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.
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.
Proposition 1 is that We Live in a Time Between Worlds, a Time Between Stories. And this too is a story, a story that makes sense to me. I live as if this story is true.
If we had a story that gave us an absolute foundation, we would need a story to explain that story. And we would need a story to explain the story explaining the story. It is all stories all the way down and there is no final story. First Principles and First Values seems to implicitly understand this. And it recognizes that the old stories of modernity have lost their power.
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.
Will this new story be better than the old stories that are fading away? I hope so. I think it is possible. But it will require a massive effort to make the story come true. The book is merely a good start.
Value must be shown to be real, and our shared allegiance to it must be self-aware and noble. Otherwise, a New Story of Value would need to be an imposed fiction, as the postmodernists claim…
The postmodernists successfully undermined the old stories of modernity, and for that we can be grateful. Those old stories built a civilization which gave us much but not a civilization that can endure. Those old stories were powerful myths. The new story presented in First Principles and First Values attempts to ground itself in Cosmic Reality, perhaps a better story, a more useful story. Again, I am hopeful.
Reality’s story—a CosmoErotic love story in which humans have unique capacities for consciousness, freedom, and responsibility—is always already animated by plotlines driving the ever-deeper emergence of Eros and Value.
This story seems to pass the test of reflecting the Good, the True and the Beautiful.
And the story has Purpose.
CosmoErotic Humanism is a philosophy that offers a new Story of Value capable of reorienting our faltering civilization.
For as long as humanity has no shared story about what should be valued—let alone agreement as to whether value itself transcends our social constructions—how can collective steps be taken to prevent the death of Gaia, the death of our humanity, and the death of the species itself?
But whether the New Story of Value becomes a widely shared story for humanity remains to be seen.
Only a shared Story of Value generates the depths of intimacy required to heal the global intimacy disorder and activate the ground for global coherence necessary to effectively deploy global solutions.
Proposition 11 is that God Lives as Stories: Story as First Principle and First Value.
Story is a core structure of Cosmos itself, a First Principle and First Value… there are ten major plotlines in the Cosmic Story that play themselves out again and again and again, at every level of reality… an ever-evolving narrative of dynamic emergence and Becoming.
Ah, we have a story that justifies itself.
…the adaptive power of story is rooted in its fundamental, ontological status. Reality itself is stories all the way up and down the evolutionary chain. Said differently, Story is a First Principle and First Value of reality, and human beings think and feel in stories precisely because this first value of reality lives in us, as us, and through us.
I have come to see that the best we can do is to have stories. We cannot grasp all of Reality so we necessarily need stories to grasp pieces of Reality as best we can. The idea that getting to this point now was embedded in the cosmic unfolding is interesting, to say the least.
The desire for a certain set of outcomes is thus a given structure of the story… these desires that drive the story are seen as important, as real—the story matters, in some sense, to the Universe itself… we are saying that story, the narrative arc of reality, is not a contrived human invention but rather a fundamental property of Cosmos.
However, I must say that the story in my head that nothing is fundamental is one that I am not ready to let go of. That story itself is fundamental is a story that needs a story to explain why this is so. That story is somehow fundamental seems to me to be merely an assertion, not a self-evident truth nor a logical truth.
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.
And this seems like a good place to pause for now.
Of course, story does not, need not, resonate with everyone.
I am not a story by Galen Strawson, a British analytic philosopher and literary critic.
But many of us aren’t Narrative in this sense. We’re naturally – deeply – non-Narrative. We’re anti-Narrative by fundamental constitution.