The Evolving Universe’s Monstrous Character
The clash between physical and evolutionary views of nature’s foundations
Which science is more fundamental, physics or biology?
The standard answer is that physics is broader. Physics deals with the matter out of which everything is made, including living things, and with the forces and constants that constrain particles and their aggregates. Physicists’ models of matter and energy tell us what objects essentially are.
If psychology and the arts and humanities tell us about ourselves, our minds, and societies, physics tells us about everything other than the human-made world of personal consciousness, values, and intelligent designs.
If we imagine that there are roughly two kinds of things that exist, objects and subjects, physics and chemistry tell us what it means to be an object. An object has mass and energy, it derives from quantum mechanical probabilities, and it’s manipulated by gravity and other physical forces.
From at least Isaac Newton onward, physics has told us what it means to objectify, to study things that are fundamentally objective, not subjective. The rigour of mathematics is paramount in this broad science since mathematical symbols strip away subjective bias, metaphor, and tradition. As Galileo said, mathematics is supposed to be the language in which the book of nature is written.
Yet although biology is clearly a special science, meaning it’s a subscience that isn’t as broad as physics, chemistry, or astronomy, there’s a biological concept that challenges physical objecthood for the status of being naturally foundational. This is Charles Darwin’s scientific concept of evolution. Strictly speaking, natural selection applies only to the evolution of organic species, but we can speak more broadly of everything in the universe as evolving, from atoms to galaxies.
Now, in theory, physical processes are temporally asymmetric. Time isn’t supposed to be a factor for matter or energy. The laws of physics don’t assume that physical things have a beginning, a middle, or an end. There are no fundamental physical processes in Aristotle’s teleological sense. There are just “efficient causes,” mechanical, objective, unguided, lifeless, and thus eternal, immortal mathematical structures, as in the intrinsic properties of atoms, or the effects of “forces.”
For instance, even if atoms go through countless changes over billions of years, assembling into molecules and disassembling as things change, the laws of physics disregard that past and deal only with what atoms are supposed to be like in an eternal present. The laws of physics are supposed to be the same for the early universe as they are for much later periods because time is irrelevant to physical objecthood, to what René Descartes called “extension,” the mind-independent spatiality of things.
Yet again, in practice, we know that even the deepest constituents of matter have a beginning, middle, and end. They began with the Big Bang, they interact throughout the stelliferous era we currently occupy, and ultimately, they’ll be extinguished when the universe ends.
Moreover, time matters to aggregates of matter, such as planets and stars, which likewise evolve. Stars go through a life cycle in which they’re born in stellar nurseries, they consume their fuel, and they expire in a supernova, or they turn into black dwarf remnants, neutron stars, or black holes.
Everything in the universe complexifies and evolves, which makes for an analogy with subjects like us. Of course, living things have beginnings, middles, and ends, and this commonality of processes is likely what led Aristotle to speak generally of purposes throughout nature. If even nonliving things have beginnings, middles, and ends, they effectively have a narrative arc, so we can ask about their purpose or “final cause.”
Insofar as the universe evolves in practice, regardless of what the laws of physics say about matter in abstract thought experiments, the biological or evolutionary view of nature is pantheistic. Science dispenses with mind-first explanations, such as monotheism, so nature must evolve by itself, with no guidance or intelligent plan. That makes nature the supreme creator, and nature is quasi-alive in sharing this one property with organisms: creativity.
To what extent, then, is nature subjective rather than objective, contrary to the physicist’s timeless conception of matter? If the universe has something like a dramatic arc to mark its evolutionary periods of progress and decline, can we speak of a universal personality? What’s the universe’s semi-subjectivity like?
We can easily go too far with this analogy since we must remember that science is doing the explaining, and even biology objectifies, employing mathematics and physics-style explanations that are supposed to filter out subjective interactions with what’s studied.
The point of science isn’t to understand things intuitively, but to predict patterns for the sake of controlling them, as dictated by science’s humanistic, Promethean ethos. All natural things are fundamentally mindless, according to scientists’ methodological naturalism, or their rejection of anthropocentrism and the miraculous. That is, scientists are anthropocentric only about the social benefits of scientific objectification that decenters subjects from the content of scientific theories.
Still, as I’ve argued elsewhere, we arrive at nature’s character precisely by assuming this fundamental mindlessness. We simply observe that these physical objects are nevertheless supremely creative, to arrive at nature’s grotesque monstrousness, meaning its counterintuitive, humiliating productivity. Nature’s creativity dwarfs ours, so the more we appreciate the impersonality of nature’s processes, the more insignificant and wayward our personal and cultural aims seem.
Here, though, we’ve effectively posited nature’s character, without presupposing anything as dubious as a mind behind natural changes. Nature’s character is dark indeed, as it’s the monstrousness that puts our mind-first, prosocial intuitions to shame. And nature’s character is found in aesthetic rather than psychological assessments.
It’s not that atoms or physical forces have homunculi or spirits animating them; rather, scientific objectification of nature entails a dichotomy between physically complexifying and evolving things, on the one hand, and the cultural lifeworld on the other. There’s the godless, amoral, absurd, metaphysically wild universe at large, and there’s civilization, the lawful, humanistic, mind-first domain of artifices.
From the latter, egoistic, civilized, progressive perspective, the cosmic wilderness seems monstrous. That’s not an arbitrary, idiosyncratic impression, but a transcendental one since it derives from the conflicting principles of scientific objectification and our existential commitment to civility.
Nature’s monstrousness consists of the fact that nature’s scientific image of being impersonally creative implicitly disgusts civilized people who find meaning in life only insofar as their anthropocentric intuitions aren’t humiliated.
Nature is an artwork that creates itself. There’s no universal character if by that we mean a personal artist guiding physical transformations. But artworks can have characters too. Of course, in the lifeworld, art’s character derives from that of the artist. Yet natural monstrousness is defined by how the universe develops by itself in a way that systematically alienates civilized beings.
In other words, nature’s character derives not from an intelligent designer but from the intelligent explainer. Nature’s character depends not on a deity, but on the likes of us and how we’re bound collectively to react to pure physical objecthood, to the opposite of our precious civilized personalities.
Nature’s monstrous character or subjective aspect is paradoxically objective just because it’s transcendental. This is to say that clever egotists who recognize nature’s impersonal physicality and evolutionary self-creativity are bound to be revolted by the smallness of civilization when the latter is juxtaposed with the vastness of nature’s wildness.