Aug 5, 2025 06:47 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 5, 2025 07:36 PM by Magical Realist.)
''Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."--John Keats
Whatever THE Truth is, if there is even such a thing, why wouldn't it be the most wonderful and beautiful news imaginable? Of course truth, in the lower case sense of the ordinary events of our lives, rarely is a wonderful outcome at all. Our loved ones die, wars rage on, murders are committed, pandemics spread, and the drama of human life fitfully surges on.
But when we talk about absolute Truth, we are in a whole nother ball park. It is the hypothetical summation and context giving everything its meaning and harmony. It would be the ultimate and elegantly efficient sense-maker to all of our mortal troubles and quandaries. Religion at one time was a noble attempt at such, only to decay thru the ages into primitive superstitions and petty moralisms.
Science then comes along and offers us a seemingly comprehensive view of reality based on law-governed physical particles. But it doesn't really answer to the meaningless angst of humanity as a whole. Not that it even should, any more than we would expect the field of automechanics to communicate the joy and freedom of driving a car. Sartre said it well: "Everything has been figured out except how to live our lives." Philosophy offers us little more, expounding on abstractions and generalizations hardly relevant to our modern plight.
Is absolute Truth then even possible? Can there even be a single all-embracing worldview in which we can live reasonably happy and prosperously? Perhaps not. Perhaps Reality itself is what resists "worldviewing". If this is so, then we might as well resign ourselves to the perspectival and relative nature of our experience--of its nature as what only appears lacking any sort of substance or permanent universal meaning.
Curiously enough this seemingly nihilistic conclusion opens the door to the best of all possible worlds. An ephemeral and ever-changing reality IS the most beautiful scenario after all. Nothing lasts forever, and nothing needs to, as there is always new and unexpected things coming from around the next corner. The Truth then as that of an adventure-filled Voyage, where we may occasionally tarry and delight in this and that, but always resuming the journey to whole new vistas of being.
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."--John Keats
Whatever THE Truth is, if there is even such a thing, why wouldn't it be the most wonderful and beautiful news imaginable? Of course truth, in the lower case sense of the ordinary events of our lives, rarely is a wonderful outcome at all. Our loved ones die, wars rage on, murders are committed, pandemics spread, and the drama of human life fitfully surges on.
But when we talk about absolute Truth, we are in a whole nother ball park. It is the hypothetical summation and context giving everything its meaning and harmony. It would be the ultimate and elegantly efficient sense-maker to all of our mortal troubles and quandaries. Religion at one time was a noble attempt at such, only to decay thru the ages into primitive superstitions and petty moralisms.
Science then comes along and offers us a seemingly comprehensive view of reality based on law-governed physical particles. But it doesn't really answer to the meaningless angst of humanity as a whole. Not that it even should, any more than we would expect the field of automechanics to communicate the joy and freedom of driving a car. Sartre said it well: "Everything has been figured out except how to live our lives." Philosophy offers us little more, expounding on abstractions and generalizations hardly relevant to our modern plight.
Is absolute Truth then even possible? Can there even be a single all-embracing worldview in which we can live reasonably happy and prosperously? Perhaps not. Perhaps Reality itself is what resists "worldviewing". If this is so, then we might as well resign ourselves to the perspectival and relative nature of our experience--of its nature as what only appears lacking any sort of substance or permanent universal meaning.
Curiously enough this seemingly nihilistic conclusion opens the door to the best of all possible worlds. An ephemeral and ever-changing reality IS the most beautiful scenario after all. Nothing lasts forever, and nothing needs to, as there is always new and unexpected things coming from around the next corner. The Truth then as that of an adventure-filled Voyage, where we may occasionally tarry and delight in this and that, but always resuming the journey to whole new vistas of being.