The block against life-value onto-axiology begins as in “math anxiety” – felt incapacity at abstraction without familiar first-order concrete referents to go on. Yet mathematical abstraction can be overcome by locking into its life-indifferent game of uniform units in tautological formulae which can go forever with no confrontation by life reality. In deep contrast at its highest order of abstraction, life-value onto-axiology (L-V O-A) confronts its apprehender with all of life at the same time – all of thought, felt side of being, action at once in the most comprehensive unifying generalization conceivable with dynamic metric of value/disvalue process. It simply exceeds capacity to absorb, and so the vast majority tune out of what is too challenging to think through (including philosophers).
This is the most elementary block against L-V O-A understanding. Then too everyday auto-conformity and blocks against what unsettles preconceptions are built into those conditioned to passive consumption as well as academics who have never left school or instituted frameworks of meaning. This level of avoidance of understanding L-V O-A can, like the others, be enough by itself to block it if there is no requirement to know it. Then it typically becomes self-evident once comprehended.
Then there are system-driven mind-stops at work. Industrial division of labour into multiplying specialties and jargons where one specialty cannot speak to another and so are a-priori locked against a value theory that cuts across them all. Every other theory, assertion or position is more vulnerable still by the partiality of life comprehension built into it by definition.
Most deeply aversive, no science, logic, philosophy, theory, argument or position whatever remains secure in its claimed truth insofar as L-V O-A is limitlessly valid and applicable. Its very objectivity, impartiality, universality and sovereignty as value, ground and compass challenges all doctrines and value systems, including physics “theories of everything” that exclude life and life value a-priori from their object of inquiry.
L-V O-A cannot be accepted or even considered if any other position, viewpoint, or theory whatever is to remain as it is, that is, closed to its universal, impartial, objective principles of life value and necessity across all terrestrial domains. In this light, we better understand why life-value onto-axiology is taboo to know.
John McMurtry Ph.D (University College London)
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
Professor of Philosophy
University Professor Emeritus
University of Guelph Ontario, Canada NIG2W1
Philosophy and World Problems
Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS)
UNESCO, Paris-Oxford
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