In a prior Substack Newsletter, we explored Philip Goff’s new book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe, making the case for cosmic purpose and panpsychism. To distill his argument that the universe is directed towards certain goals, such as the emergence of life, Philip contends that:
“…the evidence points to some kind of teleology, or goal-directedness, at the fundamental level, but in the absence of the traditional God. We could make sense of this with fundamental teleological laws, i.e. laws with purposes built into them, and there is a well-developed account of what such laws would look like. Or if you’re sympathetic to panpsychism, which I think is independently the best solution to the mind-body problem, then you could ground teleology in the goals of a conscious universe.”
Continuing the dialogue, last month we featured a post from Charles Repp assessing Philip’s suggestion that cosmic purpose can lead to individual meaning - without making a judgment on the plausibility of the claim for an unfolding purpose or plan immanent in the universe. Philip and Charles will continue the dialogue on an APA Eastern Division panel in January and I would like to join their debate in advance. First, I will question the notion of putting the claim of cosmic purpose in abeyance and, second, tease out Charles’ hopeful path to individual meaning by recasting cosmic purpose in more practical, aesthetic terms.
To frame the question of cosmic purpose and individual meaning, Charles notes how philosophy is returning to history as a tale of progress:
“The idea received its best known, if not most easily understood, expression in the work of W.F. Hegel, who saw in the course of world events a universal “spirit” striving towards self-realization. Today, philosophers are more inclined to see history as Darwinian, the product of blind forces acting on random mutations. Our field thus tends to have little truck not only with progress narratives of history but with grand historical narratives of any sort, insofar as these invariably attempt to impose some shape or order on the historical process.
Recently, however, it seems the Hegelian view has been making something of a comeback. Thomas Nagel, in his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos, and now Philip Goff, in his new book Why, argue that the standard Darwinian account is inadequate to explain the existence of conscious, rational life forms such as ours. The alternative that both lean towards involves supplementing the laws of physics and biology already discovered by science with a separate set of teleological laws favoring the development of life, consciousness, and reason. On Nagel and Goff’s view, as on Hegel’s, the historical emergence of these phenomena is thus part of an unfolding purpose or plan immanent in the universe—the story, as Nagel says (echoing Hegel), of “the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”
Charles goes on to question Goff’s contention that cosmic purpose can lead to individual meaning:
“Goff…argues that if his view is true, our lives would have much greater meaning, specifically in that we would be able to make a bigger difference in the world. “If we were able to contribute, even in some small way, to the good purposes of the whole of reality,” Goff says, “that would be about as big a difference as you can imagine making and would consequently greatly add to the meaning of our lives” …Alas, however, I don’t find Goff’s argument very convincing. My dissatisfaction with it stems specifically from the sense(s) in which it assumes individual lives are to be counted as more or less meaningful, i.e. his assumptions about what makes for meaning in life.
One thing we might mean when we say we want our lives to be meaningful is that we want our actions to make a difference in the world, to leave some lasting “mark” or “trace”...But it’s not clear why the meaningfulness of our lives, in this impact sense, would be any greater in a Goffian universe than in a Darwinian one. In the former, we would be able to direct our actions to a cosmic purpose, whereas in the latter we would be able to direct our actions only to non-cosmic purposes. But why would this make any difference to the causal impact of our individual actions?”
Charles then moves to a second possible source of meaning by participating in, or helping to fulfill, the cosmic purpose or plan:
“Supposing the universe really does have a plan, and the reason humans exist and are built the way we are, with the capacity for consciousness and reason, is to play some part in fulfilling that plan, then humans would seem to have the kind of purpose Sartre thought we lacked…But this reading faces a problem too. That is, having an assigned purpose, just in itself, doesn't seem to add meaning to our lives. Suppose the purpose of human beings, from a cosmic perspective, is to serve as food for some more rational alien species yet to arrive on Earth. In that case, the mere fact that we have a role to play in the cosmic plan wouldn’t seem to count for much meaning-wise”.
Thirdly, drawing on Robert Nozick, Charles explores a hopeful way of interpreting participation in a larger story:
“One promising option is Robert Nozick’s view that meaning in life is a matter of transcending our individual limits. “For a life to have meaning,” according to Nozick, “it must connect with other things, with some things or values beyond itself” (594, Philosophical Explanations):
“The particular things or causes people find make their life feel meaningful all take them beyond their own narrow limits and connect them up with something else. Children, relationships with other persons, helping others, advancing justice, continuing and transmitting a tradition, pursuing truth, beauty, world betterment—these and the rest link you to something wider than yourself.” (595)
Under this construct, Charles suggests meaning in a Goffian universe:
“…might go like this. If meaning is a matter of transcending the limits of our individual selves, and if we can achieve the ultimate form of transcendence only by connecting up in the right way with the unlimited, then a universe in which this sort of connection is possible will allow for greater meaning than a universe in which it is impossible.”
Charles then finally notes that even if the species is part of a plan, it is unclear that an individual is involved and, if not, it’s not clear how to be connected to the cosmos in some kind of transcendental way. However, he believes Christine Korsgaard offers a path:
“… “in her recent book Fellow Creatures (Oxford 2018). According to Korsgaard, one of the features that distinguishes humans from other animals is that we have what she calls (borrowing a term from Marx) “species being.” For Korsgaard, this means, in part, that “[w]e think of the members of our species as being members of a common community and, importantly, we think of our own lives as being, in various ways, contributions to the life of that larger community” (49). But, more than that, it also means that we see our own good as tied to the life of that larger group, in that “we think of our lives as meaningful or not depending on what sort of contribution to the life of the community they are” (49, my emphasis). Our understanding of what sort of contribution counts as meaningful depends, in turn, says Korsgaard, on our understanding of the “story of humanity,” the grand narrative of the history of our species.”
In the end, Korsgaard’s notion of “species-being” ties into the Nozickian explanation and Charles outlines a plausible framework for individual transcendence:
“A purposive universe would not make our individual lives more meaningful by enlarging our personal impact on the world or by giving us an assigned purpose in life. It might give our lives more meaning by making it possible to connect to the unlimited, whose meaning would provide the ultimate backstop for the meaning of every other connection in our lives”
Before seeking to reframe the connection between individual and cosmic meaning in a more pragmatic, less transcendental way, I want to first take issue with Charles expressly holding the claim to purpose in abeyance - even though he found it intuitive.
Philip raises the binary dilemma in confronting the question of cosmic purpose, noting the stakes are the alternatives of nihilism and meaning. Either we live in an accidental world with no meaning, or one with cosmic purpose and some kind of meaning. I maintain that, once Philip posits pan-agentialism where particles have predilections, the genie of agency cannot be put back in the bottle. There is no “middle” ground because he effectively rules out atheism in the sense of a purely accidental world. Ultimately, he is on the theistic side of the spectrum assessing divine attributes and embracing Limited Designers.
Similarly, you cannot technically suspend judgment because it’s all or nothing, where Darwinian accidents are either for some purpose or else due solely to chance in an absolute nihilistic worldview. The question is then how we define individual meaning with cosmic purpose unknown. Before offering an aesthetic conception, I want to explore how certain individual experiences commonly associated with meaning are only possible in a purposeful reality.
Wonder and the sublime, for instance, are only coherent with cosmic purpose. This is a topic I explored in a dialogue with Wisdom of Crowds, where Damir Marusic wrote a piece on re-enchantment, concluding that aesthetic experiences such as wonder can be groundless and good in-themselves. By way of example, he described experiencing the wonder of a meteor flashing through the night sky and, although impossible, hearing it - reflecting the gravity of the moment. For Damir, that was sufficient in-itself, without broader implications.
My contention is that cosmic purpose is the only basis for generating the force of such aesthetic experiences. To explore the preconditions for their weight, I want to briefly note how classical theories of the sublime draw on incomprehensibility - which reflects being unable to represent or grasp a truth.
In an APA Blog piece on unimaginable time, Carolyn Korsmeyer explores how wonder and the sublime, reflected in the expanse of space and large measures of time, turn on incomprehensibility:
“One approach to the unimaginable is by way of classic theories of the sublime, as sublime objects escape full grasp in as much as their size exceeds that which can be contained in an image. We know that there are things in the world that are too mammoth to perceive in their entirety, which makes them resistant to mental representation or (to use Lyotard’s term) unpresentable. The typical examples of sublime objects advanced by philosophers such as Kant and Burke are physical objects of great power and magnitude…examples come from natural phenomena and the universe, such as the Sahara Desert, oceans with no landmarks in sight, the stars filling the night sky—i.e., things that occupy seemingly endless expanses of space. As Burke put it, when the eye cannot perceive the boundaries of things, they seem infinite and produce an effect of overwhelming magnitude (Enquiry II: VII). According to Kant’s approach to the sublime, recognizing that the grasp of reason exceeds that of the imagination also makes us aware of the power of the mind’s freedom from the limitations of sense experience (Critique of Judgment §26).
I suggest that incomprehensibility is a function of believing - explicitly or implicitly - there is a reason for the subject experience. The gravity of the moment is generated by inadequately grasping an ordered reality. We are awestruck only because of an underlying truth. In a hypothetical accidental reality, or multiverse of infinite regressions, nothing would be consequential and everything comprehensible. There would be an infinite number of meteor showers and none of them could be wonderous. Pure accidents cannot be enchanting - we would exist purposelessly together in vain. In sum, Damir suggests his wonder can be a function of temperament and good in-itself, without a God, but I believe the sublime is only possible in a world with some purpose - in Philip’s sense of a universe with an immanent and unfolding plan.
However, the dilemma of a binary option between nihilism and some meaning (or sufficient reason) does not address the question of how individual meaning aligns with a historical narrative. I want to now broaden the aesthetic lens for a more practical, less transcendent, conception of meaning - making this connection more accessible.
It begins by construing cosmic purpose in evolutionary terms as a creative “plan” that includes the story of human creation. By analogy, we might be a “limited designer” of sorts, with human productions interpreted as part of the broader “story”. The narrative is therefore less about the unfolding of reason than a creative process. Authenticity, being true to our aesthetic essence, can then be understood as individual meaning reflecting cosmic purpose.
In a APA Blog piece with Brian Leiter on Nietzsche’s fatalism, he outlined Nietzsche’s Essentialism where everything has a fundamental essence. As part of Nietzsche’s thoroughgoing naturalism, our nature is constricted to a trajectory governed by facts or psycho-physical realities that can only be sculpted, not changed entirely. A tomato plant, to use Brian’s analogy, will not produce a different fruit, but it can be cultivated.
In this Nietzschean sense, I suggest our essence is to create. Artistic expression distinguishes our unique nature and grounds meaning. For Nietzsche, without God, the only alternative is creation. As he says in a notebook, “he who does not find greatness in God finds it nowhere… he must either deny it or create it”.
To frame an aesthetic conception in Judeo-Christian terms, Tim Andersen, a physicist, mathematician and friend of the APA Blog described a vision of creation in a Substack Newsletter:
“In order for a Creation theory to make sense, it has to take into account both the matter and the information content of the universe, but it also has to take into account that we are beings that exist within the universe and are experiencing the universe. Thus, the universe is created with matter and form that is capable of experiencing itself. Creation theories that attempt to account only for the matter and form part but ignore the experience or suggest it is an illusion are incomplete. A creation theory based on experience, however, is a very different thing from a creation theory based on the logic of cause and effect. Experience knows nothing of cause and effect because it always lives in the moment. The universe of experience is continually created at every moment. And that is exactly how we see God as Creator, not as a demiurge initiating the universe at a point in the past, but as a Being who creates continually. When we encounter God, we always encounter him creating and he invites us into partnership with him in making that creation”
In this vein, we should see human creations as manifestations of cosmic purpose. To borrow from Crispin Sartwell on fusing art and nature in The Shape of the World: What if Aesthetic Properties are Real, we must acknowledge the “materialization of art, and hence for the continuity of art with reality, the understanding of human making as an upwelling within nature, a series of natural transformations, tantamount to erosion or vegetation.”
Our manipulation of the natural environment should then be viewed as part of the creation narrative. To recall Aristotle, hands are the instrument of intelligence, analogous to the soul. In earlier APA Blog pieces I maintained that the production of technology should then be construed as part of nature and AI, our most prominent creation, as our aesthetic fate.
In one sense, elevating our productions to reflect a kind of historical destiny could be deflating. If our most refined creation - quantum AI, harvesting superposition - is merely radical computing power, completing tasks that would otherwise take conventional computers millions of years, perhaps cosmic purpose is devoid of values, with utility the measure of the natural world.
However, on the other hand, virtual reality is enough to convince some people that the whole world is a simulation - and there are radical theories in physics (nothing is locally real) and forms of strict Rationalism (Michael Della Rocca’s Parmenidean Ascent), fraying our conventional view of nature.
Such outlandish theories reflect the enduring mystery of cosmic purpose and the challenge of establishing a connection to the unlimited. Indeed, uncertainty itself defines certain religious conceptions. In an APA Blog piece on Kierkegaard and Socrates, Jacob Howland explores how faith can understood as risk itself, where the highest truth can be objective absurdity (the incarnation of God as man) “held fast with the most passionate inwardness”. He notes how Nietzsche might affirm this subjective truth: “recall that Zarathustra does not disabuse the old man who sings and praises God. He does not tell him that God is dead—for God is not dead for him.”.
Reinforcing the limits of reason in a kind of developmental skepticism, Tim Andersen further speculates in the End of the Universe that creation itself is incomplete. Highlighting that time has single direction, Tim suggests that creation is still unfolding: “At the end of time all information will exist. Our creation will impart everything that ever happened in this universe at that point…From my Judeo-Christian perspective, therefore, it is more important that the universe has an end than a beginning, a Revelation rather than a Genesis. Our creation lies in the future, not the past”.
Grappling with the unknown is the common thread across these ancient metaphysical speculations and radical technological visions. Consistent with Charles’s exploration, how can we plausibly connect to the unlimited? I believe an aesthetic conception of purpose creates a pragmatic, more accessible path. Conceiving of individual meaning as aesthetic authenticity does not mean personally having a hand in developing technology. Rather, we might broaden the notion of individual meaning by setting a lower standard, realizing our creative essence, to tap into the story of purpose.
Especially in a secularizing world, perhaps a less cerebral conception of authenticity makes it more tenable and helps enrich ordinary lives. A creative, naturalistic vision that makes sense of our place in the cosmos to sustain everyday meaning.
From the APA Archive:
Sean Kelly on the Genealogy of Redemption
What else I’m Reading/Listening to:
Charles Taylor on Wisdom of Crowds
Further Reading: