Do you (I, we...) live in a Cosmos?

Do you (I, we...) live in a Cosmos?

[ Medieval representation of the universe as cosmos ]

hysics (the science of everything) and astrophysical cosmology (the science of the universe), curiously, have little to say about whether a person lives in a cosmos. For physics and astronomical cosmology are activities persons pursue in their world of daily life, as opposed to being disciplines which investigate the makeup of that world. If one is a professional physicist or astronomer, a major part of one's world of daily life is doing research which is supposedly about "the whole", but to study this activity itself (the doing of the science as opposed to the results of that doing) is not part of the whole the scientist studies....

There can be -- perhaps relatively rare -- times where physics and cosmological theory do affect our life: when professional physicists and astronomers determine that something in their disciplinary domain is going to impact persons' lives (e.g., if they discover that a very large asteroid was going to strike the earth on 01 February 2019, wiping out mammals like a previous asteriod 65 million years ago wiped out dinosaurs).

There are also times when scientists turn their attention to their social activity of doing science. But then they consider themselves not to be doing their science per se, but rather to be doing something else: managing personnel, organizing symposia, etc. The world of daily life is not part of "everything" (physics) and it is not part of "the universe" (astronomy).

hat, then, is a cosmos? A cosmos is a benignly ordered world of daily life, in which a warming [but not burning...] sun rises each morning, the air is good to breath and the water good to drink, and in which one lives one's days in the good company of good friends, but one also can retreat to a private place (a "study", or "tokonoma"...) when one wants to reflect quietly by oneself for a while -- assured that fellowship will still be their waiting for one's return when one wishes to return to it.

The physical order of a cosmos is basically Aristotelean even if one is professionally a 21st-century quantum/relativistic astro- or particle physicist. While the physicist's theories assert that matter is mostly empty space, if the physicist has to worry about his or her pen falling thru the "solid" top of their work desk onto [or worse: through!] the floor, "something is wrong". The earth is flat, unless you take a long flight in a jet airplane, etc.

For deciding whether one lives in a cosmos, supportive social relations are even more important than benign material conditions. While everybody recognizes that an inmate of an internment camp is living in a carcel, not a cosmos, and many can see that a pariah has been exiled from the cosmos, one needs to appreciate that a person living in an anonymous megalopolis who has nobody who cares about them is not living in a cosmos, either. To live in a cosmos is to get up each morning looking forward to participating with good friends in mutually meaningful and interesting activities[fn.72

], and also looking further ahead to the coming night in which one will go to bed either with a loved and desired partner, or, if one goes to bed alone this night, confident of easily finding in the course of one's ordinary daily life activities such a felicitous partner with whom pleasurably and rewardingly to share one's life outside of public time, and looking yet further ahead to appealing activities in the next morning which will follow the coming evening -- a kind of "wheel of good karma" [or "eternal recurrence of the same" good...]....

To live in a cosmos is to find meaning and gratification (and pleasure) in each of life's daily activities, while also happily anticipating the next thing which lies ahead in one's day after this activity shall be through.... A cosmos is a place where the two aspects of time: the eternity of the present moment and the inexorable passing away of every present, are, as far as possible for us mortals (who do, sooner or later, die, and, unless life is very painful, always perceive death as coming too soon...) -- A cosmos is a place where we are happy doing what we are doing [whatever it is] and we also look forward to the next thing, both for the good it promises in itself, and also because it promises to provide a balm for the anticipated loss of present goods which the present's passing away will wrench away from us....

o you (I, we...) live in a cosmos? Or do you (I, we...) live in a mere "universe", i.e., some "Darwinean" process where everything happens by the luck of circumstances, be they the motions of Democritus's atoms, Hume's billiard balls, or today's stock, commodities and other "markets"? In the end, to live in a cosmos is to dwell in a caring but not intrusive face-to-face community of life, in which the community provides each with what he or she needs to live fully, and each person finds fulfillment in activities which sustain and further enhance the community.

Question: What difference would it make to persons living such a life if their world of life, according to their current astronomical-cosmological theory about it, was located (a) on the unique Edenic island at the center of Creation, or (b) at some indifferent place on an incidental speck of a small planet revolving around a middling star in some undistinguished corner of a volumetrically infinite, galactically overpopulated universe? Answer: It would change some specifics of the things they talk about in the pleasant and edifying conversation which fills their days.

Email me your ideas about Cosmos and cosmology!

Think

about how we are increasing the role of socially engineered chance in our daily life.

Learn to eat well, enjoy and stay thin (the French way).

The 20th Century: The century of barbed wire".
An antithesis to cosmos: what just is ("Es gibt").

Read	Garrett Hardin's classic essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons".

Learn why a city can deserve to exist (Louis Kahn).
Think about the story of The Tower of Babel.
Think about the metaphor of life as a journey.

Read	Edmund Husserl's lecture: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity (1935).

Q:	Is the adventure of Universalizing, emancipatory Culture ["Modernity" as it arose in the West...] over?

Leisure is the basis of culture.

See	12th C. Tuscan country house I find evocative of time and eternity.

See	Tuscan landscape (Leonardo da Vinci drawing).

Read about Dr. François Rabelais' Abbey of Theleme.

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29 April 2006CE (2006-04-29 ISO 8601)
v02.12

Each person needs to be a peer member of a world, a family and a community: cosmos, oikos and polis.