Possible arrangements for a cosmological poem

Suppose that you want to present your cosmological theories to a broad audience. You conceive of a beautiful poem, whether verse or prose: it will present a broad view of the universe as you see it in a brief compass, allowing the reader to marvel at the refined structure of your understanding. There’s one question left to be solved: from where – from what part of the universe – do you begin this poem?

There are a few possible answers, and I have tried to exhaust them here.

0. Contents

• 1. The silent void (Genesis)
• 2. The monad (Leibniz)
• 3. The monadic chaos (Anaxagoras)
• 4. The human perspective (Pascal)
• 5. Other possibilities
• 6. Footnotes

1. The silent void (Genesis)

This poem would begin from a primordial chaos, or void, and get to our ordered universe by a series of separations, or divisions. In the book of Genesis, we have light separated from darkness, then the earth from the sky, then the land from the sea. There are other cosmological myths that parallel Genesis, and the arrangement is well suited to metaphysical and philosophical theories as well, as I have shown by a direct parallel with Genesis just earlier. A modern scientific picture which began with the Big Bang would also suit this arrangement, since before the explosion, all matter was confused in a single place.¹ Such a poem could eventually arrive, by further division, to the simplest elements (“atoms”) that compose things, but it need not do so, and this is a strength for cosmological theories that do not involve any atoms.

2. The monad (Leibniz)

This poem begins, like Leibniz’s Monadology, from the ultimate simplest elements of the universe, and goes on to describe how they fit together to compose all the things that we experience, possibly working up to a broad view of the whole universe – as the Monadology itself does, ending with a view of the universe as the perfectly-governed city of God. More prosaically, many texts in early natural philosophy began with discussions of primitive elements, such as Aristotle’s Physics and Descartes’s Le Monde, although neither of these were properly atomists, so that poems composed to describe them might fit rather into another section.

3. The monadic chaos (Anaxagoras)

This poem begins by describing how the simplest elements work, but then describes them as composing a primordial chaos, which is then somehow separated into the common objects of experience. This is what (I believe) Anaxagoras thought was quite literally happening – a Mind was slowly separating the chaos of elements into uniform parts – but someone could in theory use this scheme as a poetic structure for a different theory.

4. The human perspective (Pascal)

This poem begins with the common objects of experience. It “zooms into” such objects to find their simplest elements; it also “zooms out from” such objects to find the broader universe that they compose. Since the movement in both cases starts from the same place, the order between them is indifferent. This is done in the section of Pascal’s Pensées called “the disproportion of man”. I have quoted it in full (from the public-domain Project Gutenberg edition) in a footnote to this post.² Notably, Pascal thought that there could be entire worlds inside atoms, and that similarly, our whole universe could be a mere atom in a much larger world. I am no historian, but I see this as a vivid picture of the strong effect which microscope and telescope observations were having on the human imagination while they were still novelties.

5. Other possibilities

It is unclear whether a poem could divide a primordial chaos directly into simplest elements, and then compose them into common things. As I envision this, it isn’t quite what Anaxagoras did, and I don’t know if it can really make sense conceptually.

I imagine that you could describe the universe with an elaborate analogy to a common object, but this would have to turn out fundamentally the same as one of the given possibilities.

I think all of these kinds of poems may be read as framing devices for presenting the constitution of the universe, without necessarily meaning anything about its history. Some of them are well suited to certain ideas about the latter, however; Genesis has often been interpreted literally, and Anaxagoras almost certainly meant his theories to represent the literal history of the universe.

I have not read Plato’s Timaeus, so I don’t know if it fits one of the structures here or is something else. Also, I would think that some “metaphysical” poems such as Dante’s and Milton’s won’t fit any of these structures because they are rather moral than cosmological.

With these qualifications, I think the four first sections of this post have exhausted all the possibilities for arranging a cosmological poem.

Genesis as an allegory for philosophy

The story of creation in Genesis can be read as an allegory for the teachings of philosophy, as pursued according to my method. What follows is a survey of such a reading.

0. Contents

• 1. Summaries and project
• 2. The silent void: to set aside all prejudice
• 3. Separations as fundamental distinctions
• 4. Darkness of error banished
• 5. Creation of sensible kinds in logical order
• 6. The life of man

1. Summaries and project

Creation, as summarized by the Catholic Study Bible, is divided into seven days as follows:

1. Heavens and light are made
2. Waters established on their own
3. Dry land made and vegetation added
4. Specific lights fashioned in the sky
5. Fish and sea creatures made to fill the water
6. The animals are created for the land, and then, finally, humans
7. Epilogue— God rests after completing all creation and is in total control

Philosophy, as summarized by Spinoza’s exposition of Descartes, involves these four steps:

1. to lay aside all prejudices,
2. to discover the foundations on which all things ought to be built,
3. to uncover the cause of error,
4. to understand all things clearly and distinctly.

The project of this reading, then, is to interpret those seven days as falling, allegorically, under these four headings. This explains the arrangement of the rest of this post.

2. The silent void: to set aside all prejudice

Genesis begins:

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth – and the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters— (1:1–2)

Just as creation begins from utter formlessness and chaos, philosophy must begin from nothing: it cannot begin from any preconceived ideas that you may have been raised with, but must instead seek the intrinsically evident “foundations on which all things ought to be built”, which must come from the fundamental distinctions, as is seen in what follows. It was in search of these foundations that Descartes doubted, although his pursuit was, in some important ways, misguided.

3. Separations as fundamental distinctions

Genesis moves on to describe three “separations”, viz.:

1. God separates the light from the darkness. (1:3–5)
2. God separates the earth from the heavens. (1:6–8)
3. God separates the land from the sea. (1:9–10)

Bodily separation is the best possible image for the process of mental distinction, which is what is represented here. Philosophy begins with some fundamental distinctions; the mind’s former chaos is divided into order.

The separation of light from darkness may be taken as the image of the first division, between being and non-being, or, which is the same thing, the conceivable and the unconceivable, the intelligible and the unintelligible. The best metaphor for understanding is by analogy with bodily sight, and light is everything that is visible.

The separation of earth from the heavens may be taken as the image of the second division, between matter and form. The sky, with its constant stars and perfect regularity, was the most constant thing in the life of ancient humans; it is also the source of light. So, it represents form, which is the immutable source of knowledge, as contrasted with the fleeting earth.

The separation of the land from the sea may be taken as the image of the distinction between substance and accident. Although the earth and the sea are both mutable, the sea is constantly moving due to the tides, whereas the earth is more stable, and also more “firm” from our terrestrial perspective. So, it represents substance, which is that which remains unchanging in the apparent things that we understand.

4. Darkness of error banished

With the fundamental distinctions laid down, God goes on to create the living creatures, which represent the sources of our knowledge of sensible things. Those will be treated together in the next section. But in between creating plants and animals, interrupting the series of the living things, God creates the specific lights in the sky, which distinguish the day from the night. (1:14–19)

In the context of Genesis, this interruption establishes a parallel between the first three days and the following three days. As the Catholic Study Bible pointed out in the cited enumeration, the first and fourth day are broadly dedicated to light, the second and fifth to the waters, and the third and sixth to the land. Philosophically, this separation of the plants from the other kinds could be interpreted as signaling their lower importance, as may be explained next.

However, this is the second introduction of light, and a more explicit division between light and darkness than the first time around. It also comes soon after the fundamental distinctions. So, more properly, it may be philosophically interpreted as representing the third step in Spinoza’s Descartes: when the principles have been found upon which all the sciences should be built, it is not difficult to uncover the cause of error, and to distinguish clearly the true from the false. All errors may be traced to a confusion of what the principles distinguished.

5. Creation of sensible kinds in logical order

Having moved the creation of the lights to the previous section, the creation of living creatures may be explained in order. They are created in this sequence:

1. Plants (1:11–13)
2. Non-human animals (1:20–25)
3. Human beings (1:26–31)

It may be noted that this is the precise order into which these three groups are arranged by the division scheme of Porphyry’s Isagoge. I will explain why I believe that this precise division and order may be taken to be philosophically fundamental rather than arbitrary.

The three groups represent the sources of our knowledge of sensible things, which are Aristotle’s four causes. One of the causes is not represented here, which is material cause. Material cause may be said to be represented alike by living and by non-living things, since it means only that a thing, to be known, must be apparent to the senses. Since not all that appears to the senses is understood, this is not a sufficient source of knowledge, though a necessary one; so, it is understandably excluded.

Plants, as the most primitive living beings, represent efficient cause. Since the most intricate features of plants were not yet known, and indeed are still unapparent to most untrained eyes, plants have traditionally represented living beings at their most basic level, and so, the bare fact of having life, understood in a basic sense as animation or self-motion. This is nothing other than an object having its own efficient cause within itself, i.e., that which explains the position of its motions in space and time. Since living beings are capable of moving themselves instead of being moved by something else, they are more understandable to us than non-living beings.

The infrahuman animals, besides being alive like plants, also evidently have senses, and so, represent formal cause. Animals undertake specific motions which they order in accordance with appearances that they receive within themselves, and so, the formal cause of their movements is also within them rather than having to be looked for without them. Animals, understood traditionally as sensitive living beings, are more understandable to us than non-sensitive living beings because they have three of their four causes within their own aspect.

Finally, human beings, which are rational animals, represent final cause. Human beings are able to make explicit connections of their motions to their form, which is to say, to sensibly communicate whether and how their motions are in accordance with their concept of themselves and of the motion. This is nothing other than the final cause of their motions being, to that extent, included within their own appearance, without having to be sought after through further inquiry. Human beings are the most intelligible to our understanding, having all four causes of their motions potentially discoverable within the very manifold that they present to the senses.

Since living beings are created in logical order, from the least to the most intelligible, the creation story is a great allegorical illustration of the sources of our knowledge. Comparing each kind with the previous provides a complete picture of how we come to understand the sensible world. This is as much philosophical sophistication as could be hoped for from the figures of a myth.

6. The life of man

The story of creation is finished, and God has gone to rest. (2:1–3) Some events in the life of the first human beings are also illustrative of things that we know from philosophy.

First, we have the naming of all the animals (2:19–20), which is traditionally associated with science and learning in general. We may assume that, in giving names to all the animals, Adam was also figuring out their place in the system of the world. In case the logical ordering of the previous part had not been clear enough, this explicitly finishes the sequence from Spinoza’s Descartes: the man understands all things clearly and distinctly.

Second, we have the fact that none other than the woman, taken from his flesh and sharing his nature, was a companion suited to the man. (1:20) This shows that human beings engage in friendships in a deeper sense between themselves than they ever could with the infrahuman animals, which is an important teaching of philosophy. Since human beings are rational, they can teach each other and achieve unity of purpose, allowing them to cooperate in ways other animals cannot.

Third, the woman is simply named “Woman” at first. She is only named “Eve”, meaning that she is “the mother of all the living”, after she has sinned. This, together with the fact that the naming of the animals happened before she was even created, is illustrative of the fact that parenthood is opposed to rational inquiry, which is the highest end of human beings. While Adam and Eve must reproduce to fill the earth, (1:28) the story still gives indications of how reproduction is an inferior, though permissible, state of human life, as the Catholic Church acknowledges. (CCC 922)

Kant vocabulary equivalence project

I propose to take the vocabulary from the Critique of Pure Reason and apply a few transformations to it.

1. Whatever is thought by the pure understanding without contradiction, regardless of whether it is given a determinate object in any intuition, may in a certain sense be called “the object of understanding”, insofar as understanding may be spoken of as an act, of which we are the subject and the thought is the object.
2. Since it is “the object of understanding”, whatever can be thought without contradiction may likewise be called “knowledge”. To think a concept is to understand it and know it, and the words may be said interchangeably.
3. Since they are the object of understanding or knowledge, all thoughts that may be thought without contradiction may be said to be “forms”, and the set of all such thoughts to compose an “intelligible world”, in yet a third sense of this term from the two senses given by Kant. (B311–312)
4. The term “exist” is also given a new sense: for a form to “exist” is for it to belong to the set of forms, so that the forms have always existed, since the set of non-self-contradictory possible thoughts has always been the same set. To avoid confusion, the forms may be said to “exist as realities” or to “exist intelligibly” or simply “to be”, while the determinate objects of sensible intuitions may be said to “exist as appearances” or simply “to appear”.
5. Since there are no intellectual intuitions, and things-in-themselves are never thought about as determinate objects, we may ignore the unhelpful sense of the word “knowledge” in which they are said to not be known, and say instead that they are known in the sense given here, as forms; meaning by this, again, only that they are thought about, although indeterminately.

With these translations, I believe that all Platonic theses may be understood in a Kantian sense without doing violence to either philosopher.

Bourgeois vanguard

I define here a movement which I will call the bourgeois vanguard.

Bourgeois ideology generally believes: that the means of production should be privately owned; that the profit motive is fundamental to human cooperation; that the intrusions of government upon industry impoverish society; that violations of property, including foremost the coercion of human persons, are rarely, if ever, justified; that behavior which does not violate property (or coerce human persons) should usually, if not always, be tolerated.

The bourgeois vanguard believes, furthermore: that so-called intellectual property is not truly property, and is generally harmful; that reason is embodied primarily in verbal logical deduction, and only secondarily in empirical science and mathematics; that the methodology of government-funded research is always, a priori, highly suspect; that animal meat and hydrocarbon fuels are commendable constituents of modern life; that it is possible for bitcoin to become a major global money, and that it would be good if it did; that religions can generally be given a liberal interpretation, and that it is good when they are given one.

At the moment, the latter meet mostly in groups dedicated to one of their particular interests. But I notice that these groups have many members in common. The demographic has not been fully explored yet.

Conservative animalism

I recently saw a conservative Facebook friend share, approvingly, a translation of the following quotation from Roger Scruton. The post was relatively popular, and had a good deal of likes and shares, seemingly all from conservatives.

It is a tautology to say that a conservative is a person who wants to conserve things: the question is what things? To this I think we can give a simple one-word answer, namely: us. At the heart of every conservative endeavor is the effort to conserve a historically given community. In any conflict the conservative is the one who sides with “us” against “them” – not knowing, but trusting. He is the one who looks for the good in the institutions, customs and habits that he has inherited. He is the one who seeks to defend and perpetuate an instinctive sense of loyalty, and who is therefore suspicious of experiments and innovations that put loyalty at risk.

So defined, conservatism is less a philosophy than a temperament; but it is, I believe, a temperament that emerges naturally from the experience of society, and which is indeed necessary if societies are to endure. The conservative strives to diminish social entropy. The second law of thermodynamics implies that, in the long run, all conservatism must fail. But the same is true of life itself, and conservatism might equally be defined as the social organism's will to live. (Scruton, A Question of Temperament, WSJ, 2002)

Soon after, I saw a different conservative friend share a different quotation. This friend was more open to listening to libertarian-leaning writers such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who was the source of the quote – of course, the quote speaks of conservatives in a superficially positive tone, so it was not that surprising. Similarly, the quote was shared approvingly and got nothing but positive reactions from his peers.

Conservative refers to someone who recognizes the old and natural through the “noise” of anomalies and accidents and who defends, supports, and helps to preserve it against the temporary and anomalous. Within the realm of the humanities, including the social sciences, a conservative recognizes families (fathers, mothers, children, grandchildren) and households based on private property and in cooperation with a community of other households as the most fundamental, natural, essential, ancient, and indispensable social units. Moreover, the family household also represents the model of the social order at large. Just as a hierarchical order exists in a family, so is there a hierarchical order within a community of families—of apprentices, servants, and masters, vassals, knights, lords, overlords, and even kings—tied together by an elaborate and intricate system of kinship relations; and of children, parents, priests, bishops, cardinals, patriarchs or popes, and finally the transcendent God. Of the two layers of authority, the earthly physical power of parents, lords, and kings is naturally subordinate and subject to control by the ultimate spiritual-intellectual authority of fathers, priests, bishops, and ultimately God.

Conservatives (or more specifically, Western Greco-Christian conservatives), if they stand for anything, stand for and want to preserve the family and the social hierarchies and layers of material as well as spiritual-intellectual authority based on and growing out of family bonds and kinship relations. (Hoppe, Democracy, §10)

What had struck me about the first quote was how Scruton frankly said that conservatism is nothing more than an animal instinct of loyalty to your family or community. Having this on my mind, I noticed how the second quote, although liable to a more philosophical interpretation of what “family bonds” mean, is also strongly suggestive of such an instinct.

Similar things may be found in other acclaimed conservative literature, such as Edmund Burke’s defense of “prejudice” in the Reflections, and Jordan Peterson also comes to mind, since he sees political beliefs in general as largely determined by temperament and personality, and after some time of noncommittally giving ideas “for conservatism”, has recently come to identify as a conservative himself, and joined the conservative media company Daily Wire.

I just think that there’s something deeply off about this whole thing. How can someone admit to be doing nothing but following his instincts? How can he do so without shame, and in public, and get away with it?

In the culture of Plato and Descartes, that ought to be social suicide. Why would we listen to a self-proclaimed mere animal? If your idea “is less a philosophy than a temperament”, you should be told to shut up and come back when you have more deliberate thoughts to communicate; insofar as that is not our reaction, we are a deeply unserious culture.

Of course, that conservatives in particular are the ones to do this is not surprising to me. They generally represent aristocratic ideas, which, like proletarian ideas, are fundamentally irrational; the aristocracy being addled by excess and the proletariat by want, only the bourgeoisie are capable of reason.

Theoretical ambitions

I write here about the sort of theories that I would like to read, and which I would like to write if I were sure of having time and an income. This is basically the stuff that I fantasize about in the shower.

Geometrical method

Social theories should be presented in geometrical style, à la Spinoza, though perhaps with more explanation of definitions and axioms than Spinoza employed, and possibly with answers to objections, à la Thomas Aquinas. This does not ensure that they are more likely to be right, but it makes claims more clear and distinct – whether they are meant as analytic or as synthetic, for instance – and it makes the connections between claims more explicit. Someone who wishes to criticize a claim made by a theory should be able to easily find all other claims on which it depends, and make explicit the stance of his criticism toward all of the dependencies and the validity and soundness of the inferences. This is best done if claims are emphasized and named, and referred to by their names, as is done in the geometrical style, where someone may say, for instance, “this follows from proposition 5 and axiom 2”.

Ethics into law

Natural-law ethics, which is already formulated deductively, should be put into the geometrical form just requested, and elaborated deductively to such a level of specificity that you can actually try particular cases by it. Positive law only exists because ethicists have slacked off.

Of course, I believe that an important practical aspect of law, viz., the measure of punishments, cannot be rationally determined in the abstract. A complete natural-law system of ethics should give some alternative standards of punishment so that the readers can apply the one that seems best to them, or formulate their own standards in relation to the ones given. For instance, historical standards of punishment from various countries could be given, alongside the opinions of notable philosophers, such as the Rothbardian “two teeth for a tooth” standard.

Supposing that there are no legitimate states, and that only legitimate states can apply coercive punishments, the judge who applies natural-law ethics would be determining the proper response of uncoercive punishers, viz., society at large, i.e., the decisions of individual buyers and sellers in the market to boycott or exclude the punished. As such, the judgment of the offenders would be broadcast publicly and each member of society would apply his own standards as he sees fit.

Once natural law can try all cases, its explicit rationality will evidently have more legitimacy than the state, and we may hope for a future where governments are not trusted to make laws.

Economics

Economics should also be developed according to the geometrical method. Since the Austrian School’s tradition already develops economics deductively, the translation should be straightforward, though laborious. Theories from alternative schools could possibly be translated as well.

The system of economics can then be synthesized with the system of ethics into a sound system of political theory, which can guide movements and revolutions. The greater clarity of this system would also allow it to more easily guide the revisionist reinterpretation of historical events; the geometrical system of economics would also be more easily used as a guide to methods in business and accounting.

Voting

 There is no reason to think that voting involves either

• consent to the general system of government, or
• consent to the government of the person you voted for, or
• support for the government you voted for, in any absolute sense.

The only thing which voting inherently involves is support for the government you voted for in preference to the alternatives, since that is the only thing which the act of voting can inherently do. Accordingly, it can only make you responsible for the actions of the government insofar as they are different from what the alternative would have been – and insofar as you could foresee them before voting.

Usually, support for not voting in leftist and libertarian groups comes from misinterpreting the act of voting in one of the three ways I listed above, or something like them. If you cannot, in good conscience, vote without thinking you are doing these things, then by all means don’t vote, but those meanings are entirely in your head.

It is true that voting does almost nothing, and that any time spent on advocacy about voting could probably be better spent on other advocacy, or other kinds of political action. If you live in a country where voting itself takes considerable effort, then the effort is probably better spent elsewhere. To that extent, there is something venerable about the voting-abstinence tradition in these political circles. But no further.