Kingston University, London

Graduate Student, Centre of Research in Modern European Philosophy

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP)

Thesis Title: Schelling's Existential Cosmology

About

Why is there something rather than nothing? Since the collapse of the last great philosophies of the absolute we are told habitually that this question can not be answered philosophically, that even to pose it is a sign of naivety or pretension, and that it would be foolish to ask for any kind of sense beyond the horizon of our being-in-the-world and our encapsulation in language games and orders of discourse. Yet the question itself has not vanished. On the contrary, driven by advances in theoretical physics it is today debated more hotly than ever amongst scientists, while the world’s spiritual and religious traditions continue to offer their great narratives in response. It is only philosophy which has abandoned all its interests in the absolute. Fortunately there have been a number of attempts to break free from a century of misplaced philosophical humility and to think the absolute afresh. In this vein the question of ultimate universal purpose must be targeted again. Even if it turns out there is none, this would not preclude the possibility that there could and should be one in future. Seizing this possibility, my work seeks to articulate a new kind of philosophical cosmology as a laying bare of how universal – and not just intersubjective – meaning can be constituted from within the groundless facticity of existence, or how a cosmos can be envisaged from within chaos. Following the cue of F.W.J. Schelling and kindred thinkers, I develop philosophical cosmology chiefly through a historical and systematic investigation of how the symbolic or archetypal dimension of reality comes to stabilize the self-organizing systems of nature and the discursive domains of human society, while at the same time allowing for its own crackup and realignment through the decisions and interventions of historical agents. Based on this fundamental figure of thought, my project will be progressively expanded and developed into what I call Metacosmology as extant physical and spiritual cosmologies are interrogated and integrated from the symbol-theoretic vantage point produced, and as rounds of investigation into the mediatic and cybernetic operation of the symbolic matrix in contemporary planetary society concretize the aesthetic and political stakes of the cosmological mode of thought.