All philosophy, all abstract thinking, begins from, and is never apart from, living experience. That's a truism. But so what? We could do worse than returning to recognise truisms now and then.
The conventional understanding is that our perception (the functioning of our senses) and our mental activity in concert, presents the objective universe to us. In other words, presents an objective world for subjective consciousness. Of course, both the subjective consciousness and it’s objective world (whether singular or plural) are modalities of the one reality, and are inseparable in actuality. This situation could be restated as following;
through the consciousness of living beings and their relationship to their environment, presented to them through the senses as their world, reality perceives itself and relates to itself.
Basically (and if I may be forgiven for a fetishising of terminology!), this presents a functional/appetitive and relative dualism within an absolute neutral monism.
If human beings are biological beings, instances of (mortal) life, and if intelligence is a characteristic of human beings, then it’s presence is tied up with the conditions of being human, and the vicissitudes of human life.
In other words, intelligence is an instrument inseparable from the human condition, to be used according to it’s benefit, but not exaggerated in it’s scope. Not if unnecessary mental suffering is to be avoided anyway.
Within the horizon of human understanding, is the limit of all dualistic thinking-including all subject/object-logic. Within this limit, such polarities as change and changelessness, one and many, self and other, particular and universal, finite and infinite, past and future, permanent and impermanent, sentient and insentient- even to the duality of relative and absolute- are discriminated and have their relative meaning.
Anyone who claims knowledge of a world independent of human experience is either misunderstanding the concept of shared human faculties and cognitive abilities- the tools used in scientific understanding, which presuppose the division of reality into subjective and objective realms- or that person is actually a god, which I doubt. Whatever is known to us is inescapably filtered through our innate capacities and structured according to our interests and general condition. Again, a truism.
At the threshold of the limit of intellectual understanding are (at least) three transformations of attitude towards thinking, and their possible consequences;
1-vexatious incoherence and painful frustration,
2- acceptance of incomprehensibility and creativity inspired by paradox,
3-just silence.
All three appear while the processes of living and dying, and the drives for life's necessities continue.
You decide, dear readers, which of the three is best ( most appropriate to your dispositions and appealing to your interests) to embrace.
Thus the question:: when has intellection gone too far?