Objective World Teeth

In mouth of madness
objective world teeth
cut across our each;
together, separate,
meaning’s ingested. 

~

I wrote this poem after writing a great deal lately about individual subjective experience – i.e. interior experience, interior frameworks from perspective positioning spectra to orienting mental frameworks, philosophies, paradigms and ideologies, sympathy, empathy, happiness, even numinous experiences. And in the recent course of reading another blog (especially the comments) about philosophy, religion and the existence (or, belief in the existence or non-existence) of God it was startling to realize just how (comparatively) invested some people are in the objective truth of such things. I frankly wondered, if only briefly, whether I even believed in an objective truth. (This ironically after criticizing postmodernism’s lack of passion due to the ’falsity‘ and trickery of mere relative assigned value.)

But the answer did come to me: yes, I do believe there is an objective truth and an objective reality, but I also believe it is only knowable subjectively, and that this is for good reason. For even ‘science’, that incredibly useful and often incredibly accurate accretion of amazingly large numbers of coherent subjective views, is only the current most rigorously arrived at, though yet incomplete, puzzle pieced guess about objective reality. And as guesses, scientific ‘facts’ and theories are mutable and subject to change. Science (or the scientific method) is only a way of arriving at a current best (i.e. highly adequate and accurate) functional theory (often theories) of what the nature of our objective world really looks like on the other side of the haze, ambiguity, imprecision and uncertainty that is our experiential existence.

Thus I rather think the actual facts of objective reality’s nature are less important than the subjective, experiential, meaningful process of attempting to adequately and accurately ‘map’ objective reality via individual and aggregate human experience – despite how inevitably flawed such a map of an ultimately unknowable objective reality must actually be.

I think the meaningful, experiential, process of science (for the human individual or human aggregate) is more important than the factual discoveries by science, and the process of meaning in human experience is more important the objective, factual content of human experience. The subjective experiential meaning of a human individual’s (or human aggregate’s) faith, religion, dogma, belief, philosophy, philodoxy, ideology or theory is more important than whether any particular god objectively exists or whether they are objectively correct. If in fact we are inevitably going to be objectively incorrect, the more important matter is not objective correctness through subjectivity but rather subjectively correct enough about objectivity.

In the mouth of existence where we are otherwise senselessly thrown, meaning, coherence, functionality, expression, adequacy, accuracy, value, worth, significance –and by interactive extension, communication, love and intimacy– these are the things that matter.