Abstract
The universe is enormous, perhaps unimaginably so. In comparison, we are very small. Does this suggest that humanity has little if any cosmic significance? And if we don’t matter, should that matter to us? Blaise Pascal, Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Stephen Hawking, and others have offered insightful answers to those questions. For example, Pascal and Ramsey emphasize that whereas the stars (in all their enormity) cannot think, human beings can. Through an exploration of some features of awe and its positive effects on us, I offer a novel way of answering the second question: even if we don’t matter, we, unlike the stars, naturally benefit from observing our own smallness. I explore implications for accounts of the absurdity of human life. Life might be absurd. But I give reasons to think that life isn’t absurd in the ways some such as Nagel and Camus suggest. Finally, I connect non-symmetric awe with Buddhist insights to strengthen a recent and more positive account of how to find meaning in life.
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Notes
True, Ramsey expresses disenchantment rather than awe in the passage above. (And, indeed, Pascal does not express awe either: he expresses fear.) But none of what I say in this paper will require that all of us always find the universe awe-inspiring; rather, I require the reasonable generalization that many people have experienced awe when looking at a starry night sky, when we first understand the scale of our world compared to the scale of apparently infinite and much larger worlds, and so on. Awe is a natural human reaction to such things, but a natural reaction is not the same as a necessary one.
This is to operate under the assumption that there are not worlds unknown to us in which billions of highly intelligent beings all stand in awe of each other. For then there might well be more instances of symmetrical than asymmetrical awe.
Perhaps spiders can experience awe. Certainly it seems possible that many non-human animals can experience awe. But it seems unlikely to me that non-human animals can experience awe as a result of a realization of their own cosmic smallness. Even here, though, one might argue that human beings are epistemically ill-positioned to justify such claims (though, of course, such a concession would merely entail that we ought to be neutral rather than affirmative about such propositions). In any case, my distinction can survive any of these concessions. That is, replace “spider” with any living thing that you take to be incapable of feeling awe, and, especially, incapable of feeling awe in response to a realization of that living thing’s own cosmic smallness. If it turns out that most or even all non-human animals are capable of feeling such awe, and maybe even do feel such awe on a reasonably regular basis, then the human ability and awe-non-symmetry becomes less unique but, I think, just as interesting. In fact, if non-symmetric-awe extends to many non-human life forms then one might argue that non-symmetric awe becomes a more interesting object of study: for one thing, it would point to yet another way in which our lives are similar to, rather than statically separated from, non-human animal lives.
Later on, Nagel would argue that an absurd situation includes “a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension and aspiration and reality” such as “…you declare your love over the telephone to a recorded announcement; as you are being knighted your pants fall down” (1979: 13). Nagel’s views have been criticized in at least two main ways: first, some argue that our lives really are not absurd, and second, some argue that if our lives are absurd then this is so for reasons other than those described by Nagel. On the former, Jonathan Westphal and Christopher Cherry (1990: 199–203) argue that that there are some ‘pretentions’ that are immune to the value doubt posed by Nagel’s P2. Westphal and Cherry have in mind the life of any very gifted person, such as a talented musician, who is also what might be called a person of integrity, living “with such grace and inner resourcefulness that it outshines the obscure arguments to the effect that everything must ultimately be destroyed, or that nothing, in itself, matters, or the reflective consciousness which, according to Nagel, stands behind them” (1990: 200). As for those who think that if life is absurd then this is so for reasons other than Nagel’s, see, for example, Jeffrey Gordon’s (1984) provocative discussion where he favors Camus’s account (described and critiqued in the main text) rather than Nagel’s.
Compare: if a team of scientists show that, based on a good deal of evidence, mountain gorillas naturally react with aggression when presented with their mirror image, the scientists’ conclusion is consistent with some other types of gorillas (and perhaps even mountain gorillas) reacting with friendly curiosity toward their mirror images.
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I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers for Philosophia for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Coren, D. “Non-Symmetric Awe: Why it Matters Even if We Don’t”. Philosophia 49, 217–233 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00220-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00220-7