0,00 €
Mehr erfahren.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Ähnliche
Cover
Laurent GrenierOttawa, 2025
Happy reading!
Title page
LIFE REVISITED
A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Purpose of Existence
Laurent Grenier
Philosophical essay
Soledit
Copyright page
Cover by Andy Magee (Reedsy)
© Laurent Grenier, 2025. The reproduction of this essay, either in whole or in part, by any process whatever, is strictly prohibited without the author’s consent.
[email protected]: 979-8-89686-444-8Legal deposit: Library and Archives Canada, 2025
By the same author
A Reason for Living, autobiographical essayNardisPress, 2004
Meditation Time:Know Yourself and the World Around Youphilosophical essay, NardisPress, 2019
Acknowledgments
My deepest gratitude goes to my brother Pierre and my aunt Claire Lagacé, who have accompanied me in my reflections for many years. My many thanks also go to my friends and relations, listed in alphabetical order: Santiago S. Borboa, Pierre Bourque, Ayoub Diab, Jacques Dufresne, Clovis Fauquembergue, Gabriel Fohom, Sylvie Hurtubise, Patrick Imbert, Matteo Locatelli, Alison McGain, Pierre Nepveu, Abbad E. Othmane, Claude Soucie and Armel Tsague. They all were kind enough to read my manuscript and give me their impressions, rich in linguistic, philosophical and scientific knowledge.
Dedication
To my nephew and niece,Arnaud and Juliette Grenier,with all my affection.
Contents
oMy worldview…
oThe problem in the search for meaning…
oThe particular dangers of our time…
oThe trunk and the organs of the body…
oThe head, arms and legs…
oConsciousness and its adaptive function…
oIllustration
oThe parallels between the steam engine and the human organism…
oThe dissipative system…
oThe origins of life and its evolution…
oIllustration
oDynamic equilibrium (negentropy) as opposed to “static” equilibrium (maxentropy, or maximum entropy)…
oThe unity of human nature and universal nature…
oUniversal nature in its multiple forms, where conflict as well as harmony can prevail between things…
oIllustration
oMeasurement problem versus fact of nature…
oAdaptive plasticity…
oFunctional flexibility…
oThe illusion of strict determinism…
oQuantum mechanics…
oIllustration
oThe problematic relationship between knowledge and reality…
oThe central role of subjectivity…
oSpirit and matter as signified and signifier of a logos…
oConsciousness from a panpsychist perspective…
oCommunication between living entities…
oIllustration
oThe objectives and circumstances of our lives…
oLife as an end and a good in itself…
oThe dissipative or living form and its universal foundation…
oIllustration
oThe abandonment of materialistic reductionism and idealistic reductionism…
oThe problem of truth…
oThe will instructed by knowledge…
oThe concept of love…
oThe immense and yet limited creative power of universal nature…
oOur relationship of filiation with our creative foundation…
oOur interconnection with the rest of the world…
oA just society and a sustainable development…
oIllustration
Introduction
“I venture the following idea, because nothing incites me to think the opposite: Reality, in its quality of being (that impresses itself on the mind through experience), is perfectly autonomous and constantly alternates, during its deployment, between the latent mode and the manifest mode.”
Please consider my essay not as a terminus, a manner of final say that claims to be authoritative, but as a starting point toward a personal and original reflection. To each their own journey and destination in the vast landscape of possible ideas.
In this spirit, I offer you eight chapters in which I expound my worldview. It is for you to decide whether the latter is credible, given your way of thinking.
This worldview has a multidisciplinary and synthetic character—at the crossroads of philosophy and science—that I consider as timely as it is perilous. Why timely? Because human knowledge has reached a high level of specialization in all fields and we are prone to get lost in the details, to the point of being deprived of an overall perspective, when the ideal would be to relate the dense and ramified image of reality to an educated and unified thought, like a trunk on the basis of which everything makes sense.
Yet, under the pretext of retaining only essential matters, such an effort at simplification is perilous, as there is always the risk of engaging complacently in simplistic shortcuts, which lead nowhere except a pleasant fancy, without true relevance. However, I believe I have avoided this pitfall, which would amount to a shipwreck rather than a discovery.
Note that I took the philosophical path while grappling with an existential crisis that bankrupted the meaning I gave to my life. A diving accident, accompanied by a grievous spinal cord injury, had reduced the teenage athlete that I was to a young quadriplegic, now unable to realize his dreams. I am therefore an autodidact for whom philosophy was initially a remedy against the feeling of absurdity and its morbid corollary: a potentially suicidal despair. This contrasts with a bona fide academic, motivated primarily by deep intellectual curiosity.
Also note that my philosophical career outside universities spans over 40 years, dedicated above all to meditation, study, and writing. The bibliography at the end of this essay pays tribute to the authors who have been my main sources of information and inspiration. These authors constitute, in a word, my cultural background. I invite anyone who wonders how my thoughts relate to this background to consult my bibliography, especially since I refrained from peppering my exposition with references to lighten its style.
This exposition builds on the premise that any problem in the search for meaning implies a problem in the acquisition of knowledge. However, despite ourselves, our cognitive means—which set the possibilities and limitations of this acquisition—are fallible, albeit sufficiently capable of adaptive efficiency to enable our survival. Hence, I readily give reality the benefit of the doubt when it appears deficient, because I strongly suspect that the way it is portrayed should be given the dunce’s cap.
Accordingly, I venture the following idea, because nothing incites me to think the opposite: Reality, in its quality of being (that impresses itself on the mind through experience), is perfectly autonomous and constantly alternates, during its deployment, between the latent mode and the manifest mode. The past gives way to the present that gives way to the future, but the former and the latter are always present when they happen, versus when they are no longer or not yet happening. Why is it so? It just is, that’s all. Admittedly, this is a tautological explanation, which betrays the mystery of a fathomless ontological evidence (i.e., an eternal becoming whose existence is equally a question and an affirmation).
Should methodically verified laws be brought to bear to improve this semblance of explanation, they would always have, in the final analysis, a more descriptive than explicative value, like it or not.
Some will prefer to posit a divine Cause to explain universal causality, trusting it will satisfy their ravenous intellect. To my mind, this type of reasoning only promises a sterile infinite regress or a single one, which arbitrarily interrupts the reasoning after initiating it.
This signifies that our way of answering a question depends on our way of asking it. We can indulge in an increasingly subtle analysis, but there comes a time when this subtlety equates to the tedium of finespun distinctions. I have more than once observed this excess in the analytical approach. A split hair remains a hair.
In short, try as I might, I find nowhere the justification for a supplement of reality that many call God. I do not have the arrogance of pretending that I hold the truth on this issue, beyond reasonable doubt, but honestly, I see no reason why reality wouldn’t inherently contain the power to be what it is, in all its awe-inspiring magnificence.
