The Universe is Monstrous, Yet Scientists Adore Nature
The paradox of existential inauthenticity in the sciences
Why aren’t scientists generally repulsed by nature?
If we take a Schopenhauerian, Lovecraftian view of nature, deeming physicality and wildness to be apocalyptically monstrous, shouldn’t we expect that natural scientists would run screaming from their subject matter? After all, these scientists understand nature best and work closely with natural processes as they study them.
Indeed, how is science even possible if nature is monstrous? Who would voluntarily pay close attention to nature’s foundations if the inhumanity of physics were so threatening to our self-serving intuitions and humanistic conceits?
When combined with scientists’ and environmentalists’ admiration of nature, doesn’t the very existence of scientific institutions refute the dark philosophical or religious portrait of the cosmos?
Clearly, that dark portrait can’t entail that nature is as unambiguously horrific as a fictional monster like a demon or zombie. Otherwise, every trace of naturalness would make us sick or insane. So, we can dismiss that extreme formulation of what I’d call dark pantheism.
The idea, rather, is that naturalness is transcendentally appalling to people. Often, we take what hides in plain sight for granted, just as fish that swim in water might lack the concept of water since this feature of their environment is ubiquitous. Only the fish that’s caught on a hook and pulled onto land would have some incentive to distinguish water from that X that we call “land,” although by then, of course, it would be too late for the fish.
This is why Immanuel Kant sought an explicit analysis that would uncover the hidden assumptions and forms of the human gathering of knowledge and the manner of understanding. The transcendental conditions of our species’ mode of experience are supposed to be ubiquitous but not obvious.
So, the horror in question is mostly unconscious and implicit, like a malaise or repressed fear, although this distaste for naturalness rises to the surface in philosophical reflection and the mental discipline that can enlighten countercultural elites.
