In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy (Volume 1)

by Eugene Thacker

When the world as such cataclysmically manifests itself in the form of a disaster, how do we interpret or give meaning to the world?

Cosmic Pessimism has a genealogy that is more philosophical than theological. Its greatest – and most curmudgeonly – proponent was Arthur Schopenhauer, the misanthrope who rallied as much against philosophy itself as he did against doctrinal religion and the nationalist politics of his time.

H.P. Lovecraft, whose stories evoke a sense of what he termed “cosmic outsideness”: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.3

the Inferno is of interest not simply due to the panoply of monsters that inhabit its pages, but because of the way in which it carefully stratifies different types of demonic being and non-being.

real demons do not need us to carry out their acts of ill will – in fact, it is the height of vanity to suppose that we as human beings are in any way necessary for them.

That which is occulted can be hidden in a number of ways: something can intentionally be hidden, as when a precious object or important piece of information is stored away or withheld (buried treasures or best-kept secrets).

We as human beings actively hide and reveal things that, by virtue of this hiding and revealing activity, obtain a certain value for us as knowledge.

magic – and in particular black magic – is deemed an illegitimate form of knowledge primarily because it stands opposed to both the orthodox religious worldview (the world as divine creation) and the then-burgeoning scientific worldview (the world as knowable in itself through reason and experiment).

What if “horror” has less to do with a fear of death, and more to do with the dread of life?

Let us consider a conceptual portmanteau, between the gothic “numinous” (the horror of the divine as absolute otherness) and Kantian noumena (the unhuman, anonymous world). In what sense is the nekros as “the dead,” also a kind of nouminous life?

“why do human beings expect an end to the world at all? And if this is conceded to them, why must it be a terrible end?”

This sense – of an unhuman, indifferent, planet, can only be expressed in us as a “powerless horror.”

the core problematic in the climate change discourse is the extent to which human beings are at issue at all. On the one hand we as human beings are the problem; on the other hand at the planetary level of the Earth’s deep time, nothing could be more insignificant than the human.