The New Enlightenment: Cosmo-Transcendental Positioning of the Living Being in the Universe

Abstract

Modern science has grown accustomed to viewing a hazy, imprecise, fleeting reality. The fact of chaotic deterministic systems, the mix of discontinuity and stability, of mutation and enduring type, presents both a challenge and opportunity to metaphysics. To pick up the challenge presented by the sciences as well as the vital concerns of humankind and to formulate a novel conception of nature-life along the lines of life’s ontopoiesis is to indicate philosophy’s new parameters. Although the rhythm of impetus and equipoise evident in life’s ontopoiesis has come to light only recently, it brings us genuine enlightenment about the cosmos, bios, and the human being – a New Enlightenment that constitutes a critical break from the tentative searching of the philosophy of the past. The transcendental realm of the logos is revealed not as confined to human consciousness but is manifested foremost in the architectonics of the earth and the cosmos. That is to say that inchoate reality is organized not by the observing mind alone but from within itself, which organization ultimately finds expression in the mind. An archeology and/or genetics that captures the correspondences between the individual and the universe, here is the ultimate foundation that Husserl repeatedly started over again to find. The “phenomenology of phenomenology” that he sought is one that sees how human creativity chimes with the ontopoiesis operative in nature – in both the cosmos and life.