First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come

rufuspollock

First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come

Authors are Zak Stein, Marc Gafni and Ken Wilber writing under the name David J. Temple.1

The motivating context of the work is that something is badly awry, we need to change our culture and our worldview i.e. core views and values. This a position we greatly resonate with, it is largely identical to what we set out on the second renaissance project site https://secondrenaissance.net/.

CosmoErotic Humanism is a philosophical movement aimed at reconstructing the collapse of value at the core of global culture. This movement emerges in response to the meta-crisis, understanding existential and catastrophic risks as rooted not only in failures of economics, politics, and technology, but in failed worldviews.

What this works focuses on are specific details of that new worldview with the aim to lay the foundations for a comprehensive philosophy of the new paradigm. Specifically, they emphasize the centrality of the reality of value.

By First Principles and First Values, we refer to a tentative list of principles and values embedded in the Cosmos itself, and that show up in different forms all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. We will more fully explore what this notion of cosmic or cosmological value means below. [Chapter 5]

It's brief 47 propositions are first steps in providing a more worked out philosophical underpinnings to the vision of an awakening society and a second renaissance. They aim to flesh out in more detail some of the core views and values of the world we wish to evolve to. In this regard, I would put it in the same bracket as the efforts of McGilchrist and the (neglected) Christopher Alexander.

It obviously builds on Integral – Wilber is one of the co-authors and both Stein and Gafni are big integralists.

Connections with Second Renaissance and Life Itself

Key propositions are:

  • Key to what ails us is a missing (global, universal) (grammar) of value – and the belief that value is "ontologically real"
  • We can credibly set out a universal grammar of value

This connects directly to second renaissance and Life Itself in several ways:

1. In Life Itself reason for existence (SCQH) from 2017 we state:

we need a breakthrough in individual and collective “being” but a breakthrough here is hard as it requires a consensus on foundational values and views including belief in the possibility of transformation [hope] and the nature and primacy of being.

This emphasis on the need for consensus on fundamental values and views resonates directly with the general thesis of the Temple piece and more specifically on the value of "Value" (singular) as one of those values – and indeed the fundamental value.

More subtly, the point we were making in the SCQH with that phrase "requires a consensus on foundational values and views" was that these are beliefs on which we need (and should have if we reflect carefuly) a priori consensus in order to coordinate. Without htat consensus we will descend into fruitless debate. Moreover, these aren't points we can prove in some way by logical argument, though we can work our way to them in some way empirically and ration-spiritually. This excerpt from the Temple text resonates closely with that:

These are not conclusions of philosophical argument subject to refutation, but rather metaphysical and ontological premises. They are the axioms that live across the great traditions of human value, truths that are Anthro-Ontologically (a term we will return to below) accessible to everyone, fundamentally both eternal and evolving.

In our second version (2019) we ask:

What are the foundational views and values, and, separately and relatedly a big vision, and how do we bring forth a culture based on these foundations within our lifetime and the next six generations that is a) radically better than today in its capacity to generate flourishing communities and individuals, both within that culture and also more broadly in society; b) engaging in powerful, practical action on collective challenges; and c) pragmatically utopian in its commitment both to being wise itself and in causing a wiser and weller world for everyone.

Again the point is similar.

Regarding second renaissance we have talk of "New ways of being, thinking and acting" and specifically talk about inner growth and wisdom. Whilst only briefly mentioned in the initial whitepapers, we see wisdom and inner growth as directly related to the capacity for "valueception".

Summary

"A universal grammar for value". Specifically, the book sets out:

  • How escalating meta-crisis derives from flawed worldviews and the lack of shared, universal, principles and values

    CosmoErotic Humanism is a philosophical movement aimed at reconstructing the collapse of value at the core of global culture. This movement emerges in response to the meta-crisis, understanding existential and catastrophic risks as rooted not only in failures of economics, politics, and technology, but in failed worldviews.

  • Value is real i.e. objective (not simply opinion)

    Technologies and societal evolutions have moved the center of culture outside the field of value. Humanity has become untethered from reality, and more specifically, divorced from the reality of value. And so there is an urgent need for new forms of religion, philosophy, and culture that reconstruct value and reconnect humanity with nature and reality.

  • This sense of value, whilst not precisely definable, closely relates to the sense of unfolding purpose and love/intimacy (in the spiritual sense)

    By First Principles and First Values, we refer to a tentative list of principles and values embedded in the Cosmos itself, and that show up in different forms all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. We will more fully explore what this notion of cosmic or cosmological value means below. [Chapter 5]

TODOs:

  • Explain how you can have a universal story or grammar of value whilst having many diverse values.
  • More detailed connection to the meta-crisis

Comments

Overall a basic massive "yes": we do need a universal set of principles and (grammar) of value. This is the return of universalism … 😉

And second comment is … that's the easy part 😉 the hard part is how does that come about.

Of course, the need needs to be articulated so it's a great start.

  • Lot of theory … where is the practice
    • e.g. easy to say there is a universal field of value … and how do we touch into that? How do we deal with disagreements or conflicts over value?
  • Also the contrast with McGilchrist in Matter with Things. Yes he is still a philosopher rather than a practitioner or spiritual leader. Yet the way he presents both the body of concrete evidence
    • It is the concreteness and the richness
    • Also McGilchrist's prose somehow has a poetry, a depth, a richness that alludes to the richer ways of knowing and being (the "right hemisphere modes") that he is talking about. So somehow the work itself exemplifies the message it is seeking to convey

Critiques

Use of unnecessary jargon

Example 1: use of "generator function" instead of a simple term like source or cause

e.g. title of chapter 8: "The Generator Functions for Existential and Catastrophic Risk Have an Underlying Root Cause: …"

This could be written as "The Sources of Existential and Catastrophic Risk Have an Underlying Root Cause: …". Once rewritten of course it sounds less cool – and actually a bit repetitive – would we lose anything by simplifying to "Existential and Catastrophic Risk have a root cause" (what's the different between an underlying root cause and a root cause?)

this illustrates point that a decent proof editor would have helped a lot … (like most of Wilber's books)

Example 2:

"The first is the success story that dominates global culture in both open and closed societies, albeit in different forms: zero-sum rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics." (chapter 8 opening)

Let's unpack that last phrase zero-sum rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics.

  • Isn't rivalrous conflict a pleonasm? ie. saying the same thing twice? Is there any example of conflict that isn't rivalrous?
  • what about zero-sum and win/lose metrics? Aren't zero sum games and win/lose games the same?
  • So boiled down that becomes: "conflict governed by win/lose metrics"?
  • and then isn't conflict almost always in (somewhat) zero-sum situations or having win/lose metrics?
  • So this phrase becomes: "The first is the success story that dominates global culture in both open and closed societies, albeit in different forms: conflict"

Example 3: "highly entangled hyper-object we call global civilization"

What is a hyper-object, what is a highly entangled one (vs non entangled)? One has a rough idea but one senses that more precise definitions would lead to pleonasm or, at the very least, the replacement with much more common words.

Excerpts and Commentary

Author page

CosmoErotic Humanism is a philosophical movement aimed at reconstructing the collapse of value at the core of global culture. This movement emerges in response to the meta-crisis, understanding existential and catastrophic risks as rooted not only in failures of economics, politics, and technology, but in failed worldviews. The core of CosmoErotic Humanism offers a system of First Principles and First Values that recasts cosmic evolution as a Story of Value in which humanity plays a unique role. These First Principles and First Values ground a comprehensive set of theories, including self and psychology, epistemology, scientific metaphysics, education, theology, mysticism, sexuality, and value. CosmoErotic Humanism thereby responds to the three great questions: Where? Who? and What? It offers a new Universe story (Where am I?), a new narrative of identity (Who am I?), and new vision of ethics (What ought I/we do?). These are some of the first words on the possibilities of a world philosophy adequate to our time of civilization transformation. What is offered by CosmoErotic Humanism is a new story of eternal yet evolving value that can serve as a context for our diversity, finally allowing us to speak of humanity as part of a shared story of evolving cosmic value.

To the reader

Cosmoerotic humanism is their name for this movement to evolve culture

The material collected here is from the internal writings of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The Center is cofounded and led by Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. Together with Ken Wilber—also a cofounder of the Center—and an international team, they execute the Center’s mission: to evolve culture as needed in response to the looming threat of existential and catastrophic risk. This movement in culture has become referred to as CosmoErotic Humanism.

In this sense analogous to our usage of term second renaissance

Introduction: On Redefining “Value” and Realizing Intimacy with All Things During the Meta-Crisis

The modern world has become untethered from reality and divorced from the reality of value

The world is not what it was when the great wisdom traditions first began to (re)connect (“religion” is from the Latin religare, meaning to bind or tie) the human to the Cosmos through the identification of a field of value in which all life participates. The last century has seen more change in the conditions of human existence than any other period in known history. Technologies and societal evolutions have moved the center of culture outside the field of value. Humanity has become untethered from reality, and more specifically, divorced from the reality of value. And so there is an urgent need for new forms of religion, philosophy, and culture that reconstruct value and reconnect humanity with nature and reality.

4 The Second Shock of Existence Is About the Self-Induced Extinction of Our Species

We face escalating breakdowns that could become catastrophic and pose an existential risk

Much of our core infrastructure has become inherently fragile, and it’s seemingly only a matter of time before one or several catastrophic risk scenarios are realized. This started to become visible, to a limited extent, during the energy crises of the 1970s, as well as a dozen or so other less-noticed but equally important recent events. Lately it has become unmistakable, with the widespread eruption of climate catastrophes, electrical grid outages, wildfires, superstorms—and, of course, the first of the long-predicted planetary pandemics.

Some risks are catastrophic, wherein large populations perish; others are existential, meaning that nothing human survives. The realization of this possibility is precisely what we have called “the second shock of existence,” which has also been recognized by dozens of thinkers who track global trends. Existential risk, or the second shock of existence, means not the death of the individual human being, but awareness of the potential death of humanity.

Breakdown can also be a catalyst to a breakthrough

In modernity, existential risk is disclosed as a scientific reality, a world-centric challenge—not a prophetic intuition, but a genuine potential playing out in the immediacy of the present. But the second shock of existence can either result in the fulfillment of a dystopian vision, or it can provoke the emergence of a New Human and New Humanity—which we discuss below as the evolution of Homo sapiens into Homo amor. We are in a new moment in history because, as discerning eyes can see, plausible paths to dystopia—leading to the genuine death of civilization—are very real. However, the path to a planetary civilization able to exist in perpetuity within planetary boundaries can also be seen, although walking that path is considerably more difficult.

5 Value Must Be Reimagined to Avoid Existential Endgames

First principles and first values … are embedded in the cosmos itself

By First Principles and First Values, we refer to a tentative list of principles and values embedded in the Cosmos itself, and that show up in different forms all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. We will more fully explore what this notion of cosmic or cosmological value means below.

This is the part where the scientific materialists will be having conniptions. I largely agree … and i wonder whether this phrasing e.g. "embedded in the Cosmos itself [capital C cosmos]" may not be a grandiose for some.

Story of value

It's a story of value too

Finally, we speak not only of First Principles and First Values but say they are necessarily embedded in a Story of Value. Again, this is not a literary device but adds something vital to the formulation. First Principles and First Values themselves neither generate coherence nor arouse our moral and political will to action. Provoking this will requires story, a narrative arc to engage us, and not only because humans are specifically storytelling animals, although we most certainly are. More profoundly, story itself is a core First Principle and First Value of Cosmos, all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain.

These are not philosophical arguments but metaphysical premises

These are not conclusions of philosophical argument subject to refutation, but rather metaphysical and ontological premises. They are the axioms that live across the great traditions of human value, truths that are Anthro-Ontologically (a term we will return to below) accessible to everyone, fundamentally both eternal and evolving.

This is an important point and relates to the

Without (a universal grammar of) value it is impossible to coordinate at a global scale

  1. There is no global coherence or global coordination without a universal grammar of value

Every single catastrophic and existential risk we face in the meta-crisis requires global coherence and coordination in response. Local responses to global issues will ultimately fail. All the local expressions of risk must be addressed at the global level to enact any form of potent response. Local solutions to global problems are not effective for planetary issues.

Global coordination requires a genuine sense of global coherence at the level of superstructure, and only through such global coherence can we avert major suffering and transform our reality.

There is no global coherence without shared, universal First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value. …

This is one of those places where i largely agree … and i have some quibbles at the absoluteness of the prose. For example, some coordination is possible on global risks even without a shared story of value (at least in the way they mean it). e.g. people enacted rules that addressed ozone depletion.

Aside on terminology

i think by superstructure they mean culture and value.

Catastrophic and existential risks arise from tragedies of the commons which come rivalrous meta-architecture

Nearly all the catastrophic and existential risks we face are global challenges—from climate change to AI to pandemics to systems collapse to arms races with exponential weaponized technologies. Nearly all these factors are driven by tragedies of the commons, multipolar traps, and races to the bottom—all of which are expressions of the rivalrous-conflict meta-architecture that generates fragile systems subject to multiple forms of collapse, be they gradual or sudden.

What is the different between a tragedy of the commons, multipolar traps and races to the bottom? Aren't they all just collective action problems?

And are these expressions of a "rivalrous-conflict meta-architecture" or of deeper aspects of the human conditions (e.g. "greed" in the buddhist sense) combined with modern technological superpowers? For example, did we have the same meta-architecture in hunter-gatherer times when we hunted large herbivores to extinction? Or when people damaged ecosystems in ancient mesopotomania?

I would suggest that the problems we find ourselves in come from a confluence of several factors:

  • Deep aspects of human "nature" (not insurmountable but deep) e.g. three poisons in buddhism "greed/craving", "hatred" and "delusion"
  • Cultural and institutional factors that exacerbate the former e.g. capitalist markets, focus on material growth, individualism etc
  • Massively expanded population and technological capacities which mean that issues arising from first two factors pose existential risks

Shared sensemaking requires shared principles and values

  1. There is no shared sense-making without minimal agreement on First Principles and First Values.

3. Open societies collapse without value at the center of public culture.

4. Polarization increases uncontrollably when there is no shared Story of Value.

Again … yes and a variety of factors.

5. Rivalrous conflict governed by zero-sum win/lose metrics cannot be constrained without superordinate first principles and values.

6. Complicated systems dominate the world in the absence of a shared story.

7. The requisite political will to address global challenges cannot be found without a universal grammar of value, embedded in a Story of Value.

7 Humans Must Learn to Move from a Pre-Tragic to a Post-Tragic Relationship to the Meta-Crisis

There is no future for human culture if it remains stuck in the pre-tragic or tragic view of the meta-crisis. The second shock of existence must be metabolized by human culture, and especially by those in the wisdom lineages of religious and philosophical thought. The meta-crisis is a demand for a mature and wise world philosophy that can help shift human culture into a post-tragic view on essential existential questions.

8 The Generator Functions for Existential and Catastrophic Risk Have an Underlying Root Cause: A Global Intimacy Disorder

Generator function one: success story of global culture based on zero-sum rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics

Hmmm, again … see my earlier point. This seems to imply that collective action problems are somehow a function of the "success story that dominates global culture … zero-sum rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics". But didn't these exist way before modern global culture? If so isn't the problem mostly the scale we are at now – rather than something new.

The point of this critique is that this summary sounds deep and like there is something new that has happened. And therefore like we could just change those "generator functions". But rewritten without jargon and with the general point it becomes: throughout human history we have suffered from collective action problems. In fact modern (western) culture reflects something of a breakthrough in cooperation … however it's also has huge limits and the very scale of its success results in existential risks – medieval kings even if as violent and aggressive as anything today did not have access to nuclear weapons.

Then the story sounds a lot more mundane and a lot harder to address.

The first is the success story that dominates global culture in both open and closed societies, albeit in different forms: zero-sum rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics. This story of human identity and worth generates an extraction-based economic model where the planet itself is commodified and all of reality is “used up” through the dynamics of economic competition. As a result, in roughly a century, humanity has nearly exhausted the resources that took hundreds of billions of years to develop on Earth. We are now governed by unlimited exponential growth curves that cannot be maintained, which leads to conflict, polarization, fundamentalist/globalist perspectives, widespread alienation, multipolar traps, tragedies of the commons, arms races that exponentially produce ever more dangerous weaponized technology, gain-of-function research, and so much more.

Complicated systems are fragile

This is the second basic generator function we highlight here: complicated systems are fragile systems, whereas complex systems are anti-fragile. There is a fundamental disassociation among the parts of the highly entangled hyper-object we call global civilization, a disassociation that makes the overall system complicated but not complex, fragile rather than robust. To describe it as complicated is to say that the many parts do not relate to each other—they cannot feel each other, nor can they heal or self-assemble.

The complicated are fragile and complex are anti-fragile may be almost tautologous (what is definition of these two types, exactly?). This suspicion is born out by the definition in the nexts chapter whereby:

Complex systems, like the human body or a rainforest, are composed of parts that organically self-organize and are thus capable of self-repair, exhibiting a state known as “anti-fragility.” Complicated systems, like airplanes or financial instruments, have no such capacities.

#jargon "hyper-object"

Then the big jump: real source is a "global intimacy disorder"

Further reflection reveals that there is a deeper root cause which underlies both generator functions, what we call the global intimacy disorder. Intimacy is always rooted in allurement. When there is no allurement between the parts or when the parts are alienated, the result is rivalrous conflict governed by zero-sum win/lose metrics, which then spawns fragile systems—key elements in the exponentially deepening global intimacy disorder.

9 Thirteen Expressions of the Global Intimacy Disorder Can Be Understood as Thirteen Forms of Alienation

win/lose is distinct from healthy competition (how?)

Let’s note that rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics should not be confused with healthy competition in the larger context of I–Thou relationships.

Would be nice to have some more on this distinction, perhaps with some rich examples or illustrations from literature or life.

2. Complicated Systems Dominate Complex Ones

3. Alienation Between Different Ways of Knowing

A third expression of the global intimacy disorder is the disconnection between the humanities and the STEM professions (i.e., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

13. The Gap Between the Elite and the “Masses”

There is in contemporary global society an evident and ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots—a gap that has historically been a core feature of civilization. It only finally began to close after the Renaissance, a trend that continued through the industrial revolution and throughout much of the twentieth century. As many have pointed out, this increasing parity has stopped, and the pendulum is now swinging wholly in the other direction.

Yes … and this starts to verge on over-simplification. There have been swings in this area before in human history - cf turchin-2023-end-times-elites. Of course, simplification and broad brush strokes are a necessary part of a work such as this. But at points like these it is perhaps a bit too far. The tone becomes a little too high pitched, a little too "never before in human history …" esque. In fact this continues:

Moreover, at this point, the trend is such that it will soon become far more than a gap in wealth and opportunity. We are moving rapidly toward a new global caste system in which a tiny elite is technologically augmented, in terms of cognition, aesthetics, physical capacity, and even longevity.

But e.g. longevity was different in the past for different groups etc.

10 Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Understandings of Value Must Be Integrated into a New Story of Value That Responds to the Meta-Crisis

Uses the analogy of the first renaissance.

11 God Lives as Stories: Story as First Principle and First Value

The Elements of Story

Story as in the narrative arc of reality is real, a fundamental property of the cosmos

🔥🔥

This is one of their crucial claims. I would agree. Stating it is the easy part. The harder parts are a) how do you know you are sensing or partaking in that arc (how do you mediate disagreements about it) b) how does one enable others to feel this truth?

Let’s clarify our own narrative thread for a moment. We are not saying that quarks are literally telling stories. Rather, we are saying that story, the narrative arc of reality, is not a contrived human invention but rather a fundamental property of Cosmos. In that sense, story is not entirely dissimilar from time and space as a fundamental constituent of reality. We perceive time and space not because we contrive them but because they are in some sense real. The same is true for story.

The Realization of Conscious Evolution

This positions us to revisit the considerations about conscious evolution raised in the Introduction. CosmoErotic Humanism hinges on the fact that humans have become conscious of ourselves as personally implicated in the evolutionary story. The realization involves a series of steps, but is straightforward in its logic:

  • We realize we have the capacity, for the first time in history, to see the narrative arc of the evolutionary story, from matter to life to mind.
  • We realize that we are this evolutionary story in personal form.
  • We realize that it is an unfinished story.
  • We realize that it falls to us to write the next chapter in the story.

A very good description of postmodern relativist zeitgeist with an illustration from Harari

Harari attempts to prove this point by pointing out that values always change: they are animated only by the powers that birth them, which weave for humanity what are but figments of our imagination, fictions, and social constructions of reality. For Harari, unconsciously echoing the zeitgeist, there is no essential difference between an English boy who travels to the Middle East to slaughter Muslims in the Crusades and an English boy who travels to the same area seven hundred years later to work with Amnesty International to assist Syrian refugees. Both are products of stories and values—stories of value—that are fictions, social constructs, and figments of our imagination. One is not more significantly evolved than any other.13

For the dominant zeitgeist, there is no Eros or intrinsic value within reality, and there is no evolution of love through levels of consciousness. There is no story, no value, and certainly no inherent plotlines to the evolution of value.

The main point is not that Harari is wrong, although he is. The point is that he is parroting the cultural assumptions of the postmodern zeitgeist, with major politicians, leading technologists, and influential mainstream cultural voices around the world endorsing his books. Having an American president promoting the idea that our shared stories of value are ultimately mere fictions would have been unthinkable just one generation ago.

12 There Have Been Four Big Bangs

This the classic levels of evolution:

  1. Chemistry: atoms and molecules forming and evolving
  2. Biology: organisms forming and evolving
  3. Mind: ideas and culture forming and evolving
  4. Shift from homo sapiens to homo amor

13 There Are Identifiable Plotlines in the Universe Story

Evolution is the universe yearning

They then apply a bit of the interior/exterior of the 4 quadrants …

The first trajectory is the movement of existence to higher and higher forms of complexity. The evolutionary flow moves from atom to amoeba (single-celled organisms) to plants to early animals to mammals to early humans walking upright to awake and conscious human beings. But this is only a limited, exterior description of evolution.

What is the interior experience of evolution during this same time sequence? The interior of evolution is a yearning of some kind. If you could feel the inside of evolution throughout history, you would sense forms of yearning going all the way back. These questions and ideas seem absurd to a certain kind of scientific mindset. But they were obvious questions to most of our human ancestors, whom scientists have largely dismissed as “primitive.” Our ancestors believed that nature and the Cosmos were self-evidently purposeful in some way, here for some reason—that the Universe was clearly a value-driven process.

14 The Plotlines of the Cosmos Become Self-Aware in the Human, Creating the Conditions for Conscious Evolution

15 There Has Been a Collapse of Intrinsic Value at the Center of Culture

There is something of the repetition of classic Wilber here 😉 e.g. here again we explain the modern/post-modern assault on value:

Value itself has been subject to withering critique in modernity and postmodernity. That critique wisely undermined and deconstructed old and outdated notions of value. But the originally valid critique overreached itself and claimed to deconstruct the very reality of intrinsic value itself. As a direct result, most people who participate in civilization today, East and West, do not understand themselves as participating in a universal field of value. A subtle, inarticulate, and pernicious nihilism is pervasive, wherein values are seen, at best, only as social constructions—or worse, as subtle ploys for power.

17 Common-Sense Sacred Axioms Have Deep Historical Precursors

This is a chapter where one feels the old Wilber.

Only in late modernity and post-modernity has there been this value vacuum at the heart of culture

The meta-crisis, with its various existential and catastrophic possibilities, has clear roots in the underlying crisis of value. The absence of value at the heart of culture is a new phenomenon; there has never before been a civilization that held, at the center of its superstructure and dominant worldview, a basic skepticism toward value. Modernity, as we have shown, had an inchoate, almost unspoken conception of the reality of value, expressed in what we call the “common-sense sacred axioms.” The exhaustion and fragmentation of these as the background assumption of social life is the story of postmodernity, to which we return below.

Huxley's six principles in the perennial philosophy hold up well

In Aldous Huxley’s summation of the perennial philosophy, fundamental premises like “Spirit is Real” are central. And they can all be validated by immediate experience, yielding direct gnosis. Huxley presents what he calls the minimal working hypothesis, which includes six major dimensions:

  • That Spirit is Real. That there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light, or Void, which is the unmanifest principle of all manifestation.
  • That the Ground is at once transcendent [beyond the world] and immanent [of the world]. That it is possible for human beings to love, to know, and to become identical with the divine ground itself.
  • That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence.
  • That there is a law or Dharma which must be obeyed—a Tao, a way that must be followed—if men are to achieve their final end. That the more there is of self [contracted egoic identity] the less there is of the Godhead. The Tao is therefore a way of humility and love, the Dharma a living law of self-transcending awareness.

It is noteworthy that four out of the six are about ontological principles and only the last two touch more directly on normative value, ethos, and practical behavior. There is, however, no true split between the first four and the last two of Huxley’s tenets, the latter tenets of action flowing directly from the former. Huxley published The Perennial Philosophy in 1944, a year after C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, which Huxley undoubtedly read, for they moved in overlapping cultural, social, and intellectual circles. Significantly, both refer to the Tao and to Dharma, terms they use in a somewhat similar manner, referring to the notion of reality as grounded in a larger field of intrinsic value.

That historical aside re Huxley and Lewis adds warmth 🔥

18 A Set of Common-Sense Sacred Axioms Undergirds Modernity

A beautiful and true list. Reminds me of the list of Alexander at the start of the Timeless Way.

  1. Choice Matters
  2. There Are Better and Worse Choices
  3. My Life Matters and Is Meaningful
  4. It Is Good to Love
  5. Sacrifice Is Virtuous; Selfishness Is Not—Heroism Is Good
  6. Effort Is Rewarded, and Laziness Is Not a Virtue But a Vice
  7. Fairness Is Important
  8. There Are Important Forms of Self-Transformation That Are Desirable and Good

19 The Common-Sense Sacred Axioms Have Not Survived the Postmodern Collapse of Value: A Reconstruction of Value is Necessary

20 Everyday Anecdotes Display the Deep Impact of Postmodernity’s Deconstruction of Value

Fascinating. More of these stories would greatly enrich and enliven the work.

The other story i'd add is the example from Haidt of the person who killed and cannibalized another person with their consent. Students struggled to say this was wrong – though they intuited it was.

Three short education anecdotes amply illustrate the postmodern deconstruction of value. Two of them come from Exeter Academy, the same school that produced Mark Zuckerberg and many other future business and social leaders. The first anecdote: a teacher at Exeter shared the following with the authors: “When I came to Exeter, I knew that my job was to teach about the good, the true, and the beautiful. By the time I retired from Exeter, both the teachers and students assumed that there was no such thing. The good, the true, and the beautiful no longer referred to something that was real.”

The second anecdote: One of us was guest lecturing at Exeter to a large group of engaged students. There were perhaps 150 or so young men and women in the group. The following moral question was our topic: “You are on a deserted island with a person you detest and whom you feel is verbally abusive to you. She is driving you absolutely out of your mind. You know you will never be rescued. She injures herself and does not have the capacity to feed herself. You are a doctor with the capacity to heal her, and you also have full capacity to feed her. Do you have an obligation to heal and feed her? No one in this world will ever know what happens, because you will never be rescued.” The overwhelming majority of the students said emphatically that one could not formulate an ought, any sort of cosmic obligation rooted in any sort of objective moral principle, which demanded that you feed the other person.

Anecdote Three: One of us was giving a guest lecture at the Bronx High School of Science in New York. We asked the students to declare that Hitler is bad and that Mother Teresa is good. The overwhelming majority of them balked, declaring that there is no intrinsic sense of good and bad. Everything is socially constructed and context-bound.

In light of these attacks, it is clear that the common-sense sacred axioms are no longer sufficient to hold a common story of culture. The shared field of eros that suffuses culture expresses itself in value. When value disappears, eros evaporates and all that remains is polarization and rivalrous conflict, the success story of hypermodernity, in all its distressing disguises.

And again that last step of logic is flawed …

When value disappears .. and all that remains is polarization and rivalrous conflict

It's part of it for sure … and we've had polarization and rivalrous conflict long-before we had post-modernity's destruction of value.

This point matters because much of the thesis rests on the inverse of that – realizing value will allow us to escape polarization and rivalrous conflict. And … it's more complex than that.

21 The Culture Must Change from Implicit Common-Sense Sacred Axioms to Explicit First Principles and First Values

23 It Is Possible to Make a Partial List of First Principles and First Values of Cosmos

A tabular list with characteristics and equations (!).

36 First Principles and First Values Are Based in Anthro-Ontology, Not the Universal Epistemologies of Natural Law

First principles and values are derived from contemplation of our own clarified interiors

#🔥🔥🔥 This is a crucial phrase because it explains how we are to discover these first principles and values for ourselves and hence to arrive at some agreement.

This means that First Principles and First Values are derived from the contemplation of our own clarified interiors. The mysteries are first and foremost located within us. First Principles and First Values live in interior space, cross-culturally and cross-temporally—across space and time.

They return to this in chapter 38

This what derived Anthro-ontologically means: by inner contemplation of objective (universal) inner nature

First Principles and First Values are derived Anthro-Ontologically. We do not enter the depth of nature as an objective reality outside of us; instead, we enter the depth of our inner nature.

38 The Anthro-Ontological Method Can Be Specified and Evolved

This section is a bit vaguer that i would like. It would be nice to have concrete examples as one has more in McGilchrist and Alexander.

Body, mind and language are the means by which truths can be known

The basic premise of this method, developed over many years, can be found in certain modern philosophers and sociologists, such as Jürgen Habermas, as well as many of the great religious traditions, even if not named as such. The premise is that human body, mind, and language are ultimately the only means by which truths can be known.

There are ways to reliably know collective and convergent truths that are themselves always evolving

What is proposed here is that there are ways to reliably know collective and convergent truths—knowable universal truths triangulated across multiple sciences—that are themselves always evolving. So it is that CosmoErotic Humanism includes theories of Eros, Ethics, Self, Power, and Community, as well as key distinctions around politics, education, and religious/spiritual practices and rituals. The claims made account for the major scientific disciplines and the truths expressed in the great wisdom traditions—ultimately grounded in clarified individual direct knowing, or gnosis.

39 We Must Recover and Renew the Eye of Value

Footnotes

  1. "David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein."

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