It Is Possible to Make a Partial List of First Principles and First Values of Cosmos

Proposition 23 from the Book "First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come" by David J. Temple

For citing, this is the appropriate citation:

Temple, David J., First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, World Philosophy and Religion Press, second edition, March 2025, Proposition 23: “It Is Possible to Make a Partial List of First Principles and First Values of Cosmos.”

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 Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.

We will now turn to the list of First Principles and First Values themselves. It is worth noting two points at the outset. First, this list is in progress. We are working on refining and clarifying the list. It is incomplete. It is evolving. We will publish a more complete list in forthcoming volumes dedicated to First Principles and First Values. Second, all the principles and values are interincluded, interdigitated; they mutually co-arise and cannot be easily distinguished in an ultimate sense.

A foundational world philosophy requires an architecture of basic elements, which range across epistemology, ontology, cosmology, and ethics (value theory). CosmoErotic Humanism is built around a (nonexhaustive and ever-unfolding) set of First Principles and First Values, which capture the most fundamental dimensions of reality. Integrating premodern, modern, and postmodern forms of knowledge, these philosophical primitives can be integrated into a new Story of Value. This is a story of evolution on a cosmic scale, the emergence of humanity as an expression of cosmic value, and the future of humanity—the birth of a new human—as the continuation of the primordial process of value actualization that characterizes all reality.

The equations that accompany some of them are intended as formalizations of richly numinous semantic content. They can be used to aid explanation and understanding across multiple disciplines, timescales, and theoretical orientations—transdisciplinary shorthand not intended for use in any formal mathematical sense. Future writings will unpack each of these across the realms of matter, life, and mind. Here we are simply offering them for the first time as a set, with only a few caveats and explanations. The goal here is to provide a gestalt, the incipient architecture and blueprint for the larger project.

[Continue reading the essay below.]

---

Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong

If you ever feel overwhelmed by what we send out, here is how you can manage your subscription:

Step 1: Learn about our different Section Newsletters on Substack:

On this page, if you click on the first newsletter (Center for World Philosophy and Religion), you will see an overview of ALL our posts. The other newsletters on that page show you the different section newsletters (with a brief description and sample posts):

Step 2: Choose which Newsletters you want to receive in your email inbox or Substack app:

You can subscribe or unsubscribe to each of these sections separately by managing your subscription here. If you get easily overwhelmed by too many emails, we suggest that you at least stay on our list for our Monthly Digests.

First-Order First Principles and First Values

The first-order First Principles and First Values are fundamental, primordial, and serve as the fabric and constitutive order, the warp and weft, of Cosmos itself. These can be thought of as the basic categories, the elements required to get anything like a Universe such as ours going. These are, properly speaking, metaphysical categories, whereas the second-order set features ontological categories. Metaphysics here concerns the most basic given realities of subject and object, of Being and non-being. Ontology is concerned with how Being becomes populated by pluralities of the real; after the One becomes many, there is much else to say.

The First Big Bang is a metaphysical wonder. Whatever was hidden is revealed, and time begins—along with the basic structures of wholes and parts, interiors and exteriors, telos, and the tendency toward the intensification of polarities. The first-order First Principles and First Values identify the order of Cosmos that is quite obviously always already everywhere. You can’t get behind or prior to these, even as you can’t get beyond them either.

Some of these basic principles of Cosmos can be found throughout intellectual history. Time and space, relations between whole and part, as well as the categories of the unknowable, hidden, mysterious, and paradoxical are perennial topics in most philosophical systems, religious or otherwise, East and West, North and South. Topics of intrinsic value and the perspectival nature of reality also recur throughout world philosophy.

In later works we will trace out a specific line from the kabbalistically inspired metaphysics of John Amos Comenius and Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling—through Peirce, James, and Whitehead—to CosmoErotic Humanism, including all the recent, related projects of reconstructive post-postmodernism. There is something like an emergent, overlapping consensus here on what an adequate meta- physics looks like.

There is also the knowing of reality directly, through immediate experience and self-reflective inquiry. We discuss this below as the Anthro-Ontological Method, which is inspired by the perennially recurring insights and practices from the totality of world philosophies and wisdom traditions.

The fundamental work of metaphysics is not reading other thinkers, but rather deepening into the experience of reality itself. The method requires individual and collective work to clarify our interiors and enable a direct knowing of reality—which only then can you test against the best of what others have found and reported.

Metaphysics is not a science. It is prior to science. Scientific practice itself depends on Anthro-Ontologically derived principles, such as the value of truth itself (which cannot be scientifically “proven”): the First Principles and First Values. We discuss this further below, but for now, the point is that the metaphysics proposed here in schematic form is not controversial, but a remembering of collective insights. These are the most basic building blocks for a new story of Cosmos—for understanding the place of value within it, as well as humanity’s role.

Second-Order First Principles and First Values

With the emergence of second-order principles and values, a dynamic ontology unfolds from within the set created by the first-order elements, a dynamic field of cosmic evolution. It is a field of value, unfolding into deeper expressions and intensifications. The equations formalize the dynamics being expressed at various levels of evolution. Despite changes in the material and biological substrate—the physiosphere and the biosphere—these principles and values continue to be expressed at higher and higher levels. Some of these are worth briefly unpacking here, while others must await full elaboration elsewhere. In forthcoming volumes we will unfold what we humbly and audaciously refer to as the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism in response to the meta-crisis—an expression of the evolution of value which itself is fundamentally the evolution of love.

Join the conversation below:

FIRST PRINCIPLES AND FIRST VALUES OF COSMOEROTIC HUMANISM

First-Order Principles: Fundamental Characteristics of the Manifest Cosmos

Perspectives

First-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives are primordial to Cosmos, constitutive of all further, more complex perspectives.

Temporality/ Eternity

Past, present, and future are inextricable aspects of Cosmos, which supervene on an eternal dimension, that which is beneath and beyond time.

Hidden/ Revealed

There is mystery and knowledge in all areas of Cosmos; unknowability is not epistemic failure but an ontological reality.

Whole/Parts

Reality is composed of “holons”: there is no part that is not itself a whole, and no whole that is not itself a part, and as such “holarchies” emerge.

Polarity and Paradox

Reality is composed of opposites joined at the hip—a situation of coincidentia oppositorum in which paradox is constitutive of all real knowledge.

Interior/ Exterior

Consciousness and matter serve equiprimordially as aspects of Cosmos, always in different ratios, and are constitutive of time and space.

Value

Better and worse—i.e., normativity—is constitutive of Cosmos, manifesting as the ubiquity of appetition (desire and need).

Second-order Principles: Dynamic Equations & Their Formulations

Uniqueness

Uniqueness = Emergent Distinction from the Field of [Universal] Reality x Radically New Value (Quality + Consciousness) x New Capacity (Attention + Eros + Function + Integration)

Uniqueness is an emergent distinction from the universal field of reality which births radically new value, new quality, and new consciousness, yielding new capacities for attention and eros.

Eros

Eros = Radical Aliveness x Desiring (Growing + Seeking) x Deeper Contact x Greater Wholeness (Value) x Self Actualization/Self Transcendence (Creation/Destruction)

Eros is the experience of radical aliveness desiring, moving towards, ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness and value, through a continuous dynamic of creation and destruction.

Intimacy

Intimacy = Shared Identity x [Relative] Otherness x Mutuality (Recognition + Feeling + Value + Purpose)

Intimacy is shared identity in the context of [relative] otherness, characterized by mutuality of recognition, mutuality of feeling, mutuality of value, and mutuality of purpose.

Desire

Desire = Presence/Call of Possible Future Value x Universal Field of Needs (Values) x Unique Identity (Level of Consciousness + Values)

Desire is a local expression and experience, in the present moment, of the call of possible future value, mediated by the universal field of value, a unique identity, as refracted across levels of consciousness.

Relationship

Relationship = Parts/Wholes x Allurement to Communion (Attraction + Creativity + Eros) x Assertion of Autonomy (Repulsion + Destruction + Eros)

Relationship is the ongoing calibration of the allurement to communion and autonomy, in which all parts reach for ever deeper and wider union and embrace, generating ever deeper creativity, depth, and transformation.

Evolution

Evolution = Eternity x Temporality x Transformation (Eros + Creativity + Complexity + Destruction) x Story (Meaning + Information + Value [Need + Desire])

Evolution is the story of reality’s ceaseless transformation, rooted in the eternal field of value, manifested as a creative advance of complexity and a progressive deepening of intimacies, yielding ever more information, meaning, and value, expressed through dynamics of creativity and destruction.

Harmony

Harmony (Fairness) = Whole/Parts x Value (Goodness + Truth + Beauty) x Eros

Harmony is the right relationship between whole/parts manifested as the fullest realization of the value (goodness, truth and beauty) of each of the parts and the larger whole, emerging in the context of ongoing eros, creativity, and integrity.

Personhood

Personhood = Irreducible Interiority x Value x Uniqueness x Perspective x Intimacy

Personhood is the irreducibly original interiority and value of a being characterized by irreducibly unique perspective and irreducibly unique configurations of Eros, desire and intimacy.

Freedom

Freedom = Paradox (Causation/Telos + Design/ Contingency + Choice/Choicelessness) x Eros (Transformation + Creation/Destruction) x Value x Uniqueness

Freedom is found in the paradoxes of choice/ choicelessness, design/contingency, causality/ telos, as these are manifested through the eros, transformation, and creation/destruction of unique value.

Story

Story = Temporality x Evolution x Plotlines (Value + Eros + Telos + Crisis) x Information (Meaning) x Freedom

Story is the narrative arc of manifest reality that animates evolution, driven by the central plotline of incessant Eros/Desire, moving through crisis towards ever increasing information, meaning, wholeness and value.

Integrity

Integrity = Evolution (Eros + Story [Plotlines + Crisis]) x Non-rejection/Exclusion (Preservation [Energy + Value] + Reparation (Saving [Reconstruction + Wholeness]) x Harmony

Integrity is the story of evolution’s plotlines and crises that result in a savings of value and energy, enabling reparations, reconstructions, and emergent wholeness and harmony.

Attention

Attention = Eros x (New Intimacy x New Value) + Unique Direction/Focus of Presence (unique desire x unique relationship)

Attention is the focused presence of ErosValue which generates the emergence of ever new qualities of the real.

---

---

First Principles & First Values

Second Edition

First Principles & First Values

Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come

by David J. Temple

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.

“The position argued for in this book is of vital importance . . . it needs urgently to be read.”
IAIN McGILCHRIST, author of The Master and His Emissary

David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, 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. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.