The Origin of the Universe and Event of Birth: Phenomenological Parallels

ion. This mental split in representation of the universe as substance and accident does not correspond however to the immediate experience of the universe in the event of one’s life, for it is in this event that it is exactly impossible to make a distinction between “substance” of life and life as an “accident”. Correspondingly it is problematic to look for the cause of the universe (as effect) if it is perceived as coaevus universum, that is as “simultaneous” with one’s life. In other words, the question of the facticity of the universe (as an effect of some cause) cannot be even addressed if the universe is seen as the totality of all. All rhetoric about the origination of the universe in the Big Bang, as the “cause” of the universe, has no philosophical significance, because it does not address the issue of the “cause” of the Big Bang itself. Even the appeal to the “particular” Big Bang taking place, for example, in the course of inflationary generation of many bubble universes does not reach any goal, since the cause of the ensemble of those bubbles indwelling in the “substance” of the “inflaton” field does not remove the question of the facticity of this field. Indeed, in analogy with ancient Greek philosophies this field can be considered as substance of the same mental kind as “water” of Thales from Miletus from which the actual state of affairs in the world can be produced by potentially infinite ways. One particular characteristic of the universe as an event amounts to the fact that the numbers of possible explanations of its facticity is indefinite and increases in proportion to the cosmological hermeneutics that cosmologists and their interpreters produce. The assertion of the universe as a whole as an event does not deny its temporality (understood in cosmology as the universe’s evolving in