On Natural versus Human Beauty

“We love what is great in nature, and we have discovered this—because in our heads great human beings are lacking. It was the other way around with the Greeks: their feeling for nature was different from ours.” –La Gaya Scienza, aph. 155

-The urge to go to nature to find what is missing in the human community—Into the Wild, of course, but even something like Spring Breakers, where provided-for teens feel some ‘necessity’ of going to a wild land of suspended consciousness and contrary values (St. Pete’s, what what!) to regain some lost sense of fullness (the incentive behind festi-hopping too)—is perhaps a newer thing. This is a very interesting suggestion—a real idea, a genuine idea. What if a human being were able to embody everything that could be conceived of as surpassingly desirable? This would be the more civilized, dignified way of behaving, culturally—how brutish, how pessimistic, really, to imbue photosynthetic organisms, however grandiose and sprawling, with the utmost ideals of what being might and should aspire toward. We’re transferring our hopes and dreams for what the singular form of being in the known universe, human life, human consciousness, may potentially encapsulate and express, onto a load of inanimation. How pessimistic and vile is this?

What has made us collectively so defeatist to have more hope in nature than in human greatness? The Greeks placed their wildest and best dreams in the idea of a great human being—we do so in nature. Why are “great human beings lacking” in our minds? Can a great human being encapsulate everything that can ever be? Are we capable of formulating, conceiving of, or even feeling something greater than the greatest human being can embody, express, evince, emit? What is behind the urge to escape human potentiality and oddly stride toward nature, hoping that nature can fill some kind of gap in our being? What can staring at a striking vista do for us that the infinite excitations of our synapses cannot? Do we not realize that these alluring vistas are only powerful because we are there to view them? The majesty and sublimity of the most compelling natural phenomenon is only thus because we are there to imbue it thusly.

What was the Greek conception of nature? Was it expressed in their view of the gods, just a forbidding matrix of wrath, chance, and cruelty? Nature was a compendium of inhumanity, and this was seen as a bad thing. For us, nature’s inhumanity is seen as its promise of salvation—it is wise and good because it is contra-human, not terrifying, as it was for the Greeks. We are more at home in the inhuman than in the human. The concept of the human has lost its allure and promise and even its interest for us. No longer is it a realm of infinite possibility—it’s a dead end, a lack, a frustration.