Jul 27 2009
Nature and Irrationality
From what I can tell, there are two prevailing approaches to nature these days: the holistic and the rationalistic. Those who take the holistic approach perceive nature as a seamless whole, which holds itself in eternal balance – when undisturbed by humans that is. Those who take the rationalistic approach assert that there is a logical explanation for everything in nature, even the allegedly erratic behavior of individual plants, animals and people. This is the fundamental difference between East and West, between the philosophies of the Orient and those that arose from ancient Greece. Or so we are told. But I don’t buy it.
In the 21st Century, a third approach is emerging – one that fuses the holistic with the rationalistic, the East with the West, the right brain with the left. In this approach, Mother Earth is respected even as science is embraced. Taking this approach, reasonable men and women work as stewards, helping nature restore itself to its proper balance. But I don’t buy this, either.
There is, of course, that old-time view of nature as a world “red in tooth and claw,” where strong prevail and weak perish, but aside from a handful of libertarian anarchists, I’ve never met anyone who truly believes this. The problem with this approach is that civilization keeps getting in the way. What room is there for civility in such a world, for law and order?
The way I see it, the wild has no place in any of these views. And when I say “wild” here, I mean truly wild – wild in a way that no theologian, scientist, or philosopher could ever fully explain. The wild as fundamental contradiction, as aberration of nature, as inherent absurdity. I seem to be one of the few people who believe that wildness of this sort exists.
After several decades of rumination, I have reached the conclusion that nature is predicated by the irrational. I don’t think there can be any serious discussion about nature without the thorny issue of wildness being addressed, first and foremost. And yes, I suspect that wildness and irrationality are cut from the same cloth, that all deviations from the norm are, in fact, as much a part of nature as the norm itself. In other words, nothing stands outside of nature.
So go ahead and call me a Pantheist. I won’t deny it. It would be irrational for me to do so. Then again, it’s hard to say how I’ll react to any box drawn around me. And this is precisely why wildness, human or otherwise, is so dangerous.
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