Towards Philosophical COSMOLOGY (from TRAGEDY)

Cosmology evokes today the vision of physical "outer space", in contrast to the "inner space" of psychology. Can these fundamental visions meet?

Revealingly, the ancestral visions in myth were cosmological. But then ca 500 BC man became "the measure of all things". As told e.g. in Greek myths, wily Prometheus stole the "fire of the gods" by hiding it in a hollow fennel stalk and gave it to man. The meaning is composite: man is now the "creator", but by an original "trick" or "artifice".

However, as later interpreted in classical tradition: "the First Transcendent Fire does not enclose its own Power in matter by means of works, but by the Intellect." Or as in modern psychology, the power of reason - or classically, of logos - as the determinacy of the mind over-comes the self as the determinacy of the body.

But, additionally: "the Intellect derived from Intellect is the Craftsman of the fiery Cosmos". Because the cosmos is indeed already "Intellect", or is actively intelligible. I.e. the world is intelligent, and ultimately intelligible from intelligible, mind from mind. The upshot is, paradoxically, that the cosmos is mind, and that the mind psychologically surges from the self by ultimately becoming "the measure of all things".

The mythological statement of this crisis came to be known in ancient Greece as Tragedy, and its over-coming, the evolution of the cosmic mind, and hence of man. Ever since, the statements in myth have been either of affirmative or negative reaction to the crisis (e.g. Zoroastrianism and Buddhism), and then the statements in logos as art, science and philosophy.

Art is fundamentally Tragic, whereas science and philosophy have barely developed their cosmological vision. The problem is in fact in the contradictory nature of the evolution of the mind from the body, thereby necessarily involving the crisis of Tragedy. Thus, cosmology cannot be just scientific, but ultimately philosophical.

And yet, as attested in history, only recently there's been "the first tragic philosopher" with Friedrich Nietzsche, who generally envisioned a "philosophy of the future". Its more precise name is indeed philosophical cosmology. In this respect, the present book actually completes a tetralogy with three previous works - Homo contradictorius, One Whole, and Over Man - that aim at discovering and developing its theoretical foundations.