Beyond the self: the natural world

 

A few months ago I wrote a text in which I confronted the demand for serenity with the irreducibly external and uncontrollable nature of the world outside us, outside the being that desires serenity.

This confrontation and separation between the desiring subject and the alien and inflexible world is reminiscent of one of the most fundamental tenets of the 20th century existentialist current, which clearly outlines the idea that we are thrown into life without ever asking for it and without instructions on how to navigate it.

In other words, the subject, yearning for well-being as a primordial need to be satisfied, suddenly wakes up in a world whose first impressions are already remarkably realistic: the space outside is blurry, noisy and distant. The vulnerability begins with whomever immediately welcomes us into the world. Even to survive the first day, we have to accept the first blessing of the uncontrollable. Powerless beings before even the smallest details of a destiny.

The transience of life stands in stark contrast to the blatant inner need for wellbeing, security and love. Yet the career of the self in being needn’t be seen as tragic. There is the work of building and the work of not letting something be built. The latter is necessary here because the presence of the ‚I‘ in an uncontrollable world is neither good nor bad, it is primarily a fact. And this fact must only be faced. We must take care not to judge it in terms of its tragedy or bonhomie. The ‚I‘ (subject or self, or self-consciousness, but basically the Da-sein) has to do some work so that judgement doesn’t build up within itself, otherwise the perception of its existential condition will be distorted by self-congratulatory, martyrish or heroic feelings.

The world with which a subjectivity is confronted is, so to speak, ‚dimensioned‘, thus assumed by the subjectivity to contain one or another function. A gift of meaning to the uncontrollable, through which the relentlessly indefinable and alien essence of otherness acquires a moderately recognisable face for us.

 

The natural world

Forcing  nature into any of its parts only provides us with a landscape. Nature, being the whole of reality, is not perceived  in any of its parts, nor will it ever be in its entirety. Faced with the idea of nature, the ‚I‘ can only have limited access to one of its parts (sensually), or conceptualise the totality of reality in which it is included (speculatively). This means that at no point does nature appear to the ‚I‘ as nature, and for this reason it is unfathomable, the ’natural world‘ being a more appropriate name for the stage on which the uncontrollable, and our relationship to it, appear.

The natural world is thus a map on which the subject positions itself, establishing a relationship with it that allows it to be seen as one of the parts of a cosmic-existential dialectic. And philosophy shows this. It was the philosophers of nature who gave birth to scientific thought in the West. That line of mysterious pagans whose ideas were rooted in regional traditions, but also in ancient calculations and observations, and who paved the way that led to Socrates and Plato.

The natural world as a dimension to be deciphered is a thought that slowly infused the mind of the pioneers of our science. A thought that never left us, even when the hybris of other epochs subjected it to anthropocentric ideas, in the humanism of the Renaissance, or when ’nature‘ became part of the work of the human spirit towards transcendence and absolute revelation, as in Romanticism:

‚What is nature? A systematic plan of our spirit“ (Novalis, Fragments).

Even in Romanticism, ideas appear that express the ultimate vocation of all philosophy as the possession of the self over itself. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, subjectivity was seen as a kind of journey that the ‚I‘ undertook within itself, leading it progressively to become aware of the highest expressions of the human spirit. The liberation of the human spirit from the rule of instinct of the natural world implies the ability to make more ‚factual‘ the truths reached by the mind, by philosophy, the arts and poetry.

But all this takes place in the confrontation between the ‚I‘ and the world, in other words, the process of achieving self-consciousness necessarily takes place through the primordial, existential encounter between consciousness and the world. And although this is an axiom that I often repeat, what emerges here is the creative, spiritually progressive aspect, starting from the simplest facticity. To experience serenity and clarity as attainable, it is necessary to act in the world, to open our eyes to the vastness of natural spaces as well as to the limitations to which human beings condemn themselves.

The Self never becomes or can become conscious of itself except in its empirical determinations, and these empirical determinations necessarily presuppose something outside of the Self. (J.G. Fichte, Some lessons concerning the Scholar´s vocation, 1794)

It is one of the great fields outside the ‚I‘, and from it comes much of the uncontrollability that affects us and defines the constitutive difference between the “here” and the beyond. But it is also in this absolute exteriority that we find beauty and refuge. The natural, as a space beyond my immediate awareness of myself, is as much a place of order in the dynamics and physical interactions of bodies as it is of impotence and lack of absolute control, in its muteness and indifference to the limits and condition of the human in search of serenity.