Raymond Ruyer’s book Neofinalism begins, after the death of God the question is not What is true? but What makes sense?
The question is not whether this or that truly exists but whether its existence makes sense. Its existence, Ruyer is quick to point out, implies ours: does yours makes sense? Does yours makes sense, without truth?
Without truth to make sense of it, does your existence make sense? And is its existence intelligible? Is there any meaning to existence?
Yes there is, immediately personalises it. As does, No there isn’t.
Each assumes the making of sense. Is a commentary on it. Unnecessary.
Truth would seem to be unnecessary to sense. But sense was how truth was found out because how God was found it, launching the new truism: eventually, whatever the prevailing truth, it does not make sense.
But there are certain truths, mathematical or geometrical, aren’t there? which make, will always make, sense. Eternal truths. Demonstrable and experiential truths. Existential truths.
But are they important? Is not their importance simply derived from a godlike quality of being forever true?
What a poor investment the truth has made if all it has to show forever is that the sum of a triangle’s angles… or a line extended… or any constant value… Its constancy itself is its downfall.
It does not require your interest. It does not even need you to notice for it to be true in perpetuity. Like God, when it comes down to it.
That God stopped making sense is not so much the issue as that belief in God ceased to matter.
Is this not the case for triangles, long division, differential equations, for everything from the simplest function to the most speculative?
What is important and is there meaning are one and the same question.
The problem is the point of view of eternity versus the point of view of one who exists. It is not yet a question of consciousness.
Consciousness presupposes the sense of what exists. As Ruyer shows.
And we are strangely attached to what exists and to who.
What is important once our own existence is in question comes to concern not what makes sense so much as what makes sense of our existence.
What is important concerns not what is meaningful to us but what is it without which we have no importance, who without whom we are meaningless.
The field is not large perhaps. It is not the time for making great moral claims. But I’m sure many will be compelled to do so, to shore up their own sense of importance, to salvage meaning from the flood.
The worst will be those, since it is a time of plague, who claim measures of health for moral certainties.
The next worse will be those clogging up the already overworked Breach Line set up by the police for dobbing in those not doing self isolation or social distancing properly.
Moralists. Then busybodies.
What is important will perhaps be a narrow field. But it will be all we require to make sense of ourselves and our existence. Best to narrow it.
Better a few simple elements than many fragile and complex compounds.
Like Mark Hollis says: one note, better that, to be able to play just one note, for it to sound
