I am an absolute sceptic and materialist, and regard the universe as a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity. Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.
H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters 1925-29
I don't know Tyson. From all appearances, he seems to be a great guy, someone you'd enjoy conversing with. But I also know enough about him from his public appearances that his thinking is more aligned with Lovecraft's than what you'll find here. In that he a conventional intellectual. Part of what I do in this blog is try to deconstruct what I see as incoherent intellectual positions. It's easy to do with conservatives, but it's done less with scientific materialists. For me the contradiction to work with starts with Tyson's ontological presuppositions, which I want to argue don't fit with what I believe his sincere feelings of awe when contemplating the cosmos.
So I think it starts with the broad acceptance most educated people of the contemporary cosmic imaginary, which is shaped more by Newton than by relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and quantum mechanics. Sure there's a difference between the imaginary and what scientists actually know, and while a lot of the freakier things like multiverses, black matter, and worm holes make it into popular science fiction, those ideas don't make it into the everyday way we think about our place in the cosmos.
So I get irritable around anybody who assumes that cosmos is just what it looks like, mostly empty space bespeckled with billions of gas balls extending unimaginable distances and that it's reason for existence is essentially what Lovecraft describes in the quote above. And then they find reason to get excited about that?! The two don't go together.
Of course this picture of the cosmos is true, but it's only part of the truth and the least interesting part. It's not that science affirms things that are untrue; it's about what it leaves out. Science studies the the husks of it, the mechanics of it. The cosmos given to us by cosmologists like Tyson or Sagan or Hawking is the cosmos not as it is but how it appears to the peculiar, late-modern, buffered imagination. There is an atavistic sense of awe that any human being feels when beholding it, but we experience this despite science, its methodologies and its presuppositions about what is real or unreal.
Science has always been a child of instrumental reason, and instrumental reason has always been the practical, debunking, snarky cousin who thinks it knows better when all it really understands is the dead mechanics of things, and who delights to make you feel like a naive idiot if you insist there's anything more. I'm fine with the kind of scientist who is agnostic about matters of the spirit; it's those who aggressively reject the spiritual that bug me. There is an honest humility in the first, but a toxic egoism in the second.
Do some scientists nevertheless feel a genuine sense of awe when beholding the cosmos? No doubt, and this capacity for awe points to something about the human spirit that scientists like Tyson, etc. are unwilling to recognize--that Mind and Spirit are ontologically prior to Matter. Matter derives from Mind rather than Mind from Matter. I'd argue that the very possibility for awe requires an understanding of the nature of the human spirit that all these guys reject not because science requires it but because their scientistic ontological presuppositions do. The result is that they use something they don't believe in to admire something that in itself isn't admirable without Mind because without Mind there is no awareness of it to begin with.
The attempt to rhapsodize about what we know from science has always been to me an attempt to make the best of a fundamentally bad situation. It's akin to marveling about how beautiful or clever the work of a taxidermist or the cosmetic work of the undertaker. There’s skill in it, and even a kind of beauty, but we're marveling at something that is not so marvelous as the thing alive when we never knew either alive. it lacks other deeper possibilities for the cognition ofbeauty because in the end its object is something abstract and dead, and as such a simulacrum, a faded memory of a living Real it purports to represent.
So any meaning we see in it beyond the engineering practicality of it seems forced at best and perverse at worst. It feels to me like an attempt to make more of something than is really there to make of it: I want to be entertained and to be in a good mood, so by the gods I’m going to enjoy this unfunny movie no matter what, and laugh at its coarse, unfunny gags. Isn't this great? Similarly regarding the cosmos, I'm going to feel the awe no matter how much what I really believe undermines any reason for feeling it. It’s an attempt to force some distant memory of beauty, from a time when humans had a a real capacity for apprehending the sacred, onto something that doesn’t really yield it precisely because of how modern science has changed our way of imagining it.
Here's another way of getting at what I'm trying to point to: I'm reminded of the story from Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel, where the author describes his having achieved a certain archery skill, and when he demonstrates it to his teacher, the teacher is outraged at the fraud because while he might have got the result that indicates mastery, he achieved that result in a non-Zen way. I don’t remember what the bogus method was, but I guess it was technically correct without its spirit being right. He had the appearance--the husks--of the master archer but not the soul on one. Such a distinction is beyond the scope of our contemporary materialistic imaginary, even for most people who profess to be religious.
Something like that is at the bottom of what I’m trying to get at here. The scientistic cosmologists are technically right, but the soul of their excitement isn’t. Their excitement by their own presuppositions is the "illusion of significance", to use Lovecraft's phrase. It's not because what they assert about the mechanics of the cosmos is wrong; it's because so much of what it insists cannot exist--is the real source of their capacity for the awe they profess. Like Herrigel, they get results, but they get at them in a soul-flattening way. It's because their methods and approaches are so soul flattening in their effects, that their professions of excitement and awe seem dishonestly acquired.
So I’m trying to make the point that scientific truth, which is real, and does in fact have a kind of beauty, more importantly has gradually come to crowd out another kind of experience of truth, and in fact has come to delegitimate it. Someone like Tyson does not see the legitimacy of this other experience of truth and beauty, so people who retain some level of soul life--and Tyson is clearly among them--try to eke out what juice they can from an unyielding rock because the rock is all they've got. But it doesn’t work.
Another less exaggerated way of saying it might be that there is something inherent in the human spirit that rightly longs for beauty and to participate deeply in the mystery of Being, but we live in a world, delivered to us by the instrumental reason of engineers and capitalist expediency that has progressively destroyed--crowded out--our capacity to experience real beauty and real mystery. So we do what we can to appreciate the work of the a run-of-the-mill landscaper who plugged in some shrubs and flowers in a formulaic pattern around the apartment buildings they built on a destroyed wilderness.
The modern sensibility wants to have it both ways, to be both scientific and romantic, but science always comes first, and has come to set a pretty low bar for what qualifies as truth and beauty. My view is that science is a destructive force insofar as it becomes an end in itself, and justifies itself by its own inner logic to know for the sake of knowing without any reference to a larger meaning mythos. It becomes non-destructively useful to the degree that it serves some larger sense of human meaning that is predicated on a completely different understanding of what truth and beauty really are. The most important thing for the human future, and so for the future of the cosmos, is a recovery of that larger sense of meaning.
The cosmos—at least that dimension of it that we inhabit—is the human unconscious. The cosmos comes into awareness of itself through the minds of human beings and the human quest to increase its collective self-awareness. So the impulse toward exploration is an essential aspect of that, and science, of course, is a part of that. The problem isn't science as a method of exploration and understanding, but science becoming the usurping emissary, to use McGilchrist's analogy. But I think the outer path of discovery, to the degree that it is not preceded by an inner path of discovery, leads to an egregious distortion of our understanding of the cosmos rather than to a deeper understanding of it. The romance so many attach to space exploration is a parody of another kind of quest for truth that late moderns have all but forgotten about, which has been--at least since the Axial Age--to know oneself.
So this is not a personal knock on Tyson' it's about the limitations of his cosmic imaginary. I'm sure his enthusiasm and love of science are sincere. But there is, it seems to me, a mismatch between his very conventional, scientistic materialist worldview and his understandable need to find a mysterious beauty in it. He joins them in a way that seems fraudulent to me--it's a fraud, a contradiction, that most people--including Tyson--are oblivious of, and accept without thinking. If he took the second impulse--his capacity for awe--more seriously, it would lead to the undermining of the first--his materialist presuppositions.
[Lovecraft quote added 7/7/21 with some other minor revisions]