| Summary: | Philosophical practice is guided by an ideal of autonomous intelligence: to think for oneself. But is a fully autonomous form of intelligence possible? Autonomy in thinking may be thought to be relative or absolute. First, one may imagine an asymptotic social process of self-ruling; in this case, to become philosophically healthy would then mean to become <i>more</i> virtuous and <i>more</i> autonomous cognitively, <i>relative</i> to others or to a previous version of ourselves. But there seems to be a contradiction here, as autonomy seems to imply, by definition, completeness rather than comparison or relativity, the latter being seen as a form of dependence. Hence, a second stance, absolute rather than relative: the idea that some humans can achieve a perfect state of philosophical health, implying full autonomous intelligence. This hypothesis was historically thought to imply a state of <i>autarkia</i>, self-divinization, or <i>autotheosis</i>: being divine by one’s own effort. Many have forgotten that most ancient philosophers, chief among them Epicurus, Plato, and Aristotle, thought this likeness to a god (<i>homoiosis theoi</i>) to be the reward of <i>theoria</i>, a theoretical life. I argue that we can reconcile relative and absolute cognition by understanding autonomous intelligence to be a <i>cosmotheosis</i>: a becoming divine not as an act of singular separation, but by welcoming the multiversal reality that we already are, and partaking in the universal creative <i>worlding</i> process referred to here as “Creal”. In this sense, philosophical practice calls for a pantheistic form of religiosity; a shared cosmology that compossibilizes all intercreative entities.
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