S1. The Oldest System-programme of Cosmotraumatics1

In his dynamicist and historicist vision of nature’s development from geogony to glottogony, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was a key precursor to Schellingian Naturphilosophie. Published in 1784, his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit presents perhaps the first truly genetic-developmental vision of hominization. Inventing the term ‘Mängelswesen’, and kickstarting the ensuing tradition of philosophical anthropology, Herder placed orthograde spinality utterly centre stage in his account of the genesis of humanity’s peculiarly ‘pliable nature’.2

Herder, indeed, is the tributary source for many of the motifs encountered across our secret history. Just like Alsberg and Gehlen almost two centuries later, he stresses the ceaseless vestibular vigilance involved in upright standing:

No dead body can stand upright: it is only by the combined exertion of innumerable actions, that our artificial mode of standing and going becomes possible.3

Like Bataille, he divines the significance of man’s prodigious ‘long great toe’; like Ferenczi and Reich, he stresses the temporary axial-phyletic relapse that occurs during sleep; like Freud, he remarks upon the anthropogenic priority of vertical ocularity over horizontal olfaction.4 Herder, nonetheless, was no catastrophist, and certainly did not share Burroughs’s horror of language, but was the grandfather of the more sanguine tribe of vertebral celebrants. Opining that the ‘whole spinal column’ is constructed to facilitate the influx of speech, Herder revered nature’s gradations toward bipedalism as so many rehearsals on the road toward humanity’s resonant larynx. ‘Speech alone awakens slumbering reason’, he remarked, such that our whole orthograde armature—‘with its ligaments and ribs, its muscles and vessels’—is legible as the physiologic prologue to ‘this great work’ of vocalization.5 Thus, for Herder, ‘[t]he more perfect the animal, the more it rises above the surface of the ground’. From this axiom one can extrude an entire world-historical verticalization process encompassing the whole procession of terrestrial evolution—which, of course, culminates in humankind, that ‘microcosm’ that contains all the prior stages: ‘the more the body endeavours to raise itself, and the head to mount upwards freely from the skeleton, the more perfect is the creature’s form’.6 Noting the suggested etymological source of the word ‘anthrôpos’ (‘man’) in ‘anathrei’ (‘to look up’), Herder concludes that it is ‘infinitely beautiful’ to ‘observe the gradation by which Nature has gradually led her creatures up to sound and voice, from the mute fish, worm, and insect’.7

Kant, Herder’s one-time tutor, convulsively disagreed. He saw that Herder, through stressing the telic identity of rationality and bipedality, was unduly naturalising reason: immuring it, limiting it, reducing it to a physiologic quirk.8 To counteract this and reiterate the non-natural nature of rationality, Kant would take extreme measures, urging that rationality didn’t arise because of uprightness, but that (reversing the teleology, to sinister effect) uprightness arose because of rationality. And the proof? Precisely that uprightness, from the vegetative organism’s perspective, was profoundly and overridingly cataclysmic, a total organic disaster acceptable only from the perspective of reason’s unnatural supererogations; not something that any natural system would desire or undertake. Standing upright is something that could be occasioned only by reasons and never by causes—this is Kant’s gambit on the matter. He emphasised that orthograde locomotion develops in spite of nature—a chronic symptom of reason alone—arriving, therefore, from without and beyond and in conflict with organic interests. Borrowing from the opinions of the Italian anatomist Pietro Moscati (1739–1824), Kant unfurls his arsenal of orthograde pathologies, almost taking a sadistic delight in cataloguing their overabundance (it is rare that Kant indulges, but here he does): ‘upright gait’ is ‘contrived against nature’, a ‘deviation’ and detour from pronograde bliss, the source of ‘discomforts and maladies’ uncountable. The litany of back problems reads like a page from Elaine Morgan’s later inculpations of bipedalism. Uprightness compresses our intestines, squishing the intrauterine foetus; causing ‘haemorrhoids’, ‘varicose veins’, ‘hernia’, and ‘aneurysm’ via never-ending gravitational drag. Our ‘blood has to rise against the direction of gravity’, which causes ‘tumors’, ‘palpitations of the heart’, and ‘dropsy of the breast’. Upon standing up, haemodynamic ‘influx into the head’ arises as a ‘vertigo’ before being’s extraterrestrial vistas (upward plunge into space): this grants us the gift of an ‘inclination [to] stroke, to headaches, and madness’. Anthropos is the animal that ‘looks up’, and instantly regrets doing so. Humans, alone, drown (so acutely divorced are we from our thalassic motherland). Deliriously preoccupied with disaffiliating reason and nature, Kant climaxes with the proclamation that orthograde rationality is actually antithetical to the ends of species procreation and, thus, to human survival itself: for gravity’s trawl along the terrestrial-spinal axis is the cause of ‘prolapsed uterus’. Nature’s ‘first foresight’, he propounds, must have designed humanity for quadrupedalism, thus to protect the ‘foetus’ and accordingly to preserve our ‘kind’. Standing upright is truly steadfast standing, therefore: defiant to the point of species-suicide. Ergo, only after the ‘germ’ of something alien entered—that ‘germ of reason’ as Kant puts it—did man fall upward.9

Yanked to its feet by the stern, inflexible puppetmaster Reason, Nature literally miscarries itself within human morphology. Here the overemphasis on rationality’s exogeneity deviates into epidemiology: it is a virus come from outside. Indeed, to ordain reason’s arrival as antagonistic to the interests of the life that hosts it is to notice that intelligence is a parasite (because a parasite ‘dwells within’ yet also ‘in spite of’: parasites assert their own antagonistic ends whilst also being utterly dependent for their existence upon their host). Kant wants to stress the irreducibility of the normative over the natural: to flaunt his discovery of the topic-neutrality and time-generality of the rulishness of the rational (or, the insight that talk about ‘ought’ and ‘should’ is not even to talk about the world: it is not in any way pointing to any ostensible or time-bound fact, and thus is not describing the natural world at all, and has no declarative content); and yet, from the perspective of the natural, this ‘purity’, ‘neutrality’ and ‘emptiness’ of the transcendental can only be encountered as an invasive malignance and nosological apostasy from the placidity of mere existence. The ontological austerity of the transcendental arrives as the emaciation of the corpulence and plenitudes of the existent.10 The infall of time-generality into a time-bound body, from the perspective of that body, can be nothing other than a petrification from without (beginning at the pineal gland): the Kingdom of Ends is a crystal world. The absolute must announce itself from within time—for this is the only medium for its arrival—but this is necessarily nothing other than the self-obsolescing of temporal existence.11 The time-bound articulation of eternity, which is the blossom of time-general rationality, is the destruction of time from within: and, of course, inasmuch as the erect backbone has ever served as the marker for this rational influx into the human animal, the vertebral column becomes, for Kant, the epicentre for the parasitization of the host by crystalline eternity, an alien insider. In rushing to vouchsafe the non-natural status of the rational, Kant ends up implying that hominization is infection. A diamond-orchid from beyond spacetime, reason is usurpation, uprightness its symptom: the perverse cephalocaudal puppetry of a helpless host body.

It seems however that Kant did not practice the uprightness he so enthusiastically preached: a keen physiognomist, Schopenhauer admired Kant’s curved spinal repose, which he hypothesized owed to the encumbrance of an abnormally heavy brain.12 One cannot help but notice Schopenhauer attempting to emulate drooping Kantian posture in his daguerreotype portraits: head bent forward, skull resting on hand, supporting the weight of genius. He is seen propping up his colossal cranium in his palm, proudly signalling that his grey matter contains an entire cosmos of wills and representations. (Just after his death, the first biography published on Schopenhauer’s life and character—written by one of the philosopher’s close friends—concluded with a chapter simply titled ‘His Skull’: therein, the proportions of Schopenhauer’s voluminous braincase are proudly compared to other ‘great men’ such as Kant, Schiller, Napoleon and Talleyrand-Périgord.)13

Opening the second volume of his master-work, this ‘high priest of pessimism’ wrote of the immensity of ‘endless space’ (with its ‘countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered over with a hard cold crust’) before swiftly reminding the reader that ‘all this is in the first instance only a phenomenon of the brain’.14 No wonder he had a heavy head.

Nonetheless, despite his braggadocious admiration for a big brain (his own included), Schopenhauer was arguably the first philosopher to truly develop the consequences of the telic antagonism between intelligence and vitality: scouring off Kant’s sanguine gloss and extruding the more pessimistic entailments. This, as we shall shortly see, emerges as an almost inevitable result of Kantian purism (that is, a certain strain of post-Kantian, German Idealist thinking was bound to veer off in this direction). To assert the non-naturality of the rational is to set up an internecine and intestine conflict between reason and the body it inhabits. Schopenhauer merely develops the Kantian suggestion. That is, for Schopenhauer, self-consciousness is simply malignance: from the perspective of an otherwise blind will it can only be appraised as an accidental pathology. The survival of ‘brainless abortions’ and evidence for the ‘spinal soul’ empirically demonstrate this: acephaly proves that intellection is superfluous vis-à-vis organic reproduction and vegetative survival.15 Apperception and objectivity is a mere ‘function of the brain’, he claimed, which, along with ‘the nerves and spinal cord attached to it’, is concordantly

mere fruit […] in a fact a parasite, of the rest of the organism,insofar as it is not directly geared to the organism’s inner-working.16

A most noxious blossom! The invading spinal root and its encephalic ‘fruit’ are ‘implanted into the organism and nourished by it, [without] directly contributing [to the] maintenance of the organism’s economy’, Schopenhauer reasoned.17 He cites Dietrich Tiedemann as originator of this parasitological theory of neurulation. Another acephologist and phylogenetic cartographer of the spine, Tiedemann had indeed previously proclaimed that ‘the nervous system […] appears to us as a parasite’. The ‘human mind’—in its ‘immeasurable activity and its most exalted flights of thought’—is merely the symptom of an invading cerebrospinal ‘parasite’: the CNS’s simulation of itself and its world is mere tumefaction of purloined energy, siphoned from the organism as an otherwise deafblind respiration-factory.18 Self-representation and an objective world, Schopenhauer thus stresses, is entirely teleologically distinct from organic reproduction: an ‘efflorescence’ and a ‘luxury’.19 And not only distinct, but antagonistic vis-à-vis the ends of life.

The implications are clear: Burroughs was right. If the CNS is a parasite, then reality is itself the symptomatology of viral invasion (insofar as, for Schopenhauer, ‘reality’ simply is nervous simulation). Reality-function is infection. Not only delusions, but the entire world of representation—in all its elaborate and contusive variegation—is nothing other than a vast garden of Schüle’s ‘delusional dream-flowers of the spinal nerve-tree’. And awareness causes suffering, for nervous complexification increases nociceptive lode. It becomes a strictly analgesic matter of disinfection, then, to abolish consciousness—as concentrated in the human cerebrospinal system—and terminate its anhedonic treadmill. What is the therapeutic path? Is there one? How can we remedy a wound the size of existence? Of course, total recall—ecphoric excavation to the point of obsidian and diamantine repose—is the only therapeutic route. When presented with an infection such as a brain, eudemonia and euthanasia converge.

This is why, for Schopenhauer, ‘the rest of nature has to expect its salvation from man’. For the arch-pessimist well knew, from his idealist training, that all natural existences—all those ‘innumerable similar beings that throng, press, and toil’—are, in the final analysis, dream-flowers from the spinal nerve-tree.20 And if reality and its long procession of suffering is the symptom of invading cerebrospinal virus, then one need only weed out the parasite and return existence to anaesthetic emptiness (śūnyatā). As such, quoting Romans 8:22 (‘For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain’), Schopenhauer maintained that humanity’s cosmic burden and vocational duty is to undertake just this step: by universalizing his ascetic maxim of anti-natalism. Accordingly, he exhorted his readers to join him in his atheological soteriology of human extinction, proclaiming that, if his ascetic ‘maxim became universal, the human race would die out’. And, precisely due to his idealist axioms, this would entail that the vast and ‘boundless’ universe—which, again, is only a ‘phenomenon of the brain’—would senesce along with its encephalic root: for, in the foreclosure of human cognition, that ‘weaker reflection of it, namely the animal world, would be abolished, just as the half-shades vanish with the full light of day’. Here, Berkeleyan idealism collides with the biogenetic law and universal extinction. The dying-out of human consciousness would trigger a meontic cascade, Schopenhauer implied, swallowing all of this world of will and representation in reverse phyletic order. And, once the animal layers are deleted (perhaps at the level of ‘lumbar transfer’ between T-12 and L-1), so too would the inorganic domains eventually come under erasure:

With the complete abolition of knowledge the rest of the world would of itself also vanish into nothing.21

Deactivating the human brain, ablating it, would trigger a reverse recapitulation—a devolutionary descent—of the cosmos itself: as the inner space of the human nervous system shuts off, layer by layer, deactivating downward through the spinal levels, so too would each phyletic rung of the outer world serially senesce—until nothing at all is left. Which is precisely why, for Schopenhauer, ‘nature’—which is just a gigantic auto-production of nociception—has ‘to expect its salvation from man who is at the same time priest and sacrifice’.22 It is the job of the cerebrospinal nervous weed to tear itself from its host, pull itself out down to its coccygeal root, in order to abolish the world and the parasitic infection that it is.

Hartmann, however, took this Kantian-Schopenhauerian trajectory yet further. Recall how Lewis would later portray Hartmann, the catalyst of Germany’s nineteenth-century pessimism controversy and architect of Weltschmerz, as an ideologue of decerebration for whom ‘no brain at all is required’.23 Lewis was in fact under-representing the true extremity of Hartmann’s views on the matter, however. For, like Schopenhauer, Hartmann also saw the rise of the unconscious spine into the conscious brain as a self-cancelling system, one collapsing under its own nociceptive blossom into conjoint salvation and suicide—yet Hartmann took this conviction to ever more metaphysically maddening heights. His extensive readings in the neurological literature led him to the fundamental axiom that ‘a being is happier the obtuser is its nervous system, because the excess of pain over pleasure is so much less, and the entanglement in the illusion so much greater’.24 (By ‘illusion’ Hartmann is here referring to the reality-function and to its intertwinement with what Thomas Metzinger has, in our time, called the ‘cognitive scotoma’—or blind spot—that is our inherent bias for valuing existence over non-existence, regardless of the preponderance of suffering involved in this preference.)25 Hartmann accordingly proposed a scala doloris, or terrestrial chain of suffering, correlated with nervous complexification and centralization:

How much more painful is the life of the finely-feeling horse compared with that of the obtuse pig, or with that of the proverbially happy fish in the water, its nervous system being of a grade so far inferior! As the life of a fish is more enviable than that of a horse, so is the life of an oyster than that of a fish, and life of a plant than that of an oyster, until finally, on descending beneath the threshold of consciousness, we see individual pain entirely disappear.26

Encephalization is a procession of ever more exquisite forms of torment, imprisonment within the petals of ever more extravagant delusional dream-flowers. The history of the evolution of the nervous system is the history of the evolution of nociception and nothing more, the cerebrospinal system just a way for cunning pain—creeping into the insensate clod—to feel itself, to ramify, perpetuate, exaggerate itself. The spine is nothing but the symptomatology of the parasitism called existence. Thus, it is our euthanistic duty to destroy it. In this, Hartmann was, of course, in agreement with Schopenhauer.

However, as one of his American admirers, Edgar Saltus (1855–1921), later recounted in a historical recollection of the consolidation of the Schopenhauer-von-Hartmann ‘school’ of omnicidal soteriology, Hartmann was himself ‘far too dramatic’ to suggest ‘so tame’ a world-historical climax as individualistic asceticism, abstention, and anti-natalism, since, as Saltus relayed, it is not only ‘the species’ but the very ‘principle of existence itself’ which ‘must be extinguished’ and torn out at the root.27 The only therapeutic path, when faced with the cosmotrauma of the wounded galaxies, is active termination rather than passive renunciation: trauma didn’t just begin with us, we are its mere by-product, and thus, in order to treat the wound of existence, we must destroy not only the nervous system but the very principle of productivity that creates it. Only this would usher in the ultimate analgesic, of total extinction, which Saltus calls the ‘great quietus’.

It is the base-plan of German Idealism and Naturphilosophie to theorise a grand voyage from unconsciousness unto consciousness. The beneficiary of this Bildungsroman, its protagonist, is invariably cast as the ‘self’. From the conclusion of the journey, personeity is revealed as both end and engine (drive and destination, parent and child) of the entire long-drawn-out process. These are the satisfactions of self-consciousness: to look back, recollectively, and know that it has made itself. However, Fichte himself had implied that the protagonist of the logical machinery of this ur-idealist drama could be switched out and replaced. Since he acknowledged that the founding principle and actor of one’s own philosophy could not be anything apart from personal ‘inclination’,28 selecting selfhood as the endpoint of the entire process can be considered arbitrary.29 Schellingian Naturphilosophie, indeed, had arguably already switched ‘personeity’ out, replacing it with ‘vitality’ more broadly construed. Yet, what would a Naturphilosophie look like which switched self-reflection for pain-perception as the motor of its colossal telic machinery and, in so doing, therefore acknowledged that the human cerebrospinal system is just the climactic avenue for cosmic trauma to become self-aware of its meandering sufferings? This would be an everted and exacerbated Schellingianism, one that culminates not with the satisfactions of self-consciousness or with the profusions of unbounded vitality, but with the acknowledgement that the human cerebrospinal system is nought but a ticking time bomb.

Luckily enough, two decades before Hartmann arrived at his own pyrotechnic conclusion to the problem of universal history (to which we return shortly), an unlikely thinker had already rendered the outlines of just such a nocicentric Naturphilosophie and prescribed an explosive therapeutic solution for the problem of generalized cosmotraumatics.

Strangely enough, Naturphilosophie and Schellingianism proved extremely influential in Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century. Through the organ of Moscow’s Academy of Sciences, Schelling was perhaps more popular there than in his native Germany.30 But, of course, in this utterly different setting, Schelling’s thought inevitably underwent some interesting mutations. It was the eccentric prince Vladimir Odoevskii (1803–1869) who, in 1844, penned a short vignette that includes what can only be described as the Oldest System-Programme of Cosmotraumatics. Here he fleshes out the suggestion of a Naturphilosophie that sees the weaving-together of nervous systems as a function of cosmic suffering rather than universal spirit.

The vignette, only a few pages long, is a short story entitled ‘The Last Suicide’. Odoevskii referred to the piece, in prefatory notes, as a ‘truly monstrous creation’. That it most certainly is. It depicts a far future humanity that has reformatted the entire surface of the planet, erasing the biosphere with the technosphere. Urbanization and overpopulation grip the planet, as cities tumefy into one megapolis: ‘the fields turned into villages, villages into towns, and towns imperceptibly expanded their limits’. Cities are slow-motion explosions. Urban centres cluster, aggregating into one world-enveloping giga-city, and the world comes up against its limits to growth, unleashing ravaging disease and social collapse (thus darkly reinterpreting Kant’s intuitions on ‘hospitality’ and the finitude of global space in his Perpetual Peace).31 World-enclosing telegraphy is cast as a pandemic, neurulating the terrestrial surface in an inorganic film of intertwined bad news and infection vectors. (For the transcontinental connectivities that facilitate news of plague also materially enable the plague as news.) Here, Odoevskii writes, ‘everything was bursting with life, but life was killing itself’: it ‘appeared as superabundance, more horrible than hunger’. Accordingly, humanity becomes sickly, alienated, suicidal and mad. There emerges a caste of thanatic philosophers—an intellectual priest-caste, hierophants of death, midwifes of omnicide, gripped by deadly schwärmerei—who have been measuring and chronicling the traumas of earth history since its beginnings:

Soon there appeared among them men who seemed to have been keeping count of man’s suffering from ancient times—and as a result they deduced his entire existence. Their boundless insight grasped the past and pursued Life from the moment of its inception.32

An avid reader of Schelling and his peers, Odoevskii here renders a Naturphilosophie that cancels ‘life’ and ‘vitality’ as protagonists of the world-process, replacing them with colossal suffering. What is a spine and a brain other than a way for trauma to enter into self-relation and to recollect its history? Odoevskii’s thanatic Naturphilosophen have ‘measured the suffering of each nerve in man’s body, of each feeling in his soul with mathematical precision’ and in doing so they have created a transcendental deduction, a genetic cosmogony, an Erinnerung of nervous systems and their fruit: pain.

‘Their boundless insight grasped the past and pursued Life from the moment of its inception’, we learn. These ‘prophets of despair’ thus produce and promulgate their completed system of nihilative idealism, synthesizing the evolution of the CNS as the self-assembly of suffering:

They recalled [Life], thief-like, creeping first into the dark clod of earth, and there, between granite and gneiss, destroying one matter by another and slowly developing new, more perfect creations; then she made death of one kind of plant bring about the existence of others; by destroying plants she multiplied animals. With what cunning she made the enjoyment, the very existence of one kind depend on the sufferings of the other!33

Abiogenesis as insurrection: usurping nervous reflexivity is here seen as parasitically invading placid inorganic repose, puppeteering it into evolution’s long drawn-out ruse. This is the ururtrauma that Ferenczi later saw at the base of organic existence. And the irritable and ‘finely-feeling’ vertebrate CNS is, as ever, the crowning blossom of this ongoing disaster. As such, Odoevskii’s maddened Naturphilosophen

recalled, finally, how ambitious Life, extending her authority […], kept increasing the irritability of feelings, constantly adding new ways of suffering to a new perfection in each new being until she created a human being, and in his soul she unfolded with all her reckless activity.34

This unfolding, of course, culminates in nothing other than our own extreme degree of encephalization. Here, with ‘foresight’, cruel evolution ‘carefully covers’ the encephalon and spinal cord in the citadel of the skull and vertebral mast so as to ‘keep the instruments of future torture within them intact’. And, at a higher level, so too does this invading neural parasite anaesthetize us with the chicaneries (Metzinger’s ‘existence biases’) that, as Odoevskii avers, protect us from ‘seeing all the ugliness’ of our existential predicament. Or, as Freud would later expound, ‘the guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death’; life luxuriantly invests in itself, reaching a pinnacle in the centralized nervous system, only as a means to proliferate, prolong, and variegate its dominion of death; so, to live, to be an anticipatory system, to collapse into feedforward control, to become chronoceptive, is merely to prolong and extend the scope and sentence of one’s neurulated suffering.35 Evolution is the engine for pain-optimization. A cerebrospinal system is just way for suffering to feel itself.

As the title of ‘The Last Suicide’ suggests, following the thanatic Naturphilosophen’s divulgence of this Completed System of Cosmotraumatics, global eudaimonia slides into global euthanasia and the ultimate therapeutic is unveiled as the denizens of Odoevskii’s future world decide to go out with a bang. The thanatical doctors pledge themselves to the ‘only true and unfailing ally against [cruel existence’s] contrivances—to nothingness’, and the world welcomes a Last Messiah (‘at last he came, the Messiah of despair!’). Upon his pontifications, the population of earth pronounces an end to the self-elongating farce of the central nervous system. Stockpiling all of civilization’s explosives and placing them hemisphere-to-hemisphere, they blow up the entire planet, in order thus to end the traumas of terrestrial neurulation. All the ‘efforts of art, all ancient achievements of anger and vengeance, everything that could ever kill man, everything was summoned, and the vaults of the earth crumbled under the light cover of soil; and artificially refined nitrate, sulphur, and carbon filled them from one end of the equator to the other’. Placing dynamite beneath the world’s foundations, the rolling revolutions of the Neuzeit reach one final crescendo:

[I]t was the prearranged signal—the next moment fire flashed high, the roar of the disintegrating earth shook the solar system, torn masses of Alps and Chimborazo flew up into the air, groans were heard…then…again…ashes returned to ashes…everything became quiet…36

Considering that the whole of terrestrial history can be seen as a slow-motion exothermic explosion—speeding energy dispersal up to fever pitch in the form of techno-industrial civilization—it is suitable that it climaxes in such pyrotechnics. Nociceptive spines are raised tendentiously from the planet only in order to vengefully catapult back down upon it with planet-cracking technical force. The cervical zenith, the upward surge of the orthograde ‘solar animal’, is a ticking time bomb: for, just as the plant coheres with the sun through its blossom, the brain of the human animal coheres with the sun in its invention of the fission bomb. Perhaps Oken was correct, then, to propose that the technical art of war is the pinnacle of the world-process. As Ballard much later ventured, ‘World War III’—where bodies, sand, and weaponry become fused in the white-hot rippling heat of the blast—‘represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world, the last suicidal spasm of the dextrorotatory helix, DNA’; and it should, by now, come as no surprise that the Seer of Shepperton flattened all of this into our psychic longing to ‘recapture the perfect symmetry of the blastosphere’—to tear down the bilaterian imbalance inherited by upright balance.37

In projecting just such a fusional future, wherein planet-destroying munitions are revealed as the only therapy for the imbalances of the nervous system, Odoevskii’s 1844 forecast of civilizational suicide brought to fruition the exhortations of Hartmann’s ‘practical philosophy’, before the German philosopher had even proposed it. Yet Hartmann’s full injunction enjoins more than the mere destruction of our particular terran biosphere. The many ‘theoretical’ volumes outlining Hartmann’s cosmogonic philosophy end on a final cadence where, after hundreds of pages of scientific speculation on neuroanatomy and phylogenetics—of the piecing together of self-consciousness from slime to spine—Hartmann transitions to what he calls his ‘practical philosophy’ for the closing few chapters.

This practical portion, he writes, is the elucidation of cosmic history’s ‘ultimate end’: disclosed to us as ‘the goal of all intermediate ends’ throughout cosmology’s grandiose development from protozoan somnolence, through the sedentary oyster and ‘finely-feeling’ horse, all the way to simian self-consciousness. This ‘end’ is, of course, nothing other than universal cosmic annihilation, consummated through humanity’s act of voluntary self-extermination. It is what Saltus called the ‘great quietus’. The intended aim? To end the atrocity exhibition that is the nervous system, and to do so once and for all.

To carry out this duty, however, we cannot rely merely on destroying our own nervous apparatus, as Schopenhauer argued, or even just our biosphere, as Odoevskii had imagined. These therapeutic solutions are parochial in precisely that sense that Kant’s moral rigorism was designed to oppose. To become categorial, the injunction must become much more embracing. We must remove all potential for any other future nervous systems. Only this would constitute the ultimate therapeutic.

A theory of Spinal Catastrophism demands an ethic of soteriological therapizing, as Barker well knew.38 Priest and suicide: our solemn task is thus to become the universe’s way of killing itself; for we can’t just destroy ourselves, it is our duty to destroy everything. This, Hartmann expatiates, is the apotheosis of all cosmic striving—‘from primitive cell to the origin of man’—and is the pinnacle of ‘utmost world-progress’.39

The ‘tame’ Schopenhauer is here criticized and duly surpassed: for he ‘conceived the problem [only] in an individual sense’—thus obviating its categorical force. ‘[W]e must apprehend it universally’, Hartmann urges. Indeed, he pictures to himself the Schopenhauerian scenario—of ‘mankind [dying] out gradually by sexual continence’—and finds it entirely lacking, concluding that it would merely ‘perpetuate the misery of existence’. ‘What would it avail [if] all mankind should die out gradually’, he asked? No, this would not do: the ‘world-process’ or ‘Unconscious’ would just spit out another humanoid species, another upright ape, to recommence the procession of pain all over again. No, humanity must become the mouthpiece and manifestation of Absolute Negation within history (thus ending history from within, ‘coincid[ing] with the temporal end of the world-process, the last day’).40

We must become ground zero for Infinite Negation’s entrance into Finite Time. (Christological connotations are unavoidable: like Odoevskii’s Last Messiah, or Schopenhauer’s priest-and-sacrifice, we must all become what Jean Paul Richter contemporaneously called the coming ‘Dead Christ’.)41 Our extinction, therefore, cannot be privative: it must be superlative. We cannot go gently into the cosmic night; we must go out with a bang big enough to somehow become self-propagating; it is our solemn duty to enact a negation so superlative that it cannibalizes existence from within. It is our strictly analgesic duty: to remove not only our own nociception, but to remove the potential for any future nervous systems—anywhere.

Without providing details as to precisely how this is to be achieved, Hartmann’s ‘categorical imperative’ demands that we therefore destroy the entire universe from within. Only a ‘universal negation of the Will’, he insisted, would bring about a world-historical negation so complete as to divide cosmic existence by zero. Ergo, this end-point of the ‘world-process’ is the ‘cosmical-universal negation of the will, as the last moment, after which there shall be no more volition, activity or time’.42 From this endpoint, chronogenesis is thus revealed as a self-collapsing deviation from otherwise obsidian repose. It is just the ecphoric recall of its own inexistence. Philosophy, which Hartmann calls ‘icy cognition’ as ‘insensitive as stone’, is thus the temporal unfolding of nought, as nought but the self-explication of this end, and it is the end announcing itself through us, as it were. Reason, as Kant had implied in spite of himself, is crystalline eternity leaking backwards into the time-tainted present: such that neurulation, weaving up through the spine’s neural arches into the encumbering human brain, is just how history pieces together its own terminus.

It is the duty of a spine to destroy the universe; or, a spine is the universe’s method of acknowledging this duty to self-destruct. Hartmann proclaimed that even if humanity—or a terran successor species—proved unfit for the task, then some alien exo-civilization would eventually elsewhere accomplish it.43 Standing upright, as even Kant had realised back in his 1771 anatomical review of the cosmic curse of orthograde posture, had never coincided with the interests of so-called ‘life’. Listening for outer space signals in the 1980s, Barker was evidently musing on the same set of problems. Given our own existence, it was clear that no other exo-civilization had yet accomplished intelligence’s grand soteriological task, Barker remarked.44 Eventually, he would find the silence deafening.