I well understand provocation, lol, so no worries, there. I certainly did not mean that one ought not to question such things.
I see what you mean, with regard to Lovecraft, but he makes very clear in his letters that his attraction to the cosmic perspective is predominantly
emotional. See, for instance, the following excerpt from a letter of his:
Quote:As for me, I think I have the actual cosmic feeling very strongly. In fact I know that my most poignant emotional experiences are those which concern the lure of unplumbed space, the terror of the encroaching outer void, & the struggle of the ego to transcend the known & established order of time, (time, indeed, above all else, & nearly always in a backward direction) space, matter, force, geometry, & natural law in general".
--H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 17, 1930
To me, this emotional as well as intellectual attraction to cosmicism is as revealing a marker as any of a "spiritual" perspective, regardless of Lovecraft's consciously avowed mechanistic materialist philosophy. Indeed, like Nietzsche, Lovecraft seems to me to be very spiritual, even if despite himself, in ways that matter to me, at least, and much more so than the majority who take that title openly.