Beauty

Aesthetics, evolution, swans

I read “the Orthodox Survival Guide” and “Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future” by father Seraphim Rose last fall. Very good reading, highly recommended. In one of them, I forget which, he spends a chapter critiquing the idea of scientific, biological evolution, “the theory of evolution” as it were. I went into it pre-groaning: oh here we go, I thought, here’s the point where I have to jump of the train and it stops being cool theology and it becomes a bunch of cope, to make the weltanschauung fit.

Now, I don't believe in evolution any more. But let’s be specific. The theory of evolution seems like common sense - and that’s because it is. The beginning of human civilization, and human consciousness as we know it, begins with the domestication of animals. The knowledge that a species can be changed over generations is inherent to our most basic sentience. Breeding is core to the human experience. Second nature.

We know a priori, in the blood, that horses can be bred for traits. The variety of dog breeds are a testament to this knowledge, and now we say viruses can be observed evolving in real time and so on. But that’s the thing. Evolution explains variations within a species. It does not explain the generation of new species. Even if you take the mule and stretch the timeframe to millions of years, to generate a mule that also mutated into being capable of breeding, the timetables just doesn’t add up to account for the variance within nature. It would take several sun-lifetimes.

But that’s not really the point. I don’t really particularly care whether “evolution” is real or not. What I think is interesting, is what we can say about the theory of evolution itself.

Much like many ideas developed in the last 200 years, it presumes a historisation that everyone born before the current year was retarded. That’s right, the current year wasn’t invented by American late night propagantainment talkshow hosts, it was invented by the French revolution and the enlightenment.

It’s the idea of the Middle Ages as depicted by Monty python, or the roman empire in life of Brian: filled with retarded, public school IQ shredded British factory workers from the late industrial era. Projecting your current era into the past, just like we do today when people make movies about a Disney feminist getting metoo’d in the middle ages. The basic idea of enlightenment philosophy is to take something already known, and universalising it as an ultimate principle. Evolution as theorised by Charles Darwin and Co, is taking something already well known, our knowledge of breeding, and attempting to stretch it from its appropriate use, to a ultimate universal principle - and it is stretched thin and becomes cope to make the weltanschauung fit.

But then, what is this basic idea? If it is the case that the theory can be wrong, in part, be insufficient, then from whence does it originate? If it is flawed, then it is not simply us recognising a truth, originating in itself. If it is even the slightest bit inaccurate, it cannot be, and must originate as a projection of the mind. A schema of interpretation.

What is then this schema? Made ex nihilo? Arbitrary? A random guess? A random mutation of the mind, competing in intellectual marketplace in a survival of the fittest?

My daring thesis: The idea of the theory of evolution is the biological application of the theory of German idealist dialectics. Hegel as a dog. The theory of Hegelian dialectics is an examination of the structure of the human mind - psychology. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It is an attempt to account for human thinking, human understanding, human interpretation. And it just so happens, by random one in a million chance, to mirror exactly how the generation of new species supposedly occur in nature, external from human observation. The missing link is the antithesis. And don’t worry about not being able to say what the antithesis is, because the system works, don’t you see, we already have the synthesis.

When we look at nature, what is awe-inspiring about it is that we are face to face with the limitations of our minds. When we look at nature evolutionarily, we see only the reflection of the limits of human cognition, a fading shadow of the basic framework of our own minds: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Enlightenment and modernist philosophy is the notion that all things are secondary to reason, and that by reason all things may be known in full, and nothing is beyond it. The fundamental aesthetic experience of Nature is proof that something is beyond it: nature is Beautiful, because it shows us that there is something beyond our reason, it’s “more than we can take in”, and this exact overwhelming quality makes us able to infer what we cannot know or sense: there is something more. It is overwhelming, and scary, and monstrous, and wonderful. It is religious ecstasy.

Like I have said about music being a proof of value and meaning, wild nature is a proof of metaphysics. And all you have to do is look.

Reason is not a cold, valueless thing. Reason is not the Buddha, reason is not a sterile laboratory. Reason hungers. Reason is a desire for dominion. To understand something is to own it, to be in control of it, to be able to manipulate it, to be its master. To attempt to understand All Things, is to try to make yourself master of all things. Reason is erratic, irritable, reason is an inflammation of the soul. Reason is irrational. It is not a high force we tap into at the height of meditation and tranquillity, but a base, low, human drive: I must understand this. Like all human drives, as hunger and sex, it ought to be tempered. We live in an age of reason. Everyone is eating and jerking themselves off to death. Our appetite for reason must be tempered with an appropriate madness.

On a macro scale, this untampered desire for total mastery over nature has recently resulted in the two years of global madness and the destruction of the world economy, and ushered in an era of biological warfare legitimised as an aggressive business move.

Anything that is not beautiful is not true.

be not afraid