First Principles & First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come

AS THE META-CRISIS DEEPENS, THE FATE OF CIVILIZATION AND HUMANITY HANGS IN THE BALANCE.
 
First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.



Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.
 
Taking the form of forty-two telegraphic propositions, this extended monograph provides a brief unpacking of CosmoErotic Humanism as worldview, and the First Principles and First Values that form it source code. The propositions collected here unpack the urgent moral need to articulate a new vision and theory of value.
 
Humanity must redefine what it understands to be valuable if it is going to survive. Humans must understand the importance of what they value in the Cosmos—the reality of value itself—beyond the notion that what they value is, for example, simply an arbitrary price that can be fixed to a commodity.
 
The idea that a tree is only as valuable as what it can be sold for is absurd.
 
The idea that a person is only as valuable as what they can contribute to society is also absurd.
 
In fact, both the tree and the person incarnate a dimension of value that is immeasurable and fundamentally irreducible to its commodified form. Yet just this kind of absurdity has been driving global culture for centuries.
 
There has been great confusion in value theory over the last two hundred years. On the one hand, conservatives have attempted to simplify the discussion to a single list of preordained and eternal values, which must be protected and to which all people must pledge allegiance.
 
At the same time, driven by a reductive materialism, scientific communities largely claim that only what is described by physics is real and that therefore nothing ultimately has intrinsic value. Given this metaphysical assumption, contemporary value theory has stridently argued that value is but a contrived human invention.
 
The rise of postmodernity has only exacerbated this trend, labelling all values "social constructs," "fictions," or "figments of our imaginations." This claim has now entered mainstream culture.
 
First Principles and First Values argues against this. Value is not merely instrumental or economic. It is not a social construction or cultural contrivance—not a mere fiction covering over a truly valueless and therefore ultimately meaningless world. The propositions here begin to demonstrate that value is intrinsic to Cosmos, all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.
 
Value is foundational and evolving. It is not that human beings contrive value; rather, value precedes life. Life is an inherent expression of value. Life is contrived in pursuit of cosmic value. Cosmic value in this way generates life, as life emerges in pursuit of value. We live inside of value even as value lives inside of us. Reality is value.
 
But this is all ahead of the story.

David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zachary Stein, joined in this volume by Ken Wilber. The Center is a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal story of value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence.