Cosmos

Cosmos is a major work by Michel Onfray, published in 2015, in which he proposes a materialist and immanent philosophical cosmology. In Cosmos, Onfray seeks to reconcile thought with nature. He opposes metaphysical and religious traditions that have separated human beings from the sensible world and upheld an abstract transcendence. By contrast, he affirms an immanent vision of reality, in which human beings are fully embedded in the fabric of the natural world, governed by its laws, cycles, and rhythms. The book draws on a long lineage of naturalist and materialist thinkers—from the Presocratics to Epicurus, from Lucretius to Nietzsche—to defend the idea that the cosmos is neither created nor directed by an external moral purpose. It is order, movement, and becoming, without any transcendent design. To think the world, therefore, is to learn how to inhabit it lucidly, rather than to withdraw from it. Cosmos presents itself at once as a philosophical essay, a materialist manifesto, and a poetic meditation on our place in the universe. It occupies a central place in Onfray’s work by providing a cosmic foundation for his project of an embodied, earthly, and resolutely anti-transcendent philosophy.