There is too much of interest to me in First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come by David J. Temple to be contained in a single book report. And how the book was organized did not align with how my mind naturally functions. The solution for me was to write several essays.
My first essay was About David J. Temple.
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.
My second essay was About a Story.
There was something about First Principles and First Values that I liked immediately. I liked the emphasis on story, a word used 298 times in the book. For me, the ideas in the book are easier to accept as a story rather than an absolute truth to be believed.
My third essay was About Evolution.
The point I want to make is that the theme of conscious evolution is a big story that is currently growing in popularity and, fortunately, a hyperobject that no one person or organization can capture.
My fourth essay was About Death and First Principles.
The word death is used 70 times in the book First Principles and First Value. Before exploring what the book says, I would like to reference what I said about a year ago in my essay About Nihilism and Death. As I reread my own words now, it provides excellent background for this essay.
I will try to capture my remaining comments about this book in this book report.
The central premise of First Principles and First Value is that values are embedded in the Story of the Evolution of the universe. It asserts that the Is–ought problem can be overcome. This is an extremely bold assertion which will probably get a lot of discussion in philosophical circles.
For reference, there are hundreds of papers on this and closely related moral philosophy topics at The Is/Ought Gap on the PhilPapers website.
I am interested in how metamodern thinkers and others are exploring this territory. I watched most of the videos in the Transcendent Naturalism w/ Gregg Henriques & John Vervaeke playlist which positions spirituality in a non supernatural approach. I would like to see some dialog between metamodern and modern thinkers.
The central premise of First Principles and First Value focuses on a particular value.
One of these First Principles and First Values is intimacy. What this means is that a particular definition of intimacy can be used to explain, in a very basic way, how the Universe works, and thereby ground intimacy as a fundamental value of Cosmos. Intimacy, as defined here, is experienced by human beings when individuals share an identity in the context of relative otherness, in which there is mutuality of recognition, feeling, value, and purpose.
This idea is new to me and will probably be new to most people. It may take me a while to integrate this idea into my worldview, although doing so is not my objective. At the moment, it is far easier for me to accept that emergence and complexity are basic than that intimacy is basic.
I addressed another theme in the book in my Substack article About the Problem of Evil.
And there is another theme in First Principles and First Value that has resonated with me for a long time. The words unique and uniqueness are used 139 times. The The Uniqueness Equation is a very novel way to express this idea.
Proposition 24 - The First Principle and First Value of Uniqueness
The Uniqueness Equation:
Uniqueness = Emergent Distinction from the Field of [Universal] Reality x Radically New Value (Quality + Consciousness) x New Capacity (Attention + Eros + Function + Integration)
Significant, in my opinion, is that we now have eight billion unique people inhabiting Earth. Uniqueness feels basic to me. Perhaps we also have eight billion stories about intimacy.
Touched on only lightly in the book, too lightly imo, is the matter of free will. It also seems significant to me that we have eight billion people each of whom have a tiny bit of free will. I had more to say in my essay About Free Will.
David J. Temple writes,
A Set of Common-Sense Sacred Axioms Undergirds Modernity
A first axiom is the assumption of free will and its implicit corollary that our choices matter.
It seems to me, a nonacademic average and ordinary person, that neither modern thinkers nor metamodern galaxy brains have adequately addressed free will.
From my writings about First Principles and First Value it should be obvious that this book has captured my attention. There is much that I like and there is much more to come from David J. Temple. However, there are a few things that do not resonate with me that I feel obliged to express.
I immediately disliked the term CosmoErotic Humanism. Its use feels like a branding exercise, an attempt to capture something that should not be captured by any one organization or person. And it feels totally masculine. I suspect that it will not resonate with many women, and perhaps particularly those with a mature feminine spirit. I am not alone in my reaction.
Also, I did not like how the book was organized. Perhaps galaxy brains can hold 42 principles in their minds, but I cannot, too overwhelming. However, it afforded me an opportunity to draw out the themes in my own way so no harm done.
It is my intention to pay some attention to the discussions of this book in the SPACE and I will be on the lookout for reviews of this book by others.
Epilogue
On July 10, 2024 I published my book report on First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come by David J. Temple. On July 11, 2024 Marc Gafni published 404 — Live Your Story: The First Commandment of Cosmos on The Center for World Philosophy and Religion. Overall I am impressed by the book, but less so by this article.
A trivial point is the use of 404 in the title. I usually see this code as a web page error message, "404 Page Not Found", identifying dead links. If it has meaning in this context, I do not understand.
My general criticism of this article is that it goes too far in its assertions and is too dogmatic in tone.
The First Commandment of Cosmos.
No, the Cosmos does not give commands. For me, this is uncomfortably close to stating God commands.
Story is not a human contrivance; it is a quality of the real.
In my opinion, Story is a human construct, a very useful way of expression that I quite like. For me, the idea that Story somehow is present in Ultimate Reality is a story, potentially a powerful and useful story. To assert this as a fact is to elevate subjective opinions to the status of objective facts.
The essential elements of the story are the same all the way up and down the evolutionary chain…
For me, this is a human idea projected onto the facts supporting the story of evolution.
Story is not just a random contrivance, but a quality of the real; the real is animated by intention, by infinite depth, by sacredness. There is a sacredness to the real, and sacred means that it’s not merely matter but ultimately matters.
When we say story is a quality of the real, when we say that it’s not merely a coincidence of matter, but that it matters ultimately, what we mean to say is that story is a quality of the Universe. It is backed by the Universe…
Frankly, it seems to me that Gafni is a True Believer in this story. For me, it is a red flag when I see True Believers in the stories that they themselves construct. The danger, imo, is that this shifts the focus as being a True Believer in anything is a powerful force.
There are many historians who view story that way — reductionist materialist historians, who recognize the importance of story because story is what coheres us.
I agree with the power of stories as a path towards coherence. But true belief is also a path towards coherence and, imo, a dangerous path. I seek to avoid conflating the two.
The implication — but often not only the implication, but an explicit claim — is that story is an accident of the cosmos, because the cosmos itself is an accident. In other words, we are living in a cosmos whose nature is accidental. It is non-purposeful, it lacks intention, it has no qualia.
The story that the Universe is an accident with no Purpose is a story that is fading, beginning to lose its power. I am strongly in favor of new stories, better stories, more useful stories. I am not in favor of becoming True Believers in those stories.
Story is an ontology of Reality. Story is real. That’s critical.
I do not like the assertive tone of this article and for me, story is very useful framing that is not critical.
Mathematics itself lives on the boundary between the interior and the exterior. Mathematics is the ghost in the machine. Mathematics indicates a coherent cosmos in which numbers themselves are intimately related to each other, and they are unfolding. As the numbers come together, they form coherent configurations of intimacy, which disclose the telerotic universe — the universe that is filled with Eros, with radical aliveness, seeking deeper contact, desiring deeper contact, and generating greater wholeness. That’s the nature of mathematics. Mathematical value discloses the intimate universe, which is a storied universe.
For me, that the universe can be described in the language of mathematics is a MYSTERY that I would like to write more about sometime.
There is an Eros equation, and there is an intimacy equation.
- Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, desiring ever deeper contact and ever larger wholeness
- Intimacy = the experience of shared identity in the context of relative otherness x mutuality of recognition x mutuality of feeling (pathos) x mutuality of value x mutuality of purpose.
These equations are disclosing value in Cosmos, the intrinsic values of Cosmos. And here’s the key. Value is real. Value is a real structure of cosmos.
These equations are clever and useful. But to imply that they have validity similar to the equations used by physicists is, imo, inappropriate at best. This is not way to bring mathematicians into acceptance of the story.
I am going to scream this from the rooftops. Value is real, and story is a value of Cosmos. This means that the experience of Reality is most accurately disclosed as story. Story matters, because it’s not merely matter. Story is the disclosure of the inherent ErosValue of Cosmos.
This, imo, is psychological manipulation. If you cannot see what Gafni sees, what is obviously true, what is self-evident, there is something the matter with you. True Believers love screaming from rooftops.
We see the dimension of desire between, say, proton, neutron, and electron — the desire that forms an atom — but we see it from the outside. If we are blinded dogmatically, if we make a dogmatic, non-empirical, anti-empirical, dogmatic a priori statement and say the world is materialist, we could look at those early levels of Reality as being mechanical and miss their music, as Nietzsche correctly pointed out.
Personally, as per the stories being told by John Vervaeke and Gregg Henriques, stories about the emergence of difference at the level of Life and Culture, I see desire in particle physics and desire in humans as very different things that using the same word for both does not erase.
And then, as we evolve more deeply, and we transform more deeply, we begin to be able to hold a wider and wider story, until we have an experience of what was called Conscious Evolution.
Again, imo, this is psychological manipulation. Again, I believe we need better stories. I have never had an experience of conscious evolution nor do I accept that that makes me less evolved than those that do.
Live your story means clarify your story.
This I like.
The commandment of Cosmos is to live your story because Cosmos is made up of stories. That’s what Cosmos is. Cosmos is story.
This I do not like.
Intimacy means story.
I am currently exploring what intimacy means with trusted friends and I hope to write more about this sometime.
Any group that claims that to murder someone outside of my group is not murder, that there is something fundamentally, qualitatively different about murdering someone who’s outside of my group, then they are not in the Field of Value. Anyone who steps out of a universal grammar of value that applies to all of the things is not in the Field of Value.
And I would advise caution towards all those who claim to know what the Field of Value is, although it is an interesting idea to explore.
At this point, Marc Gafni introduces another matter that feels out of place and inappropriate in the context of this article
…in the Middle East today, there is zero, zero, zero moral equivalence between Hamas and the pluralistic democracy called the State of Israel …To suggest some sort of moral equivalence between that position and Hamas, which is basically a philosophy of death, to have that misunderstood and endorsed by professors at American universities, along with upper middle class kids all over the world who basically don’t get that the Field of Value is real, and can’t follow a storyline, and can’t track what’s happening is the breakdown of story — it’s a big deal.
And since Gafni has opened this door, I will walk through it and comment.
Soon after October 7, 2023 a friend asked me what I thought. Referring to the Government of Gaza and the Government of Israel I said, both sides are monsters. Today I would say that the Government of Israel has proven to be the bigger monster because they have a bigger stick. The Middle East is an extremely complex situation and no doubt Gafni has much more to say. So do I but this is not the time or place.
However, to claim that one understands the Field of Value and knows how to apply this to the current situation in the Middle East is grandiose, to say the least.
Let’s bring it back to the center now, my friends: live your story! That’s the commandment of Cosmos.
Why is that the commandment? Because the outline of my story is everything.
What does it mean to live my story? To live my story means, first, to embrace my story. I’ve got to embrace it. I can’t try and be in another story. For whatever reason, cosmos placed me in this story. Two, from the place of embracing my story, what is the heroic transformation that I can accomplish in my story? Within my story, there is a transformation.
Sadly, there is a troubling aspect to the story of Marc Gafni.
On Jan 1, 2016 the following article was published by Marc Gafni’s third wife, Chaya Gafni.
A voice for Gafni’s victims, from one who was there
Yes, there is a risk to writing this “aloud.” But there is also a risk to staying silent, staying safe. Twenty years and untold numbers of victims later, I have learned that staying safe can also be risky business.
In fairness to Gafni, here are links to Gafni’s response to the allegations against him.
To live my story means, first, to embrace my story. I’ve got to embrace it. I can’t try and be in another story. For whatever reason, cosmos placed me in this story. Two, from the place of embracing my story, what is the heroic transformation that I can accomplish in my story?
Finally, I take responsibility for my own story and the idea that the comos is somehow responsible for my story, or anyone’s, does not land well.