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Whatsapp How can we utilise our sense of wonder to confront problems like climate change?

As a boy, David Wood was taken on a family road trip across the USA which ended at the Grand Canyon. That jaw dropping moment set him on a life’s journey to understand the planet and our place in it. Rediscovering a sense of wonder, Wood writes, might be one way for humanity to face the challenges of the Anthropocene.

The last decades have witnessed a gathering scepticism about traditional humanism. The fundamental objection is that the very idea of Man all too often serves as ideological cover for racial, gender, cultural or species domination. Man is a loaded term.

Yet we are a distinct species: homo sapiens, notoriously responsible for a sharp rise in the extinction rate of other species on the planet. As an animal, Man seems to have a biological reality beyond colour and creed.

Exploring deep time, geological time, reopens the whole question of what kind of animal we are, how we are animal, how we can embrace becoming animal, and whether there is a case for any kind of human exceptionalism.

Consider first our inheritance. Homo sapiens is an essentially historical creature in ways shared by other living beings and in other distinctive ways. Homo sapiens is one of a group of hominids who survive now only as fossils. After we split from the apes some tens of millions of years ago, some 20 types of hominid followed: Australopithecus afarensis, homo habilis and homo erectus—the list goes on. Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) itself overlapped and interbred with Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (Neanderthal man).

Typically brains got bigger and bodies got weaker as hominids succeeded one another. We evolved tool making skills, we moved from being hunter-gatherers to farming and now to urban life, and our diets, beliefs, and social arrangements followed suit. We are not unique as tool makers, but our development of technology has taken tool making to a wholly new level, dramatically affecting communication, transportation, culture, agriculture, the production of material goods and lethal weaponry.

Meanwhile, we have developed a sophisticated and creative symbolic universe through writing, art, music, theatre, film and so on; an output that almost rivals the natural world in its wealth and complexity. We may be said to have realised what Teilhard de Chardin called the ‘noosphere’.

Tipping points

There have been tipping points in human understanding, points marked by names such as Copernicus, Kant, Darwin, Marx and Freud. Freud himself called Copernicus, Darwin and psychoanalysis ‘wounds to the human psyche’. In each case a certain understanding of human sovereignty has been shown to be an illusion, or at least the product of covert forces.

In each case, we have had to unlearn habits and schemes that displaced the earth from the centre of things, accepting that the world as we experience it is not just there but cognitively shaped by us in deep ways, that we form a continuum with other non-human life-forms with whom we share an evolutionary history.

What Nietzsche called the death of God, Foucault the death of man, and the French soixante huitardes more generally called the death of the subject all testify to this composite new dawn. If doing so did not resurrect a discredited Enlightenment narrative, it would be tempting to call this progress.

Apart from Darwin, these are changes, transformations and displacements within human history. What I am calling ‘geological consciousness’ displaces human history itself, relocating it not just within the history of life, but within the normally slow moving history of the geological.

Exploring deep time, geological time, reopens the whole question of what kind of animal we are, how we are animal, how we can embrace becoming animal, and whether there is a case for any kind of human exceptionalism.

The passions in the Anthropocene

Environmental engagement has been plagued by a sense of futility. The facts are in, but what to do? Reason does not seem to be calling the shots. One explanation could be derived from Hume, who claimed that, ‘Reason is and ought only to be a slave to the passions.’

Connectedness and awe are just examples of the passions that animate a geologically alive being. The role of the passions here is vital, if only because of the rightfully magnetic power of the everyday, the space in which we live, move and earn our living.

I would like at least to gesture in this direction by glossing over four distinct such responses: wonder, curiosity, delight and Angst.

Wonder

‘Why does anything exist rather than nothing?’

This question can be posed formally, but it surely has its roots in the experience of wonder, which Socrates called ‘the only beginning of philosophy’ and Descartes called ‘the first of all the passions’.

Unlike Plato, Descartes thought of wonder as a gateway or stimulus to science which could be set aside after serving its purpose. My sense is that this is too harsh—wonder need not impede science. Moreover, if wonder is independent of the geological, it takes on a distinct flavor when filled out geologically.

When cosmologist Brian Swimme describes the Big Bang and its primal fire as ‘an explosion of energy powerful enough to send all matter flying apart for billions of years into the future … a fire that is a billion trillion times hotter than the center of the sun’, he sounds like a child who has discovered the giddiness of big numbers. I think he is giving voice to wonder, running up against the limits of language and imagination while still needing to press words into service.

In the Three Metamorphoses, Nietzsche wrote of the lion that can destroy but not create value. The dislocating power of wonder is not enough. It may be just such a passion, however, that can both break with the everyday and yet stick around subsequently to infuse the space it opens onto with coherence and significance. It is for just such ongoing infusive power that psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray tries to redirect cosmic wonder towards wonder at the sexual other.

If I had not had the jaw dropping experience of staring into the Grand Canyon at the age of 10, gobsmacked at the exposed sedimentary strata a mile deep carved by the Colorado river over hundreds of thousands of years before there was any Colorado, I might have been seduced by her suggestion. As it is, I was bitten with a geological wonder that cannot be reassigned.

Curiosity

Is this really a passion? Heidegger comes down hard on curiosity for its superficial lack of engagement, but that is too harsh. Perhaps I am signaling deep curiosity rather than Heidegger’s endless flitting.

Consider this: I find a spearhead at the end of my field. It’s somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 years old. I want to know all about it: which tribe made it, how they attached it to the spear, what they hunted. Perhaps what they thought of when they looked up at the stars, what this land looked like then.

I walk on and find a large slab of limestone on which are etched coral fossils from about 450 million years ago, over 200 million years before the dinosaurs. Yes, there is wonder again. It provokes imagination—I am told this was once a shallow sea. What would it have been like to be here then? What else was flourishing? I want to know!

This is indeed where science takes off and it is just something like wonder that can protect science against being drawn into the economy of control and exploitation, and stop it becoming an offshoot of the will to power. The earth sciences continuously test this edge— focused on the earth, exposed to the cosmos, giving substance to wonder.

Delight

Consider the paintings of birds by 19th C naturalist John J Audubon. They are accurate, but also works of delight at the variety of the natural world, capturing birds in poses reflecting trademark activities. Delight is attention to detail rather than focusing on limits and deep meaning. It suspends such issues. One could treat such attention as a response to the turmoil of the big questions while preserving the wonder that scientific curiosity risks evaporating.

Angst

Kant understood what he called the ‘dynamical sublime’ as one in which we feel fearful without being afraid of the object—such as the experience of watching a storm from the safety of a window. The big idea is that a powerful experience can provoke an awareness in us of the even greater power of reason.

This would include, for example, Pascal’s comment on looking up at the stars: ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.’ It would include Heidegger’s account of angst, captured by the sense that ‘beings as a whole are slipping away’, and one of Nietzsche’s accounts of how we might respond to the eternal return.

I am taking our passions seriously not because they are the ultimate drivers of change, but because once aroused they can come to block or inspire transformation. Reflection on their underlying conditions can direct attention to what more basic problems need to be addressed.

What then of Hume’s claim that reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions? Well, it’s just not that simple, especially when our passions conflict, or when they are intimately bound up with what reason concludes from trying dispassionately to make sense of the world. Moreover, sometimes our passions need re-educating, as they might now in this time of environmental fragility.

David C Wood is professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

This is an edited excerpt of his first lecture for the Thinking Out Loud—Sydney Lectures to be held at the State Library of NSW.

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