Look, somewhere down the line we killed the cosmos and we’re living long, long, long after that enveloping we once knew. Living limply afterward.

This was a very bad idea. Existentialism starts off from the death of the cosmos and then advises us to buck and embrace our own lonely freedom. Even worse.

Without a commitment to the cosmos, we’re screwed. We’re deluded human agents just messing around with, you know, maybe some social change. What? Screwed how?

Nihilism, that’s how. Our lives have nothing ultimate to rest upon. Careful where you step, mate, because you’re bound to lurch down a hole.

Take a mechanized universe functioning according to natural law. Fudge it why don’t you and say, at least from a first-person point of view, that human beings are an exception, that we’re special somehow. Then see what happens when we chiefly develop the egocentric capacities to pursue our first-person desires and to satisfy, as best we can, our first-person needs.

Well, here we are. Human atoms spinning in an infinite void.

Come on, what about community? No genuine community, only ersatz, sans cosmos.

And God? No God without entwinement with the cosmos.

Don’t you know that the heart seeks intimacy with the other and that–horror–that has been foreclosed? This, yes, and it yens to merge with the other in love.

Cold comfort is what we’ve got: humanism and “the infinite universe,” not the intelligible cosmos and the love of being.