Adventures in Anthropocosmic Evolution

Thinking with David J. Temple (Zak Stein, Marc Gafni, and Ken Wilber) about CosmoErotic Humanism

In First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on Cosmoerotic Humanism, the Metacrisis, and the World to Come, Zak Stein, Marc Gafni, and Ken Wilber (under the collective pen name David J. Temple) offer an ambitious philosophical intervention into the metacrisis: a civilizational condition they define not only by technological acceleration and ecological destabilization, but by the annihilation of shared narratives of value. Their effort is not merely diagnostic. They propose a new civilizational story rooted in evolving eternal values, a neoprimal metaphysical orientation that can serve as both compass and ballast as we spiral deeper into planetary transformation.

I’ll be recording a dialogue with Zak and Marc later this week and wanted to share some preliminary thoughts after finishing their book.

Their central thesis is that reality is a love story, an unfolding erotic drama. This is consonant with my own work in process-relational philosophy and cosmopolitics. Temple’s vision of cosmoerotic humanism charts a path from matter to life to mind to supermind. I think Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science offers a complementary mode of vision, one that reintroduces the interior perspective on cosmic evolution through a new form of imaginal and moral perception. Where Temple’s framework remains largely within the linear time frame of outer events, Steiner’s esoteric cosmogony in Occult Science invites us to experience the same process as an interior metamorphosis of memory and imagination, an anamnetic recapitulation of the sacrifice and longing of angelic beings.

The Wisdom–Power Gap and the Crisis of Meaning

At the heart of Temple’s intervention lies a concern that modern civilization has been captured by a form of pseudo-Eros: a technological, mechanized drive toward optimization divorced from the deeper questions of meaning and motivation. What we lack is not technical know-how or raw power, but wisdom. Our civilizational crisis stems from a failure to imagine what it means to be human in an ensouled cosmos. The authors call this the wisdom–power gap: we have acquired Promethean powers without the prophetic imagination required to wield them in world- and soul-enhancing ways. The metacrisis, in their view, is the consequence of a civilizational story that has lost contact with its cosmic sources of value.

Their response is to construct a metaphysics of evolutionary love: the cosmos itself is animated by a desire for intimacy, coherence, and communion. In the background are thinkers including Schelling, Peirce, and Whitehead. Teilhard is not mentioned, but probably should be. Same goes for the authors of The Universe Story (1992), Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme.

First principles (governing exterior order) and first values (governing interior purpose) are said to unfold together in a dynamic interplay of ever-intensifying personalities, of individuals in evermore complex communion. Personality is not an emergent accident of matter and biology but intrinsic to the real, a constitutive feature of any cosmos that thinks, feels, and desires.

Steiner’s Cosmogony: A Complementary Take?

I think Steiner’s vision offers an important alternative but complementary take on evolution.

The Inner Realities of Evolution

Where Temple outlines a trajectory from matter to life to mind and beyond, Steiner invites us to imagine these same phases from within: not merely as linear stages in a physical evolution from atoms to amoebas but as moral-ontological initiations, a relational metamorphosis of the shared life of angels, humanity, and the cosmos. Steiner maps the unfolding of spirit into form from the fiery sacrifice of the Thrones on Old Saturn, to the radiant bestowal of light by the Spirits of Wisdom on Old Sun, to the fluid longing and resignation of Old Moon, into the moral estrangement and redemptive possibility of our present Earth phase. Time, space, and matter are not simply by-products of entropic decay and random symmetry breaking. They are the consequences of spiritual deeds.

What moderns call matter is, in Steiner’s view, the husk or outer expression of deeper spiritual processes. Heat, for example, is not merely the mean kinetic energy of molecules. What we measure as this or that temperature is, in its inward, qualitative concreteness, the residue a primeval act of divine sacrifice. Light, similarly, is the reflected devotion of higher beings. And water is the incarnation of cosmic resignation. Each elemental phenomenon is morally charged, expressive of angelic moods and movements that give rise to the very substance of our world, to our own bodies and souls.

Here, evolutionary time is not a linear progression but a complex differentiation into unity. Just as a human embryo folds upon itself in the act of gastrulation, forming ever deeper inner worlds from its initial sheath, the cosmos, too, is an enfolded and unfolding organism. Its outer forms are the echoes of earlier feelings. The movement from Saturn to Earth, from fire to freedom, is not simply the story of material complication, but of how spirit descends, dies, and seeks its own redemption in and through human beings.

Personhood, Story, and the Return of the Sacred

Both Steiner and Temple insist that the world is not just a cacophony of brute facts but a sacred story. For Temple, personhood is intrinsic to the cosmos; for Steiner, the human being is the recapitulation of divine dramas, a microcosm of angelic acts. Both visions resist modern disenchantment not by returning to premodern cosmologies, but by reactivating the spiritual organs of cognition that modernity has atrophied.

The shift must be epistemological and ontological at once: to move from seeing the physical cosmos as composed of external objects to recognizing it as the bodily expression of sacrificial wisdom. This demands more than conceptual assent, it calls for the sincere cultivation of imaginal organs capable of perceiving the world’s moral depth (McGilchrist’s, after Scheler’s, “value-ception”). Steiner calls this spiritual science; Temple calls it cosmoerotic humanism. Both require a new kind of human consciousness: one awake to cosmic longing, attuned to sacrifice, and response-able to the future.

The Fourth Big Bang: Evolutionary Love Becoming Conscious of Itself

Temple’s proposal that we are approaching a “fourth Big Bang”—the awakening of evolutionary love to itself—finds unexpected harmony with Steiner’s description of humanity’s Earth phase as the site of redemptive possibility. For Steiner, the turning point of the Earth cycle occurs with the Mystery of Golgotha, where Divine Love incarnates into the depths of matter and dies, transforming heavenly longing into the possibility of earthly freedom. Christ has entered and unified with the life of Earth and Humanity. For Temple, this moment is echoed in the possibility of a planetary ethos of love emerging from the abyss of our nihilistic age.

Both accounts affirm that the cosmos is not complete without our participation. We are not passive recipients of divine grace nor accidental byproducts of a blind evolutionary algorithm. We are agents of cosmic self-becoming. The path forward is not merely a further technological leap, but a transfiguration of the human heart. Steiner referred to this as the awakening of the “I,” while Temple refers to our future as homo amor.

Value Precedes Life: Ontology as Erotic Process

A cornerstone of the book is the proposition that value is not an emergent property of complex systems but rather a generative principle of the cosmos itself. Value thus precedes life. Life emerges in pursuit of value, powered by what the authors call cosmic Eros. Matter is pregnant with yearning, laced with interiority, impulsively seeking intimacy and coherence.

This echoes Whitehead’s organic realism, particularly his account of creativity as the ultimate category, with God as the lure toward the realization of eternal objects within finite occasions of experience. In his metaphysical scheme, values are not subjective overlays but intrinsic potentials of the universe, projecting and canalizing evolutionary trajectories. The authors describe their view as a form of “evolutionary perennialism”: the eternal manifests historically and evolves dialectically without ever collapsing into mere relativism.

Narrative Ontology

Stein, Gafni, and Wilber assert that narrative is not epiphenomenal to cosmos but constitutive of it. In other words, the cosmos is not merely describable through story, it is storied. Story is an ontological category.

Here again, Whitehead is prescient. His philosophy of organism insists that propositions are not only statements about the world but ingredients in the world, offering potential patterns of relevance that may or may not be actualized. A proposition need not be true to be important: it must be interesting. And it is precisely the imaginative power of “false” propositions that opens the world to novelty. To say that reality is a love story is not to impose fiction upon fact, but to recognize the ontological force generated by fiction due to its potential amplifications of value.

A Crisis of Mood

The metacrisis is not reducible to climate change, technological overreach, or political polarization, though it encompasses all these. It is, at root, a crisis of mood, a civilizational breakdown in our ability to feel the world adequately. It is the erosion of our shared sense of value, of sacred orientation.

We suffer from a global intimacy disorder, exacerbated by digitally mediated environments that flatten culture and strip personhood of dignity. The long arc of co-evolution between interiors and exteriors has nearly ruptured. We possess no story of value adequate to our power, no mythos capacious enough to guide us through the Anthropocene. As a result, we oscillate between despair and denial, neither of which can animate the collective imagination necessary for planetary renewal.

Toward an Anthropo-Cosmic Perspective

The authors adopt what they call an “anthropo-ontological” view of cosmic evolution. Their position feels strikingly consonant with what I have elsewhere referred to as an anthropocosmic perspective.

Human beings are not exceptions to the cosmos but exemplifications of its deepest tendencies. The structures of human subjectivity—freedom, yearning, love—are not anomalous intrusions into a meaningless material universe, but the flowering of cosmological powers at play since the beginning.

Evolution is not merely a process of natural selection, but also of erotic selection: the inward pull toward intimacy. Evolution is the universe becoming more aware of itself. In Temple’s terms, the first “Big Bang” brought matter; the second, life; the third, mind. The fourth is dawning now: when self-reflective humanity awakens to itself as evolutionary love.

From Rivalry to Synergy: Post-Tragic Politics

The political implications of this metaphysics are worth making explicit. We must move beyond zero-sum, rivalrous dynamics, beyond the poisoned polarization of current discourse, toward a new planetary synergy grounded in a shared field of value. This does not mean homogenization or the erasure of difference. Evolution does not seek fusion but increasing complexity through differentiation alongside communion.

In Whitehead’s terms, the aim is not a return to simplicity but an advance into intensity, into the ever-enriched harmonization of contrasts. Politics must be reimagined as a mode of shared participation in value-realization, rather than a battleground of competing interests untethered from any common Good. This would require not merely institutional reform but a re-enchantment of the world, a transformation of consciousness capable of bearing the tragic, moving through it, and arriving at a post-tragic orientation attuned to the relational basis of reality. Human life is not a zero-sum game, it is an invitation to intimacy.

Reclaiming the Future

The future is not fated, it is a field of value to be cultivated. First Principles and First Values calls for a planetary renaissance of the ethical imagination grounded in the recognition that reality itself is a love story. We are not neutral observers but active participants in an unfinished cosmos brimming over with value and meaning. Something important is going on, and we have a role to play. We must become responsible for the future.

Temple offers a speculative scaffolding for a new mythos that promises to bridge science and religion, individuality and society, freedom and love. Whether or not one agrees with every proposition, the overall invitation may still be worth considering: to live as if value is real, as if story shapes the world, as if love is not merely human sentiment but the source energy of cosmogenesis. What at first appear as fictions may end up triggering the renewal of the world.