When in Austria last year, my love for mountains was born simply by being exposed to mountains for the first time in my life. Driving through California approaching San Diego has reawoken that love and reminded me that I need to spend more time among the mountains because they are among the most beautiful things nature provides. Their enormity makes everyone and everything seem small. But there is a sort of freedom in that smallness, a sense that this enormous thing in which one exists is not void, not absence, but majestic and wonderful.
Of course, there is still terror to be felt in our isolation in a world that will not defend us or care for us. There is enough, but it is not provided for us — it is simply provided and we may do what we will with it. A man in the mountains is like humanity in the universe — yet, though the man will be humbled by his experience, mankind will not be humbled by its position in this small corner of habitable space in the world.
After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.1
Mankind must care for itself just as each man must care for himself. Our value, our beauty, depends upon our existence and our ability to perceive ourselves. The joys found wondering amid these mountains have meaning only as long as humans still exist.
In contrast, the environmentalists’ concern for Mother Earth seems absurd. Concern for other lifeforms is reasonable and just, but the concern for life itself is madness. Life will go on existing after we have all died out. The victim of our global climate changes is not the planet (which cannot die), but only ourselves.
If we want to commit suicide, we will — just as generations of “brave” soldiers have in pointless wars. Environmentalism’s selflessness seems confused: the only ones endangered by human behavior are humans.
- Friedrich Nietzsche : On Truth And Lie In An Extra-Moral Sense↩
J-Wu!!! How’s the tour going?
:*