{"id":3376,"date":"2017-08-24T10:35:30","date_gmt":"2017-08-24T14:35:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/gloryseed\/?p=3376"},"modified":"2017-09-28T10:54:37","modified_gmt":"2017-09-28T14:54:37","slug":"lovecrafts-cosmicism-works-fails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/gloryseed\/2017\/08\/lovecrafts-cosmicism-works-fails\/","title":{"rendered":"Lovecraft’s Cosmicism: What it Is, How It Works, and Why It Fails"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"H.<\/a>
H. P. Lovecraft
Photo by Lucius B. Truesdell\/Public Domain<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Today I reflect a little on the thing that draws me to H. P. Lovecraft, his aesthetic:\u00a0Cosmicism<\/a>.<\/strong> This is a little excerpt of something that will be published by Scenes Media<\/strong><\/a> in the near future. (When it is, you\u2019ll be among the first to know!)<\/em><\/p>\n

What is cosmicism?<\/h4>\n

Summed up briefly, Cosmicism is based on the idea that humanism is an illusion. Human consciousness, human civilization, humane values, and all the rest, add up to a bubble that surrounds us and keeps us from seeing that the cosmos is wholly indifferent to us. (Interesting word choice there by Lovecraft.) It\u2019s not that it is necessarily hostile, although it might seem that way. Its just that in the vast sweep of time and space, human beings are nothing. We have our time on this speck of a planet, but there were eons before we arrived, and there will be eons after we\u2019re gone. The abyss surrounds us.<\/p>\n

Concomitant with this vastness is the meaninglessness of it all. Here\u2019s where his well known atheism comes in.<\/p>\n

How is works<\/h4>\n

If that strikes you as terrifying, that\u2019s just what Lovecraft was after. And that\u2019s his genius. He didn\u2019t write slasher-fiction, or supernatural horror. He thought the cosmos as it is described by science is scary enough. His best work is a process of discovery for a protagonist. Over the course of a story the subject learns the awful truth with a growing sense of horror. Usually the story ends with a descent into insanity and plenty of screaming.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the best example of this is his story, The Colour Out of Space. But he didn\u2019t always stick to the script. More frightening for me is an early story, The Picture in the House, which is more a classic ghost story with some cannibalism thrown in\u2014just suggested, not described, thankfully. (And there\u2019s more to suggest that Lovecraft was a disillusioned Romantic. I\u2019m thinking of his fine story, Celephais, another early work).<\/p>\n

But back to Cosmicism, here are my thoughts on why it works, to a degree, and why it fails.<\/p>\n

Why cosmicism fails<\/h4>\n

The way cosmicism works is by a sort of trick you play on yourself, much as when you repeat a word over and over again until it becomes a nonsense sound disassociated from its referent. This can be a disorienting and even nauseating experience. The genius of cosmicism comes from a disconnection of this sort. It is a little frightening. And if you\u2019re the sort of person who enjoys a being scared vicariously, Lovecraft is someone you should read.<\/p>\n

But there is a danger in taking him too seriously. This feeling is not some sort of godless gnosis that gives you a glimpse behind a curtain of illusion. It is just a matter of losing touch with things that are truly real and part of the cosmos. (And now for some etymology. Cosmos means order. And applied to reality it means order on the largest scale.)<\/p>\n

Reality is not a collision of alien and completely unassociated things. It is contiguous and we\u2019re a part of it. And it just so happens that there is a place in the cosmos that is very hospitable to creatures like us. And we live in it. Furthermore, our consciousness is suited to this place. If it wasn\u2019t, we wouldn\u2019t be here.<\/p>\n

This is what fascinated the ancients. They wondered about how it could all hold together, and how it was that humans could apprehend this truth when other creatures were oblivious to it. What they came up with is the logos<\/strong><\/a>. Logos is reason, or speech, actually both. (They knew enough to know you can\u2019t have one without the other.) This means that whatever orders the whole cosmos, in some sense runs right through us. And it is by accessing the logos that we come to understand anything at all. That\u2019s why we put the little suffix \u201clogy\u201d at the end of so many disciplines: biology, sociology, anthropology, and so on. And it is what makes science possible. And this is an irony, and just one of several ironies we stumble across when we think of Lovecraft and cosmicism, because Lovecraft had a reverent regard for science. And he used its discoveries to make his aesthetic plausible. But what he couldn\u2019t do is make it logical. (Yet another term that owes its existence to logos.)<\/p>\n

(And I go on to other reasons Lovecraft\u2019s aesthetic fails. And just for fun, I use the logical problem I identify here to show how The Colour Out of Space can actually be used to illustrate the way Anselm\u2019s Ontological Argument<\/a> for the existence of God works. You\u2019ll have to wait for the Scenes Media article for that, though.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I reflect a little on the thing that draws me to H. P. Lovecraft, his aesthetic:\u00a0Cosmicism. This is a little excerpt of something that will be published by Scenes Media in the near future. (When it is, you\u2019ll be among the first to know!) What is cosmicism? Summed up briefly, Cosmicism is based on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2522,"featured_media":116,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,366,367,368],"tags":[5,374,3],"class_list":["post-3376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atheism","category-h-p-lovecraft","category-necronomicon","category-weird-fiction","tag-atheism","tag-cosmicism","tag-h-p-lovecraft"],"yoast_head":"\nLovecraft's Cosmicism: What it Is, How It Works, and Why It Fails<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Today I reflect a little on the thing that draws me to H. P. 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