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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Forty-Two Axioms of Inflation

Why First Principles and First Values Collapses Under Its Own Metaphysical Weight

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

The First Principles and First Values project of Marc Gafni (with Zak Stein and collaborators) announces itself as a civilizational necessity. Humanity faces a “meta-crisis.” Value has collapsed. Intimacy is disordered. Only a reconstructed metaphysics—an evolving perennialism grounded in intrinsic cosmic value—can save us.

This is not modest philosophy. It is salvific architecture.

But once stripped of rhetoric and rendered in analytic form, the 42 propositions reveal something less like a coherent moral ontology and more like a metaphysical confidence trick: an ambitious but under-argued attempt to smuggle teleology and normativity back into the cosmos under the banner of “evolution.”

Let us be precise.

1. The Meta-Crisis as Metaphysical Lever

The project begins with a plausible sociological observation: we live in an age of fragmentation, technological acceleration, and weakened shared narratives.

But from this entirely defensible premise, it leaps to a metaphysical conclusion:

Because coordination is difficult, we need a new ontological foundation of value.

This is a non sequitur.

Pluralistic societies function through procedural norms, not shared cosmic teleologies. Liberal democracy does not require a unified metaphysical story; it requires institutional constraint and negotiated coexistence. The inference from “fragmentation” to “ontological reconstruction” is aspirational, not logically necessary.

Crisis becomes rhetorical leverage for metaphysical inflation.

2. The Smuggled Teleology

The philosophical core of the 42 propositions is the claim that evolution exhibits intrinsic directionality toward increasing value, interiority, and complexity.

But here is the critical point:

Increasing complexity does not entail increasing value.

Evolutionary biology describes adaptation under selection pressures. It does not describe moral ascent. Bacteria remain evolutionarily successful. Parasites thrive. Extinction is common.

To move from:

• Evolution trends toward complexity

to

• Evolution expresses intrinsic moral direction

requires an additional metaphysical premise. That premise is never rigorously defended. It is assumed.

This is not an escape from the naturalistic fallacy. It is a poetic restatement of it.

3. Narrative Ontology: The Anthropomorphic Universe

“God is stories.” The universe has plotlines. Reality unfolds narratively.

At the level of human meaning, narrative structure is undeniable. But projecting narrative structure onto the cosmos is an anthropomorphic move unless independently justified.

Stars do not pursue character arcs. Entropy does not resolve thematic tension.

To treat cosmic processes as plotlines is metaphorical unless one provides a metaphysical argument for narrative as ontologically primitive. The 42 propositions gesture toward such an argument but never supply one.

The result is cosmic dramaturgy masquerading as ontology.

4. Anthro-Ontology and the Epistemic Void

The system's epistemology rests on “anthro-ontology”—the claim that interior phenomenological disclosure reveals real features of value.

This move attempts to avoid crude objectivism. Fine. But it introduces a fatal problem:

How do we adjudicate competing disclosures?

If one mystic experiences cosmo-erotic unity and another experiences tragic absurdity, what decides between them? Without shared epistemic criteria, anthro-ontology collapses into expressive pluralism.

The system claims realism while operating like existentialism.

5. Evolving Perennialism: Stable Truth That Evolves?

The phrase “evolving perennialism” sounds sophisticated. It is conceptually unstable.

Perennialism traditionally asserts timeless metaphysical truths. Evolution implies contingency and change.

To combine them requires careful modal clarification:

• Are the first principles necessary truths?

• Emergent regularities?

• Narrative heuristics?

The text oscillates between these possibilities. It wants both metaphysical depth and adaptive flexibility. What it produces is equivocation.

6. The Moral Urgency Shield

A striking feature of the document is its tone of urgency. Techno-feudalism looms. Surveillance capitalism metastasizes. Humanity risks self-annihilation.

This is rhetorically powerful. But urgency does not validate ontology.

History is full of grand metaphysical systems justified by crisis. Crisis intensifies longing for coherence. It does not automatically generate philosophical clarity.

When metaphysics becomes a response to anxiety, inflation follows.

7. The Structural Pattern

Once you abstract from the rhetoric, the structure of the 42 propositions is clear:

1. Diagnose fragmentation.

2. Assert intrinsic cosmic value.

3. Interpret evolution teleologically.

4. Claim participatory access to value.

5. Offer a comprehensive narrative framework as solution.

This is not analytic philosophy. It is visionary system-building.

Visionary system-building is not illegitimate. But it carries enormous burdens of precision. Those burdens are not met here.

8. The Deeper Problem: Totalization

The project does not merely propose ethical principles. It claims to articulate first principles—foundational truths about reality itself.

History teaches caution. Every attempt to ground politics, culture, and morality in a comprehensive metaphysical system risks overreach. Totalizing frameworks tend to:

• Conflate description and prescription.

• Elevate metaphors into ontological commitments.

• Insulate themselves through moral urgency.

The 42 propositions show signs of all three.

9. What Remains Valuable?

To be fair:

• The critique of nihilism is legitimate.

• The defense of intrinsic dignity is admirable.

• The desire for integration across domains is intellectually serious.

But one does not need cosmic teleology to defend human dignity. One does not need narrative metaphysics to resist techno-authoritarianism. One does not need evolving perennialism to ground moral realism.

Secular moral philosophy has wrestled with these problems for decades with far greater argumentative rigor.

Final Assessment

First Principles and First Values is not trivial. It is ambitious, imaginative, and rhetorically charged.

But philosophically it suffers from:

• Teleological assertion without demonstration.

• Normative inflation from descriptive premises.

• Conceptual ambiguity about realism and epistemology.

• Metaphorical elevation to ontological status.

It wants to be the new metaphysical constitution of humanity.

What it delivers is a spiritually stylized manifesto still awaiting analytic discipline.

The tragedy is not that it reaches too high. Philosophy must sometimes dare. The tragedy is that it mistakes reach for rigor—and narrative force for ontological proof.

If humanity requires first principles, they will have to survive harder scrutiny than this.