Thoughts on Humanity
Romantic Realism, Transcendental Nihilism, and Ecological Renovation in the Eremocene
‘The objective reality of extinction’ in the Anthropocene, marked by the sixth mass extinction crisis, has already manifested in the ‘subjective knowledge of the trauma to which it gives rise,’ described best through E.O. Wilson’s invocation of ‘the age of loneliness,’ the Eremocene. ‘Being without companions’, to be alone is to be lost in silent forests and swimming in barren reefs, the sense of there being nothing else, an elusive reality many environmentalists deny when opting for a more comfortable future to restore ecosystems to, or rather some past baseline of which we reminisce about in old field journals, a kind of environmental MAGA where the first A is an E and we are making Earth great again. Nationalism-like conservation from the voices of the only charismatic MEGAfauna that matters when we exist in an correlated self-other duality. As Maya Angelou laments, “The race of man is suffering,” but we do not suffer alone. By expanding our definition of Human to include the non-human, the Other, then extinction is forthwith. Microbiomes, grizzly bears, plastic straws. We are already dead.
Adopting this nihilistic view is liberating in so much as it allows us to toss off the tendency to view every problem we’ve created on the planet, from oil spills to destroying the vast majority of wilderness on the planet, as one that we can solve through ephemeral objects like adaptation plans or sustainable development goals. Biodiversity loss is inevitable and writing your own obituary is a radical act of defiance against a culture that would much rather encase you in carbonite, replicate your likeness, 3-D print you, and sell you on markets ad nauseam because everyone suffers from carbonite poisoning. Yet, the reality of our everyday existence is beautiful and interesting, full of reefs made in labs and communities preserving endangered languages. Ecology must strive for renovation, a ‘spiritual rebirth’ of what could be and should be, and age marked by intimate relationships with rivers and friendships with the un-charismatic micro-fauna. In this regard, an ecological renovation needs to be rooted in the reality of extinction and science yet striving for the spiritual and supernatural, a future that isn’t as it was before but rather as it could be in our dreams, a world that is both romantic and real.
“but nobody can make it out here alone.”
Romantic Realism
Ayn Rand describes the method of romantic realism as “…[making] life more beautiful and interesting than it actually is, yet [giving] it all the reality, and even a more convincing reality than that of our everyday existence.” The term is an aesthetic one that combines elements from both romanticism and realism, concepts usually seen in opposition but finding a sort non-human symbiosis, like zooxanthellae living within corals. Or do corals live within the single-celled dinoflagellates since things and their parts aren’t so easily separated as our Aristotelian messiahs to preach? Ships trapped in ice trapped in ships trapped in ice, holotes inside of holotes, there is magic in the microbiome that makes you You. As Stauffer describes Joseph Conrad, “he is rather a Romantic-Realist than a writer of ‘realistically-romantic novels,’- or, better still, there is almost equal balance between the two.” Romantic Realism is more than just reality explained in a romantic way, or its inverse of detailing romance in a realistic way, it’s finding a balance between sensual and real objects, between relational engagements and realized qualities. In order to understand the collective whole, we must experience the magic of parts.
Romanticism was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, a moment of unprecedented growth at the sake of the natural world, which tended to emphasize emotion and intuition, bolstering the relevance of horror and awe and sublimity and the beauty of nature. Much of the modern environmental movement has found itself settled in a romantic experience of the natural world, with the voices of Wordsworth, Darwin, and many others forming the ecocentric perspective that dominates the narratives, as Ashton Nichols argues in many of his books. British romantic poets asked the very questions we find ourselves asking today about the relationship between humans and the world as a whole, is everything connected? In this age of silence and loneliness, how could we not be overcome with “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” as Wordsworth describes romantic poetry? There’s even begun a resurgence in the modern environmental movement calling for art and the humanities to take center stage after decades of natural scientists trying to explain away reality in tables and figures.
The second half of the 19th century found Romanticism at odds with what is usually considered its polar opposite, Realism. Another aesthetic concept, Realism sought to abandon the supernatural and the implausible in order to represent the subject matter with truth and reality. The goal of realist art was to serve as an accurate detailed representation of the appearance of scenes and objects, as they are rather than how we imagine them. This all sounds a lot like the anti-realist philosophies of correlationism, which disavows any reality external to the correlation of being with thought as inaccessible. Or rather, that thought is bound within the human experience, an anthropocentrism that attempts to paint the world exactly as it is without acknowledging the fact that reality is as subjective as the supernatural and that objects exist independently of human perception. Realist art took the form of field notes and peer-reviewed papers, focusing on that which could be accessed through science and senses alone, without specters or spirits or creation myths where humans turn into animals and animals into humans.
With the start of the 20th century, aesthetics saw the rise of modernism, challenging realism in its focus on the inner self, consciousness, and the power of scientific experimentation to challenge and consequently change reality. Unfortunately, there was still no space for the supernatural for the modernist artists and the correlationism that plagued realism manifested in the belief that man’s intelligence and ingenuity are sources of enlightenment, while at the same time portraying man as disillusioned, frustrated, and overwhelmed by societal expectations, a hopeless anthropocentric shipwreck. Stock exchanges, unexploded ordinances, pictures of cities without any green paint. Fortunately, with a departure in the late 20th century, came postmodernism with all the weird art and post-structuralists and, ultimately, metaphysical realists rallying against the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy, wrecks of hope sailing through seas of ice.
Transcendental Nihilism
Caspar David Friedrich, considered one of the most important painters of the German Romantic Movement, had a unique ability to show his feelings in his paintings, making natural scenes dance with specters of loneliness and contemplation. Often placing human figures admiring the scenery into the painting so that the viewer could take the place of the figure and experience the moment as well, he was able to intimately capture the objectivity of nature, where despite his best efforts to imbue the painting with his feelings, it sometimes resisted his “advances.” In an true act of speculative realism, he engaged with nature in a way that was both withdrawing and non-anthropocentric, writing: “I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks to be what I am.” As Donald Kuspit sees it, Friedrich’s paintings “depict a more assertive, violent, powerful, implacable, overwhelming nature — a nature that is grandly inhuman, a nature in which human presence is beside the cosmic point — [and] are among the works that are the true beginning of Romantic realism.”
Depicting nature as fatalistically nihilistic, Friedrich reaches out into the world through his Romanticism in an attempt to overcome the correlationism of both art and Self. Quentin Meillassoux defines correlationism in his book, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2008) as, “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. We will henceforth call correlationism any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined.” Essentially, he argues that Kantian philosophy presupposes that objects can only exist because we, humans, perceive them and that in perceiving objects we must assign our own meanings and cultural associations to the objects. For speculative realists, feelings, landscapes, shipwrecks, and painters exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects (admittedly more of an Object-Oriented viewpoint, which happens to fall under the Speculative Realism umbrella).
The terrifying nature of the ice-scape takes on their own imaginative positivism, observed and imagined at the same time, while Friedrich’s own feelings of isolation seep through the brush strokes, juxtaposed against erasure of the fragility of man by the realities of natures own artistic notions. Romantic realism, like speculative realism, attempts to balance the ‘projective identification with nature and perceptive identification of it’, where objects project parts of their self into the other, a form of imagination where nonhuman object relations distort their related objects in the same fundamental manner as human consciousness. Compared to the the realist painter captures the subjective reality of objects how they are perceived by the painter and the romantic artists undermine objects by allowing the supernatural to manifest the perceived reality; the romantic realist allows the objects in their paintings, the paintings themselves, and the feelings of the artist captured in the painting to distort not only the realities they share, but the realities of the observer, the room the painting is hanging in, and the unassuming title of the work of art.
Following Meillassoux’s argument to the eventual end, we reach a point of “dia-chronicity,” where the “temporal discrepancy between thinking and being” raises futural and telluric implications “about [the] possible events that are ulterior to the extinction of the human species,” a post-apocalyptic state that takes place ulterior to human finitude. Ray Brassier defends this form of transcendental nihilism, where the world as inherently devoid of meaning and embraces nihilism as the truth of reality. As addressed at the start of the article, our very existence in the Anthropocene is an acknowledgment of the “organon of extinction,” that it is only because life is conditioned by its own extinction that there is thought at all. Romantic Realism has a weird way of capturing this sentiment, particularly when one stares at the post-apocalyptic-like landscape of The Sea of Ice, the ship already lost beneath the towering ice, our own existence devoid of any spatial or temporal narrative to put our woes at ease, it’s unbearably lonely out here.
Despite the fact that we are already dead and that there is a meaninglessness to our very existence, I don’t agree with the transcendental nihilistic fatality of our being. If we are already dead, then the only way forward is to be born again, not so dissimilar than the Evangelical commitment, where meaning can take form again, becoming an object in its own right. What comes after nihilism is an object-oriented renovation, a spiritual realism of sorts where we no longer strive to rebuild reefs for our own needs and wishes from blueprints that we drew up based on our own data. You can hear all the correlationism in that idea and it becomes clear how the age of loneliness means asking ourselves the question; who will be lonely? Is it humans we are most worried about? What about coral reefs? Will homes falling in disrepair be lonely too? Or is a shipwreck never lonely when there is the sun and the oxygen and the shifting ice that holds it in a close embrace?
Ecological Renovation
Transcendental nihilism means we must accept that the end of the Antrhopocene means the end of the anthropos, or as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro details in his seminal Cannibal Metaphysics:
The thing about the Anthropocene is that “although it began with us, it will end without us…” To even think it is to find oneself in a space of both the supernatural and the scientific. “The semiotic regime of myth, perfectly indifferent to the empirical truth or falsity of its contents, comes into play whenever the relation between humans as such and the most general conditions of existence imposes itself as a problem for reason.”
To even think is to find oneself in a space of both the supernatural and the scientific, how romantically real. Ecological renovation is a form of spiritual rebirth, where our ouroboros-like nihilism both feeds on itself and brings new life into the world, for to be alone is to be wholly oneself. If, as I’ve argued, we see all beings, human and non-human, as a collective One then certainly loneliness doesn’t necessarily necessitate being without companions, but being surround by them. Cyborgs, talking dogs, ships trapped in ice, 3D-printed coral reefs, a global revolution that fragments arilogistics and capitalism and correlationism. Renovation would look similar to Alain Badiou’s belief in “[a]n age of technologies incredible for all of us, of tasks distributed equally among all of us, of the sharing of everything, and education that affirms the genius of all. May this new communism everywhere and on every question stand up against the morbid survival of capitalism.”
We have a psychic connection with the Other, which is really just our Self, species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate, we are all dying together. We can not “save” what is already dead, but we can rise from the dead, a zombie ecological renovation that loops back towards the intimate relationship between humans and the excluded ‘nature’ that was severed in the past, 5,000 years of inventions that served a handful of people. We can’t just strive to adapt to climate change or restore to what once was but rather we must manifest a romantic realist future of what “could be and should be,” where the supernatural and the scientific lead us away from developing at all costs and we can sing karaoke all day long in our clean-powered homes. As the snake eats its own tail, I try to imagine what that might look like and realize that this is where philosophy breaks down and I need to remind myself to play in the absurd.
When I walk through the jungle I can feel the spirits of the crows and streams tell me about the mysteries of time, where they feed the peoples before me, how they’ll vanish after I leave, how I’m just a viscous little spec on this island or that island. I howl at the full moon when it breaks through the rain ladened clouds, the gravitational partner to the earth and the seas, as though she can hear my plea for help. Am I a ship trapped in ice or is the ship trapped in me? I write eulogies for species that aren’t yet extinct, while we can still speak and learn of each other, eels sliding between my weathered legs. Philosophies are not enough, we need art and conversations and magic and a spiritual kind of conservation that doesn’t undermine the earth into a holy Gaia nor overmine existence as just ecological niches in a transcendent trophic web. Silence in the middle of the jungle is terrifying, like wandering through the lonely foliage of a neighboring island where all the birds are eaten by an invasive snake species. We are already dead and the future is not the past but rather a bizarre rebirth where we build the flying machine first before pushing it off the ledge.
“How to find my soul a home / Where water is not thirsty / And bread loaf is not stone”
