It is hard for me to understand why most people do not desire thought - either a thought that cracks open ideology or a thought that provides a universal categorial frame. What is it about me that makes me desire thought? Paranoia, suspicion, alienation, I guess. I've never belonged anywhere. Or maybe just strong affect as a sort of default. I yearn and yearn, never stop
A THESIS
Are humans able to directly access absolute reality? The answer could be no: we are locked inside whatever transcendental horizon we inhabit. It could be yes: by engaging in ascetic discipline or partaking in aesthetic experience of some kind, we develop a sort of spiritual organ that can touch, commune with and apprehend the absolute. Or maybe no - there is no absolute reality anyway. Or maybe yes, but it can only be apprehended by mathematized thought - not a spiritual organ.
Whatever answer one chooses, it is always a wager, a conviction that cannot be justified by reference to an external criterion. And the question always persists. Or not? In fact,
one who has come to feel they know the absolute become quite certain that their knowledge is true. We can say, at the very least, that this knowledge will always face antagonism upon being communicated, however. Once it becomes intersubjective, it becomes a wager
DECISION
There's always a decision to make about which aspects of the cosmogonical question to take seriously and which to foreclose.
The most ambitious decision is to not only establish first principles, but to take a further step and make claims about "why" the first principles are what they are. This further step goes beyond the limits of reason into revelation - a divine act that can only be known through mystical union.
Way on the other end of the spectrum, we have variants of the view that we should not allow ourselves to establish first principles at all. Thought begins in media res , and first principles must be either renounced altogether or subjected in principle to revision
There are strong reasons, both epistemological and ethical, to choose one of these latter routes - but it is nevertheless hard to do so without the suspicion that the task is simply impossible. The principles always get snuck back in through the back door
The best route is surly a combination of these two approaches - it is doubly honest. Honest in the Hegelian/paranoiac sense of refusing to lay down first principles that are not completely certain, but also honest about the fact that this radical approach obfuscates an aspect of though that can be denied but not escaped: there is a cosmogonical question beckoning us whether we want it to or not
BEFORE SKEPTICISM
Cosmogony is not the same as the problem of skepticism. The question of how to begin, and whatever answer is finally arrived at, is already metaphysics.
There are basically two types of skepticism - empirical and transcendental. Empirical skepticism doubts that immediate experience is real (am I in a simulation? How do I know that regularities I'm accustomed to are laws?). Transcendental skepticism doubts that the categorial apparatus through which I experience the world has any purchase on the real in itself (If my brain is evolved and inflected by culture, how can I be sure that my a prioiris are, so to speak, really a priori).
One can either see skepticism as a problem (even a distressing one) to be solved (al-Ghazali, Descartes) or a sort of epistemological fact to be savored (Sextus Empiricus, Kant, Hume). And there are different ways of either resolving or savoring the mystery.
But it in all these cases, the cosmogonical problem has already been elided.
The problem of cosmogony is pre-epistemological. It is simply the problem. Something is wrong, something is astonishing. That is all.
Further, if we take this 'something wrong' to be a gap inherent to the symbolic, or we take it as a starting point for a theory of the idea, as a differential antagonism - we have also crossed from cosmogony into either metaphysics or deontology. Similarly if we identify it as an affective dimension of cognition or if we propose a practical solution (eschatology).
We can't even identify terms in terms of which to approach it (say, set theory, discursive proof, conceptual architecture, mystical apprehension, natural science) without eliding it, which is to say without positing it as having some kind of cause and therefore basically being a substance
Cosmogony simply preserves and protects the fact - but it is not even a fact - that there is something wrong. All we can do is give it a name: its name is SHEYMN.
But - there is more to it than that. Because as soon as we isolate SHEYMN in this way we gesture towards a space in which strictly speaking there is no difference between my own woes and the creation of the entire universe. The materials of Lurianic Kabbalah become available to a theory that is one with its own expression as well as that which it seeks to describe.
VERSIONS OF THE VOID
How meaningful could the comparison between the, for lack of a better word, existential void, and the physical void from which matter is spontaneously generated, as understood by mainstream physics?
Zizek seems happy to suggest that these are two "versions" of the same thing, although he would introduce language to complicate their relationship.
William Lane Craig points out, though - not in response to Zizek but generally - that the quantum-cosmic void is really not a nothingness at all. The whole point, in fact, it that it is swarming with energy (the Higgs boson etc)
Of course, so is the existential void...
PHENOMENOLOGY
There is no phenomenological horizon. Any horizon is a construction. More precisely, there is no -one- horizon. The horizon is an infinity, it could be anything. It is key to grasp this during an age in which the nature of rationality is being reconfigured. There is, in other words, a place for the horizon to go.
THE BEGINNING
Much is made of the difficulty of beginning in philosophy. How to begin? The imperative to be without presupposition, wherever it comes from, is crushing. We must begin without presupposition, but we cannot.
Cosmogony begins and ends with this fact. Full stop. The impossibility of ever beginning cannot be overcome. The mistake of philosophy is to pose this problem and then attempt to elide it with some kind of solution - any kind of solution. There is no solution.
Of course, there are actually three solutions. They are: metaphysics, deontology, and eschatology
And then there are four more: ascesis, catharsis, fervor and majesty. So there are seven solution; not none and not three.
But these seven solutions solve nothing, and it is crucial to recognize and even celebrate this fact. The cosmogonical problem might be foreclosed, elided, approached from different directions, but not solved
HEGEL, CANTOR, BADIOU
There is not very much consensus on whether there is or is not an absolute - a totality of all things. If we take set theory as our structure for enumeration, we run up against the famous paradoxes involving self-membership and so on. It would appear that, if the "all" exists, it is self-contradictory. Alternately, it could not exist, and then there would be no contradiction. Russell, Badiou, Priest all posit slightly different views on this topic.
It seems to me, however, that they key insight about the All is that it cannot either exist or not exist in the way that ordinary local things do. It is not something that is either present or absent. Rather, or on the contrary, it has a sort of dynamic quasi-existence (insistence, virtuality, whatever). Importantly, this quasi-existence of the All is what generates temporality. Therefore, debates about whether it exists or not are not terribly meaningful. Lacan had it right: the not-All exists.
THE BIRTH OF THE CARDINALS
I have enumerated Four Cardinals of the Ark Work: Ascesis, Catharsis, Force and Power. These apply just as much to Transcendental Qabala, Transcendental Black Metal and Aesthethics. Cosmogony at the cosmic level is perhaps hypothetical, but at the human level it is simply a fact: Four Cardinals were born, because of suffering and wonder. What is cosmogony, after all, if not a yearning-thought that says "there must be something more".
The Four Cardinals were originally a single cardinal. It is only the unfolding of history that has separated them out as four distinct operations or fields. What they share, though, is that they go 'beyond the pleasure principle', which is to say they go beyond representation and ordinary intuition. They go beyond the reality that appears natural, yet is unbearable.
Ascesis: there is a real world that we cannot see - but by disciplining our senses and emotions, we can come to see it. This has to do with attachment and so on
Catharsis: there is a real world that we cannot see - but we can access it by reasoning. In the case of science this takes the form of mathematical physics and so on, and in the case of psychotherapy it takes the form of symbolic articulation of the source of the symptom.
Force: there is a real world that we cannot see - but we can bring it into the light of day if we fight for it. This is the real of political emancipation and artistic innovation: always an attack on received wisdom.
Power: this is the real of charisma, of creation ex-nihilo. In a way this isn't really about a real world that is invisible - it is the real of visibility itself. It organizes the order and rank of the visible world, and it wins hearts, it is the real of love.
It seems to me that these four fundamental fields or operations presuppose an originary torsion that gives rise to them. You could say that the torsion is phenomenological: "something isn't right"
THE REAL GOD
Theological phenomenology and speculative realism are both unsatisfactory when it comes to the question of cosmogony. Theological phenomenology transplants God from its rightful perch beyond and outside the universe to a sort of always-already inner outside, the ideal limit of the phenomenological brackets. Certainly there is a place for secularized mysticism, but I think that this place (i.e. no place at all, the place from which unaccountable givenness comes) doesn't do much for religion in terms of its connection to ethics and politics.
A properly secularized theology would need more of a connection to reason, so that it could have a basis for fighting against Christian and Muslim fundamentalism - two of the greatest evils in the world - as well as liberal-democratic nihilism. There needs to be a God in the strongest sense of the term - a God who, on the one hand, created the world, and, on the other, is the source of value and norms. Accepting that there is a creator-God who is the source of astonishment and love, thought would then subject religion to a purifying critique from the perspective of the history of art, science, and emancipatory politics.
Religion needs to be constrained - severely. Dogma is oppressive and prophets are charlatans - these are all-too-human adulterations of the nectar of true religion, which can only be art (which is in essence communion with God qua love) and music (which is in essence communion with God qua astonishment).
If we reject living religions because of their danger and falsehood and also reject theo-phenomenology on account of its impotence, theo-realism is the only really sensible path to take. The scientism of atheist thinkers is not much more satisfying than the mystification of phenomenology. Grounded only in erudition and requiring quite a bit of obscurantism to seem consistent or even interesting, atheist scientism is in no way able to connect thought to genuine ethics. Or rather, it only is able to if it sneaks in some kind of theology through the back door (for which, for example, many people criticize Badiou - but usually from the atheist perspective I am opposing here).
What's needed then is a proof of the existence of God (using syllogistic logic and contemporary results from mathematics and science) supplemented by a critique of religion on the basis of art and emancipation.
I haven't mentioned non-Abrahamic religion, like the Indian and Chinese complexes of religions and religious philosophies and the various types of shamanism existing throughout the world (and contemporary repetitions of hermeticism and cabala in various cults and orders). Broadly speaking I'd say that these complexes provide materials for the artistic and musical reinscription of religion, but that without grounding in an established creator-legislator god they are easily co-opted as grease on the wheels of the capitalist assembly line, at least in the West. The mindfulness of American yogis and the cosmic thrill seeking of the counterculture, if we're really being honest, are in the last instance a diversion of attention from the exploitation and destruction in the world - from the real issues. I'm quite sympathetic with both of these stances, but there is a certain militancy in Christianity and Islam that I think is actually worth keeping. The question is what the war is about.
THE FORECLOSED
There is a question - "Why" - that persists beyond any attempt to answer it or obviate it. The type of philosophy or scientific cosmology one chooses or develops might come down to the way in which one chooses to foreclose the question. I think it is important to keep track of the fact that the question is there, even when foreclosing it. It is the Ur-question. Why? Why me? The question has something like a modal status. Pain and awe drip from its mouth as it asks.
If there is a correlation between thought and being, the correlation lies here. Obviously philosophers today are extremely eager to deny that there is any correlation between thought and being - the real utterly outstrips the relation between mind and the world. The real could perfectly well go on existing without any minds. And the only reason there are minds is that there is a problem to be solved in the real. The real is a sort of outer limit to thought that can cause thought to transform even its most basic axioms, or could destroy thought. There are a number of different positions that argue basically along these lines.
But the cosmogonical question does not presuppose the real. The cosmogonical question is rather: why is there the real? Is it because something went wrong? Why are things unfolding? Why are they not going as well as it seems they could be?
Is the real real because of a decision? A mistake? No reason? Because of creativity? Loneliness? If one chooses to approach this question, one has very little to work with besides the affective and the decisional.
Or could the mathematic-physical endeavor actually produce an equation that accounts for the real?
D.H. LAWRENCE
"In the beginning - there never was any beginning, but let it pass. We've got to make a start somehow. In the very beginning of all things, time and space and cosmos and being, in the beginning of all these was a little living creature. But I don't even know if it was little. In the beginning was a living creature, its plasm quivering and its life-pulse throbbing. This little creature died, as little creatures always do. But not before it had had young ones. When the daddy creature died, it fell to pieces. And that was the beginning of the cosmos. Its little body fell down to a speck of dust, which the young ones clung to because they must cling to something. Its little breath flew asunder, the hotness and brightness of the little beast - I beg your pardon, I mean the radiant energy from the corpse flew away to the right hand, and seemed to shine warm in the air, while the clammy energy from the body flew away to the left hand, and seemed dark and cold. And so the first little master was dead and done for, and instead of his little living body there was a speck of dust in the middle, which became the earth, and on the right hand was a brightness which became the sun, rampaging with all the energy that had come out of the dead little master, and on the left hand a darkness which felt like an unrisen moon. And that was how the Lord created the world. Except that I know nothing about the Lord, so I shouldn't mention it.
But I forgot the soul of the little master. It probably did a bit of flying as well - and then came back to the young ones. It seems most natural that way.
Which is my account of the Creation. And I mean by it, that Life is not and never was anything but living creatures. That's what life is and will be, just living creatures, no matter how large you make the capital L. Out of living creatures the material cosmos was made: out of the death of living creatures when their little living bodies fell dead and fell asunder into all sorts of matter and forces and energies, sun, moons, stars and worlds. So you got the universe. Where you got the living creature from, that first one, don't ask me. He was just there. But he was a little person with a soul of his own. He wasn't Life with a capital L. "
WHY
The cosmogonical question is not exact, and for this reason it surpasses the attacks on its validity from the direction of philosophy and from the direction of science.
The question is basically, "Why?". It lies on a threshold between a question of pain and a question of structure. On the one hand, "Why is something wrong? It is apparent that something is inherently wrong. Why is that?". On the other hand, "Why are there the symbolic, the imaginary and the real?"
This second question simply will not go away, at least not yet, as far as I can tell. It is literally a question about the genesis of the world insofar as the world is a 'physical' flux of contingencies knotted together with mathematical laws as well as affects and perceptions. Scientific cosmology does not begin to answer the question, "Why is there mathematics? And why do we understand it? And why does it describe the world that we sense?".
It is fair to take as axiomatic, or at least as a postulate, that mathematics, reality and affect are three different "wings" of the world. Mathematics yields new, unprecedented, astonishing synthetic truths. These truths end up explaining regularities in reality, but they don't constitute these regularities. Reality offers something more, a greater measure of contingency, a facticity of causal chains that do not have a mathematical explanation. The mind that experiences, suffers and learns, that receives and overcomes, is something different as well. THE THREE WINGS differ but are knotted together. Why? And why is something wrong?