Cosmicism, Tragedy, and Greek Mythology

In the Western world (the one that’s still led largely by American culture), we learn in public school about the ancient Greek myths of Zeus, Perseus, Sisyphus and all the rest. It turns out that the reason for this isn’t just historical. Greek religion and philosophy are foundational to the “free world” of our Western civilization, but the conservative, nature-loving Greek ethos is also currently a fashionable way of making sense of secular humanism. Life-affirming new atheists and hedonists or neo-teleologists like Richard Carrier, Sam Harris, and Massimo Pigliucci need to sail between Scylla and Charybdis, between the anachronism of a theistic defense of morality and the horror of the cosmicist suspicion that life is absurd.  

The Ancient Greek Myths

Both Plato and Aristotle were virtue ethicists, meaning that they thought that happiness is our ultimate goal and that to achieve that goal we need to learn to excel in certain ways. Excellence requires a balanced character so that we avoid emotional extremes and make wise practical judgments. Their preoccupation with balance, harmony, virtue, and self-restraint was endemic to ancient Greek culture as a whole. As Luc Ferry explains in The Wisdom of the Myths, you can find these themes throughout Greek myths which predated the Presocratic philosophers. From the birth of the gods and the creation of the cosmos and of humankind, to the warnings about hubris and the celebrations of heroic battles for justice, the Greek mythos was founded on respect for the natural order, due to the assumption that this order is a metaphysical compromise between the lethal extremes of supernatural stasis and chaos.

The cosmogonic myths tell of how the cosmos was forged in epic wars between forces of order and chaos and specifically between Gaia and Uranus, the destructive Titans, monstrous Cyclopes, and the more creative and stable Olympians. According to these myths, Cronus the Titan betrayed his oppressive father, Uranus, castrating him and creating the conditions for the birth of a new generation of gods. Cronus and his sister Rhea create this new generation, but Cronus gobbles them all up to prevent a similar rebellion against him by his progeny. His child Zeus escapes and overthrows Cronus, freeing his siblings, the Olympians, as well as the Cyclopes and other chaos monsters from Tartarus, who reward Zeus with the gift of the lightning. That added power enables Zeus to prevail in the war against Cronus and the Titans, the outcome of which amounts to the current cosmic settlement. Ferry emphasizes the “profundity of the existential problem that begins to take shape in the crucible of this first and original mythological narrative.” The point is that

all of existence, even that of the immortal gods, will find itself trapped in the same insoluble dilemma: Either one must block everything, as Uranus blocked his children in the womb of Gaia, in order to prevent change and the attendant risk that things will deteriorate—which means complete stasis and unspeakable tedium, such as must ultimately overwhelm life itself. Or, on the other hand, to avoid entropy one accepts movement—History, Time—which includes accepting all the fearful dangers by which we are most threatened. How, henceforth, can there be any equilibrium? This is the fundamental question posed by mythology, and by life itself! (59-60)

Hubris is the arrogance arising from ignorance of our proper place in the world, which misleads intelligent creatures into attempting to overreach, to transcend their nature or station. The myths of Asclepius, the model for Doctor Frankenstein, of Sisyphus who is punished for playing a trick on Zeus, and of Prometheus who is punished for attempting to perfect part of Zeus’ creation all warn that pride leads to our downfall. The gods reestablish the cosmic order as soon as anyone attempts to disturb the equilibrium. Heroes such as Heracles, Theseus, Perseus, and Jason, by contrast, fight for justice which is likewise interpreted as balance, as in the figure of Dike, Lady Justice, who was depicted as carrying a physical balance scale. Heroism for the Greeks was a means to immortality through merited fame, whereby the hero escapes the oblivion of the masses who never so memorably distinguish themselves by their actions and who are thus doomed to become anonymous shades in Hades. The greatest heroes fight “in the service of a divine mission, in the name of justice, or dike, in order to defend the cosmic order against the archaic forces of chaos, whose resurgence is an ever-present threat” (248). These heroes are demigods, half-human and half-divine, and so their attempt to immortalize themselves isn’t hubristic.

According to Ferry, the good life for ordinary humans is the subject of Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus shows himself to be a wise, self-made man as he lives in harmony with the cosmic order. Odysseus is cunning in that he possesses instrumental rationality, meaning that he focuses on the narrow questions of how to get what he wants, because he takes for granted what he is and where he’s going. That is, instead of trying to alter his nature, he understands and accepts his finitude and sets himself the task only of figuring out how most efficiently to achieve his human goals, namely those of returning home after the Trojan War and of reuniting with his family. He demonstrates his lack of hubris by resisting the temptations—by the Lotus-Eaters, the Sirens, Circe, and Calypso—of immortality or renunciation of the world (forgetting Ithaca and abandoning his voyage home). 

This conservative Greek ethos duly appears in the teleological ethics of Plato and Aristotle, who taught that the good life for us means excelling according to our “form” which in turn flows from the ultimate Good in nature or from a divine Final Cause to which everything is attracted. Stoicism also expresses the ancient Greek ethos, since according to Stoics wisdom consists in accepting the present moment as it presents itself in reality, and recognizing our limited control over the world, restricting our efforts to regulating the inner world over which alone we can be sovereign if we master our thoughts and feelings. Our proper aim is to develop a will that’s in accord with nature, and we accomplish this in the Odyssean manner, by learning how the world actually works, and improving our instrumental rationality for the purpose of being happy with our position in the natural order. Wise people thus display not mere abstract knowledge, but a calm demeanor since they’ve mastered their unrealistic fears and longings and so they’re immune to suffering—although not exactly from misfortune.

Tragedy and Cosmicism

While rejecting the Greek myths as having literary value at best, new atheists such as Richard Carrier, Sam Harris, and Massimo Pigliucci assume much of the Greek foundation of Western philosophy. Carrier and Harris are science-centered, “wily-Odyssean” utilitarians who assume that happiness is our ultimate goal in life, while Pigliucci accepts also virtue ethics and the teleological and Stoic perspectives.

But there’s a problem: the ancient Greek ethos is flawed, and the flaw is anthropocentrism. To be sure, we can reformulate its tenets in philosophical rather than mythical language, but the principles of ancient Greek ethics will still be naively human-centered. True, the Greeks weren’t as naïve as Christians who presume that God made the world just for us. The Archaic and Classical Greeks were more naturalistic in believing that we have only a limited role to play in the universe, albeit perhaps a pivotal one. But the conservative principle of preserving a cosmic balance between order and chaos is indirectly human-centered, because it assumes that the most worthy equilibrium is the status quo in which we emerge to play our part in the cosmic drama. Here again is Ferry to lay out the crux of the Greek myths:

If the cosmic order were perfect, if it were indeed characterized by a faultless and immutable equilibrium, time would simply come to a stop, which is to say all life, all movement, all history. And even for the gods there would be nothing more to do or see. From which it is clear that primordial chaos, and the forces that it periodically causes to erupt, cannot and should not disappear completely. And humanity—with all its vices and its generations succeeding one another indefinitely as a consequence of Pandora, whose legacy is that men are now “truly” mortal—is likewise paradoxically indispensible to life. It is a magnificent paradox, which we might rephrase thus: there is no life without death, no history without succession, no order without disorder, no cosmos without a minimum of chaos. (162)

Humans, then, are indispensible because we have rational and irrational tendencies. We have the capacities to preserve and to upset the natural order, and so we matter to the cosmic balancing act. The Greek myths are frank about the benefit of humanity to nature, since they maintain that the gods keep us around because we amuse or honour them by worshipping them and caring for their shrines. But even if we lay aside the polytheism and religious defense, there’s no reason to assume that the natural order that makes human life possible is good and worth fitting into, such that hubris becomes the arch-vice. What the Greek ethos does is add a normative dimension to the anthropic principle. According to this principle, the universe must be compatible with that which is obvious, namely the existence of the conscious creatures who observe the universe. Intelligent life couldn’t have evolved without a certain balance between order and chaos, which allows for space and time and change. But instead of merely registering that fact as a matter of amoral causality, the Greeks based their ethics on this naturalistic outlook. Thus, this natural order became the highest good, from which it follows that our ultimate aim as a species is to play our proper part in that order.

What threatens this ethos is the more uncompromising naturalism that you find in modern existentialism and in H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmicism. Nietzsche, for example, believed that nature itself is amoral and that we can deem the world good only by an arbitrary act of willpower. Lovecraft allowed that the universe might have some cosmic purpose, but he took the upshot of science to be that our role in the universal development is so miniscule that to appreciate our value in the cosmic scheme is to lose all sanity as well as any scrap of our dignity. However, the more subversive view of nature is found also in the latent humanism of ancient Greece, as in the atomism of Epicurus and the tragedies of Sophocles. The atomists inferred atheism and thus the subjectivity of morality, and concluded that we should strive to please ourselves in the limited time we have while we live, with no illusions about some metaphysical grounding of our animal habits.

Perhaps most tellingly, though, as Ferry appreciates, the tragedians seemed to recognize the dead end of Greece’s cosmic perspective. The tragedy of Oedipus presents us with the problem of evil, which threatens to reduce Greek myths and philosophy to absurdity much as the books of Job and Ecclesiastes allow Jews to wink and nod when pondering the merit of their religion. Oedipus is caught up in a series of accidents that lead to his downfall. He does nothing to deserve this end, which makes it a matter of fate. He’s doomed to suffer, to unknowingly kill his father and marry his mother, which leads him to tear out his eyes in horror, because that’s what inhuman, impersonal nature evidently had in store for him. There seems no higher justice that can excuse this absurdity, although Ferry attempts to reconcile his exhaustive analysis of the teleological basis of the Greek myths with the disquieting implications of the Greek tragedies.

Ferry points out that, for the ancient Greeks, later generations sometimes have to suffer because of the sins of earlier ones, because nature can’t course-correct at the drop of a dime, as it were. Destiny intervenes in Oedipus’s case, because his ancestors had turned the world upside down, compelling the gods to rectify the situation, but their solution can sometimes take a long time before balance is more fully restored. (The balance is never ideal, because chaos is always threatening to reassert itself with horrific, destabilizing eruptions of “unnatural” possibilities.) “This is why,” says Ferry, “we must in effect retrace the entire history of Thebes since its foundations by Cadmus if we are to grasp the roots of the misfortunes that strike Oedipus.” For example, “Cadmus wedded Harmonica, who, despite her name, was herself already the fruit of certain discord, being the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, a rickety and forbidden pact between love and war (not least because Aphrodite was officially married to Hephaestus…)” (355). And so on and so forth, the point being that we can expect tragedies to befall anyone at any time. As Ferry writes, “no more than the rain chooses to soak this or that individual but falls indifferently on the good and the bad, the misfortunes that strike individual men are by no means always merited. That is the way of things, simply, about which we can do nothing, for these afflictions are an essential part of our human condition: that of mortals plunged into a life and a history that entails at every turn the possibility of an error with which we must learn to come to terms” (357).

The problem, though, is that the more convoluted the causality involved in the destiny of those who come to grief, the more accidental and absurd the cosmic panoply seems, in which case we might doubt the wisdom of assuming the goodness of the overall order. Thus, Ferry adds that the original spectators of these tragedies must have felt “that this whole saga is frightful and that reality itself is not to be trusted or embraced for being willed and determined by the gods under such terms as these. Put differently,” he asks, “how to reconcile Greek wisdom—considered as love of the real and as reconciliation with the present moment—with the tragic impulse that goes contrary to it and encourages the thought that, even if determined by the gods for ultimately harmonious ends, the world is a thoroughly intolerable place for many of us?” (362). If we dispense with the latter religious dogma and assume there are no human-friendly deities setting things aright, the cosmicist doubt only increases. The notion of cosmic “harmony” or “balance” is, at any rate, a mere metaphor deriving from music theory or from the ancients’ short-sighted observation of regularity in the paths of stars and planets. If the tragic perspective leaves us with just impersonal, unjust cause and effect, that is, with chance and necessity which doom or gift us indiscriminately for no higher reason, the ancient Greeks were poised to adopt a version of our cynical “postmodern” perspective.

Ferry tries out a few solutions to that problem of reconciliation, his best being what he calls the latent humanism in the Greek tragedies. This is why Oedipus tears out his eyes, just as Job cried out against God in righteous indignation, because neither accepted his fate as just. As Ferry writes, by Oedipus’s 

very public suffering—which contains no discernible amor fati [love of fate], or embracing of the present—he revolts, he protests, he cries out that something is wrong. His daughter Antigone goes even further and, in more extreme form, takes up the torch on his behalf. Not that either of them questions—at least not explicitly—the universe in which they find themselves plunged: on the contrary, Antigone states clearly that she belongs to her family and can do nothing about it. And yet there is a false note. These individuals are formidable: Oedipus is wise, intelligent, kindly, honest; Antigone is courageous, loyal, faithful to her ideals (which are of the highest order)…and yet they are crushed. (365)

Moreover,

if Oedipus and Antigone become heroic and, in a positive sense, legendary figures—for us as, originally, for the Greeks—then this is because they testify, like no other personages, through their suffering as such, to what is singular about the human condition within the cosmic order. Here we can sense the early ferment of a humanism to come. In the same way as Prometheus, in Aeschylus’s play, revolts against the gods in the name of men, the spectator of Sophoclean tragedy cannot but start thinking, however obliquely, that this world must be changed, improved, transformed—and not merely interpreted. What is certain is that there is a glitch in the scheme of things, and that it has a name.

This glitch, for Ferry, is us, that is, the call for us to fulfill our subversive potential, given especially the atheistic and absurdist implications of philosophical naturalism. Instead of surrendering to the natural order, Antigone pleads for a “morality of the heart,” for an interrogation of the way of the world. “And it is this that is properly human in her character: that it is not reducible to order, not assimilable either by the gods or by the cosmos.” This promethean humanism, which puts our subjective good above the alleged objective good of nature, would of course bloom many centuries later with the European Renaissance, the American Revolution, and the Enlightenment. Ferry notes the relevance of Prometheus, since “it was indeed Prometheus who, according to Plato, was the first to see humankind as starting from nothing but capable of achieving everything, including a rejection of the appointed order of things” (366).

This is how Ferry ends his book, and it amounts to an admission that there’s no reconciliation, after all, between the teleological framework of the Greek mythos and the absurdist, tragic perspective. We can submit to nature or we can satanically rebel against the world, but we can’t do both. The Greek mythos preaches the conservative, prudent option of bowing before the gods and searching for excuses for how their exploits in managing the natural “order” are often humiliating or catastrophic for mere mortals like us who seem instead to be the only intelligent creatures around. The Greek tragedies hold out the progressive, disaffected option of “hubristically” assuming the role of humans-who-would-be-gods and who thus shoulder the responsibility to remake the world in our image. With modern science and technology, capitalism and democracy, secular humanism and consumerism, we have in effect opted for the latter path, although few of us understand the tragic implications of our “individual freedom.”

Crypto-Satanism and the Glory of Anti-Nature

Let’s look a little closer at the two standpoints to clarify the conflict. For the ancient Greeks as well as the modern utilitarians and neo-Stoics, we ought to be happy, as is our supposed right because nature grants us this potential. This kind of morality is naturalistic in the modern context, because it substitutes natural rights for divine ones, despite the fact that the original formulations of this morality were polytheistic rather than philosophical. Nature is supposed to be inherently good and even the Greeks’ sophisticated, philosophical answer as to why that’s so is human-centered. The present natural order is taken to be better than a lapse into some static or chaotic arrangement, and the reason for that assessment can only be the presumption of the anthropic principle combined with the alleged self-evidence that we deserve to live, in which case any world that makes us possible is itself not just causally necessary but favourable. Again, the myths expressed this argument by personifying the natural conditions of our emergence and so making mental projections of us out to be crucial to cosmic evolution.

Plato and Aristotle de-personalize the ultimate causes and speak of them as being intrinsically perfect, but they don’t explain why the source of abstract forms is “Good” (Plato) or why a self-sufficient, immaterial mind that thinks only about itself ought to be desired by everything in nature (Aristotle). The implicit reason for Plato seems to be the proto-Gnostic one that his sun-like Good and source of all multiplicity is worthy because of our connection to it; specifically, we’re trapped in an inferior, transitory plane of material copies of the eternal Forms, and we carry the potential for goodness in so far as we can contemplate deeper reality and “remember” our metaphysical basis. The implicit reason for Aristotle seems to be the more parochial one that he’s biased in favour of philosophy, and because human philosophers can’t be entirely self-sufficient because they depend on society for their protection and nourishment, they can only dream of being able to philosophize on a permanent basis without having to sully themselves with noble lies and the business of earning a living. In either case, however cosmic or metaphysical the philosophical narrative, the logic of ancient virtue ethics reduces to the presumption that we matter and thus that our preconditions are good in hindsight.  

Carrier, Harris, and Pigliucci won’t appeal to any such grand narrative, but are more likely to declare that happiness is self-evidently our ideal state. For example, Carrier identifies moral facts with what we would in fact most want (namely happiness) were we rational and in possession of all the relevant information, while Harris alleges that we can’t imagine a better world than the one in which pleasure vastly outweighs pain. The reason new atheists typically assume the brute factuality of happiness as our highest good, even though they’re bereft of metaphysical or theological rationales, is that they can hear the cosmicist knocking ominously at their back door.  This is to say that they’re well aware that science has removed us from any central position in the universe, so that the only valid form of the anthropic principle is the weak rather than the strong one.

The weak form states that the universe exhibits fine-tuning in that it cosmically selects for intelligent creatures as a matter of fact, meaning only that as a matter of evolutionary (if not logical) triviality, intelligent creatures can naturally emerge only in a universe capable of eventually producing them. By contrast, the strong form (in Barrow and Tipler’s discussion) adds an imperative to our emergence as though nature were trying to produce us as its highest goal. This stronger form is a hangover from the quasi-theistic content of the original Greek formulations of this kind of teleology or fine-tuning. If intelligent life only mindlessly evolves, thanks to indifferent processes that happen here and now to favour life but need have no human-friendly end in view, and we refrain from shamelessly presuming that we’re noble creatures who deserve to come into being, we have no reason at all to call the natural preconditions of life "good."

On the contrary, the cosmicist urges, we have grounds for suspecting the opposite, that we would be horrified by the ends of cosmic evolution if we could fathom them. Instead of inferring nature’s goodness because of its evolutionary relation to us, we should start from the assumption that our emergence is accidental so that we’re alienated from the universe instead of being obligated to submit to the natural order. If every particle pops out of quantum chaos for no reason, having thus no basis for gratitude towards its conditions of possibility (supposing a particle could feel such a thing), we too should reflect on the logical gap between “is” and “ought.” All that we care most about—mentality, society, family, reason, culture, pleasure, hobbies, purpose—mean nothing to the wider world. We popped into being because of natural, indifferent regularities that happened to kick in at our time and place, and that natural order will eventually turn against us, making our survival impossible. Why is there any such thing as natural creativity? We don’t know, but if we did, says the cosmicist, the answer would shock and humiliate us. The new atheists therefore assign the wrong value to the natural conditions and forms that indeed permit us to be happy (or angst-ridden). We prefer to be happy, to the extent that we succumb to our ignoble penchant for cowardice, but truly wise people are horrified by the godless universe. The preexistent world, therefore, isn’t simply good. To call it that is to perpetuate a noble lie, at best, to soothe the slumbering masses. Instead, the amorality, indifference, and mindlessness of our natural causes ensure that those causes ought to appall us.

In any case, regardless of what we say to ourselves or in public when we attempt to boost our confidence, sell mass-marketed books, or attract young minds to our philosophy seminars or podcasts, the modern world evidently is disgusted with nature. Our allegiance to Satan, mythically speaking, is palpable. Witness the fact that we’re collectively opposed to the wilderness at every turn. We are the executioners of organic life forms (and perhaps the gods of artificial varieties). We’re implacable in furthering our business of replacing green places with grey ones, as it were, the natural with the mechanical, the world’s strange living-deadness with our noosphere. Just to take one example out of tens of thousands that are available in late modernity, we’re now infamous for dragging lone trees out of their communities which we call forests, so that they can adorn our suburban lawns and live, it turns out, a much-diminished life. Trees and plants aren’t entirely unaware and they flourish when in the company of other members of their kind. So just as most of us are guilty of exterminating or enslaving most land animals, we’re perpetrating a similar holocaust against plant life.

Although few of us admit it, our “liberated” way of life presupposes not virtue ethics, Stoicism, or even hedonism, but cosmicism. We’re all progressive in our hostility towards the natural order, in our urgency to replace not just all mindless parts of the world, but the subhuman ones with artificial extensions of ourselves. We say we want to be content with the real world, but we know in spite of our bluster that only godless nature exists and that intelligent life is anomalous and therefore absurd. We don’t fit into nature, nor should we try to, because we needn’t honour a universe that can’t care about anything. Of course, we should fear nature as our true, monstrous deity, but there’s no honour in being a zombie creator. And to say that history is better than stasis or chaos is to presume that we’re of ultimate concern, which is preposterous. The Greek myths are thus terrific fictions but philosophically dubious. Greek tragedy, however, does highlight the paradoxical kind of satanic or promethean humanism or “progressivism,” according to which anti-nature, not the natural status quo, is the highest good.