We’re Tormented and Tantalized by Cosmic Wildness

How science confronts us with the absurdity of nature’s godless creativity

Paradoxically, what we might as well call the Age of Science, in which microscopes and telescopes showed us the alien extents of nature both near and far is also a narcissistic age in which many of us have retreated to our inner depths.

Scientists found they had to develop a method of objectification to understand nature’s counterintuitive complexities, and this kind of knowledge proved alienating. We compensated for this secular form of apocalyptic revelation, for this stand-in for the Godot who never arrived as promised by the messianic scriptures, by indulging in a culture of individualism that’s explicitly, proudly aimed at fulfilling our petty desires.

Capitalism, democracy, modern art, and the rule of law are humanistic in that they prioritize the reservoir of interests we generated only as we set aside theological fantasies and attempted to blot out the real world’s inhumanity by giving free rein to our artificial self-expressions. The weirder the universe seemed, according to scientific explanations, the more we were compelled to delve into our unconscious and into the human creative potential.

Consequently, modern philosophers faced the problem of bridging this apparent dichotomy. Rene Descartes popularized the conviction that we’re intimately acquainted only with our nature as thinking beings since only that nature can’t be doubted away with yet more thoughts that prove we’re thinking beings. All else is foreign to us, which is tantamount to saying that people, as such, are anomalous in nature, like decadent aristocrats caught out in the wild.

How, then, can we hope to understand the external, mindless world?

To be sure, we can model or track natural patterns, but that’s only assigning labels that enable us to predict what will unfold in the systems we observe. Science affords us no comparable Cartesian intimacy with nature. On the contrary, by powering high-tech industries, science would have us replace the wilderness with an artificial, humanized habitat.

What fundamentally, then, is the wildness that characterizes the objectified, godless cosmos? I’ve reflected on this perplexing question elsewhere, but here’s another way of answering it.

Dualism and Darwinism

First, we can begin to deflate Cartesian dualism with the Darwinian perspective. From biology we know that we evolved from wild animal species, and that life in general emerged from nature’s nonliving form of creativity.

We know, too, from our abundant modern self-awareness that our species is preoccupied not with acquiring wisdom, contrary to our Latin name, Homo sapiens, but specifically with expanding our spheres of technological control and cultural assimilation. We’re essentially civilizers, as in terraformers, even if it took tens of thousands of years for our ancestors to develop the tools necessary to fulfill this inherent ambition.

From the modern, science-centered perspective, at least, the lifestyle of nomadic hunter-gatherers wasn’t wholly human, but was largely animalistic and thus unfit for people who have inherent rights. Life in the wilderness is all-too threatening to those rights, so that if civilized parents should attempt to raise their children in the wild, they’d be susceptible to governmental intrusion into their affairs.

Indeed, far from seeking even instrumental wisdom, meaning the ability to get what we want, we’ve been inclined to sacrifice our wants if that meant giving our civilizing endeavours a religious rationale. The gods called for the lower classes to sacrifice themselves for the greater social good and for the exaltation of the more civilized upper class.

In any case, the upshot is that whereas we mean to terminate the wilderness with our array of artifacts, nature took a crucial step towards terminating itself long ago by evolving a species of inveterate civilizers. Nature did so with no plan in mind, but only spasmodically experimented with trials and errors, creating a plethora of life forms, and giving each their due, from bacteria to single-celled organisms, to plants, to dinosaurs, to mammals, to intelligent terraformers.

It’s not as though our species fell from the sky to meet this monstrous threat which is nature. Nature seems alien to us mainly because our brains can’t easily encompass the innumerable haphazard stages that link even the cutting edge of modernity to nature’s savageries. The wild has been long in evolving our kind, and deep time is as mysterious and as tantalizing as outer space.

Still, Darwinism seems to block us again, by recognizing that very temporal barrier to our attempt to fathom our evolutionary origin. We know that we evolved from animals, but that’s not the same as understanding at an intuitive level what it means to be wild.

Deducing that wildness is the negation of human pride

At this point, though, deduction can step in since we can specify what wildness is by negating the aspects of civilized personhood of which we’re so proud. If we presume that the ideal person is alive, self-aware, self-interested, intelligent, civilized, moral, law-abiding, ambitious, proud, and deliberately productive, nature must be the opposite.

The universe is productive, too, mind you, and indeed monumentally so, but nature’s productivity is only accidental, and nature isn’t resolved to preserve any of its constructs. Even as stars and planets will far outlast our species, that’s only because these constructs happened not to have been obliterated in an earlier, more chaotic stage of the natural order’s unfolding. Plenty of other stars and planets were destroyed as they collided with each other, eons ago. The present order seems stable as we view the same stars in the sky each night, but this is an illusion maintained by our limited perspective. Galaxies will one day likely be flung apart by dark energy, and all the stars will go out.

Nature shuffles its parts without creating energy so that the gamut of cosmic products will be nullified by entropy.

By contrast, civilizers try, at least, to protect their artifacts, treating them implicitly as so many extended body parts. We build walls around our societies to preserve them against nature’s onslaught of indiscriminate gifts and curses.

Cosmic wildness as existential absurdity

But can these deductions by negation spur an intuition of wildness? Perhaps the primary obstacle here is the sheer absurdity of nature’s infantile fertility. We prefer to dwell on what makes sense since contradictions hurt the critical mind. Try to imagine a square circle, and you throw up your hands in frustration. We dismiss absurdities as unreal since we presume that nature is perfectly logical.

Yet that very conceit of universal reasonableness blinds us to the nature of cosmic wildness. Nature can hardly be logical since nature obeys no rules at all. The notion that nature is logical is based on an extended metaphor that flatters us. We think that our social norms are so worthy of our submission that all reality must likewise adhere to them. As a pristine wilderness, however, nature submits to no ideal, including the values of reason.

Despite the utility of assuming that nature is logical or rational, we can confirm that this pragmatism leaves open nature’s essential indifference to these imperatives by recognizing the profound absurdity of every single natural event. Everything that’s scientifically explained and thereby objectified is necessarily spooky and absurd from the perspective of socializers and civilizers. Nothing is more outrageous than godless, impersonal, pointless, but vast creativity, and nothing’s more monstrous than nature’s abundance.

The notion that nature must be reasonable is as wrongheaded as the empty religious boast that a person dwells at the universe’s supernatural point of origin. Only minds can be reasonable. Objects or physical constructs are monstrous in being neutral towards our rational expectations. We credit nature with reasonableness when we’re only complimenting ourselves for having devised a working model of some natural process. Yet no such model is adequate even to any part of natural reality since that reality spirals off into infinite fractal complexities, the whole of which dwarfs our conception of reason.

Again, the whole cosmos is absurd and wild, not rational, and we ought to deem it blasphemous to say otherwise. Thus, intuiting the nature of wildness would amount to reconciling ourselves to existential absurdity.

Yet in turn, that reconciliation would be like the attempt to walk upwards on a downwards escalator. Even as nature evolved its nemesis in civilized personhood, nature hid itself by ensuring that our mentality would prefer to think in ordered, mature ways. After all, that’s a condition of our progressive enterprise: we mean to apply the blueprints we imagine, to impose a meaningful order onto nature’s hideous concatenations.

In quasi-Kantian terms, then, nature’s wildness is the “noumenal” unknown that lurks behind our all-too human conceptual simplifications. Or in existential terms, this wildness is the absurdity that mocks our heroic ambition to find redemptive patterns everywhere.

If we would understand the wilderness, we must contemplate the terror of irredeemable absurdity, and art rather than philosophy might be a more fitting modality for that endeavour.

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