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Wednesday, February 14, 2024

 

The belief that all values are subjective is false. Therefore, a pillar of modern culture is false. Therefore, the universe is not meaningless. Science does not have the last word over reality. 

      The Good is grounded in reality. When we find something truly beautiful, we are not merely projecting our feelings onto the blank screen of a meaningless, beauty-less nature or work, but responding in our human way to something very real. 


Or when some of us are saddened and disturbed by the brutality inflicted on animals in the meat industry, we respond to the violation of the real animals; we don’t project feelings onto the blank screen of the animals because we enjoy being disturbed (unless we are sentimental). Our intellects and our feelings both work together to reveal reality - in this case, in all its horror:



If we believed we were projecting feelings – that we were sentimental – then the ground of our sadness would be removed. If you are not moved by such suffering, you don't know what you are seeing; you are meaning-blind.

     When the victims of war crimes cry out for justice, it is because violence, terrible wrong has been done to real human beings. We don’t project our horror onto beings that are objectively without value or meaning. If that is what we believed, then our horror would mean nothing.

       When we value something, when in thought or action we respond to anything according to some judgment or pre-judgment of what it is and its true value, we respond to reality, adequately or inadequately. I think you have to have a brain dried out by too much modern philosophy to believe that values or emotions are just "subjective." To believe the universe is meaningless and valueless you have to be a kind of an idiot.

    To want to make ourselves the creator and judge is value is to want to become like God – or better, like Milton’s Satan: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

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