Life and Meaning Again

There's a couple of issues from Life and Meaning I should maybe look at. One is that this concentration and value judgement on life based on meaning,  and that necessarily being the primacy of words over life, leads back to Plato and his strange idea of the world of ideal forms, and within that intellectual world the absolute primacy of the idea of the Void. To quote from that piece:

The Greek void is specifically a language form, an intellectual creation or form, and revels in the fact of its existence as such. Why are the likes of Plato drawn to this concept of the void as an absolute - the thought which sits atop all other thoughts, the ascendant within the mental hierarchy? It is because, as said, the world of the senses has been decided to be unreal, and so what is most real should partake least of all of the sensory world, and what partakes least of all being apparently an idea. Ideas are stated to be the purest of substances, and the most pure of these substances is an idea which is utterly self-referential and distinct from the debased world of external reality. And so the void: a pure self-contained idea without reference to the debased world of sense perception. Hence through the ages, and still, the exaltation of the imagined holy landscape of Pure Reason.

And so the stress on the meaning of life, and the judging of life on that basis. So this is the historical basis of this false judging of life on the basis of its meaning, that notion of life being debased and fallen, split somehow from the perfectly spiritual, and Reason offers an escape route, though this idea is much older again than Plato, but it is through his  medium that the idea has been refracted on into the subsequent 'European' intellectual tradition, and into such modern inevitable rivulets as material atheism and life's declared meaninglessness.

The other thought to look at more deeply is that of accidental meaningfulness, which I mentioned in the Life and Meaning piece. Evolution is a scientific theory or fact that is falsely imagined to possess of some philosophical significance, that is that it negates the viability of an architect of life and renders valid the judgement of the human condition as being accidentally meaningful. As shown, the intrinsic intelligence of the human condition, as with any structure, cannot be denied, but even this is apparently not enough for it to be meaningful; instead it has to be connected directly to an external element to life, an architect or God - and so the depressing arguments about Intelligent Design. As described one cannot talk of anything as external to life or what is, and so this is invalid discourse to begin with. This is all an existential failure where life is not being accepted as is, intrinsically intelligent. With the evolution argument, and other 'scientific' stances is the attempt to posit the intrinsic intelligence of life as accidental, that things were senseless and unintelligent, and through chance and time eventually structures of accidental intelligence ensued, and so while offering the impression of being 'meaningful' these structures are only accidentally so.

But as written earlier: "Every structure that exists is intrinsically of an intelligent order; if it weren't internally intelligent it wouldn't cohere as a living/real structure. The fact of its existence, be it an atom, a stone, a bird, insect, human, etc. is absolutely dependent on its being intelligent and in itself meaningful."

There is no point within existence where this intrinsic intelligence of life's or reality's structures is flouted. The existence of every millisecond of being and the existence of everything that exists within every millisecond is inseparable and absolutely intwertwined with and dependent on this intrinsic intelligence. This intrinsic intelligence doesn't enter the equation of reality accidentally somewhere down the line of existence. Every atom, every gas, everything that can explode leading to further refinements of structure, an explosion itself, time and existence itself are and can only be because of their being of an intelligent order.

That this intrinsic intelligence is unarguable and present at every point is perhaps best illustrated when we consider what the ground of intellectual analysis or penetration of any 'structure' is based on. In this sense of intellectual penetration of structure I am including phenomena from atomic particles to phenomena like gravity, light, sound, etc. And what this ground is from which intellectual vision proceeds is that the structure observed and analysed is of an intelligent order. If it were not intrinsically intelligent then the discoursing intellect could produce no results.

And so again is shown the falseness of the notion of accidental meaningfulness; there is no point where an observing intellect can declare that this meaningfulness is accidentally introduced into the system of life as there is not and cannot be any point at which the meaningfulness can be said to be absent. The entire basis of the intellect being able to state anything about any system is that of the system's being of an intelligent order; thus it can meaningfully yield meaningful statements. If a system were declared devoid of intelligence, well then it could not be a system in the first place and so the statement self-contradictory.

 Thus anyway, all in all, the obvious truth of WIlliam Blake's line: "Everything that lives is holy" - holy here in an intellectual sense being life's unarguable nature as being intrinsically significant at every point of itself.

[This is all a bit dashed off & lacking in elegance but twill have to do for now.]