Notes on Lack and the Cosmological Trinity

In the Phenomenology of Mind,[1] Hegel introduces the idea of the willing of the self to be certain of itself, a poetic concept (in the philosophical sense) which, as philosophical poets, we feel urged to apply to our own indagations into the volitions embedded within the cosmological-machine we call the universe.

We believe that if the universe has a will, it must be a primitive will toward that which it lacks. And if this is the case, then the thing that was found to be most lacking by the unconscious motor of the cosmological-machine may very well have been an intuition of this lack of certainty of itself (in which would be embedded other intuited deficiencies, such as the lack of self-knowledge and the basic lack of being able to perceive itself).

By making this assumption, we place Lack of Certainty of Itself at the centre of the universe’s subconscious drive, or cosmological will. A drive which would have incited an evolution toward the complexity of biological life forms capable of perceiving and developing perception into consciousness, eventually becoming intelligent, sentient organisms within the universe that are capable of perceiving, for the universe, the cosmological-machine itself, and hopefully, eventually understanding it from the inside. A process which, from the point of view of the whole, allows the universe to understand itself from within and develops a certainty of itself from the observation and understanding of those within the self.

Certainty of itself can therefore be added to the other two primordial lacks we have found in the motor of the cosmological-machine, i.e., permanence and preservation, in order to create a metaphysical triptych of the cosmological drive.

So, Certainty, Permanence and Preservation are our Cosmological Trinity. A trinity which has evolved and is evolving, being driven by the primordial need of gaining that which is lacking and describing cosmological purposiveness.

First, there was a lack in what was and that lack was overcome when the state of being emerged out of nothingness into something. In this way, with the emergence of the first particle out of nothing, the primordial drive was able to fill the gaping hole of absolute lack.

Here, therefore, we now have a definition of the primordial drive, that it is the will to fill the gaping hole of lack.  

Yet, for certainty to be a lack, as we propose, one firstly needs reason, and this creates a paradox, for reason needs certainty as lack of certainty is a gaping hole in reason. But how can that be?

What this means is that certainty and reason had to evolve together in a very slow process (the evolution of consciousness in the universe) and that the intuition in the drive that pushes the process forward is pre-perception and even pre-existence. For something to come from nothing there had to be an intuition embedded in the nothingness that could provoke a change of state.  

Intuition of lack is, as such, the basic element of all existence and is buried in the very fabric of non-existence.

For Permanence to be lacking we must firstly have ephemerality and Permanence becomes the gaping hole in the ephemeral.

By seeing Permanence as this hole in the ephemeral, we can also understand the positive force of lack despite its negative connotations.

Lack is a gateway that is always opening us up toward other potentialities, which is not to say that all potentialities are desirable. Lack can be a gateway to the desirable and undesirable fields of possible existences.

Likewise, Preservation is a result of the lack in ephemerality. Preservation is a necessary tool for any possible permanence to take place.

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The creative spirit of the universe, then, resides in Lack. Lack is the great artificer, that which gets things done even before the possibility of thought, and hence before the thought of what needs to be done, has come about.

In the beginning was not ‘the idea’, but the lack of that which was and this is the gaping hole of something within the absolute state of nothingness.

[1] G.W.F. Hegel, PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, Dover, 2003, p. 384