THE QUEST FOR TRUTH AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

The quest for truth as the meaning of life is only one of a number of quests or meanings which life vouchsafes its human beings. I personally – or perhaps one should say ‘universally’ – have made the quest for truth and, I believe, achievement of it the meaning or purpose of my existence, thereby enriching my life. But those with a metaphysical bent, who are more likely to be divinely male and classless, are always up against the other types that life throws-up from out the pluralistic chaos and manifoldness of her will.

There are people who get their purpose from knowledge and are arguably physical and more likely to be male on masculine rather than divine terms; others who get it from strength and are more likely to be chemical and female on feminine as opposed to diabolic (superfeminine) terms; yet others whose raison d’être would appear to be the pursuit of beauty from a metachemical disposition the opposite of their chemical counterparts, whom I would describe, despite appearances to the contrary, as diabolical.

Truth is airy, knowledge vegetative, strength watery, and beauty fiery. I say nothing of their respective upended gender counterparts, who will be more against the corresponding gender virtue, or freedom, in sensuality or sensibility, depending on the case, than strictly of the virtue, whether heathen or christian, superheathen or superchristian, that reigns over them.

But the Beautiful and the True are incompatible, as, to a lesser extent, are the Strong and the Knowledgeable. If life were only one thing, say meaning achieved through Truth, it would be a lot different from how it is, and doubtless anyone who seriously entertains the prospect of or hope for ‘Kingdom Come’, as a society governed by godly criteria, would approve of a life governed by Truth. But then not only the Strong, but the Beautiful and the Knowledgeable would have to have been defeated and consigned to the proverbial rubbish heap of history. Some task!

I fear that gender and class rivalry, with conflicting meanings and virtues, will persist in the world for some time yet, and the world will continue, in consequence, to be a place which defies a single meaning because it is by nature heterogeneous and more disposed, if truth be told, to phenomenal virtues like strength and knowledge than to their noumenal counterparts.

Otherworldly virtues like Truth, whose raison d’être, as a godly thing, is Joy, its heavenly reward, have always been against ‘the world’, and can only emerge to any appreciable extent at the expense not only of ‘the world’, but of those netherworldly forces, like beauty and love, which normally prevail over it.