‘Even the articulate and brutal sounds of the globe’ says De Quincey ‘‘must be all so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their corresponding keys’ (collected writings 1889, p113)
When we admire or love something of a different nature than us, we anoint it with anthropomorphism; we lovingly ascribe to it human traits, we interpret its admirable aspects as a service, a favor, for which the perfect compensation is, appropriately, that which is most essential and exclusive to us — sentience. And when we hate someone of the same nature, we remove them. We call them ‘inhuman’, ‘monsters’, or dehumanize them by treating them as if they’re not, well, like us — human.
“The universe is composed of stories, not atoms”.
When appreciation for these inanimate favors is lost, we remove that — once lovingly granted — sentience. They regain their inanimateness, or rather, we — having fawningly taken it away — give it back. The highest form of appreciation is indeed giving what’s most dear, what’s indispensable, and the most degrading is taken away the most essential character that something could be said to possess.
All is but rooted in that chemistry of essences.
To me, the expression ‘universe’ is dishonest; an oxymoron, definition of something of which there’s none, and for which none can be. A sham, a loose, vague, totalizing expression of a non-expression. A quasi-expression that somehow approximates that which we know (or pretend to) and those other, unknown things, and the unknowable ones behind them. It (Universe) was once its own thing, independent of us, indifferent, resistant to logic, untainted by our infantile conceits. But later, man became the center of it, and it (universe) the subject. The plot had twisted, the order of things reversed, and the implications are no less cosmic. Philosophy is simply is the attempt to justify those sporadic reversals; of proscribing order, so that, the absence of an ‘object’ — engendered by the incessant oscillation— is justified, or decided as either-or.
Did I say ‘later’?, forgive me, in no way was I trying to answer the perennial paradox of ‘who came first, the chicken or the egg’, though I may have presumptuously done so, the ‘chicken’, that is, the Universe. I didn’t mean to invoke time. But it’s clear as I retrace the preceding lines, that I was less a perpetrator than a victim, of a thought process wrought by — and is incomprehensible without — time; as well as of my own humanity, that is, of being conceitfully at error, yet, errors presuppose truth, more so, time, because, without time, statements are eternal, with them, they’re ephemeral, no matter how (temporarily) truthful. ‘Truth is the daughter of time’ was a famous medieval maxim, uttered in those times when ‘man’ was considered the ‘Object’; when he sat upon that cosmic throne, while his subject (the universe) was at his service, though he indwelled her. For her servitude, she was rewarded, and plentifully so, with sentience, though she knead him up.
Philosophers, as they had done so in other ways, tried to justify her servitude; why such a powerful thing would serve such an insignificant thing, rather, how did the potter become the slave of his pot, not knowing that they were tarnishing the gift they once awarded her. Man was unprepared to face the implications of his generosity and tried to take it back. Some, having glimpsed the conspiracy, justified her subservience as ‘maternal’; contending, that she’s our matriarch, that her service was that of a mother to her newborn, believing this explanation would save her from the patriarchs, who’d been plotting her alienation….
They succeeded, eventually. Xenophanes’ rhapsodies yanked back her humanity, Epicurus banished her, later the hexameters of Lucretius lacerated her, Aristotle mourned her, Plato built her a tombstone, and ever since philosopher had been expanding it, one brick at a time.
Once perceived as a great machine, thanks, in large part, to aristotle, renaissance occultists, inspired by early medieval neoplatonists, sealed at once, that fantasy; of man being the object, centre and foci of this universe, of his anthropocentrism. Man was relegated to a subject, and the universe assumed divine infinity. The repercussions were horrific. They spooked mathematicians, trapped philosophers in labyrinthine voids. The only beneficiaries of this turnover were the poets, and reasonably so, as poets aren’t interested in solving problems as their aforementioned counterparts, but in articulating them.
