Nietzsche’s Telescope: The Philosophical Abyss of Hubble
Zero, nada, zip. We’ve found two trillion galaxies, but no aliens, no gods, and no universal meaning for human existence. Writing in the wake of Darwin, Nietzsche knew humanity faced a massive existential void between the past and the scientific future, prompting the famous phrase “man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss.”
As depicted in the artwork above, extending from the Large Hadron Collider to the Hubble Space Telescope are layers of media, a rope of technologies which 21st century philosophy has yet to scale. At least not on any widely-accepted or planetary scale. The fifty years since Apollo 11 shows that. Tribes and warriors run this planet, despite the obvious messages of Apollo and Hubble.
The most famous telescope in human history, the Hubble has wowed us with wondrous images of stars, nebulae, galaxies, and many other epic cosmic phenomena. Its most profound images have been the “Deep Field” series, wherein the telescope was aimed at tiny dark spots in the night sky of the Milky Way. In each little void, Hubble gathered light from thousands of galaxies located billions of light years from Earth—a surprising and utterly mind-blowing discovery. So far, no Creator has bothered to photobomb any of the Hubble images and there is no widely-accepted secular philosophy that connects us to this vast and awe-inspiring universe.
We could say the Hubble telescope is Nietzsche’s telescope.
In the Wake of Darwin and Hubble
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche speculated that since humans are the superior species that evolved from apes, there might be an equally greater species that would evolve from humans — what he termed the “Ubermensch” or “Superman.” Nietzsche wondered:
“What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame ….man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss.”[1]
So what comes next? What will emerge in the next stage of human evolution, especially our intellectual and philosophical evolution? What follows in the wake of the universe revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope?
Named after Edwin Hubble (who discovered the expanding universe in the 1920s), the Hubble telescope represents one of the greatest scientific and technological accomplishments of the human species—illustrating the power of human reason and cooperation, along with boundless creativity and curiosity. For the Deep Field images, the vision capacity of the human eye was amplified by a factor of four billion!
By revealing an immense universe with two trillion galaxies and stretching across 100 billion light years, the Hubble telescope is the rope over the existential and philosophical abyss of the 21st century. At the same time, the Hubble telescope presents a massive opportunity for artists, filmmakers, and philosophers to create new cosmic narratives that connect humanity to the sublime majesty of the universe.
Rope Over The Philosophical Abyss
Nietzsche wondered what will emerge from the next stage of human evolution. We can ask a similar question for the Hubble Space Telescope:
What new philosophy might emerge from the Deep Field images and the most famous telescope in human history?
So far, that philosophy has yet to appear and develop any challenges to the dominant narratives that humans use to explain their origin, destiny, meaning, and purpose. The reigning narratives are theism, tribalism, nationalism, family, and consumerism, all confirmed by scrolling through the daily carnival of social media and the Google news reader. Sure, science and ecology have made small indentions on these narratives, but there is no widespread transnational cultural narrative based on these facts:
— All humanity shares 99.5% of the same DNA and are part of a planetary living system it shares with millions of other species.
— We are a tiny (yet brainy) species on a single planet orbiting a star in one galaxy, among two trillion galaxies dotting the cosmic voids stretching across 100 billion light years.
Four centuries after Galileo, Hubble has exponentially ramped up our non-centrality by showing we are the center of absolutely nothing, a tiny species in a majestic and indifferent universe. All 21st-century philosophy exists in the wake of the Hubble telescope.
God and Philosophy Are “Dead”
The Apollo missions, 2001, and the original Star Trek TV series blasted us into a future with the opportunity to build a unified planetary civilization, but we rejected it because we were unwilling to accept that we are a single species inhabiting a watery rock orbiting a flaming ball of hydrogen in an infinite universe.
Via Apollo, we’ve walked on the 4.5 billion-year-old moon, and via the Hubble Space Telescope, we’ve peered across 13.7 billion years, the age of the observable universe—and there is not a Creator in sight. As Nietzsche famously said long before Apollo and Hubble: “God is dead.” Apollo’s photos of Earth from space and the Hubble Deep Field images have obliterated the rationales supporting the dominant narratives (theology, nationalism, and tribalism) we use to explain our origins, meaning, and destiny. Yet our species remains in utter denial.
In The Grand Design (2012), Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow claimed that “philosophy is dead” (p. 5). They wrote: “We wonder, we seek answers. Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions: How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? … Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.” (p. 5).
Of course, philosophy is still alive in academic journals, Amazon books, and the ever-shrinking philosophy section at the Barnes & Noble bookstores. But, as a force in popular culture, contemporary philosophy is largely dead, primarily because it has failed to keep up with the discoveries in contemporary cosmology. In the wake of the stunning achievements of the Apollo and the Hubble telescope, philosophy has failed to generate a popular cosmic narrative that integrates the origins and destinies of the human species into the vast and wondrous cosmos.
This “death” began with the crash of Apollo 8 and Earthrise and continues well into the 21st century. Of course, scientists like Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lisa Randall, and Richard Dawkins have written popular books on science, but that is not the same as writing a philosophy for human existence in the Hubble universe, a philosophy that gives us meaning, purpose, and hope. The corpse of secular philosophy—for living in the Hubble universe— is fully aflame on the long-running TV series Ancient Aliens, about which I have written in Medium.
A Laughing-Stock
It seems most humans apparently can’t handle the paradoxical meaning of our greatest scientific achievement and most important philosophical discovery: The universe is vast and majestic, and our species is insignificant and might be utterly meaningless. Our species has discovered we inhabit an immense universe in which we are not the center and have existed for only a blip in cosmic time. There may well be no meaning or purpose to our existence in the immensity of the cosmos that spans billions of years in the past and trillions upon trillions of years in the future.
Or maybe some cosmic meaning can be found in the notion that we are one way the universe knows itself—self-aware “starstuff” (as Carl Sagan said). So far, our species has proven too vain and fearful to move forward and develop new narratives based on our actual place in the universe, too small-minded to embrace our shared evolutionary origins and create a shared destiny for our long-term future and the health of our planet, the very home that provides the resources for us to live, love, and explore the cosmos.
Like Nietzsche’s apes, we’re a philosophical laughing-stock, a planet of advanced simians who still believe a Creator has a super-special destiny for us and our nations, a plan that shows we’re central to our 4.7 billion-year old planet and 13.7 billion-year old universe — still the center of all value, meaning, and purpose. How narcissistic must our tribes be? Do we really, honestly believe that hydrogen atoms evolved for 13 billion years so that a single species on a tiny planet in a remote part of the cosmos could pretend it is the center of the universe, when in fact that species is the center of nothing and nothingness?
Nevertheless, our tribes arm themselves with thousands of nuclear missiles, apparently yearning for a real-life armageddon, just like the original Planet of the Apes (1968). As astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) says, “Out there, there has to be something better than man. Has to be.” Taylor is surely correct, for in terms of a philosophy for the majestic universe we live in, we’re very much a laughing-stock.
Our most popular space films are all about war, tribalism, and narcissistic human psychodrama—especially the Star Wars films. Deluded, deranged and flat-out dangerous, we’re a threat to other species in the universe. Something better than us? Has to be!
A Post-Hubble Launch?
Most seem too terrified to embrace the evolutionary and philosophical blank slate first symbolized by the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1968 masterpiece of art and philosophy from Stanley Kubrick. Tall, sleek, and beautifully indifferent, the monolith is an icon of awe, wonder, and the cosmic void, yet it’s also a towering blank slate for us to write a new philosophy for the future of the human species. The Hubble images represent the same thing, a blank slate for a new philosophical beginning, a new way to think of human existence and responsibilities in the Anthropocene.
We are a species with much promise, the very species that touched the black monolith in 2001 and then tossed the bone into space and began exploring the universe. We are simians that emerged from Africa’s savannas and evolved into humans, apes who became astronauts, spear throwers who became space farers. In our midst emerged artists and philosophers who wondered about our place in the cosmos, and scientists and technologists who have extended our consciousness into space and across the universe to offer remarkable new perspectives on our origins and destiny. We are a brainy and brave species that looked up to the starry skies with our telescopes and said, “What the hell! Let’s go for it!” So we launched Apollo to the moon and pointed the Hubble Space Telescope to the edge of the universe.
Like the apes in 2001, we have tossed the technological bone in the air, but we have yet to evolve beyond the Star-Child gazing at Earth rising in space. When are we going to launch the philosophical bone into the cosmos? That’s the question Kubrick poses at the end of 2001, with the Star-Child appearing against the blackness of the cosmos, Earth literally rising in his gaze. As a space-faring species, what will humans make of themselves in an awe-inspiring universe with unlimited possibility?
If Star Wars and strip-mining the moon are the best we have, we’re a laughing-stock.
The Cosmic Sublime
We need a deep philosophical shift to match the Hubble Deep Fields, a new philosophy to match the new view of the universe. It needs to embrace the massive “explosion of awareness” provided by Apollo and the Hubble telescope. The philosophy needs to connect our tiny existence to the vastness and majesty of the cosmos, especially Apollo images of Earth from space and the Hubble images of the universe. That connection is found in not merely in science, but in the aesthetics of the sublime—the experience of awe, wonder, and vastness that overwhelms one’s sensibilities and narcissistic worldviews and points toward a new understanding of our existence. The sublime is simultaneous experience of:
—the infinite (immensity of the universe) and infinitesimal (our tiny selves on Planet Earth)
—the exaltation before the majesty and beauty of the cosmos and the extinction of our previous narratives
— the existential void and the freedom it summons forth, the power to make ourselves anew in the universe as it is, not as we wish it was.
It is the cosmic sublime that can inspire humans to transcend current narratives and embrace a unifying experience that connects humans to the cosmos and larger narratives for our species. [2]
Science alone is not enough, especially when it is complemented by war, conquest, and competition. Rather, it is art, aesthetics, and philosophy that should guide us and our science into the nothingness and awesomeness of the Hubble universe. It’s time for the artists, theorists, philosophers to join in the efforts create this new philosophy and narrative. [3]
[1]Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (New York: Penguin, 1972), 26. By citing Nietzsche, this does not mean I necessarily agree with everything or anything he wrote beyond the fact that he pronounced God to be “dead” and posed the profound question: What will evolve from humans?
[2] Of course, this concept is a single starting point, though I use it to outline a new philosophy in my Medium essay “Explosion of Awareness.”
[3] That’s one reason I co-created “Rope Over Abyss (Nietzsche’s Telescope).” Mixed-media and acrylic with pumice. 6’ x 18’. Inspired by the international award-winning essay: “Hot and Cool in the Media(S)cene,” by Julia Hildebrand and Barry Vacker (2018).
Photographic and graphic images in artwork, left to right: The Compact Muon Solenoid Detector on the Large Hadron Collider, CERN. Apple iPhone, Predator drone deployed by the Pentagon. Graphic image of NASA satellite. Hubble Space Telescope, NASA.
