As Lewis Mumford explains well in Technics and Human Civilization, what I call the promethean existential rebellion against nature’s monstrousness begins tens of thousands of years before civilization, with the creativity involved in forming verbal and nonverbal symbols and in forging the egoic veto power over the brain’s cognitive capacities. We created ourselves as persons at the mental level long before we created cities and civilizations.

Lots of other animal species do this to a limited extent, putting their stamp on their habitat, communicating in codes that only they and their prey and predators can understand. We, too, wanted to stand out as an independent species, appalled as we were by the environment’s indifference, as it evidently both created and destroyed every living thing.

Science and philosophy disenchant nature in Weber’s sense, which means they deprive us of cosmic or universal purpose. That’s the absurdity of life that follows from modern objectivity or from our cunning detachment and from the depersonalization of nature.

I think we talked before about the physical basis of colour, and I explained to you how physical surfaces absorb and transmit different wavelengths of white light. This understanding of how colour works goes back to Newton’s prism experiments, I believe. So you’re wrong in saying that colour is entirely subjective and arbitrary. (See the links below.)

For some reason you presume that aesthetic values must be positive, so excrement can have no aesthetic value. But the opposite of beauty is ugliness, and both are aesthetic. Indeed, I emphasize nature’s monstrousness, which again is aesthetic. So that criticism of the priority of aesthetic value is a nonstarter.

Perhaps we ask “Why?” because we’re curious or we’re struck with wonder. The search for meaning follows from survivalist curiosity, though, once we discover that the world is separate from the ego, as Ernest Becker explains in The Denial of Death. All children go through that trauma of discovering that solipsism is baseless because the external world is opposed to the whims of the individual will. The question becomes: What are we supposed to do as personal individuals in an impersonal world? Answering that question is the quest for meaning.

https://lab-training.com/what-is-the-basis-of-colour-of-substances/

https://www.thoughtco.com/understand-the-visible-spectrum-608329

https://www.britannica.com/science/color/Physical-and-chemical-causes-of-colour