The meaning of the world

I’ve presented the different principles which I shall try to abide by. But before diving into details, I’d like to take stock and offer a tentative outlook on what one may call, a bit emphatically, the way of the world, or the meaning of life.

• Abstracta are necessary, omnipresent and eternal.

• Physico-mental complexity is fleeting and marginal.

• The plucking of distinguished abstracta by complex concrete structures is the finality of the universe.

To endorse, as I have, Platonism, can be dispiriting. That all mathematical objects exist is quite convenient. But that all possible and conceivable abstracta do, is less of an attractive proposition: can we marvel at the Sistine Chapel, Mozart’s concertos, or Baudelaire’s poems, if they (and the thoughts and feelings they elicit) are mere embodiments of an unfathomably complex abstract entity that always was? Even more, if there is an unlimited manifold of unseen, unheard, untold chapels, concertos and poems?

Yet, dismay or relativism would be unwarranted. It is the meeting between the plenitude and eternity of the abstract realm and the ephemeral complexity of our world that gives it true meaning. The value of La Recherche, of Abbey Road or of Le Souvenir does not lie in books, records or a painting, nor does it reside in the abstract representations that contain their various informational, semantic and axiological layers. Their value is in the connection between ourselves, transient shadows in the universe’s cauldron, and the everlasting abstracta through the looking glass.