Introduction
Please consider my essay not as a terminus, a manner of final say that claims to be authoritative, but as a starting point toward a personal and original reflection. To each their own journey and destination in the vast landscape of possible ideas.
In this spirit, I offer you eight chapters in which I expound my worldview. It is for you to decide whether the latter is credible, given your way of thinking.
This worldview has a multidisciplinary and synthetic char-acter—at the crossroads of philosophy and science—that I consider as timely as it is perilous. Why timely? Because human knowledge has reached a high level of specialization in all fields and we are prone to get lost in the details, to the point of being deprived of an overall perspective, when the ideal would be to relate the dense and ramified image of reality to an educated and unified thought, like a trunk on the basis of which everything makes sense.
Yet, under the pretext of retaining only essential matters, such an effort at simplification is perilous, as there is always the risk of engaging complacently in simplistic shortcuts, which lead nowhere except a pleasant fancy, without true relevance. However, I believe I have avoided this pitfall, which would amount to a shipwreck rather than a discovery.
Note that I took the philosophical path while grappling with an existential crisis that bankrupted the meaning I gave to my life. A diving accident, accompanied by a grievous spinal cord injury, had reduced the teenage athlete that I was to a young quadriplegic, now unable to realize his dreams. I am therefore an autodidact for whom philosophy was initially a remedy against the feeling of absurdity and its morbid corollary: a potentially suicidal despair. This contrasts with a bona fide academic, motivated primarily by deep intellectual curiosity.
Also note that my philosophical career outside universities spans over 40 years, dedicated above all to meditation, study, and writing. The bibliography at the end of this essay pays tribute to the authors who have been my main sources of information and inspiration. These authors constitute, in a word, my cultural background. I invite anyone who wonders how my thoughts relate to this background to consult my bibliography, especially since I refrained from peppering my exposition with references to lighten its style.
This exposition builds on the premise that any problem in the search for meaning implies a problem in the acquisition of knowledge. However, despite ourselves, our cognitive means—which set the possibilities and limitations of this acquisition—are fallible, albeit sufficiently capable of adaptive efficiency to enable our survival. Hence, I readily give reality the benefit of the doubt when it appears deficient, because I strongly suspect that the way it is portrayed should be given the dunce’s cap.
Accordingly, I venture the following idea, because nothing incites me to think the opposite: Reality, in its quality of being (that impresses itself on the mind through expe-rience), is perfectly autonomous and constantly alternates, during its deployment, between the latent mode and the manifest mode. The past gives way to the present that gives way to the future, but the former and the latter are always present when they occur, versus when they no longer do or not yet. Why is it so? It just is, that’s all. Admittedly, this is a tautological explanation, which be-trays the mystery of a fathomless ontological evidence (i.e., an eternal becoming whose existence is equally a question and an affirmation).
Should methodically verified laws be brought to bear to improve this semblance of explanation, theywould always have, in the final analysis, a more descriptive than ex-plicative value, like it or not.
Some will prefer to posit a divine Cause to explain universal causality, trusting it will satisfy their ravenous intellect. To my mind, this type of reasoning only promises a sterile infinite regress or a single one, which arbitrarily interrupts the reasoning after initiating it.
This signifies that our way of answering a question depends on our way of asking it. We can indulge in an increasingly subtle analysis, but there comes a time when this subtlety equates to the tedium of finespun distinctions. I have more than once observed this excess in the analytical approach. A split hair remains a hair.
In short, try as I might, I find nowhere the justification for a supplement of reality that many call God. I do not have the arrogance of pretending that I hold the truth on this issue, beyond reasonable doubt, but honestly, I see no reason why reality wouldn’t inherently contain the power to be what it is, in all its awe-inspiring magnificence.
Let me use a metaphor. The philosopher who erects a conceptual system to account for what exists is a sort of contractor. He is brought to a plot and told, “Build me a practical home that takes full advantage of the space provided for this purpose.” And now this contractor strangely acts as if this space had only half its size and builds a narrow house at the base, which requires, to be habitable, another level in addition to the ground floor and the basement.
My reaction? “Things could have been so much simpler by making the most of the available space, which allowed the house to be limited to a basement and a ground floor. But no, you found a way to complicate my life unnecessarily with one staircase too many!”
Yet again, some people reading me will remain hungry and anxious to feed on a divine supplement of reality, as if the world left to itself was grossly lacking, like a disabled halfwit, incapable of tying their own shoes, pardon the expression. It turns out that I do not share this reductionist prejudice, where we seek a supernatural richness all the more as we entertain a terribly impoverished image of reality.
That said, those imbued with religious inspiration will discover, against all expectations, that their thinking and mine have a lot in common, though they diverge on certain points. Even then, didn’t the fire that brought light to our human ancestors arise from friction between two materials, thereby showing indirectly that the mind gains clarity when it meets opposition?
Anyway, just keep in mind that I am eager to share with you the fruits of my search for meaning, as they have proven greatly helpful to me and, I very much hope, will likewise benefit you.
