On Cosmicism: Part One

“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” (Pensees, Blaise Pascal)

“Something might be true, even if were also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existence that to understand it would lead to our own destruction.  The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much 'truth' he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.” (Beyond Good and Evil, 39, Friedrich Nietzsche)

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” (The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft)

I have referenced Lovecraft's famous opening paragraph from his brilliant short story before (see here and here).  It bears repeating in relation to Pascal and Nietzsche as all three are more or less on the same page.  Each quote approximates the loose theory presented by Lovecraft in his weird fiction aptly labeled “cosmicism.”  This theory is present in such Lovecraft masterpieces as The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Shadow Out of Time, among others.

Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi defined cosmicism thusly: “This is the idea, given the vastness of the universe both in space and in time, the human race (now no longer regarded as the special creation of a divine being) is of complete inconsequence in the universe-at-large, although it may well be of some importance on the earthly scale.” (page 12)  The inconsequential reality of our humanity within the seemingly infinitely engulfing cosmos is precisely what “terrified” Pascal.

Lovecraft pushed this sort of terror to its extremes in his unprecedented fiction.  “...the depiction of vast gulfs of time and space by the creation of huge monsters who rule the universe and who, far from being hostile to human beings, are utterly indifferent to them and occasionally destroy them as we might heedlessly destroy ants underfoot...They are worshiped as 'gods' by their human followers, but in reality most of them are mere extraterrestrials who are guided by their own motives and purposes.” (Joshi, page 13)  

Pascal's terror and Nietzsche's warning that “you can't handle the truth” fit the psychology of Lovecraft's prose.  Fear or dread serves as a good starting point for cosmicism but it is not a very profound insight.  Fear is what drives us away (backward) toward “a new dark age” that we seem to be on the verge of currently with the conservative resolve against the coming of the Modern.  As Joshi rightly points out, the universe is not really out to get us.  That is just Lovecraft playing around with his weird fiction.  Rather, humanity is of no consequence within a universe that is self-creating ever greater entropy. 

Properly understood, this does not necessitate fear at all.  We should, instead, approach the cosmos in a state of awe and wonder.  Which, ironically, is what Lovecraft actually did in his life.  He was fascinated by astronomy and was eagerly attentive to new discoveries about space.  It enthused and inspired him.  He was especially intrigued by the discovery of Pluto and incorporated that as the planet Yuggoth in his fiction.  

At the same time, however, this wonder was tempered by a sober fact of our insignificance in the cosmos and the resulting indifference of the cosmos toward us.  The vastness of space is a cause for awe but our insignificance within it is a source of shock for most people (like Pascal).  Due to what I term as humanity's subtle-arrogance that we feel that we must be significant (usually to some other thing - God), we simply can't cope with ourselves on any other terms, as Nietzsche pointed out.  Our cosmic (or ultimate) significance is a “necessary fiction.”

Lovecraft wrote in his short essay “Time and Space” that:  “Nothing more deeply disturbs our settled egotism and self-importance than the realization of man's utter insignificance which comes with knowledge of his position in time and space. […] In a few billion years, a mere second in eternity, the sun and planets must lose the heat bequeathed to them by the parent nebula, and roll black, frozen, and untenanted through space.  Therefore, the very existence of life and thought is but a matter of a moment in unbounded time; the merest incident in the history of the universe.  An hour ago we did not exist; in another hour we will cease to be.

“In our solar system we discover the apparently boundless earth to be a comparatively small planet, and in the immediate universe we find the entire solar system to but an inconsequential molecule. […] All that we know, see, dream, or imagine, is less than a grain of dust in infinity.  It is virtually nothing, or at best no more than a mathematical point.

“But whilst all these considerations may well serve to diminish the presumption of the petty philosopher, they should not be permitted to discourage humanity in its devotion to the ideals it has always pursued.  Life and mankind have their place in the natural plan, however infinitesimal that place may be; and the laws of Nature are too obvious and well-defined to warrant a feeling of futility and unrest.” (pp. 30 - 31)

This acknowledgment of our insignificance and yet also of the importance to avoid “futility” is a two-phase revelation of human relevance within the cosmos.  The cosmos is simultaneously overwhelming and yet something to revere, not necessarily encumbering the importance of our daily lives. This is sort of what Mary-Jane Rubenstein drives at in her book Strange Wonder.  I read her work sporadically because its view of wonder was not what I was expecting and, for a while, I could not connect with her perspective.  But thinking about cosmicism has caused me to reconsider Rubenstein.  

She writes that wonder is something to be approached with caution.  It involves what she refers to as a “double movement” within the beholder.  This involves both shock and awe doing a two-step dance not unlike what Lovecraft mentions above.  It is both unsettling and inspiring.  According to Rubenstien, the more palatable and tranquil aspects of wonder are a contemporary rendering of it.  Only a few centuries ago, wonder was more complex.  “Terror or shock” was seen as being “in continual tension with wonder or awe.” (page 47)

“If we follow the traces of its forgotten and repressed meanings, then, wonder loses much of the sugarcoating it has acquired in contemporary usage. As we saw with Socrates’ reaction to the pseudês doxa, wonder in the biblical and classical worlds responds to a destabilizing and unassimilable interruption in the ordinary course of things, an uncanny opening, rift, or wound in the everyday.” (page 10)  This is the type of wonder that Lovecraft taps in to with his cosmicism.

Specifically with respect to Pascal's existential terror, Rubenstein writes: “This particular double movement recalls the passage in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1670) wherein the reader is invited to contemplate the vast infinity of the entire cosmos, in comparison with which “man” is “lost” in insignificance. Pascal then suggests we turn to think upon the “equally astonishing” and vastly minute infinity revealed in the tiniest cells of a mite under a microscope, in comparison to which “man” seems a veritable “colossus.” Existing between these two ontological “abysses,” the person attuned by wonder will “marvel” to the point of being “terrified” at himself. For he knows that his very existence is nothing, and yet, at the same time, this nothingness constitutes his very existence. Contemplating the infinitely vast and the infinitely minute, he will “tremble at these marvels.”” (page 37)

For Rubenstein, the “terror” of things is also the source of “wonder”, and vice versa.  Strange Wonder is fascinating, troubling, challenging work that opens our contemporary eyes to the nature of wonder in Pascal's mind, to the nature of truth in Nietzsche's mind.  Terror looms at the heart of every inspiration.  Cosmicism says yes, the universe can be wonderful and awesome but it also utterly crushes human self-significance to the point that can be troubling to those of us who approach the universe with the idea that we are the center of it or that we are special in some, varying way.  We are not.  Yet, following Rubenstein, we must marvel at that which makes us trivial.  The double movement of wonder is strange indeed.

Our cosmic insignificance does not exist for religious people like Harvard professor Karin Öberg, who was once an atheist but converted to Catholicism.  (These conversions – atheism to theism – going in either direction are always taken as a kind of cultural trophy for whichever side is so chosen.)  She believes that the wonder of creation points to a creator.  Lovecraft would rightfully scoff at such silliness.  Öberg is fleeing from the “deadly light” of our cosmic insignificance to the “peace and safety of her new dark age;”  that is, her position is a degeneration away from reality back to the understanding of the middle ages.  

There are plenty of reasons why the “feelings” of Professor Öberg's beliefs are likely the product of pure human imagination.  First of all, the true extent of the cosmos was completely unknown to every religion in the world including Catholicism.  In fact, when Galileo first observed the moons of Jupiter and Copernicus discovered that, contrary to Biblical understanding, the Earth is not the center of creation, they were abused by the Catholic church for revealing the truth.  The Church had no clue about cosmic reality and the Bible does not either.

Secondly, we are a storytelling species.  The minds of the ancient geniuses of humanity were just as magnificent as the minds of geniuses today but they were not capable of advanced reasoning.  Such application of mind was unknown to them.  Instead, they invented stories about the stars in the sky and the movement of some stars (planets) because they simply had no other tools with which to work and they had little else to wonder about.  They were, nevertheless, geniuses of their time.  Those stories became myths and the myths became culturally ingrained which, in turn, became facts written in the first sacred texts a few thousand years ago.

For some absurd reason, most people think that once written language was established and it could survive all cultural change that particular language's profession of belief became a hard and fast truth.  In fact, it is merely the first stuff we chose to write down.  None of it likely resembled human truths 10,000 – 20,000 years prior to that.  We privilege the first surviving written wisdom in a fetish-like way without even questioning it (there was a lot of old wisdom – perhaps most – that is now forgotten).  This is fair enough, all our original wisdom was housed in such stories.  They were and still are today, however, stories as fact.  The wisdom they contain is subject to change and is malleable to new facts and emerging insights (the Earth revolves around the Sun was a shocker for every world religion).  

Creation stories (mostly forgotten ones) were universal and they all “explained” the cosmos without realizing what they were talking about.  Just as the Catholic Church didn't know what it was talking about by punishing Galileo and Copernicus.  The Earth and humanity are not the center of anything other than themselves.  Religion is, at best, a medieval technology seeking to address advanced problems of physics without any knowledge of physics.  Physics is not intuitive, at least not to a degree that would reveal actual facts.  Professor Öberg's imagination gets the better of her.  She places the feeling of old cosmic stories over the fact of the immensity of space.  Nietzsche called these stories “necessary fictions” which most people need to avoid Pascal's terror of infinity and human triviality.

Recall Joshi's quote earlier that cosmicism is not just about space but about time as well.  The immensity of space from planets to systems to galaxies to galactic groups to superclusters to the entire observable universe of innumerable superclusters (see the true scale of things here) is augmented by the billions of years to time so far and the trillions of years likely to come.  Lovecraft's cosmicism and my Expansive Omni-directionalism (EOD) orients each human being inside of this.  

Yet, the Christian faith, for example, has no clue whatsoever of the extent of this immense time and space.  The meaning that Christianity offers might be reassuring but is not taking everything into account.  It is, essentially, a pre-medieval psychological tool of understanding and an increasingly irrelevant way of experiencing things.  Santa Claus for adults.  While Hinduism is much more advanced compared with Christianity in terms of with cosmicism's concept of time, it too is riddled with antiquated attributions, finding absurd gods and spirits in every object and experience, as well as the primitive attribution of reincarnation of the atman.

Were dinosaurs significant on this Earth?  They dominated the lush planet for tens of millions of years.  Far, far longer than our measly history.  Yet, Professor Öberg's and everyone like her thinks they should base their supposedly absolute pristine profoundly meaningful understanding of the universe upon information which derives from sources where dinosaurs (among many other actual things) never existed.  For all their epic grandeur on this Earth, they are not mentioned in any religious text.  That is because, as I said before, geniuses created stories (fictions) to explain everything based on their experience, not on the fossil record.  Why base your absolute truth, why attribute to a god, based upon teachings that have no idea how the cosmos works?  This is obviously absurd no matter what you feel or believe.  And yet it is how most people are.    

Finally with regard to Öberg's creator, there is the absurd fact of the immensity of space and time.  Earth, once the center of creation as a matter of faith, cannot be seen from the scale of the observable universe.  God did not need to make it so vast for the purposes of his supposed creations.  For as long as we've been around (200,000 years or so) human beings marveled at creation without need of all this incomprehensible immensity.  If this was all created for the sake of humanity then God is the most wasteful (or excessive) maker imaginable.

But not only that.  Once more, even upon this good Earth our species has existed but for a blink of time.  Compared with the immensity of billions of years of evolution, hundreds of millions of years of life, though our civilization leaves a heavy footprint upon the Earth's space, humanity is hardly noticeable through the deep past.  Written history has been around for about 5,000 years.  All of our wisdom and beliefs and knowledge are merely 50 centuries old. Everything we imagine or believe will be forgotten with the expanse of time.  Ultimately, there will be no one around to remember anything about humanity.

From the perspective of EOD, it simply does not add up that we are the most important thing to ever happen when most everything has happened without us, without our wisdom, beliefs and knowledge.  We do not have the existential leverage we claim to possess.  To crown ourselves with significance compared to all of life through time on Earth is folly.  Evolution and the cosmos at large does not notice us.

Öberg's belief that the cosmos points to a creator is medieval, at best.  It is also arrogant without her intending to be that way; a classic example of subtle-arrogance.  To equate our little selves as equal or superior or the primary project compared with everything that has ever happened on Earth and in all the vastness of space is, at bottom, a disturbing psychological disability hindering her ability to see us for what we are.  It is also maniacally arrogant to a degree approaching megalomania.  

Why don't we recognize this obvious and universally accepted form of absurdity?  Why do human beings have to be so important in relationship to some attributed source (a creator or some other righteous force) in order to have value and meaning their lives?  This is a confused perspective.  It is as if we cannot be comfortable with life unless we are the chosen ones or the central thread of reality.  This is the residue of magical thinking and it needs to stop.

How do we fit into the grand scheme of things?  We don't.  For humanity, the grand scheme of things is that there is no grand scheme of things.  The cosmos trivializes each of us.  But to say the cosmos is reality or true or absolute or whatever is not to say human experience has no scheme at all.  We are not the cosmos.  The cosmos is not us.  The human grand scheme lies not without but within.  Most certainly that should be passionately important to each of us.  

Lovecraft lived a depressing life.  But that doesn't make cosmicism inherently depressing nor does it suggest that Lovecraft's miserable life reflects poorly upon cosmicism.  The cosmos are truly indifferent to each of us.  Yet, in true double movement fashion, we are significant travelers in the cosmos.  This is not some fiction.  It is a cold fact.  That doesn't mean you have to be miserable.  Lovecraft had his passions – for astronomy, for antiquity, for reading, for writing letters, even for aesthetics as a higher form of life.  He simply did not use his psychological tools to put that together into something more meaningful and inspiring for himself.  Nevertheless, you and I can use our tools and benefit from Lovecraft's hard truth while finding meaning and purpose in the way we live our lives in spite of cosmic reality.

Get a sense of the vast scale of cosmicism here.

(to be continued)