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Nature’s Otherness and the Consolation of Madness
The futile bridges of philosophy, science, mysticism, and horror fiction
Our aim is to grasp and comprehend nature however, to make it ours so that it is not something beyond and alien to us. This is where the difficulty comes in. How are we as subjects to get over into the object? If we venture the leap over this gap, and, while failing to find our footing, think that we have found nature, we shall turn that which is something other than what we are into something other than what it is. — G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature
The great difficulty of appreciating anything’s otherness is shown by the lengths to which the philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel went looking for philosophical foundations of knowledge.
Rather than just conveying nature’s impersonality or alterity, using something like poetry to hint at the otherness of a leaf, stone, or the void of outer space, Hegel employed an atrocious, pretentious writing style to hide the absurdity or triviality of many of his pronouncements. He set the paradigm for the worst of the Continental philosophical writing that would follow. The trick was to invent hundreds of new concepts or new meanings of old ones and have fun equivocating as he swirled them all together in many dense pages of apparent gibberish.
