Enlightenment and Cosmic Horror

H.P. Lovecraft, existentialism, and the dark side of modernity

What’s the relevance, if any, of cosmic horror, or of literature that emphasizes horrific emotions such as dread, disgust, and awe to modern philosophy?

On a first pass, the one seems to have little to do with the other. Modern philosophy is largely a handmaiden to “modernity,” to individualism, science, technological progress, and liberty in political and economic transactions (democracy and capitalism). And that modern world is supposed to be uplifting and progressive.

Early-modern philosophers secularized the monotheistic expectation of an apocalyptic culmination of history: instead of waiting for God to arrive to fix all our problems, we’d get to work and fix them ourselves. We’d return to an appreciation for ancient pagan pride in human nature, instead of demonizing our godlike potential. After all, the monotheistic faiths had become dangerously wrong in that not only had the prophecies been erroneous and the scriptures debunked by historical-critical methods of interpretation, but the exclusive claims of Christian sects and of Islam led to limitless persecutions and wars.

When you think of modern Western philosophy, you think of dry, academic disputes about cognitive technicalities since the sciences took over the big questions of how to make us happy or of the nature of consciousness and the universe. Academic philosophy has taken a back seat as a stage for pompous intellectuals to show off even though hardly anyone else is watching them.

The Dawning of Modern Horror

However, this rosy view of modernity that’s made philosophical questioning seem rude and ungrateful reveals just the corporatized, solipsistic narcissism that makes greater, perhaps non-academic philosophizing necessary.

The history of later modernity is itself largely a tale of dawning horror. The first inkling that something was amiss in the godless modern age was the inhumanity of the English Industrial Revolution which conflicted with all the happy-talk about calculating means of maximizing happiness. With few governmental regulations, children worked in dangerous conditions, on machines with little training or in mineshafts. True, the overall standard of living began to rise consistently in industrialized societies, but so did the population size of meat-eaters and the automation of labour, which are trends that don’t necessarily have happy endings.

Then the sinking of the Titanic dealt a blow to secular utopian visions. The conceit was that Reason could replace God and make life easier with technological innovations. And then came the two world wars which made a mockery of that presumption.

Modernity had indeed made life easier especially for the upper class which had always prospered, even long before the Scientific Revolution. Modern progress had also eliminated some ailments for everyone, brought millions out of crushing poverty, and empowered middle classes with job opportunities and modes of entertainment that used to be reserved for the wealthy.

But look behind the curtain of that progress and you find that the gadgets we love to buy are manufactured and distributed by labourers that are treated like the machines that will soon replace them. The food that feeds our flourishing populations derives from tortured livestock, the growth of cities and farms that destroys biodiversity, and the pollution that causes global warming. We’re responsible for the sixth mass extinction in the evolution of life.

The early existentialists, including Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky thought carefully about the upshot of modernity, and later existentialists such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre amplified their misgivings in response to the world wars. Nietzsche, for example, said that the “death of God” is a cultural catastrophe since it creates a void that only a superheroic species can fill. Alas, the modern creature comforts threaten to democratize the decadence that used to infect only the royals or the richest one percent of the population. As consumers, we’re trained not to be skeptical, to play hard and to work harder and to die without having examined the meaning of our life.

Heidegger said we’re liable to be inauthentic humans, to avoid confronting the existential structure of human life. Instead of recognizing the stakes of choosing what we should do in the shadow of our inevitable death, we take our orders from others and act as though we were machines. We submit to the artificial environments we construct, allowing our handiwork to dehumanize us.

Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror

But the writer who most explicitly tied modernity to horror was Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a weird fiction author from the early twentieth century who invented a form of cosmic horror. Prior to Lovecraft there were plenty of horror stories, namely of the Catholic, Gnostic, or Gothic variety. There were demons that could lead us astray, tempting us into sin and sabotaging God’s plan for our salvation. The result was the vision of the ultimate horror of eternity spent in Hell apart from God’s love.

Lovecraft updated the horror genre to reflect God’s evident absence and irrelevance. In the Lovecraftian mythos, scientists replace theologians as the surveyors of cosmic being, discovering unspeakable truths about our accidental rise to ephemeral glory and about our insignificance in the wider scheme. Again, liberal humanists had secularized the ancient anthropocentric religions, which had projected human mentality onto the forces of nature in the forms of spirits and gods. In the modern world, the wilderness that’s indifferent to our survival and to our wishes is disposed of and replaced by an artificial habitat that caters to our needs.

Lovecraft’s weird fiction uses all-powerful alien and ancient god characters as symbols to burst that modern bubble. The wilderness seeps back into our metropolises, as scientists piece together the cosmic frame of reference in which all our secular triumphs look like vain childish outbursts. We discover, for example, that immortal, all-powerful aliens created our species to serve them as slaves, but we were given a “moment’s” reprieve while these alien overlords were vacationing for an eon or two. The alien god Cthulhu returns, reconquers the planet in the blink of an eye, and shatters our sanity.

This weird pantheon reflects the disenchanted wilderness. Lovecraft’s alien gods are indifferent and inscrutable rather than evil. Morality as we know it is irrelevant to intergalactic life. Life emerges and evolves in the universe and faces nature’s foundational absurdity. There’s no supreme deity at the root of being, but just the amoral energies and materials that scientists posit. The real world is objective, so the subjective values that reassure us are gross distortions of where we truly stand. We cling to those values the way children cling to security blankets or as the ancients clung to their religious brands and mascots.

The Question of Our Adequate Character

With this background in mind, let’s reframe the question of the relevance of horror to philosophy. In ordinary terms, the question is twofold:

(1) Is there a state of mind needed for a best way to live?

(2) Is horror integral to that state of mind?

The first question is really whether there’s some higher calling so that our choices and actions matter. We can think of this higher calling as a zeitgeist, a human potentiality, existential authenticity, honour, or some cosmic role we should be playing.

Late-modernity or so-called “postmodern” incredulity might seem to have settled this question in the negative: according to this way of thinking, all truths are subjective and relative. We alone decide what has meaning and what doesn’t, and we can change our minds. Moreover, there’s no perspective beyond what we can muster, and the rest of the universe doesn’t care what we do. We’re the only ones watching.

Even so, notice how concepts of enlightenment resurface even in the trendiest, most secular, progressive crowds. So-called wokesters who are skeptical of all capitalistic and nondemocratic institutions are nevertheless confident that justice matters, that even microaggressions and tasteless jokes are intolerable, and that standards of social justice apply to all thinking people.

Saying that our values are “subjective” and “relative” rather than objective and inherent doesn’t necessarily entail nihilism or complete indifference as to how we should live. True, after modernity has done away with the intuitiveness of the old theistic religions, it’s no longer clear that the operations of the nonhuman universe dictate our values. Yet neither is an answer to that first question arbitrary.

For example, it seems to make a difference whether someone is stuck in the past or is being true to what the philosopher GWF Hegel called the present “world-historical stage.” Even if history has been self-made rather than guided by a higher power, there are objective developments that do us credit and there are others that cast doubt on the worthwhileness of our kind. The growth of human populations is one such objective measure, others being globalization, computational efficiency (Moore’s law), technological empowerment, and so on. We can be aware of these trends or we can be oblivious to them, and our lifestyles can stand for obsolete worldviews or for prophetic announcements of where we’re heading.

The second question suggests that, under the cosmic circumstances, there’s something grotesque about a modern social or individual character that’s too rosy. The stories of Franz Kafka, “The Stepford Wives,” “The Matrix,” and “Westworld” gave voice to this suspicion that as we’re obsessed with consuming goods, we’re turned into items that are, in turn, consumed. And Edvard Munch’s picture, “The Scream,” has come to symbolize the modern anxiety that typically lies under the surface of our glib preoccupations and self-deceptions.

We take on a false sense of our importance, losing sight of the big picture, and even as scientific knowledge expands to encompass the Big Bang, black holes, and quantum mechanics, and as knowledge and art proliferate on the internet, we paradoxically occupy ever smaller social worlds. We explore less of what’s available because our behaviours are routinized, our sensibilities numbed by the hollowness of the digital products that captivate our short-sighted attention.

The value of human life becomes as superficial as that of the goods we consume. (We are what we “eat,” indeed.) We identify with our carefully managed personas that are plastered across our social media accounts, because those personas are oases of self-made purpose in a meaningless, inhuman wilderness.

An appreciation of modern horror, then, might be a sign that you get it, that you understand what our species has historically done, what the existential stakes are in our choices, and what the world really is, where we stand in it, and what we should be doing as a result.

Enlightened Theodicy

But perhaps the best way to face the question of horror’s relevance is to consider the most worthy alternative, which is the tranquility or contentment offered largely by Eastern philosophies and religions such as Buddhism.

Again, we needn’t concern ourselves here with the exoteric religious alternatives to modern horror since modernity has neutered them. Nor need we take for granted how modernity is sold, since the benefits of liberty are ironically undermined, in turn, by modernity’s dark side, by the threat of horror in the face of unvarnished reality. The sword of reason that slew the gods is liable to cut us down too.

Yet long before the revolutions of individual rights, monks would disassociate from the mass hallucinations that make up conventional wisdom, and they would confront the nature of their consciousness with meditation or entheogens, and somehow find nirvana or inner peace.

The choice is thus between two pictures of enlightenment, one that envisions a happy or at least a neutral cosmic equilibrium, as in the oneness of Self and World (Atman and Brahman), and the other that denies there’s a tidy theodicy, an absolute harmony that should reassure those who know the most. The question is whether the accumulation of experience and the application of reason are worth it or whether the human adventure is a Faustian bargain. Are we wise in pursuing our Luciferian potential to uncover all the universe’s secrets or is the universe clowning us via that vanity? Are we Homo sapiens or Homo fatuus (foolish people)?

Let’s set aside the abstractions and focus on the question of suffering. In its evolution, life is a magnificent emergence, but it’s also a brutal one. Living things feed off each other, which is why the very concept of individual rights is almost a miraculous invention. From the genetic perspective, body types are vehicles for safeguarding and for transmitting the genetic code. But living bodies are doubly instrumental in being used by each other. Predators use prey for food, and even vegetarians use plants for sustenance.

Living things parasitize each other in countless ways, resulting not just in untold suffering in the animal world, but in the absurd, amoral spectacle that is life’s panoply of species. The countless acts of killing are outrageous, but so are the mating dances, the hoarding of mates in dominance hierarchies, and the innumerable rapes, betrayals, and other narrow-minded acts of savagery.

There’s heroism in natural competition and cooperation, but there’s also an overwhelming bathos, an anticlimax resulting from the intervention of chance in life’s affairs. How many times has one animal saved its companion from certain destruction only to be destroyed by chance the very next moment? How seldom is poetic justice found “under the sun,” as Ecclesiastes puts it?

What, then, is the enlightened reaction to this apparent disequilibrium, to this monumental embarrassment in the way life has had to propagate itself, given the universe’s indifference to its struggles? Should we discount the humiliation as a mere illusion, exercising mental tricks to foster the peace that comes from not caring much about anything? Or should we give pride of place to the horror, despair, disgust, awe, and grim resolve that speak to the real antagonism between natural reality and the clever, indignant creatures we’ve proved to be?