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This is Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
Those of you who heard our last show probably assumed we had wrapped it all up for
this season.
And frankly, I did too.
But I'm back with a few quick thoughts to leave you with as we go through this summer,
like no other, in a year that may or may not be remembered as world historical,
depending on what the future holds in store for us.
The least we can say is that the year 2020 has found ways to throw us for a loss,
to discombobulate and unsettle us, and to envelop us in a thick fog of doubt and dread.
That's why I'd like to think with you today about where we find ourselves.
I borrow that phrase from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who begins one of his essays by asking,
"Where do we find ourselves?"
That's a weird question to throw at his readers.
Does it imply that we're lost, that we're not where we're supposed to be?
And who is the we?
Emerson's answer only adds to our disorientation, I quote,
"In a series of which we do not know the extremes and believe it has none.
We wake and find ourselves on a stair, there are stairs below us,
which we seem to have ascended, there are stairs above us, which go upward and out of sight."
I don't know what Emerson had in mind, but that sounds to me like a sprawling universe
that disappears out of sight on all sides of us.
If we put his question in a cosmological context, Emerson's stairs become stars.
Here we are on one of eight planets in a solar system, located in a galaxy with one or two hundred billion stars,
a galaxy with seven hundred neighboring galaxies that belong to the Virgo Supercluster.
The Virgo cluster in turn belongs to a much larger supercluster called Lan Yaquia,
which boasts of some 100,000 galaxies beyond which the series of which we do not know the extremes continues on indefinitely.
Asking where we find ourselves in the cosmic order is a losing proposition.
Since the universe doesn't stay put long enough these days to yield any reliable bearings.
A few years ago, we thought there were some 200 billion galaxies in the universe,
but in 2016 an article published in the Astrophysical Journal,
by someone named Christopher Konsilyce, expanded the estimate by a factor of 10 to 2 trillion galaxies,
each with 100 or more billion stars and some may even contain trillions.
In some, our wear depends on our when,
so we really have to specify a date when it comes to our cosmic address,
since our understanding of the universe changes according to where we find ourselves historically,
in human time, which unfolds differently than nature's cycles of eternal return.
How now, what does history have to do with it?
Our universe is 14 billion years old while the earliest fossils of Homo sapiens date back to only 200,000 years ago.
What does our puny human story have to do with that immensity?
Answer everything.
For without a mind to conceive it, there is no universe at all.
There may be matter, light, energy, and the sum of their interactions.
Yet the comprehensive whole, the everything that is in the singular,
is found only in our mental conceptions of it.
If our when in flex our wear, it's because those conceptions have a history.
Geocentrism, heliocentrism, general relativity, inflationism,
to mention only a few of our Western paradigms,
and that history takes shape in minds and cultures capable of forming ideas of a greater whole.
Where I could put it this way, until further notice, the universe exists only here on earth.
If it exists elsewhere, it will be somewhere with an idea of it.
What I'm claiming is nothing to do with idealism.
It's based on the simple fact that the word universe is a singular noun,
and that a singular noun for something as comprehensive as a universe presupposes a mental synthesis that is to say a general concept.
If physicists do not have an idea of a universe, they would not be seeking at the moment a grand unified theory of the four fundamental forces of nature,
namely gravity, electromagnetism, the weak, and strong nuclear forces.
Maybe Thoreau was right when he said, "The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions,
and therefore we should spend our lives in conceiving."
He could have added that it also answers to our perceptions,
and we should therefore spend our lives in perceiving.
Our planet is unique, not because it contains homo sapiens with minds that can abstract,
but because something in the universe, by some preposterous accident it seems,
conspired to make biology possible on the surface of this third stone from the sun.
Not only possible, but abundantly possible.
For some reason, or no reason at all, the universe came alive here on Earth.
Here is where it lives, here is where it breathes, here is where it sees, here's and feels,
here is where it thinks, and here is where it pays its pound of flesh for straying into sentience.
If it's true, as Carl Sagan famously declared, that we humans with our science and discernment,
are away the universe knows itself, those are his words.
The same could be said about sentient beings in general.
In the West, we tend to exalt abstract thought and objective knowledge,
but the distinction between sentience and intelligence only goes so far.
Feeling, sensing, craving, and grieving are also ways the universe knows itself.
Pain, too, has its truth.
As the Greek trudetian excalus puts it in the orastia,
Zeus has led us on to know the gods lay it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth.
We cannot sleep and drop by drop at the heart, the pain of pain remembered comes again,
and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.
From the gods enthrone, there comes a violent love.
There you go.
There's a lot to be said for this Greek and biblical and even Nietzsche and correlation between suffering and wisdom.
If there's a problem with it, though, and I wouldn't call it a problem exactly,
is that it might be overly anthropocentric.
What if the passions of sentience are themselves primordial forms of truth?
What if the universe is known to the Arctic fox as much as, and even more than, to you or me?
I, for one, refuse to assume that the universe knows itself better through me than through the crooked rose that is bent by the same wintry fever,
or the crooked worm that goes at my shroud sheet.
The gods' violent love reaches all.
And who knows? Maybe it reaches non-living matter as well.
St. Paul declared, "All creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."
Maybe sentience is non-living matter's groan, made audible.
All we know for sure is that there is no sign of life anywhere else in our cosmic vicinity.
We and our companions in misery, as Schopenhauer called, our fellow ascensions, are completely and unutterably alone as far as the eye and its telescopes can see.
This simple fact makes you wonder whether life is extraordinarily precious,
or whether a biogenesis was a cosmic mistake and earth is where living matter remains in quarantine.
Certainly, there is a terrible disconnect between the searing beauty of our planet's waters, lands, skies, biomes,
It's opening onto the stars and the general misery of the creatures who are able to perceive it, or who, due to their misery, failed to perceive it.
If I may invoke a personal recollection here, I remember one summer afternoon when I was driving along a stretch of the Aegean coast with a French friend of mine,
Now dead, who was chattering on about various people we knew in common.
The air was exceptionally clear that day, and nine miles off the coast, the Greek island of Kyos rose up from the sea like a colossus, almost close enough to touch.
When I asked my friend Jean-Claude to put aside the gossip and turn his attention to the spectacle of nature all around us.
He glanced out the car window and, after the briefest interval said, "Lanachur nekur de kur de nautur tajidee."
Nature is but the setting of our tragedy.
As a high school teacher who taught the classics, Jean-Claude No doubt was alluding to the staging of Greek tragedies in open air amphitheaters,
typically built right into their natural settings, often in full view of the sea and surrounding mountains.
For the Greeks, that passive backdrop of nature would have added to the pathos of human suffering enacted on the stage.
Yet it also provided a measure of consolation since the landscape of nature represented a context of permanence for the transience of human life and history.
Two and a half millennia ago people didn't think the natural world had much to do with the pity and terror of our self-inflicted dramas.
Nor did they think so two and a half centuries ago I would say, and maybe not even two and a half decades ago.
Well, we have since lost our innocence for it has become increasingly evident in our historical present that our human tragedies are no longer confined to the stage of history.
They have begun to convulse the decor itself.
Indeed, now that we're approaching the denu mau, it turns out that the setting is what the story was all about in the first place.
Who in the past would have ever suspected that? Certainly not the Greeks.
In his poetics, Aristotle speaks of the moment of "anagnorises" or "recognition" as the climactic turning point in classical tragedies.
That's the moment in the plot when the hero recognizes the true nature of his or her identity and situation,
and it prepares the way for what we literary critics call the "falling action of the story" namely its resolution.
There is every reason to believe that in the history of our relations with the earth we are at such a moment of recognition.
All of a sudden we are coming to the terrifying realization that the downfall of nature's support system is a distinct possibility.
All of a sudden the storyline has shifted and we're in an altogether different drama now.
One, we're the setting threatens to collapse and bury the stage of human civilization in a pile of rubble.
In this moment of revelation, and I speak in the present tense here,
"Ludeko de notroutagidie" becomes "nattagidid de notrudeko".
The all-consuming concern of history in the immediate and near future will no doubt be all about trying to find ways to avoid or forestall that outcome.
When it comes to the fate of the biosphere, much will depend on human action in the economic, political, technological and social realms.
Yet I for one believe that there is another arena just as important as the pragmatic one.
I mean the arena of thought or whatever we want to call the place where anagnorisis happens.
Recognition in Greek tragedy meant above all self-recognition, coming to know who one is and not who one thought one was.
Human kind is poised for such a self-recining I'd say whether we're ready for it or not.
At this moment in history we find ourselves at a turning point where our species as a whole must come to know itself in its relation to the earth,
where we must begin to acknowledge that we find ourselves on a planet from which there is no escape and for which without our intending it we are now wholly responsible.
We must know ourselves in our mortality, know ourselves in our cupidity, know ourselves in our insanity.
Unlike a Greek tragedy there are no gods presiding over an inevitable fate, there is only nature, human freedom and the limits of nature's tolerance of our excesses.
Beyond that we must reflect on in order to come to terms with the physics as well as the metaphysics of finitude.
I'm referring here not just a human finitude but also to the ingathered finitude of our planet.
The two are intimately connected, especially when it comes to our denial of them.
Only by recognizing that we find ourselves in a series of which we do not know the extremes can we begin to take the measure of our limits, the limits of our power, the limits of the planet.
Hence the limits we must now place on our destructive and productive activities.
If human civilization and not just our species is to survive on this universe conceiving cosmos perceiving earth.
I'll leave it at that for now and just add this rain check.
If we can finally understand that limits define the very being of things, that without limits there is no universe.
That the universe is nothing but the open chasm where every existing thing is thrown into its limits, be it atoms, photons or galaxies.
If we can begin to understand the fundamental ontology of limits then maybe, just maybe we can find a way to embrace limits as the generative condition of being rather than dread them as a deprivation of being.
Before we put entitled opinions on hiatus for a few months, I would like to thank once again our fearless and faithful producer, Vitori Amololo.
I've been blessed with many wonderful producers since we started up this show 15 years ago, but Vitori is really special and we couldn't do it without her.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening, stay well.
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