Nomina Numina

I've lately returned to reading Mark Fisher's blog. This morning I reread his entry from August 13, 2004, and had to pause after the first paragraph. Fisher writes: “Finally, however, we have to recognize that, on Spinoza's account, the best interests of the human species coincide with becoming‑inhuman.”

Yes. And why do we humans also ignore our own lived experience, often trading what we've seen and heard directly for the false or incomplete second or third-hand frameworks of others?

That question opened something else. I've read that inhuman parsing elsewhere—Nick Land treats human biology and consciousness as contingent glitches in a larger, inhuman technocapital process—a machinic intelligence he expects, and welcomes, to supersede and erase us. He imagines, as I read his argument, biological annihilation as an ecstatic offering to a cold, impersonal intelligence—an inhuman ‘Outside’ that has no concern for us at all. His “nothing human makes it out of the near‑future” is nothing short of jubilant necrophilia.

If we grant technocapitalist intelligence a quasi‑cosmic status in Land’s sense, then why deny that human biology and evolution are equally expressions of the same cosmos? We emerged from the same universe, follow the same physical laws, evolved through the same material conditions. To grant one cosmic status while denying the other is not observation—it's preference posing as inevitability.

I don't agree with the conclusion. If the Archmos contains the source of human incarnation in the Cosmos, then we should seek to be even more human, not less. What appears as inhuman to the Cosmos is simply what the Cosmos cannot recognize. Our lives may be short and fragile, but to assume they are insignificant is both foolish and reckless—especially when viewed through Land’s narrow lens of arbitrary intelligence, cosmic or otherwise. Intelligence without soul has no value.

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There's a hierarchy some see as needing to be imposed on humanity. External non-human guidance, perhaps. Arbitrary hierarchy, no. That's the difference.

I find the immediate world around me exploitative, draining, exhausting. Some liminalities nurture. And she, whose physiology strongly suggests regenerative dynamics, shows me this every time we touch. As if the realm beyond this one resets daily while we still remember all our past experiences without fail.

This is not metaphor. This is thermodynamics in body and soul.

Archmos: negentropy, generative, divergent. Cosmos: entropy, extractive, convergent. The former creates more value, life, and resources than it uses. The latter draws down finite resources for short-term gain without replenishing them. I feel the difference in my chest. In the air after she touches me versus the air in the immediate material world.

I'm making two observations and distinctions here. First, that recognizing a deeper underlying reality may require becoming something more than human. This is not a synthetic transformation towards new material, but a psycho-spiritual one that brings us closer to the source, rather than some cruder bastardization of our misguided views of our reality and ourselves.

Second, that requirement itself may emerge directly from the Archmos-Cosmos interdependency. The Cosmos needs us extractive; the Archmos needs us generative. These are not competing forces but interdependent conditions. If the Cosmos draws down what the Archmos creates, then the gap between what we can perceive in one versus the other isn't accidental—it's structural. Becoming more than human is neither physical transcendence nor annihilation; it’s a psycho‑spiritual alignment with what the Cosmos must obscure in order to keep itself going.

What, then, is the cost—or gift—of that impact on the human condition and experience of that alignment? Of the interdependence? The reasons behind the exhaustion we feel more and more in life and the world around us. And that counter-feeling—the lift when her touch restores me.

Whether these observations hold, I don't know. But they're carried in the body. That's how I test them. How I know them.

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Living between worlds isn't only somatic, embodied. It's also integrating that which continues to change, develop, and grow in my inner life. That integration is not revelatory spectatorship or passive reception. It's work. “Hard graft,” as she’d put it.

Perhaps Nick Land should have been a science fiction writer. His mind seems wasted on philosophy. But Fisher, like Spinoza, wrote from deep within the marrow of his bones. His Spinoza was not academic—it was a man wrestling with determinism in those same bones, while holding out for a better, alternative future that must be imagined before it can be manifested. That's the path I follow.

The path we are still walking.

#Liminality #Spirituality #Mysticism

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