The universe is immense, and we are so very tiny. When we contemplate the vastness of the universe we inhabit, our humdrum location, and our inevitable future doom when the sun implodes, or later on, in the heat death of the universe, human life can seem utterly insignificant. This sense of cosmic insignificance is not uncommon. Pascal famously wrote, When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me . . . 4 One of Joseph Conrad’s characters describes one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies.5 The young Bertrand Russell, a close friend of Conrad, bitterly referred to the Earth as “the petty planet on which our bodies impotently craw.” Russell wrote that: Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way . . . 6 This is why Russell thought that, in the absence of God, we must build our lives on “a foundation of unyielding despair.” Such quotations could be easily multiplied—we find similar remarks, for example, in John Donne, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Byron, Tolstoy, Chesterton, Camus, and, in recent philosophy, in Thomas Nagel, Harry Frankfurt, Ronald Dworkin, and Susan Wolf.7 Many take our insignificance to be an obvious, undeniable truth. But are we really cosmically insignificant? Why should we be insignificant, just because the universe is so vast? Over forty years ago, Thomas Nagel remarked that “[r]eflection on our minuteness and brevity appears to be intimately connected with the sense that life is meaningless; but it is not clear what the connection is.”8 This connection remains unclear. And the same could be said about the supposed significance of our humdrum location, or the inevitable future extinction of human life. These questions about our significance do not receive much philosophical attention. Many contemporary philosophers, if they even notice such questions, consider them an embarrassment to be avoided, the product of a simple metaethical muddle. The very idea of cosmic significance is ridiculed. We shall see that this gets it all wrong. The experience of cosmic insignificance has little to do with metaethics. We can make good enough sense of the idea of cosmic significance and its absence. And we can see why our minuteness compared to the vastness of the universe can make people feel insignificant. This impression does turn out to be mistaken, but not for the reasons typically assumed. In fact, it turns out that we might be of immense cosmic significance, even universally central,
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 07:38:00 +0000
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