Inside and Outside the Cosmos

Can we talk about something other than the cosmos?

The cosmos is everything.

No it's not. You said so yourself last week: The Cosmos Isn't Everything.

I was being ironic, in the sense that the cosmos is by definition -- from a materialist perspective -- everything. But it can't be everything, if only because we know about it, while it can know nothing of us. Therefore cosmos + knowledge of it is more than the mere physical cosmos, for the act of knowing the cosmos is obviously not a mere physical event. 

If our knowledge of the cosmos were only from inside it, it would essentially be like sensory knowledge -- i.e., knowledge of its surface -- whereas even positing a cosmos is an act of consciousness that transcends any empirical considerations. If the cosmos is matter, energy, and physical laws, how then do we know about them? It reminds me of an aphorism:

If laws of history existed, their discovery would abrogate them.

Likewise laws of physics, chemistry, and logic, except to say that these actually exist, while laws of history don't. So, does discovery of the laws of physics abrogate them? 

Obviously not entirely, for we can't eliminate gravity or banish entropy. Nevertheless, if knowledge of physics is a linear entailment of the laws of physics, it would not be knowledge. Or, put it this way: the I who knows cannot be a function of the it that it knows, because thoughts are not composed of any it-like material.

When we say "the cosmos," we're not just experiencing sensory data, rather, a mental abstraction that synthesizes countless observations into a unified whole. In one sense, this act of conceptualization appears to be a leap beyond mere physical sensation. 

But in another sense it seems to be more of a primordial intuition that is part of the standard equipment of the human being. I say this because the great majority of civilizations have known squat about physics, but I'm not aware of any that didn't know they were living in a cosmos. 

Just how does I-ness emerge from it-ness -- or subject from object, interior experience from purely exterior objects? In short, whence the first person perspective in a third person cosmos?

Innerestin' how people come to superimpose a subjective first person perspective over third person objective reality, which is to say, the problem of ideology. Just this morning, Rob Henderson wrote of George Orwell’s "revulsion toward 'the smelly little orthodoxies that compete for our souls,'” which accounted for "his contempt for intellectuals":

Orwell himself admitted, “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.” That was the thread running through his work. He distrusted theories that ignored the concrete realities of ordinary people.

There's another mordant observation by Orwell in the article, that "As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents." The difference of course, is that Christianity includes a theory of why its adherents are such bad advertisements, but what is the socialist's excuse for being such an assoul? No wonder Human nature always takes the progressive by surprise.

The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which "we," the clever ones, are going to impose upon "them," the Lower Orders.

And we are back, somewhat ironically, to the question if I and It, which is to say, Who and Whom. Who is who is in charge. Whom are the bags of wet cement deprived of their Who-ness, their human agency.

Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs. 

Because after all, socialism -- at least in the Marxist tradition -- presumes a materialist metaphysic in which we are all Its that are shoved around by the dialectic of history. Or in today's parlance, victim-objects with no say in their own fate.

Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy -- or even two orthodoxies, as often happens -- good writing stops.

That one is worthy of Dávila. In fact, The leaden prose of the Marxist offers an irresistible attraction to leaden minds, for which reason The effect of liberal rhetoric on taste is called nausea. These aphorisms check out:

In western Europe and America large sections of the literary intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist Party or have been warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading.

Probably widespread good writing --or even rudimentary taste -- would be sufficient to destroy progressivism. 

Back to reality vs. ideological theories of reality, 

In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one’s weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. 

Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.

Brilliant. Which goes to another aphorism: that Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest. Orwell alludes to two of them, that the whole is greater than the part, and the principle of noncontradiction. But

The liberal mentality is an angelic visitor impervious to earthly experiences.

 More on the treatment of I as It and Who as Whom:

If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole [...] the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way between the corners of a book, it is nearly always as objects of pity or as comic relief.

So, what is our bottom line for today? I suppose that if you are wrong about the cosmos, you're wrong about everything. Or, as Thomas put it, "an error about creatures reacts in a false knowledge of God," the cosmos being but a name for the biggest creature of all.