Gary Childress wrote: ↑Thu Jun 15, 2023 11:27 pm
Sure, everything is understandable, but what should and shouldn't I believe to be true? Can you tell me that?
Gary asks a good question, but I think it should be modified away from "I'll tell you something" -- which places it on a personal plane -- and back toward "What sort of things can genuinely be said to be true?"
What is true on the natural plane, the plane of nature, the Earth? I believe I have already stated that in my way of seeing, which I admit to being subjective interpretation, but which yet seems right, is that we do not discover and we cannot extract metaphysical truths from natural processes.
So, the earth-sciences define truths that are more like sensible explanations about why certain things go on as they do.
It is only in the human world where (what I refer to as) metaphysics enters in. Simply put, an idea, a concept, a wide and general view, and also an interpretation -- these are metaphysical. I choose not to focus on the definition of metaphysical as a sort of miraculous magic. i.e. the intervening in the natural world of some power or entity that is understood to be above or outside of nature.
So I take metaphysics at the most basic level. Our 'psyche' is a metaphysical entity it seems to me. To be human is to have a psyche certainly but also to be a metaphysical creature. To operate with a strong and determining idea (say for example that of the realization of justice) is to operate with and work with a
metaphysical idea.
If I understand what, say, "comes to us" from the metaphysical domain as being essentially insubstantial in the sense of not materially quantifiable or locatable, then what exactly is *it*? Can it be said to *exist* if it cannot be, say, isolated or captured?
So if ever there is something *quintessential"
quintessence
Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. the fifth essence, of which the heavenly bodies were thought to be made, distinguished from the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth; hence, the most pure essence or most perfect embodiment of a thing or being. — quintessential.
it is to be located in what I am trying to refer to. It does not *exist* and yet it certainly
exists.
It seems to me that in order to talk about the *truth* of the very essences of what we are talking about, that we don't have much choice except to conceive of the metaphysical dimension as what is actually being discussed. But how are the *truths* that are discerned as 'operating' at those levels defined? Who has defined them? And when comparing various of the declarations that arise from them (an invisible, intuited world that is realized in ways different from standard measuring, as in weights and sizes) how are these things adjudicated? And, importantly, do hierarchies of value exist? and can these be said to be *real*?
Okay.