Saturday, June 26, 2021

Lovecraft's "Cosmicism"

H.P. Lovecraft's cosmicism is the literary application his nihilistic atheism, so at least he was consistent enough to avoid the errors of pretending like atheism is existentially compatible with any kind of ultimate objective meaning.  Someone could be an atheist and still believe in objective meaning or morality, but they would only be holding to two ideas that logically exclude each other as far as truth goes.  Lovecraft, like some atheists, still embraces a denial of God's existence that contradicts the necessity of an uncaused cause and that would still be unverifiable (and thus unjustifiable) even apart from that, yes.  He just does not run from the logical ramifications of this false stance.

The being Azathoth ironically still serves as a literal uncaused cause of the universe in Lovecraft's mythos, although the nature of how his creative power works, just like several other things in his fiction, is commonly described in a way that reduces down to logical impossibilities that only a fool would possibly think true--or even hypothetically possible.  In this case, Azathoth's dreams keeping material reality and other minds in existence is impossible because a dream inherently does not connect with an external world [1].  He could accidentally trigger the existence of other creatures which have metaphysical dependency on him as he happens to sleep and dream, but that is as close to the typical summary of his dream-based creation as is possible before conceptual contradictions and therefore illogicality arise.

Another even more important flaw is that Azathoth is often said to sustain all of reality other than himself, and yet the laws of logic and the space in which created matter is placed cannot not exist [2].  Epistemologically and metaphysically, logic cannot change, and one ramification of this, albeit a particularly abstract and precise one, is that logic alone is the one thing that has to exist regardless of what else comes in or out of existence, including minds, creatures, and the entire cosmos.  Not even the uncaused cause could exist unless it was at least logically possible for it to be a part of reality.  Then there is the supposed incomprehensibility of the cosmic creatures in Lovecraft's writings which are supposed to suggest themes of nihilistic indifference towards human life.  Looking at entities like Cthulhu is supposed to inflict madness due to their allegedly incomprehensible appearances.

Nothing is actually incomprehensible; if this was not the case, to comprehend that something is incomprehensible means it is not beyond comprehension anyway!  There are just logical facts, introspective experiences, or sensory experiences that some people might feel "crazy" for thinking of or or that they might feel mystified by.  No matter what the issue is, at least logical axioms must apply to it, and everyone who thinks about the matter without making assumptions can realize this necessary truth.  Thus, there are always at minimum a handful of inescapable logical facts about a topic or idea that could be known by anyone as long as they are willing to look to reason.  I do not know if Lovecraft truly believed that an unknown or unknowable thing is beyond human epistemological limitations rather than the necessary truths of reason, which are self-verifying, universal, and therefore infallible, but the popular presentation of his ideas does not cast this aspect in a favorable light.

These deep philosophical problems with his literary philosophy, which contradict the truths of rationalism and are still passed off as if they are logically possible, combined with Lovecraft's cosmicism and prominent racism, make him a thoroughly irrational thinker at best.  He is just a racist person who assumed nihilism is true--for nihilism could not be proven even if it is true--and also happened to create a story that still grasps at subjects of great depth, as he was at least dedicated to philosophy enough to think about issues of "cosmic" importance directly and take them seriously.  His stories can still be enjoyed by rationalists and Christians who appreciate the sincerity and scope of the themes; it is just that cosmicism and its erroneous ramifications would never be thought anything more than metaphysically false or epistemologically baseless ideas, depending on which part is considered.



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