WHAT IS THE COSMOS?

1. We all know that the Cosmos is largely composed of starry bodies, together with such planets and/or moons as may circle, in Solar System-like vein, around certain of them, as in the case of our sun. Starry bodies in space, together with their satellites and a whole lot of debris which has built up over the millennia, constitute our general concept of the Cosmos.

2. Some have contended that the Universe, to give it its alternative name, is meaningless, since devoid of God in the conventional or traditional sense of Creator, like Jehovah, and that we accordingly live in a meaningless Universe, since we, too, are part of the overall picture. I won't go into the Existentialist pros and cons - mostly cons - of this argument, because it is not relevant to our text. But I will contend that if the Universe was truly meaningless it would not be the sort of place in which one could live but, rather, closer to what it probably was like before galaxies and solar systems and such-like cosmic units were formed out of the cooling of smaller stars and the gradual coming to pass, in contrast one fancies to the everywhichway chaos of primal cosmic matter, of magnetic reciprocities and tensions such that, together with other factors, eventually led to the development of galaxies and related orders which, in the manner of our solar system, display a variety of orbital patterns, whether in relation to space itself (allegedly curved, if Einstein and such physicists are to believed) or, more probably, in consequence of the various bodies attracting and repelling one another in a kaleidoscope-like array of interdependent movements that owe more to basic gravitational forces in relation to different volumes and masses than to any 'cultural' interpretation of orbits as such which, while intellectually attractive, doesn't really do all that much justice to the rather more primitivistic relationships characterizing such primal bodies as stars at various stages of cosmic devolution.

3. Now it seems unlikely that galaxies and solar systems were ready-formed, as it were, out of the so-called Big Bang at the roots of the Universe - always rather suspiciously suggestive of a secular parallel to monotheism - but, rather, that they took an immense time to come into being, more time than we could reasonably comprehend, and that wherever they did form, which may not have been everywhere, the Cosmos ceased to be meaningless, or anarchic, and became meaningful, and ordered - even, in some limited sense, civilized. For we should not confine civilization just to Man, even though he may be the paragon of it, but should allow for something equivalent to civilization, even if on a much lesser or 'bovaryized' basis, in relation to the Universe generally.

4. Now the Universe achieved, in galaxies and solar systems, whether or not other solar systems exist outside this particular galaxy, a meaning which would otherwise be lacking. It became in some rudimentary way civilized, whereas in its original manifestation as starry bodies presumably flying everywhichway in primal chaos it would have been not merely barbarous but infernally philistine, if we take 'philistine' to mean the opposite of cultured, and therefore that which most accords with the absolute beginning of things rather than their absolute end, with appearance rather than essence, with will rather than soul, with doing rather than being, with the Devil rather than God, with outer rather than inner, with light rather than lightness, with speed rather than calmness, with individualism rather than co-operation, and so on and so forth.

5. Even now I think it safe or, at any rate, reasonable to contend that the Universe or Cosmos, whatever one prefers to call it (and it may be that Multiverse or even Polyverse is the more appropriate description of something so vast as potentially to be composed of countless galaxies and/or solar systems, as well as the possibility of anarchic stars or bodies that even now would defy meaning), is primarily philistine, or apparent, or manifesting the most basic id-like will, and therefore that which stands at the inception of life as the precondition for anything else, whether lower or contrary.

6. But I do not believe that one can or indeed should limit the Cosmos to just a philistine status, even if that may happen to be its most characteristic attribute and therefore one that would necessarily have to take precedence over all the others, including barbarism, civilization, and - dare I say it? - rudimentary manifestations of culture, as though in crudely supernatural, natural, and subnatural departures from a quintessentially unnatural inception and basis.

7. For the 'everything within everything', the fourfold of things even within the Cosmos, never mind Nature, Man, and Cyborg, is surely a credible argument and interpretation of reality, and I would not be the first to espouse it. Anaxagoras believed such a thing in the fifth century B.C., at around the same time that Empedocles did justice to the fourfold classification of the Elements which has inspired so many philosophers, including myself, right down to modern times.

8. However that may be, the Cosmos, I shall maintain, is primarily a philistine reality which, despite the chaos from out of which it must have emerged, achieved, in part or in whole, a degree of order which we have since been able to testify to and interpret in terms of galaxies, solar systems, and so on. In fact, without such an order we would not have come to pass in the first place, any more than the subject of my next question, Nature.