Life! The existential and the cosmological

Existentialism became increasingly evident in public (and, more, private) thinking through the middle twentieth century, with roots that were probably strongest in Nietzsche. It was a valuable - perhaps essential - consideration of "the human condition", of what it was like to exist. 

Yet it was partial, radically incomplete; because its assumptions were non-theistic, and "the world" was seen as unalive, and life as accidental, uncreated. 

So existentialism could not be made to work but led to pessimism and either despair or else (more commonly) the "bad faith" responses of careerism, intoxication, self-distraction...

"Cosmology" - in the sense of understanding Man's place in the cosmos - is likewise an essential consideration, and was (a few generations ago) a major subject of discourse. 

But, again, this went nowhere, and could go nowhere, because all possibility of purpose and meaning had been excluded by prior assumption: the cosmos was unalive, accidental, happening perhaps by "scientific laws" or regularities - but it had nothing to do with us, beyond providing the raw materials from which we happened to arise. 

Existentialism was mostly a matter of looking at the world from within, cosmological thinking looked at us (when it even considered human beings) from the outside  - and the two activities could not be integrated because their mode of thinking was alien to each other: the one worked from subjectivity as a given; the other took it as evident that subjectivity was something that (maybe?) went on inside people's heads, and had an effect only when it had led to action. 

After featuring in mainstream public conversation, books, media from the 1940s and into the 1980s; as the millennium approached such matters dropped out; and the age of materialism took almost complete control of Men's thoughts in the West.    

What we are supposed to do from here, is recognize the importance of such matters and that we cannot live meaningfully (that is, with a purpose that both comes from within each as an individual, and is harmonious with the purpose of "everything") unless we get such unfinished business back onto the agenda!

The old ideas were much better than anything now; but they all failed - and inevitably - because of their incompleteness - and this radical and insoluble partiality was a matter of fundamental assumptions. 

This is why we need to "start again" in a way that have never previously been necessary. And because of the actual situation we inhabit, this starting again cannot - certainly will not - be a group activity; nor can we get the answers we need from other people; and absolutely not from our actual culture. 

That's the quest and adventure; and that is something new and different in its very nature. 

We are compelled to take personal responsibility - and there are no excuses for failing to do this.