The Cosmological Problem of Subjectivity -- A Lecture (11/6/26)

A Lecture

So I want to get to the core of something we’ve been discussing, which is really fundamentally philosophical, literary, cosmological, and scientific: the core of subjectivity itself, which we can only learn about through the novel or the literary form.

The tradition of the superfluous man in 19th-century Russian literature, I think, in particular really gets at this. We’ve discussed Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, and those are really places I want to linger. And Goncharov as well. His entire oeuvre, in my understanding, rests and resides specifically around this most inward problem: the problem of internality, interiority, and depth—that these themselves are the story of the history of the cosmos.

And this is really, I think, one of the fundamental binding threads that allowed me to articulate my ontology. Which is to say, the binding point, or the glue, between Channel One and Channel Two, which is the genome and the symbol, in terms of the cave painting, right?

And we understand both of these as symbolic registers. That the genome is legible. It’s a linguistic phenomenon, just as much as the forge of the stars is legible, in terms of the—I was going to say the neural technology, but the nuclear technology of the stars—the forge which produces the elements, which we then understand cascade down and through spacetime, articulating spheres of information, spheres of transmissibility and transformability, so to speak, recombination, which is occurring in the universe, in everything from the star to the cell, this change that is happening across spheres.

So the point that we get to is the experience of this very high-grade information technology, which is, of course, the forebrain, this very recent evolutionary force of the last couple hundreds of thousands of years, which then produces for us the kind of interiority which we’re able to get through these very piercing and probing, we could say, psychological authors. Anyone from Kierkegaard to Dostoevsky to Proust. And Joyce as well could be considered here.

This is the fundamental thing which is beneath literature, which is, I would say, beneath the arts itself, but first and foremost, you could say, the first-person, or the “I” form of existentialist literature.

When Rimbaud says, “I is another,” what he’s gesturing towards is that the foundation of subjectivity is rather unmoored. The sense of the experience of identity or the self is in large part formed and informed by the existential historical conditions which preceded it.

It’s the experience of an architecture which we ourselves did not create, at least not in a conscious fashion, but rather are passing forward via sexual reproduction.

And so there is, in Goncharov, the fundamental tension being inward existence and outward life. The problem of an interior life meeting and encountering the realities of the world, which is to say, the shifting decades of Russian history at the hinge of the mid-19th century.

And, of course, Goncharov’s subject is the interiority of his subject. So his subject is subjectivity itself: the experience of existence and the appearance of the world to someone or something, that being that which constitutes the lived reality.

And this is the deepest, or most inward, scope of the study of cosmology.

So when we’re studying the principles and foundations of stars or galaxies, how they form, when they form, and why, and how they’re in communication energetically, in an interstellar sense, this is a very high-level abstraction. It’s a high plane of discourse.

And the transmission of these intergenerational stellar forms, over millions and, of course, billions of years, brings us to the evolutionary paradigm of the human being as it stands today, let’s say, in the 21st century, the year 2026, equipped with the iPhone, artificial intelligence, the forebrain, the mechanism of the eye, right? The sensate body, the biology experiencing the cultural paradigm which we now live in, which, of course, I’ve already articulated as bios-culturos, I guess you could say.

So this is the crux, or the intersection, the cross at which any living being stands upon. Simone Weil articulates this as statera facta corporis [quotation uncertain], the reality where the living being stands at the cross, the crossroads, the intersection.

I’m not going to be able to articulate that off the top of my head, especially without coffee, but that’s the statement that she makes, and that’s one of the epigraphs of one of my previous books.

So we have to understand the mystery of subjectivity, right? Because it’s the experience of a technological mode, which is to say, a way of being, that is, of course, accessible at different levels of depth.

So when we read A Season in Hell, we’re reading the articulation of a certain neurosynaptic architecture. We’re reading the articulation of the body of Rimbaud interfacing with historical consciousness.

And this is, of course, when he talks about the Gauls, and when he talks about Frenchness, when he talks about the possibilities of liberation in history, and his understanding of subjectivity being one fundamentally of rebellion, effectively against everything.

This is also the exact kind of nihilism that we hear in Turgenev, and experience in Goncharov, and understand the larger Russian milieu of this time period being deeply influenced by Hegel and by German idealism.

And this is the transmission, of course, across borders of this very fertile form of thought which emerges in Jena.

And where I want to go with this here is when there is literature expressing the depth of the experience of this interiority, what we really are doing is excavating the possibilities of a technological consciousness, right? Something that’s fundamentally founded upon an architectural reality.

And so what we are doing is really excavating a reality, an architectural condition of being, which is not yet truly understood, right?

And this is what’s at the crux of the split between, you could say, science and the humanities: that the humanities are exploring the technological capacities and extent of being human itself.

And scientifically, if we understand this at depth, this is like a technological recursion, that in this highly advanced informational apparatus, we are experiencing being itself through a very specific lens.

Like a genotypic, a phenotypic, and a species lens.

A neurobiological lens, right?

And understanding this at depth is actually excavating a form of cosmological understanding which is not obtainable via simple measurement.

And this is well understood by Goethe, of course, as one of the main historical scientist, philosopher, literary figures.

That it is impossible to draw a real disciplinary gap here in this existential condition.

The issue therein is that we don’t know exactly what the character of being is.

And so a work at sufficient depth of the perception of experience, articulated with sufficient linguistic dynamism, may actually capture that character.

And what I mean by that is that the character of being is that which is beneath the sheaths of information technology which we’ve previously described, in anything from Darwin to cellular architecture to the nervous system, to what we perceive of as interstellar galactic formations.

What we’re tracing there is the character of the energetic structure of existence and creation itself.

And that becomes embodied and recursively magnified through the human experience.

So when we’re reading literature as such, specifically this first-person existentialist thought, or the articulation of the position of the subject in an authentic way, what we are reading is really our only way of seriously being able to begin to interrogate the being’s perception of itself in a fundamental fashion, which is to say, the least degree of abstraction.

This is, of course, different than studying, we could say, phenomenology, neuroscience, psychology, et cetera.

This literature itself being the only form of inquiry capable of sustaining the sufficiently deep interrogation of the being’s perception of itself, the inhabitation of the existential condition, which is fundamentally the cosmological being itself inhabiting this informational technological container of the architecture, we could say, of the human species itself, or whichever species has acquired sufficient sentience to begin this recursive symbolic project of articulating itself in a long form, right?

This is, of course, different than Picasso’s Guernica or, let’s say, a piece by Bach, in the sense that it is a direct articulation of the condition of the subject.

And I’ve previously said that Coltrane’s music in particular is an extremely existentialist movement. A Love Supreme, My Favorite Things, some of my favorite pieces by him, of course.

But these are not, let’s say, direct linguistic articulations, and there’s a subtlety there in terms of the description of experience in a form which is digging at the, let’s say, architectural condition of the subject. It’s kind of difficult to describe semantically.

These existential texts, such as The Fall, or Notes from Underground, or A Season in Hell, are excavations of the condition of the subject.

It’s an attempt to, let’s say, explain or examine via the construct of this communal language, right? And inscribe that experience in a reflective way, or recursive way, that the genome is articulating itself through an externalized symbolic structure, which is the same, obviously, the attempt to outwardly replicate the genomic structure, which we know as, let’s say, English or French or Mandarin, et cetera, right?

And this is the symbolic world of this investigation, which is Rimbaud’s application of French to A Season in Hell, or Dostoevsky’s application of Russian to Notes from Underground.

And this is, of course, where we achieve the transparency of the “I as another,” Rimbaud’s “I is another,” that the subject discovers that it is not a fully transparent structure or assembled individual, but rather it has this vast archaeological depth behind it.

And this is very similar to, we could say, fossils of almost perfectly preserved ancient fauna in permafrost. I’ve already discussed this with amber and insects, that the human being object, right—this is the subject-object continuum here—is the container for this ancient substrate, which evolves up, and the body itself is actually carrying this millennial and multimillion-year processual information in its very form and evolutionary structure.

So this is a dig, really. What it is is an archaeological dig.

And the difficulty here, of course, in a Western scientific sense, is that there has not been sufficient shrift or attention given to the ontological condition of the subject.

Which is to say, of course, the cosmos has been studied and objectified. The nervous system has been studied and objectified. This is the history of anatomy, let’s say, dissection, or Kepler or Galileo, right? Microscopy and macroscopy.

But this is actually a native process, and, of course, where we would think to look is the last place. Or where we would need to look is the last place. Where we would think to look is everything but the place we would need to, in the sense that the cosmos already, in a native, billions-of-years fashion, produces a being capable of perceiving itself.

But, of course, this subject—subjectivity—is something that appears transparent to the organism, because it’s the very apparatus through which it perceives the world.

And, of course, this is the value of Blake to a scientific study. Perhaps just as valuable as Newton, in the fashion of making clear the veil of perception, and this is also Goethe’s color theory.

There’s a vast contribution of the humanities in and toward the faculty of, of course, the problem of perception and the apparatus of perception.

Spinoza being a lens grinder is an almost hilarious irony, because what here we’re talking about is, at full depth, we’re not really talking about cellular structures. At full depth, even beneath the cellular structures, the greatest microscopy is the existential being, right?

And this problem becomes somewhat transparent to itself in the great psychological advances of, we could say, Dostoevsky.

And, of course, Einstein understands the value of Dostoevsky extremely explicitly, and says as much.

Because the interior life is just as relevant, perhaps even more so, than the formation of stars, or the movement, the stochastic nature of cells.

What becomes transparent is we now have access to the character of being, and we have access to the character of being through ourselves.

This is, if we understand Spinoza correctly, and we understand quantum mechanics correctly, we understand cosmology correctly.

This transparency is the making available of cosmological subjectivity locally, right?

This history of existence itself is an unbroken continuum, an unbroken process.

And the being itself being in a position to experience and interpret and express its own existence at sufficient depth—this is, of course, the great works of existentialist literature.

And why Goncharov is so essential, so essential to what I’m talking about here, is that the subject of history, cosmological history, is the formation of subjectivity itself.

Which is, of course, extremely opaque.

It’s the foundation of historical shamanism across cultures. This is very much so the baseline, or the basis, of what Eliade is speaking about, but it’s also the informational technological revolution of the universe itself.

The technology through which cosmological being interrogates the fact and character of its own being.

This is why I brought up the Book of Job as being one of the earliest existentialist texts.

It’s the reflection upon creation, which is the essential requirement.

And this is very difficult to achieve from phenomenology or materialist study, right? Because the anatomy or the nervous system of the human being, or the human body, does not give us—

It’s rather the examination of the hardware through which the transmission occurs, and that the transmission itself is the character of being, which is the essential draft or the essential strain, which is foundationally that which we are studying, and that which is at the root of all things in a creational sense.

It’s the endeavor, which religiously is called God, and scientifically is called the poetry of nature.

It is the same transparency which Galileo and da Vinci pursue in that wine is light, light in water.

That there, this chemical equation of being itself does not rather solve being, but it makes being available and intelligible to us in the architectonic part.

But rather when we read, let’s say, Dostoevsky, or we read Rimbaud, we are experiencing something of the ineffable inquiry into the character behind the structural formation of beings.

And this is very difficult to achieve by way of an objective inquiry, that the descent into subjectivity is necessary for this process to occur.

This occurs consistently in Gnostic thought.

It’s a very Gnostic theological concept of the fall of Sophia, or that the spirit becomes seated into form, becomes fragmented.

The process of the incarnation of man is the attempt to reunite with being itself.

You can also understand this, and we talked about The Fall in Camus. This is also, of course, the fall of man proper.

So in this, Kierkegaard understands this quite well, and this is why Kierkegaard is often described as the first psychologist.

Of course, he is inhabiting a Christian theological lens, where he’s speaking about this fallenness, and when he’s speaking about the dialectical redoubling as a principle of man reflecting upon being itself, existence in creation.

So it’s very difficult to get to the level of essential depth of inquiry in terms of existence without inevitably crashing into and colliding.

We examine everything from stellar formation to evolution, to biology and elemental structures, information technology, cellular structures, and the movement, the dynamic movement that occurs within cells, right?

We can examine all of these procedures externally and, let’s say, materialistically, but we return to the experience, the lived experience of interiority.

And we rely linguistically, semantically, on someone, let’s say, Proust, or Goncharov, or Rimbaud, to depict or draw out this essential existential experience, which itself is fundamentally common and yet incredibly uncommon in the sense that it is the excavation of the thing which cannot be achieved by pure materialism.

And this is, of course, profoundly disruptive to the Western historical advance of, let’s say, the emptying of the sacral, or the emptying of the sacred in the name of a profaned cosmos, or a profane culture, profane civilization, which is in large part led by the Scientific Revolution, which becomes the Industrial Revolution, of course.

And this also becomes the collapse of local and regional and tribal religious and cosmological constructs, which themselves were mythological narrations.

And so we lose that quality, which is then, of course, replaced by these, you could say, the rogue poet, so to speak, who still conducts this inquiry. Percy Shelley here would also be relevant.

So the question is, how can we excavate this lowest level of depth, or this highest level of depth, maybe is a better term, of subjective interiority?

This is the ungraspable. This is that which is occurring within the structural elemental compound nature of the universe, which can itself be measured, examined, qualified, and quantified, right?

We can make these things relatively transparent with the scientific technological instruments which are readily available.

Let’s say, the splitting of the atom.

This still can tell us little to nothing about the existential condition of being.

And this is, of course, where we ride within the technological suit of humanity, and are then able to recursively fold back on what is it to experience being, and then use this linguistic scaffolding, which is a historical and typically culturally bound method of communicating, to utilize this instrument in the archaeological dig.

And then draw it out into expression so it can be, let’s say, codified, translated, transcribed into other linguistic symbolic forms and then transmitted into the larger, let’s say, milieu of global or cosmological consciousness.

Evolutionary procedures of, let’s say, however many variant forms of sentience are at an end process in an evolutionary sense in the cosmos at large.

Participating in this process of the unfoldment of being and the access to technological solutions, which are made to solve historical material problems.

And yet, incidentally or otherwise, give us access to this creational substrate, which is the underlying factor, the essential factor, which is the character of being, or the aeon as a child at play with colored balls.

Who is that child?

What is that child?

What is it beneath the constructs of history, religion, culture, the human programmatic vessel, the nervous system, the synapses, the senses, right?

The biochemical substrate, which holds up this informational technological architecture, to participate within the larger process of transformation of stellar energy.

Which I’ve called, of course, thermonuclear energy.

We go into metabolisms, cellular respiration.

These are all procedures structurally through which energetic information is transforming, and this being and this organism is embedded within that process.