First Principles: Intimacy
This post is a brief addition to my introduction in my last post to CosmoErotic Humanism (CEH), an emerging worldview that seeks to address existential risks through a new narrative of value.
One of the central theses of the CEH book I am reading (First Principles & First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come) is that modern and postmodern schools of thought, despite their valuable contributions to our understanding of the world, have implicitly and explicitly rejected the notion that the universe inherently possesses value, meaning, and purpose. Consequently, this denial of intrinsic value has contributed to the personal, political, social, economic, and existential crises that humanity faces today.
The authors advocate for a New Story of Value, recognizing that “language, story, and narrative constitute part of the ontology of manifest reality itself” (9). This story posits that life is an expression of pre-existing, cosmically fundamental value. Our capacity to understand, name, and categorize this field of value is limited and, in fact, limiting. The authors propose that value is not static but evolving, and not discrete but overlapping and intertwined. They illustrate specific First Values, particular instantiations of ontological value, invoking but surpassing the traditional truth, beauty, and goodness. Today, I discuss their First Value of intimacy.
(An aside: It’s easy to dismiss their metaphysical claims about reality as the musings of generalists out of their depth in theoretical physics, but have you seen the recent decades of theories in physical and consciousness sciences? It’s all totally wild! Space-time, quantum entanglement, many-worlds, biocentrism, retrocausality, panpsychism, etc. etc. I just finished Reality is Not What it Seems and, well, the title says it all. While this is not proof of CEH’s validity, the notion of value as cosmically fundamental is one of the least outlandish worldviews on offer and actually confirms and explains many of our intuitions and understandings across disciplines. In other words: There is definitely some midwit risk at play here.)
Intimacy
In asserting that intimacy is a First Principle and First Value of the universe, the authors mean that “a particular definition of intimacy can be used to explain, in a very basic way, how the Universe works.” For humans, they define intimacy as when “individuals share an identity in the context of relative otherness, in which there is a mutuality of recognition, feeling, value, and purpose.” They argue that something analogous to this understanding of intimacy appears at every level of evolution and is so fundamental at micro and macro scales as to constitute a feature of reality itself. Moreover, at each level, intimacy not only exists but progressively deepens. They conclude that “Reality is thus intimacy itself, as well as the drive for the progressive deepening of intimacies — the evolution of intimacy — in all of its expressions” (12).
To illustrate, the authors engage in “scientific metaphysics: seeking higher-order coherence within and among the various fields of science” (14), writing as “expert generalists” who interpret and synthesize key truths across disciplines. Although one might be reasonably skeptical of this endeavor, I find that their portrayal of intimacy across disciplines is unlikely to be seriously offensive to domain experts.
A story of value across disciplines
Starting with physics, the authors describe the increasingly complex unions of subatomic particles, animated by a force — a primordial intimacy: “There is a proto-desire to touch and form larger unions…These coherently bonded particles generate an entirely new mutuality of purpose — they function together as an atom” (16).
The field of chemistry is essentially the study of the results of these fundamental physical intimacies. Distinct atoms and molecules continue to exist in their own right but naturally gravitate towards larger and more complex shared identities. New properties and capabilities emerge, and then themselves cohere into something new.
Biology then takes up the baton, as “cells themselves emerge from the intensification of intimacy between the macromolecules that preceded the first cells” (18). Biological evolution follows, as cells over millions of years combine and specialize in increasingly intricate ways, enabling the emergence of higher-order intimacies between discrete parts with mutual purpose.
In human psychology, the role of intimacy is even clearer; it’s a literal survival need and a cornerstone of healthy development. Humans “want to be in some form of relationship without losing the integrity of our autonomy” (21). Organizations, too, require “a shared identity between the distinct parts, coupled with mutuality of recognition, the capacity to feel each other, a shared ground of value, and shared purpose” (23).
A Global Intimacy Disorder
The authors describe how a society’s rejection of fundamental value — especially that described by intimacy — is a dead-end game. Global civilization is a “highly entangled hyper-object” but is “complicated but not complex, fragile rather than robust” (76). Its many parts increasingly do not relate, and cannot self-assemble to heal or coordinate to prevent the existential risks we face. They depict the meta-crisis as largely a global intimacy disorder, a “web of exponential, existential alienation” (79). Alienation — the opposite of intimacy — grows between people, our food systems, our animal cohabitants, our histories, our attention, our agency, and from the stories and truths about value that might otherwise help us rediscover our cosmic course.
The fundamental nature of intimacy powerfully animates the authors’ arguments for a new cultural superstructure — a New Story of Value — to reverse this alienation. Even if one is reluctant to fully embrace their metaphysics, it is clear that we need new ways of relating to one another and to the intertwined components of our world. While we sort out the ontology and philosophy — and I do believe it is important that we do — it is evident that we need to restore and reimagine the ways that the distinct parts of our world relate, and seek ourselves deeper and richer intimacy.
