The previous question was about what “picture” of nature—although we’ve departed from that inappropriate terminology—science might give us. As noted in closing the preceding post, it is finally the “us” that it now comes down to. What is our relationship to the natural world that science continues to dissect and describe for us and the one that we experience on a daily basis?

To give us something from which we might be able to “climb upward,” I’ll begin with a rather depressing viewpoint:

            Bertrand Russell’s essay, “A Free Man’s Worship,” was published almost a hundred years ago. Speaking even then of “the world which science presents for our belief,” he wrote:

“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that (nothing) can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, and. . . the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. . . .Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

            Wow! If that doesn’t feel just a bit depressing, I give up. Is our relationship to nature, then, merely this insignificant speck of dust on a grain of cosmic sand, at the mercy of physical forces going it blind? Russell believed that it was and that we should be resigned to it, but that we should strive actively nonetheless to create beauty, truth, and perfection in order to achieve some freedom from the eternal forces that will destroy us. But the question remains, is that the only depiction of humanity that science can provide? Perhaps not, especially with a little help from the humanities.

A Different and More Optimistic Approach

          Let me suggest a different approach to our relationship with nature, one that references and takes seriously the discoveries and advances of the sciences but which also—in, perhaps, more simplistic fashion—portrays from a humanist perspective a three-fold relationship that encompasses our connection to nature:

• We are both a part of nature and observers of nature
• We are stewards of nature
• We are recipients of aesthetic gifts from nature

So follow along and let’s see where this approach takes us.

We are both a part of nature and observers of nature

          To state the obvious, we cannot live outside nature.  We are all part of the world that we observe, theorize, and order as best we can with the aim of understanding it and living within it. We can’t divide the world into ourselves on one side of the screen as spectators, and everything else as a spectacle on the other side which we remotely observe. I can’t even watch my own mind and pretend I’m not looking.

          Perhaps the acceptance of the scientific understanding of our world as the ultimate conclusion—and, therefore, the relegation of humanity by some to an unfree, determined position in a world controlled by regularities—is itself an exercise in colossal arrogance. Perhaps this natural world and we within it are more than any scientific—or for that matter, religious or philosophical—system can hope to capture in a “one-and-done” account.

          With that “floated out there,” I want to turn to a mid-20^th century scientist—a naturalist, archeologist, paleontologist, poet, and sometime philosopher of science—Loren Eiseley, whose writings and poetry will appear with some regularity in what remains in the exploration of this topic. In the Preface to one of his books of poetry, The Innocent Assassins, he remarks that

“Some have called me Gothic in my tastes. Others have chosen to regard me as a Platonist, a mystic, a concealed Christian, a midnight optimist. . . .  I am probably all of those things by turns . . . “.

And in his book, The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature, he tells his readers that

“the essays in this book . . .are offered . . .as a somewhat unconventional record of the prowlings of one mind which has sought to explore, to understand, and to enjoy the miracles of this world, both in and out of science.”

That said, to the point noted earlier that perhaps in our “Dissociative Identity Disorder” as both observers of and participants in nature, we have thought too highly of ourselves, Eiseley puts it this way:

“We might ask ourselves whether our own little planetary fragment of the cosmos has all along concealed a mocking refusal to comply totally with our conception of order and secure prediction.”

He expresses it more subtly but, in my opinion, with more “punch,” in a poem from his book, The Innocent Assassins.

                        His Own True Shadow

Just fifty years ago we thought ourselves

still at the center of the galaxy.

We love the center, whether in God’s eyes,

whether, as once we thought, the universe,

whether as an all-rational mind destroyed

by Sigmund Freud or Darwin’s tampering,

center we choose to be, but truly now we drift

a slow lost way upon a minor arm

of one faint nebula while millions more

beyond the utmost void all shine and spin.

Still from black holes that suck creation in

to antimatter that eludes our grasp,

hiding perhaps some mirror shape we fear,

still, still from all of this who brings form in,

analyzes, discards it, age to age?

                                          I am reminded

of how this passion haunts our primate kin.

Once in a zoo I saw a Cebus monkey take

a little handful of small sticks, arrange them

                                       carefully,

in a tight fistful, all within his power,

lend them brief symmetry, then bemused,

not knowing what to do, cast them away.

How like this are the mental sticks men gather,

            insect taxonomies, travelings of light,

trajectories of rockets, pouring of our blood

down gulping cell walls feeding aching brains.

Our towers rise, our words pass through the dark,

                                                but then

we cannot find the center, so contrive

to smash our little bundle of dry sticks.

Arrange them first and classify, of course.

Cebus did that, then flung the sticks away.

He lost his touch, could not construct a world

with sticks of any pattern, only gather and arrange.

We are his own true shadow, even we.

          And so we continue, generation after generation, to “gather and arrange the sticks” available to us, because as a part of the nature we also observe, we cannot help it. As I noted in a previous post, “the effort to understand . . . is central to the very nature and existence of humanity.” Eiseley, again, puts it this way:

“Century after century, humanity studies itself in the mirror of fashion, and ever the mirror gives back distortions. In one period we believe ourselves governed by immutable laws; in the next by chance. In one period angels hover over our birth; in the following time we are planetary waifs . . . . We exchange halos in one era for fangs in another. Our religious and philosophical conceptions change so rapidly that the theological and moral exhortations of one decade . . . .produce only yawns in later generations.”

But note that he doesn’t limit the repetitive “arrangement of the sticks” just to science. Marilyn Ferguson argued in The Aquarian Conspiracy, published forty years ago, that the “pendulum was swinging” in science to a new paradigm in which science and the arts and humanities would have more in common than anyone previously thought possible.

            I think that Eiseley is not merely a rare soul in the scientific community, although he was surely that, but perhaps he is also a symbol of that swinging pendulum. Because as a committed naturalist and evolutionist, he could nevertheless say that

“Man, unlike the lower creatures locked safely within their particular endowed natures, possesses freedom. He can define and redefine his own humanity, his own conception of himself. . . . In this ability to take on the shape of his own dreams, man extends beyond visible nature into another and stranger realm.”

Eiseley is not alone in the scientific community in his confidence that there  is a dimension—

• call it transcendence,
• depth,
• or with Karl Heim, a capacity for experiencing supra-polar space,
• or with the Greeks “soul,”
• or with the Hebrews “the breath of God”—

a dimension in man not exhausted by the categories of the descriptive sciences. Eiseley calls it the “inner galaxy.” 

         He is a symbol for me of the scientist, respected by his peers, honored in his profession, orthodox in his scientific commitments, but who yet remained able to see the natural world to which he addressed his professional skills, an awesome dimension of dynamic life to which he was bound, out of which he emerged, and yet over against which he stood in a unique, reflective relationship—an integral part of the nature which he observed.

          Note also, before we go, that Eiseley’s recognition of humanity’s unique place in the natural order is also shared outside the scientific community. For example, David Brooks, political and cultural commentator and Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, in his recent sermon at the Washington National Cathedral (July 5, 2020), said:

“Í always love quoting my friend, Catherine Cox, who once said that when her daughter was born, she realized that she loved her more than evolution required.”

Such a simple statement with such profound significance for our special place as both inhabitants and observers of nature.

          After this overly long post, we will move on in the next one to explore our roles as stewards of nature and as recipients of aesthetic gifts from nature.