In the preceding chapters I have been trying to show, first, that life, emergence and evolution all share in the anticipatory bearing of nature that came into bud most visibly in our own desire to know. Secondly, I have been arguing that there is need for a rich (stereoscopic) empiricism that takes seriously the fact that critical intelligence is inseparable from the rest of nature. And thirdly, these first two considerations have led me to emphasize that the whole picture of nature changes dramatically from that of naturalism once we view life, emergence and evolution in terms of a representation of nature inclusive of critical intelligence. I have been led to conclude that scientific naturalism is finally incoherent since its formal view of nature is not large enough, logically speaking, to encompass either the fact of critical intelligence or the infinite horizon of being and truth anticipated by the desire to know.

Having looked at life, emergence and biological evolution in their actual continuity with the desire to know, it is now time to reach out and draw the whole cosmos more explicitly into our subjectivity-enriched picture of nature.