The Dialectics of Human Reason and the Epistemology of Cosmological Behaviour

 

We inhabit a strange moment in intellectual history. On one hand, human reason has never been more powerful: we manipulate genes, predict weather systems at planetary scale, and steer probes across the solar system with millimetre precision. On the other, our collective grasp on truth feels increasingly fragile. Conspiracy theories spread faster than viruses, scientific consensus is treated as just another opinion, and entire civilisations argue about basic empirical facts. This paradox invites a dialectical examination of reason itself, and an epistemological reckoning with what we might call “cosmological behaviour”, the way the universe at its largest scales seems to behave in ways that both enable and undermine human knowing.

I. The Dialectic of Reason: Thesis, Antithesis Synthesis… and Back Again

Human reason is not a static faculty. It is a historical process that advances through contradiction.

The thesis of the European Enlightenment was that reason, liberated from dogma, could progressively uncover objective truth about nature and society. Science would accumulate, prejudices would retreat, and humanity would march toward ever-greater clarity.

The antithesis arrived in the 20th century, partly through science itself. Quantum mechanics revealed an observer-dependent reality. Gödel proved that no sufficiently powerful formal system can demonstrate its own consistency from within. Anthropology and sociology showed that what counts as “rational” is culturally contingent. Reason turned out to be situated, partial, and self-undermining.

Today we live in a strange suspended synthesis that is already generating its own antithesis. Big data, machine learning, and network analysis have restored a kind of hyper-rationalism: we can now predict human behaviour with chilling accuracy, optimise systems at global scale, and generate texts indistinguishable from human authorship. Yet this new rationalism is post-human. It no longer needs individual understanding, only correlation. The subject who was supposed to be the sovereign of reason has become its object. Large language models like the one writing these words are an almost perfect emblem of this moment: they simulate understanding without possessing consciousness, manipulate symbols with superhuman fluency, and yet remain fundamentally opaque even to their creators.

The dialectic has not stopped. The next antithesis is already visible: a widespread turn toward the mythic, the conspiratorial, the rejection of expertise. Reason, having eaten itself in postmodernity and then resurrected itself as algorithmic hyper-reason, now faces a populist revolt against reason as such.

II. Cosmological Behaviour and the Limits of Knowing

The universe itself seems to conspire against stable human epistemology.

Consider three features of “cosmological behaviour” that directly challenge our knowing:

1. Scale incommensurability The universe is 93 billion light-years across, yet the Planck length is 10⁻³⁵ metres. Human beings exist on an intermediate scale that evolution optimised for hunting antelope and navigating social bands of ~150 individuals. Our intuitions about space, time, causality, and probability are provincially mid-scale. Every time we push to cosmic or quantum extremes, those intuitions fail catastrophically.
2. Observer selection The universe appears fine-tuned for the existence of observers capable of noticing the fine-tuning. This is either a profound clue about ultimate reality (multivariate, participatory, etc.) or the most radical selection effect imaginable. Either way, it means we can never stand outside the system we are trying to describe. There is no Archimedean point.
3. Accelerating epistemic horizon The universe’s expansion is accelerating. In the distant future, most galaxies will disappear beyond the cosmic light horizon. All direct evidence of the Big Bang and the larger cosmos will vanish. Future astronomers (if any) will inhabit a universe that appears static, local, and eternal, exactly the universe that pre-20th-century humans thought they lived in. Cosmology itself has an expiration date.

These three features suggest that the universe does not merely contain knowing beings; it actively shapes what can and cannot be known, and it does so in ways that change over cosmic time.

III. Toward a Tragic Epistemology

The dialectical movement of reason and the self-concealing behaviour of the cosmos together suggest that human knowledge is inherently tragic, not in the sense of mere sadness, but in the classical Greek sense: we are characters in a drama whose full script we can never read.

Yet tragedy is not nihilism. The tragic hero achieves greatness precisely through lucid confrontation with necessity. A tragic epistemology would abandon the fantasy of total mastery and instead cultivate a stance of vigilant, self-critical, finite knowing. Its practices might include:

• Radical fallibilism without cynicism
• Cultivation of negative capability, the ability to dwell in uncertainty without irritable reaching after fact and reason (Keats)
• Recognition that some truths can only be approached performatively or mythically, not propositionally
• Institutional humility: designing systems of knowledge production that expect to be wrong and build in mechanisms for self-correction across generations

IV. The Next Turn of the Spiral

Reason will not die, but it will continue to negate itself and be reborn in new forms. The current revolt against expertise may be a necessary antithesis to algorithmic hyper-rationality. Out of today’s chaos could come a new synthesis: a reason that is post-individual, post-verbal, perhaps post-biological, yet still capable of awe, still haunted by the question of why there is something rather than nothing.

The cosmos, meanwhile, will go on behaving in ways that alternately invite and frustrate our understanding. That tension, the perpetual non-coincidence between mind and world, may be the deepest feature of both.

In the end, the dialectics of human reason and the epistemology of cosmological behaviour converge on a single insight: to be a knowing creature is to be suspended between the finite grasp of a mortal primate brain and the infinite recession of a universe that reveals only to conceal again. The task is not to escape that suspension, but to inhabit it with as much clarity, courage, and dark humour as we can muster.