual and human levels of existence is a meaningful thing as long as that expansionism is not frantic and reckless and takes into consideration the ecological well-being of the world that allows human existence to be possible in the first place.

In the same sense that cognizant and creative expansion is desirable, small-mindedness and lack of creativity is undesirable: and there is a moral imperative embedded in this idea.

Neither Augustus nor Trump had or have had authentic meaningful intentions in their lives and this has to reflect on their creditability; on the way they must be judged by the future, which is where all final judgement will be made.           

[i] Suetonius, “The Twelve Caesars”, Augustus, #99

[ii] Ibid, Gaius (Caligula), #56

The Morality We Bring with our Existence

We have argued in other posts here that the universe exhibits an intentionality that manifests as intuition through the intuition of its Meaning (the final purpose of everything). Nevertheless, the universe cannot modify its own nature and it has no consciousness of itself; it is incapable of making deliberate decisions – its actions are always therefore intuitive ones, blundering rather than flowing through intention. Seen in this way, we can say that the universe has evolved into its laws via a blind process of selection through trial and error. In turn, the laws have sustained a directionality of accidental evolutions that have developed their own intentionality, and allowing for the creation of the meaningfulness of existence through the presence of consciousness in the universe – albeit, a consciousness that is experienced not by the thing-in-itself, but by its individual parts.

The state of existence through consciousness, i.e. the Ideal State, should be considered as the first realisation of Meaning in a full sense (with a capital M). This Meaning that comes from perceiving and knowing, must be measured qualitatively against the blind, intuitive cosmic purposiveness beginning with the primordial spark of intuition which first produced dimensionality, then matter and forms in that dimensionality, out of the meaningless void that preceded it.

At the physical level of reality the difference between the Ideal State and the matter and forms of reality created through trial and error are (almost) irrelevant – once meaning is intuited by the universe it becomes an essential part of it. However, from a qualitative standpoint the difference is existentially immense and deeply profound.

Because of this qualitative difference that we, as the knowing, conscious, and (potentially) rational components of the universe, all possess in ourselves, our being here is impressed with a cosmological importance and moral responsibility at an existential level of everything that points to another kind of humanity, vastly different from the kind of individuals being produced by civilisation as we understand it today. In other words, we are just not who we should be.

This is not because the truth concerning our reason for being here is so hard to understand or find, but because it is so difficult to accept, for all the responsibilities such an acceptance contains.

The first moral lesson to be taken from this is that:

The world (universe) does not exist for me/us, I/we exist for the world (universe).

I live in a surrounding world that I exist for, as through my existence the world attains a part of its Being (where Being = being perceived and cognised).

The world exists for me, but only because I exist for it. If I were not part of the world’s intuitively developed intention for existence I would never have existed myself. Around me are other subjective, cognitive beings that also exist for the world. In my synthetic activity with the other subjective beings that I am connected with the world becomes constituted in an originally perceived way that grants the world an original form of existence. Our experience and observations regarding our lives in the world around us is an enriching experience not only for us, as subjective agents, but also (more importantly) for the world itself as the object of our original perception.

The amalgamation of all these original syntheses of perception belonging to humanity and other perceiving organisms (in past, present and future states) make up the grand synthesis which constitutes the existence of the universe. It is from this perception of reality that an authentic and spiritually honest morality for all humanity can be constructed.

In Search of Hidden Meanings

We have already talked extensively about meaning and we have argued that the meaning of Meaning is the essence of everything, and that existence oscillates between Meaning and non-Meaning. Meaning allows for intention, and intention creates a pathway towards a final meaning, an Omega-point of all meaningfulness.

Nevertheless, the path of Intention is never clear, rather it is chronically obscured by possibility and distraction, as well as by the opaque nature of Meaning itself.

Meaning is therefore always enigmatic and elusive. It is shy (like Nietzsche’s Truth) and carefully guards its form. Looking for it, one can easily stumble on an ersatz form of it. Likewise, it is easy to manufacture substitutes for it – meanings that can support an intention rather than finding the intentions that came from the meaning.

To uncover Meaning and meanings, it is necessary, however, to investigate the essence of intentionality.

When we talk of Meaning (with a capital M) we refer to the meaning of everything – which is the meaning of the universe. To find this Meaning we must examine the universe’s intentionality. This can only be done by speculating on cosmological facts (all intentionality can only be understood speculatively – and to have any claim to veracity that speculation has to be based on a speculation based upon scientifically verified data).

Intentionality has its horizons, but to find Meaning we must develop our investigations in a way that allows us to see beyond those horizons. Objectivity can only be achieved by elevating our view in order to see beyond the normal perspective of vision. The same is true of time as well as spatial dimensions. There are both future and past horizons to see beyond, as well as lateral horizons that inhibit our understanding of the present. Just as all intentions have horizons they are equally all susceptible to uncovering.

Our Cramping Horizons

Central to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology is the concept of the horizon. These horizons are different kinds of intentional contexts in which our experiences appear. Human life takes place primarily in a familiar world, which Husserl often calls the ‘near-world’, and there are horizons of familiarity and unfamiliarity in all experience. The extreme limit is the completely unfamiliar or alien world where the customs and traditions are alien, strange or foreign. He wrote in his Cartesian Meditations:

“Every subjective process has a process ‘horizon’, which changes with the alteration of the process of consciousness to which the process belongs and with the attention of the process itself from phase to phase of its flow – an intentional horizon of reference to potentialities of consciousness that belong to the process itself.”

At present, our proper horizon of reference is obscured by the selfish interests of the conservative forces of Wealth. The depth of this horizon should be much greater, but the consumer society keeps it operating on a very thin surface of superficiality, which by denying the horizon’s field of depth, pulls it a lot closer to us and this has a cramping effect on reality – very much like art works made before the art of painting in perspective was conceived.

Life becomes an enclosure, we feel boxed in by it, as if the horizon’s wall is impossible to surmount. But what we, as a community of human beings, don’t realise is that the wall is an illusion, created by an atmospheric effect, just as mirages are created. To escape we merely need to walk through this illusionary barrier and it will evaporate before us, allowing us to get the real deeper perspective of reality. However, this walking through the illusionary horizon of reference is primarily a revolutionary act and that is what makes us hesitate. The great strength of the system is that, no matter what we think of it, it is still ‘the system’, and as ‘the system’ it is that which is perceived to sustain us, not matter how cramping that sustenance is felt. The wider horizon of the better world depends on our ability to unleash our imaginative power, the realisation of any Utopia is primarily dependent on our ability to imagine it: the better world will never arrive spontaneously. Imagination, therefore, is the first great revolutionary act.  

Information, Consciousness, Reality, and Meaningfulness

Human minds are magnificent in-gurgitators of information – consciously or unconsciously, whether we like it or not. If we don’t like it, perhaps we can escape this condition through the practice of mind-clearing meditations, but the normal human condition is fully immersed in working together in some way with the information that constantly presents itself before us. At times this information is problematic, raising questions or demanding a need to act, and it is in these moments of mental agitation that we can consider ourselves properly conscious of the information we are facing, whereas most of the information confronted by us is received and dealt with unconsciously.

It is the conjunction of this information (at both the conscious and unconscious levels) which constitutes what we consider reality to be. To deepen our lives we have to deepen our reality through a gathering of information – either as information in the pure sense of the term as data, or through the information we can gather by having new or intense experiences that are felt rather than ‘known’. We also synthesize our experiences with other human beings through sharing and receiving narratives and other information with other human beings.

Because there is so much information available to any consciousness, information itself has a seductive nature and it evolves and changes in aesthetic ways to make it more attractive and desirable for absorption. In this way reality becomes an elaborate synthesis of different consciousnesses – and, in fact, reality as a whole is a synthesis of all syntheses of consciousnesses.

To be part of reality, therefore, implies a participation in this synthesis of consciousness.

From this arises a moral standpoint: For life to be meaningful, the contents of the syntheses of consciousnesses should be meaningful as well. And so we come to our contemporary dilemma, for how can meaningfulness be possible in this consumer age in which the synthetic consciousness of reality is driven by robotic cookies pushing us constantly into the field of superficiality that is the essence of consumerism? And the conclusion to this question (that we can’t) then leads us directly into this world of misinformation and fake news, with all of its perverted ideological motives for blatant deception in which black is called white, and evil is passed off as good.

When meaningfulness is lacking, uncertainty abounds, creating a chaos that quickly sinks into totalitarianism. And the only way to resist this push toward an insane reality is to make reality authentically meaningful again: whatever that means and whatever sacrifices have to be made to achieve it. To start with there needs to be an injection for love of truth, of information established by facts. No easy task: technology has allowed statistical information to blossom, and sociology has never had it so good. Nevertheless, we have seen with the growth of statistics that there has also been an equally rapid development of statistical manipulation by certain interested groups capable of fashioning their own fake realities that are dystopian in essence.  So, for meaningfulness to be reinstated, we cannot rely on information alone, we have to be able anchor the information machinery to authentic human needs based on universal moral imperatives that favor Humanity above the interests of Wealth. It is time now to search for what those authentically human, moral imperatives must be.     

Meaningful Reasons

LANGUAGE IN THE MEANINGFUL UNIVERSE

For science to be possible the universe has to be constructed with meaningful criteria.

Likewise, for any language to exist, there needs to be a priori meanings which languages will need to express intelligible concepts. Or, in other words, without meanings there could not have been complex languages that are needed to unravel those meanings. Language is not just communication, it is a construct needed for making sense of things, and its existence implies an intuitive reason preceding the existence of language, that could intuitively perceive a need to make sense of things.

MEANING IN THE MEANINGFUL UNIVERSE

If meaning exists as an essential piece of the universe then meaninglessness is reduced to a mere fantasy or a lack of seeing the meaning that is always there.

Nihilism, as such, is a maladjustment of reality.

I am because I think and I think because there is a reason to do so, because there is Meaning (with a capital M) that makes thinking necessary.

If the nihilists are right, and the universe really is devoid of meaning, then language would have to disappear for there is no need of language if there is no meaning. Yes, we can affirm that we create our own meanings in an absurd universe – but that idea is just an absurd running away from the logical truth residing in the fact that there had to be a Meaning for language to be necessary in the first place. That Meaning has not disappeared; it resides in all meanings as their essence: it is meaning itself.

MEANING AS COSMOLOGICAL INTUITION

To properly understand this idea, Meaning has to be separated from either the Ideal or God. Cosmological intuition is the best term we can find to grasp this primordial drive that is Meaning. An intuition stemming from the meaningless void from which it exploded. An intuition in the void capable of creating a beginning, a Big Bang. An intuition for time and space and an ordering of matter into forms, driven by a desire to become more than an intuition and manifest itself as a reality – something capable of knowing things and knowing itself; of knowing and being-known; of uncovering its own self; of understanding what the intuition that itself is really is; of the discovering the meaning of itself and the realisation that that meaning is embedded in everything; and that everything should be preserved as that which deserves to continue because it is meaningful.

Meaning strives to exist and to remain. It wills eternity, which it knows it lacks, and needs the cognitive, sapiens entities that have evolved from this Meaningfulness in time and space to develop a way of making that eternity possible.     

THE UNIVERSE, HUMANITY AND RADICAL OPTIMISM

These are terrible times: the global warming that has made natural disasters more virulent and regular than ever before and the prospect for the arrival of an unguarded AGI (the Big Brother of AI) now being projected before 2030 are existential questions for humanity which, added to the undercurrent of a looming global cataclysm between warring nuclear powers or a division of the world political map between totalitarian oligarchies, shrouds reality with a dark shade of ugly grey. So terrible is the current situation that many people turn off from reality by ignoring it, getting on with their lives from a position of denial, while others watch in a mixture of doubt and disbelief as irrational behaviour streams torrentially through the media, propagated by those who stand in positions of what used to be the supposedly caring roles of leadership. The madness we live in invites laughter at times, for in essence it is more absurd than real, but an insanity none the less. The consumer age that is ours cannot be perpetuated without serious consequences and part of those consequences are the death throes of capitalism and the fall of civilisation as we know it today. We have an anxious world population, tormented by the snowballing growth of uncertainty that infects our lives: uncertainty for the present states and even deeper uncertainty for the future.

Given this pessimistically bleak world scenario, the current nihilistic worldviews that are propagated by our consumer-age reality can offer no answers other than to seek consolation through the therapy of shopping (the more compulsive the better). This has to change. The problems facing humanity today are deeply serious and rooted in the dilemma between survival and extinction. A radical, systemic change is needed for us to ever be able to overcome these existential threats around us. This is understood by political extremists and is being milked to the advantage of far-right ideologies. At the same time political alternatives to the far-right seem useless, for while the political centre is fundamentally a mirage and a great lake of impotence the radical left remains the hot house of moralistic squabbling that it has always been and no saviour seems to be anywhere within the political, ideological spectrum of salvation. To get back on track there needs to be a psychological shift in our collective worldview. Only when humanity starts taking a more positive, optimistic view of a future embedded in meaningfulness will Humanity with a capital H become possible. And Humanity is what humanity needs. In this nihilistic age, an anti-nihilistic worldview, a new radical kind of optimism, is the only positive way forward.

To accomplish this we have to rethink what we are. To do that we have to reconsider where we have come from and find the positive, because authentically natural, evolution of what our authentic nature is. To do this we must investigate the composition of everything with a positivistic bias and look for a natural, universal meaning to reality – a natural, embedded reason for humanity being in the world. To do that we have to start with the question of why: Why is there a phenomenon like human beings in the world? Our existence here has been the result of a very long and intricate process of evolution that began with the beginning of everything, i.e., the Big Bang, and the key to our reason for being rests in that same evolutionary process. The same key that opens the door toward a new, radical positivism.

Once we consider life – and especially the evolution of sapiens organisms – as part of an evolutionary process, then we start to perceive the cosmos as something that is striving toward a necessary final form, wherein, through complex, intelligent life forms, its true sense, its reasons, are being disclosed and its short-comings might be overcome. This implies a tremendous, implicit symbiosis between intelligent life-forms like us and an otherwise blind, unconscious universe. And if this companionship with the universe is real, then this suggests that we have been created by cosmological evolution in order to participate in the greatest, most purposeful task of all – the process by which the blind universe comes to see and know itself. Our consciousness makes the universe itself, self-aware.

Arguably, we participate in this relationship whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not. Our sapiens nature implicates us in the task at hand in an unavoidable way. Nevertheless, our non-sapiens (anti-human) historical process has led us away from this essential meaningfulness. The anti-human development of civilisation has been a process that has pulled us ever more distant than the natural evolution which would have lifted us toward an authentic involvement in cosmological needs and the disclosure of the real meaningfulness of our companionship with the universe. By pushing us away from authentic purposiveness, historical process has created a civilisation fashioned from the absurd resignations of nihilism and the superficial relativity that can justify any argument whatsoever. Logic, however, tells us quite clearly that the world does not exist for us, but we exist for the world – that is our most pressing responsibility, and from that idea we can start to build the Humanity we have never properly had.

Authentic meaning is the most deep and enriching discovery that could be made, but the truth is that meaning still needs to be uncovered. And authentic meaning, like all meanings, is the answer to a question, the result of an investigation. It has an essentially enigmatic nature and it must always be remembered that the meaning of Meaning is to find the meaning. Meaning is morphic – each answer raises different questions with new and different answers. In this way, Meaning (with a capital M) is an accumulation of all discoveries made in the quest for Meaning. From this idea a new positivistic view of humanity and a radically new human optimism can be forged. The radical positivism we now so desperately need to pull us up and away from the stifling nihilism that is consuming us.

Necessity vs. Self-suffiency

There is no self-sufficiency in the Universe of Meaning and there never has been. Meaning was born from the Meaninglessness and needs the meaningless to define its meaning. The Universe itself needs the Void for us to be able to understand it through the capacity to situate it in a particular place (i.e., within the Void).

This lack of self-sufficiency has existed since the primordial beginnings of everything. The inanimate universe needed consciousness to make it known and, through being known, to exist. Consciousness needs the space and time, provided by the Universe to exist in. Everything is embedded with necessity.  

The Meaning of Meaning

What is the meaning of Meaning?

(I)

To find it we need to open the concept up to the absolute condition: the meaning of Meaning lies in the reason for being, and as such is buried in the idea of why it all exists. The fundamental question that needs to be answered is, therefore, why does anything exist at all?, which has traditionally been a metaphysical conundrum (God willed it) but will only ultimately be resolved through a scientific understanding. However, the answer could also well be that there is no reason why the universe exists, and that might be resolved when we can be sure of how it came into existent (again, through science). But this does not negate the meaning of Meaning as such, it merely points to a condition that Meaning has evolved. In such case, the meaning of Meaning will need to be found by examining cosmological evolution (once more, through science).    

If we seek the answer from a personal perspective, however, the process becomes far more convoluted, although it also starts from an absolute idea of Meaning. Ultimately, the meaning of my Meaning is the meaning for my being here, and this also bifurcates between the metaphysical idea of destiny and the natural, scientific observation of genetic propagation, and between these two there is the socio-psychological idea of the social destiny set out for us by our cultural identity and social indoctrinations. But this drags any personal solution to the enigma through a whirlwind of relativity that in turn devalues any attempt at tackling the conundrum and invites a nihilistic surrender – just get on with your life, for there can be no obvious purpose to it at all – and our task here is precisely to overcome all nihilisms. So, how do we turn back or leap over this demon of nihilism.

In order to make Meaning meaningful, it needs to be, above all, practical. Nihilism is so successful today because it offers a very lazy kind of pragmatism: no need to stress oneself with vain reasons for doing things, just accept that there are no good reasons for anything and get on with doing whatever you find enjoyment from. However, this philosophy that seems like a very workable kind of hedonism, ideal for our consumerist culture, eventually reaches the dead end it has always been rushing to and collapses in on itself, like a dragon devouring its own tail. To escape this void-creating tendency therefore, purpose has to compete on the pragmatic level with nihilism. And to do that we now have to ask ourselves, what is the practical side of the meaning of Meaning?

The answer to this question resides in what it avoids, for meaningfulness escapes nihilism. The practical side of discovering the meaning of Meaning is, therefore, that it liberates us from nihilistic pitfalls such as superficiality, emptiness, unfulfillment and depression. What’s more, because of its Absolute condition, the meaning of Meaning transcends the personal and offers solutions on a universal plane that also transcends political ideologies and cultural identities, animating the intersubjective, pan-human side of existence.

In order to know the meaning of Meaning it seems logical that we would firstly have to deduce what Meaning is, but Meaning in the absolute sense is hidden from us and is only intuited to exist or not exist at all. So, our problem now is: How can we know the meaning of something that is unknown to us? To discover Meaning at an absolute level means to decipher the meaning for the existence of the universe, and this can only be done through metaphysical speculation (which will never provide a satisfactory conclusion), or through a cosmological investigation. The latter, which is made more practical by being more tangibly and intellectually conclusive, will have to be carried out by a thorough cosmological analysis of the present state of the universe, an investigation driven by the question why?: Why has the cosmos evolved in this way and not in any other way?. This question will be partly answered by investigating how?: How have be come to be in this condition?. But as our general concern is Meaning, the fundamental part of our investigation needs to be concerned with why?.

(II)

Let us begin with a logical proposition: Anything that is meaningful is qualitatively better than anything that is meaningless. For a universe to be a good universe, therefore, it needs to be embedded in purpose or meaning. In the case, the term good now functions in the wider sense of anything that is meaningful. And what this also means, is that a universe devoid of purpose is bad.

Arguably, a nihilist could reason that none of this is important because these concepts of meaning and meaninglessness or good and bad are merely human concepts, and therefore ephemeral and transcendental in a cosmological sense, that have no absolute bearing on reality and so should not be taken seriously in any scientific analysis of reality – yet this also presents another truth, which is that the meaning of the universe is a psychological one only, and is therefore completely dependent on the complexity of intelligences capable of forming rational, ethical propositions, i.e., Meaning and its consequences depend on human rationality and this demonstrates our importance; our meaningful role in the meaning of Meaning.

(III)

In his General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Husserl makes an interesting comparison between the factualness of things and the essence of them[i]. For Husserl, our individual experience of our existence in the world is universally contingent, a contingency that he calls ‘factualness’, but that the random behaviour implied by contingency is actually moderated by the essence of things that stem from the very shapes and forms of things comprising the Eidos of reality. It is through things like shape, form, or tone that individual items fall into an essential group of items, or species, and that: “Everything belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too.”[ii] Or, in other words, we, as individuals, are most definitely random, contingent entities, but everything belonging to the essence one of us can be a part of everyone else.

What this means is that we are united by our shared essence, i.e., by our humanity. And this also means that the best way to resist divisiveness is to accentuate this shared essence.

One of our essential human traits, for example, is the complexity of human language that we use to communicate and understand each other and the universe in which we live. Although we have thousands of languages and dialects, and many more that have disappeared, there is an essential quality of all those languages which is communication and comprehension, that is only possible between human beings, or between human beings and the animals that live with humans, or between humans and the machines that are built or programmed to understand our languages.

This means that a primary essence of being human is meaning. Without meaning language would make no sense; would be pointless; would not be used; and from this we can say that without meaning there could not be any humanity or human beings. Meaning then comes before language, even though it is language which has to uncover meaning.

The idea that the essence of humanity and, as such, of each individual human being, is meaning immediately creates a problem, for while we understand the general meaning of things it is not so easy to say what an absolute meaning of Meaning is: What is the meaning of our existence, of being human, of being here?

Ironically, the search for the meaning of that essential question has led to humanity’s greatest metaphysical errors – the idea of God, or the notion that is no meaning at all, or that the answer to the question of Meaning is elsewhere and impossible to grasp here.

If instead of God, we had used the term Meaning, and subsequently affirmed that the meaning of Meaning is Meaning, the history of humanity could have been a far less turbulent phenomenon. If, instead of claiming that God were the Alpha and Omega, we had understood that Meaning is the beginning and end of the universe. If we had been capable of understanding that the universe had to have emerged out of a void of non-meaning, and seen such an emergence embedded with, an albeit, purely intuitive purpose to create the meaningful; if we had understood how this process would have required the formation of cosmological conditions apt for the creation of and ability to sustain life-forms capable of evolving into sentient organisms that could ask and resolve the question of Meaning; and if we had been able to rationalise how by doing so, cosmic evolution was capable of making the meaningless universe meaningful, then we would now be able to appreciate the meaningful place of our own humanity within the domain of the Absolute that is cosmological purposiveness, and by so doing having a far more purposeful and confident, and less anxious, idea of our own selves and our shared humanity.

By looking for the meaning of Meaning by investigating our own inquisitive instincts that evolve from the raw question of Meaning that is such an integral part of the essence of humanity, we will allow the beautiful blossom of a Meaningfulness (in the absolute sense) that is being unravelled, uncovered and in a continuous state of becoming known.

It is this meaning, understood as an essence, that gives us our why and what for.

Through our intuitions we are able to sense an absolute Meaning to the universe, and it was such an intuition that created the concept of God. But it is Meaning that is the essence, not God. This essence can only be known vaguely, through intuition, because the nature of the essence as Meaning is only an intuitive one. Meaning as an essence is an intuition of what Meaning could be when the Universe which is the subject and final object of Meaning matures to the state of Absolute Meaningfulness.

In the beginning there was an intuition of Meaning.

Meaning as an essence needs a factual, material-world environment (with three dimensions of space and a forward, unilinear motion of time) in order for it to become existence.  

For an essence to exist it must be given form. The form given to, or created by, the essence that is Meaning for us, is our Universe.  

(IV)

If the essence of the Meaningful Universe is the intuition of Meaning, then everything in the Universe is imbued with Meaning via intuition, although this does not mean that all activity is meaningful.

The intuited Meaning has to be grasped, but, in order to grasp it, it needs to be located. An intuition of Meaning does not tell us what that Meaning actually is. Only when we can be completely sure of what the Universe really is and what it could be will we be able to clarify what Meaning is. At the moment we can know the Universe from what our cosmology tells us about it. We know it is expanding and that it will probably continue to expand until everything freezes and dies. However, reason tells us that this is an absurdity.

Via intuition we are told that there can be a thing we call eternity. Eternity, therefore, is a possibility in Meaning, and as Meaning will always gravitate towards meaningfulness, and abhor meaninglessness, the eternal is a logical component of cosmological will.

As for what eternity is for such a will, we define it as a Permanence of Being (wherein Being means cognitive existence – that which knows and is known).

Meaning in essence has no syntactical form: it is, in a grammatical sense, itself void of meaning. It comes out of its opposite, the Meaningless void and, from that antagonistic birth, is immediately imbued with positivism. Meaning is a will for the Meaningful. Creation of an inanimate, meaningless universe is not enough: Meaning needs the silent space to become animated and capable of possessing its own creativity.

In order to achieve the physical conditions allowing for conscious existence to be possible, in order for that to happen, life-forms needed to be created. The evolutionary process unto life was therefore a logical imperative imposed on the universe via Meaning. Living organisms that could reproduce, morph, adapt, evolve, learn, advance, and change the environment around them were necessary for the meaning of Meaning and the subsequent meaning of everything to become possible via consciousness. For the meaning of Meaning to be grasped the universe needed organisms capable of asking: What is the meaning of this universe?. And for Permanence of Being to be possible, the Universe needs a consciousness capable of acting according to the logical answers found around this ultimate of all questions which is What is the meaning of Meaning?.   

[i] Edmund Husserl, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Martinus Nijhoff, 1983, Chapter 1, § 2, p. 7

[ii] Ibid, p. 8

God is Dead, Long Live Meaning!

xr:d:DAF4jj-1xaU:20,j:3507592243663730935,t:23123115

                 (I)

Perhaps more than anything else, philosophy and religion have been locked in a seemingly impossible struggle with the conundrum of meaning. What is the meaning behind us being here? Or is that a mute question because, in the natural world that encases the ideal existence of our minds, there is no meaning? The nihilist will affirm the negative result, and many may applaud this conclusion because it allows them to wash their hands of the dilemma, but, for most of us (and the extent and persistence of world religion reinforces this assumption that we are the majority), the idea of an absurd, purposeless fabric of reality is disturbing and fundamentally impractical.

Purposefulness is an essential ingredient in all pragmatism, in order to do what needs to be done we need to know what needs to be done, but this fact does not assuage the reality that despite our gut instinct that a cosmological purpose must exist, we have not the slightest idea what that underlying meaning of everything could possibly be. Hence, the widespread acceptance of, for the most part, naïve explanations of the meaning of life, which are propagated by religious narratives, centring meaning within the idea of God, or the gods. For those, on the other hand, who find religion too innocent, too manipulative, or even too political, there are plenty of philosophical indagations to turn to, but, no matter where we look, for the question of meaning it seems there is always an underlying current of uncertainty that will undoubtedly persist until we have scientific proof and a clear demonstration of what the cosmological reason for existence has to be, if even it has to be at all. And because the former, it seems, is, at least primarily, impossible to prove, the latter becomes more palatable, and this explains the powerful gravity wielded by nihilism.

The truth, as such, can only really be truly affirmed by the normalisation given by science, but science, at the moment, ignores this task, regarding it as too metaphysical or too esoteric. Really, it seems perfectly happy pushing the problem straight back to philosophy – and hardly anyone listens to, let alone understands philosophy. Nevertheless, a deep, philosophical reflection on Meaning is necessary not only for the psychological well-being of individuals but for the whole of society, if not for the proper working of civilisation itself. Given the current state of human individuals being little more than machines of unbridled consumerism projected into the world to devour and contaminate it by producing growing mountains of consumption and waste, a deeper reason for being needs to be propagated in order to save humanity from ourselves. It is only by wrestling with this problem that humanity as a whole will be able to push forward in a meaningful way. Subsequently, we are now faced with the obvious imperative to resurrect the age-old philosophical interrogative and once more attempt to tackle the question of why we, and the universe, exist. To do this, there is a tautological knot that needs to be unravelled. We need to ask ourselves: What is the meaning of Meaning?

                    (II)

This meaning of Meaning may simply be to discover what Meaning is, or in other words, the meaning of Meaning lies in the act of attempting to answer the question “What is the meaning of Meaning?” As soon as the question is asked, Meaning becomes a transcendentally significant concept and could be considered an alternative to the very idea of God. This is because the secret of existence lies in the unravelling of this mystery and precisely defines what really happens when one goes looking for God – the search for God is a search for Meaning, and the idea of God is therefore nothing more than a mask, usually an andromorphic creation, of an otherwise abstractly conceptual fabric of existence. But any definition of the concept of meaning depends on a transcendentally ideal formulation of the interrogative itself. Or, in other words, there needs to be a mind that is complicated enough to be able to formulate questions like this one. And that means that the meaning of Meaning can only exist once someone or something exists that is capable of formulating the question regarding the meaning of Meaning itself.

By bestowing Meaning on existence we animate it. In the same way, nihilism, which denies meaningfulness, is a depressing force on existence. With nihilism one has to find reasons to go forward with, despite the fact that there are no fundamental reasons, and such an existence is absurd. Nihilism renders everything absurd through the relativity that is generated by meaninglessness, while purpose and reasons are transformed into Quixotic fantasies. However, by establishing that the meaning of Meaning is to ask what is the meaning of Meaning, we are already stepping beyond nihilism because part of the answer to the question is embedded in the mere fact that we are able to formulate the question. Our Meaning for being here is to be capable of formulating the biggest of all questions, and whether or not we can answer the mystery we know that the Meaning is wrapped up in our own existence. Or, in other words, the reason for our existence resides in the fact that we are capable of asking what is the reason for our being here. And from here, we have a starting point for going forward in a truly meaningful way because we find that the grounding point of meaning resides in our own common human condition, because, as far as we know, it is only in human consciousness, with the complex tools of human languages, that reality can be engaged. This is carried out, not as a static presentation of what simply exists but as a dynamic process in which each human subject is involved in a creative, subjective experience, both felt and imagined, of the universe we are a part of.

                   (III)

Individuals and societies mature by overcoming their own infantile beliefs, and faith in a mythical being like God is just as infantile as a belief in the idea of Santa Claus. However, the price of our loss of innocence cannot come at the forfeiture of all absolute and good reasons for doing things, because individuals and societies need to know that they are operating purposefully in order to develop in a healthy way, both materially and psychologically.

By analysing the meaning of Meaning in the absolute sense we leap beyond the figure of God and go straight into what would be God’s mind itself. The form of God, therefore, is now the form of the Universe, and the Mind is found in the reason why this Universe has evolved the way it has. That the meaning of Meaning lies primarily in the ability to ask and attempt to answer what Meaning is, elevates us, as ones endowed with such a capacity, unto the field of cosmological meaning itself. In our essence we are very much a real part of the Meaning of Everything.