The Wonders of Our Sublime Subjectivity

The Amazing Mystical, Beautiful, and Undefinable Experiences (Vol. 4; Issue 31)

Despite scientism’s unfortunate dominance, many realms of our experiences in life happen outside the technician’s gaze. Consider the beauty of a sunset.

Astronomy tells us the word, sunset, is an illusion. The Earth spins on its axis, rotating west to east every 24 hours. Nicolaus Copernicus first discovered the phenomenon, as well as the Earth’s rotation around the sun, in 1543. The heretical idea—negating prior assumptions that celestial bodies circle around us—nearly cost him his life. Religion dominated the international narrative then, and these observations negated humanity’s related egotism. And, Copernicus’ ideas, confirmed a century later by Galileo (similarly threatened), initiated the scientific revolution.

We’ve enjoyed that knowledge for 400 years or more, yet we humans still celebrate an awesome sunset. And, we call it the SUNSET.

Our romantic, even passionate excitement at our star’s apparent descent emerges not from complex science, but from subjective experience. Even highly educated persons do not run atop a hill, wait for dusk, and proclaim:

Oh, look, the Earth is slowly rotating!

Such people would be shunned, banned, or at least, ignored. They’d ruin the experience. Nor would such individuals describe how the gorgeous, dynamic colors result from sunlight scattering while passing through the atmosphere. The spectacle of colors occurs as different wavelengths of light and differently sized particles meet.

I lack the space to rant about the moon, which, science tells us, rotates around the Earth. But when witnessing a picture of the moon like the one above, hovering over the endless ocean, hopefully brings neither gravity nor rotational axes to mind.

Side point:

Scientism has intimidated international culture since the 1600s, replacing the spiritual based worldview that preceded it. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, anything but a religious man, anticipated science’s ascent along with the terrific problems it wrought. How ethics fails to keep pace with science confirms his thinking. However, even the imaginative Nietzsche could never have dreamed of horrors like the Holocaust, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, or the destruction of the humanity-nourishing climate. These perils remain active. The first, leading to the invention of the word, genocide, still rages on in places like Myanmar, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Syria.

Even though Nietzsche dared not dream such disasters, notice his clairvoyance:

God is dead… And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?

How indeed are we to find solutions, let alone “comfort” or “games,” when faced with such unimaginable dangers? We must find ways to curtail science’s excesses. Heeding my editor Andrea’s advice to “avoid the negative,” I return to the astonishing beauty of subjective experiences that thrive beyond the realm of scientific description.