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Staring Into the Abyss (NOT a Political Diary) [1]

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Date: 2024-11-04  

Fredrick Nietzsche warned against staring too long into the abyss, because the abyss will start to stare back. (The full quote is more ominous: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” But — as is usually the case with Nietzsche — he was onto something more complicated, and this diary is about the abyss, not about monsters.)

Paul Sutter, a theoretical cosmologist (and did you know there was such a thing? I didn’t) wrote a guest essay in yesterday’s NYT that caught my eye this morning: The Emptiness of the Universe Gives Our Lives Meaning. He starts with that Nietzsche quote (probably his most famous line), but then says Nietzsche was wrong: The abyss — the void that makes up almost all of the known universe — doesn’t pull you in; it asks you to make a choice.

We can recoil in fear and disregard our humanity in the face of sheer cosmic dread. Or we can transform the shadows of the cosmos into a light that illuminates the uniqueness of everything we know here on Earth.

When we look at our place in the universe, he writes, we can either feel totally insignificant and meaningless in the face of its immensity and fall into nihilism and despair, or we can see it as a challenge to make the best of the unique situation in which we find ourselves:

It’s true that in cosmic terms, Earth is neither large nor long-lived. But that is only one way of measuring significance. Compared with the voids, there is something special happening on our planet. Despite decades of searching, Earth is still the only known place in the entire universe where conscious beings raise their curious eyes to the sky and wonder.

This is one of the existential questions that keeps philosophers up at night: How do we find meaning in the universe? One answer is the one that some religions — not all, and not all the time, but a lot of the time — give: The meaning of life on Earth is to gain eternal life after death. I’ve never accepted that. I study the history of western religion, and I find that — again, not always, but far too often — this becomes an excuse to ignore the problems of this world out of a belief that they don’t matter in the eternal scheme of things, or that God has made these problems to test us, or that he will fix things when he gets around to it.

That is exactly the wrong lesson to take from staring into the abyss. What the abyss — the void, the universe, eternity — is trying to tell us is that this life, this now, is what matter most. How we approach (not answer, because there no final answers) that question dictates how we live our lives. Are we determined to be one who has the most toys when we die, or should we aim to be one who leaves the world better than we found it.

OK, that was political. No apologies. Even the void can’t help getting into politics — because, in its deepest meaning, politics is about how our governments will help us deal with the void and the question it poses. Or how they will not.

Here is Sutter’s closing thought, which I will let speak for me:

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