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{"id":1971,"date":"2023-05-27T18:45:30","date_gmt":"2023-05-27T22:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/spiritualnaturalist\/?p=1971"},"modified":"2023-06-08T01:54:20","modified_gmt":"2023-06-08T05:54:20","slug":"can-you-love-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/spiritualnaturalist\/2023\/05\/can-you-love-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"Can You Love Nature?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Eric Steinhart<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/head>

\n

Painting by Elmer Wachtel, Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We humans often love other humans.\u00a0 We love our family members and our friends.\u00a0 And we often have more abstract kinds of love, like love for our communities and our countries.\u00a0 We might have love for non-human animals like cats and dogs.\u00a0 Humans also often love things that aren\u2019t even alive, like food or power or money.\u00a0 We love activities like running or painting.\u00a0 And we can even love abstract ideals like truth and justice. \u00a0But can we love nature?\u00a0 And can nature love us?\u00a0 We need to think about love.<\/p>\n

When it comes to love, philosophers often distinguish between two kinds of love: extrinsic love and intrinsic love.\u00a0 Extrinsic love is the love you have for somebody or some thing because it\u2019s useful for you, that is, because of its utility for you.\u00a0 Its love you have for something in relation to your own interests and needs.\u00a0 This love is based on its extrinsic value for you, that is, its utility for you. Sexual love, linked as it is with biological reproduction, is extrinsic.\u00a0 Our love of our parents, children, and other biological relations, is also extrinsic.\u00a0 Our love of food, money, power, and so on, is extrinsic.\u00a0 We love food because of its biological usefulness, that is, because we need it to live.\u00a0 Likewise money and status and power are useful for meeting our animal needs.\u00a0 Extrinsic love is also linked closely with pleasure: the things we love extrinsically give us pleasure.\u00a0 Many types of abstract love, such as our love of art or music, or our love of truth and justice, are forms of extrinsic love.\u00a0 Beauty, truth, and justice are useful.<\/p>\n

The other kind of love is intrinsic.\u00a0 This love is sometimes referred to as agapic (or agape) love.\u00a0 Intrinsic love is the love you have for somebody or something because of its intrinsic value, that is, its value in itself, regardless of its usefulness for you.\u00a0 Agape love isn\u2019t necessarily purer or more perfect or better than extrinsic love.\u00a0 But it is different.\u00a0 You can have agape love for something that isn\u2019t helpful to you, for something that is indifferent to you, or even for something that hurts you or causes you pain.\u00a0 Agape love doesn\u2019t depend on your interests or needs.\u00a0 It only depends on the qualities of the loved object.\u00a0 More abstract kinds of love, such as love of beauty, truth, and justice, are close to agape.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s likely that agape love is rare.\u00a0 When you love your family members or friends, it\u2019s very hard to get beyond their utility.\u00a0 In particular, when we love our sexual partners, biological forces are really doing powerful work.\u00a0 We might think our love for our spouse is purely for their intrinsic value, the value they have in themselves, but that\u2019s probably false.\u00a0 Still, it\u2019s likely that we can get a glimpse or insight into agape love through our love for our partners.\u00a0 And when we love political leaders for embodying justice or positive ideals, that love might come close to agape love as well.\u00a0 But agape love is hard to find in human relations.\u00a0 We are animals, and our lives depend on each other too much.\u00a0 Agape love is disinterested love.\u00a0 Nevertheless, it\u2019s something that most people understand, that is, loving somebody for who they are, independent of their relation to you.\u00a0 Extrinsic love can certainly motivate agape love.\u00a0 Given that extrinsic love is essential for survival, our awareness of extrinsic love probably comes first, and agape love later.<\/p>\n

We can obviously have extrinsic love for nature.\u00a0 Nature includes humans, and our biological love for them is clearly part of nature.\u00a0 We love other humans because of evolution by natural selection.\u00a0 Humans who didn\u2019t love others didn\u2019t reproduce, didn\u2019t raise children.\u00a0 Evolution selects for extrinsic love, especially love based on reproduction. Likewise we have extrinsic love for the parts of nature that we eat, that is, for plants and animals that provide us with food.\u00a0 That\u2019s biological love.\u00a0 Likewise our love for our pets and for other human-adjacent animals.\u00a0 Humans bonded with dogs and cats (and they bonded with us) purely because of biological utility.\u00a0 We might have agape love for these parts of nature.\u00a0 Agape love is easier to understand and experience at more abstract levels, so we might start to get a glimpse of it as we marvel at the ways humans and animals cooperate with each other.\u00a0 These point to justice, which, as an ideal, we can love for itself.\u00a0 We sometimes get a glimpse of agape love in altruistic sacrifice, when some animal sacrifices its own live to protect another.\u00a0 And agape love shines forth in acts of unmotivated giving, acts of gifting which are not performed with the expectation of getting something useful in return, that is, acts of grace.\u00a0 Grace arouses gratitude.<\/p>\n

When we talk about love for nature, we often (unfortunately) just think of nature as a domesticated temperate zone forest, filled with charming mammals.\u00a0 This is nature as a source of rest and relaxation, as entertainment.\u00a0 But nature includes animals that will be more than happy to kill us and eat us.\u00a0 Nature includes the viruses and bacteria that infect us, the parasites that make us sick.\u00a0 Nature doesn\u2019t exist for the sake of making humans happy or healthy.\u00a0 Nature is sometimes helpful (and worthy of extrinsic love), but it\u2019s just as often hurtful or harmful (and worthy of extrinsic hatred).\u00a0 If a tornado destroys your house and kills your family, you\u2019d be right to have extrinsic hatred for it.\u00a0 We do lots of work to protect ourselves against nature.\u00a0 We build houses.\u00a0 Romantic views of nature, as a source of positive values for humans, are just misguided and wrong.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s equally wrong to say that nature is indifferent to humans.\u00a0 In this context, nature includes the whole evolutionary history of earth, perhaps even the universe.\u00a0 This evolutionary history has been far from indifferent to humans.\u00a0 As extremely complex natural things, humans are extremely improbable.\u00a0 Evolution certainly did not aim at or intend for humans to exist.\u00a0 We are not its goal.\u00a0 But there\u2019s every reason to believe that evolution is maximizing complexity, that the complexities of the most complex things have been steadily increasing over cosmic time.\u00a0 Evolution has an arrow of complexity, an arrow which parallels the arrow of time, and probably emerges from very deep thermodynamic and information-theoretic laws of physics.\u00a0 This arrow of complexity is not accidental.\u00a0 Of course, that doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s intentional.\u00a0 Evolution is mindless.\u00a0 But mindless algorithms can produce increasingly complex things in non-accidental ways, that is, in ways that are lawful, regular, and mathematically patterned.<\/p>\n

Evolution does not wander randomly through the library of possibilities.\u00a0 It climbs Mount Improbable, to use a phrase from Dawkins.\u00a0 And, if you dig down into the basic laws of physics, those laws are finely tuned for the evolution of greater complexity.\u00a0 Again, fine-tuning doesn\u2019t imply the existence of any cosmic intelligence.\u00a0 Evolution can finely tune itself.\u00a0 Evolution is far from blind.\u00a0 It has fantastic eyes, eyes focused on extremely abstract purely mathematical features of an extremely high-dimensional space of possibilities.\u00a0 In computational terms, evolution is a recursive optimization algorithm.\u00a0 It slowly piles up complexity.\u00a0 This applies to the evolution of atoms, molecules, and organisms.\u00a0 As a recursive optimization algorithm, evolution produces greater complexity. \u00a0Greater complexity brings with it greater values of all kinds: beauty, life, intelligence, rationality, morality, and so on.\u00a0 Evolution is a value-producing computational engine.<\/p>\n

As a value-producing computational engine, evolution is both providential and benevolent.\u00a0 Again, this doesn\u2019t mean it cares about humans.\u00a0 It does not care about humans.\u00a0 Its benevolence is not diminished by the fact that it will happily wipe us out, and that the very same forces that brought humans into being on earth will drive the sun to expand until it incinerates our planet and kills all life.\u00a0 Benevolence requires producing greater value, but it doesn\u2019t require caring about humans.\u00a0 Evolution doesn\u2019t care.\u00a0 The same evolutionary forces that made your life possible will make you age, sicken, and die.\u00a0 They will kill everybody you love, and destroy every structure you value.\u00a0 All this means is that evolution isn\u2019t a proper object of extrinsic love.\u00a0 You can love parts of it for their utility, and hate parts of it for their disutility.\u00a0 But you can\u2019t have extrinsic love for evolution itself.\u00a0 From an extrinsic perspective, it is indeed indifferent to you, or better, it\u2019s ambivalent.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, the extrinsic perspective is not the only perspective.<\/p>\n

Considered intrinsically, the benevolence and providence of evolution are worthy of agape love.\u00a0 Agape love is paradoxical in the sense that it doesn\u2019t follow the rules of extrinsic love.\u00a0 You can have agape love for evolution even as it makes you age and die, kills your family and wipes out all life on earth.\u00a0 You can have agape love for powers that hurt and harm and destroy.\u00a0 Utility and disutility are irrelevant for agape love.\u00a0 To have agape love for evolution is to love something eternal in nature.\u00a0 It is to love the algorithmic and computational patterning in the laws of physics, abstract mathematical patterning that brings ever-greater complexity into existence.\u00a0 The ancient pagan Platonists saw this mathematical patterning as evidence for a power that directs all things towards what they called the Good.\u00a0 Again, this does not mean what is useful for humans.\u00a0 The power that aims at the Good will destroy humanity, it will destroy all life on earth, and our whole solar system.\u00a0 Eventually, as all complexity is devoured by black holes, and as all complexity collapses into thermodynamic heat death, the power that drives all things towards the Good will incinerate all the complexity and value in our whole universe.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the power that aims at the Good remains absolutely and perfectly benevolent.\u00a0 Its benevolence transcends all human interests, transcends all human-centered or even life-centered values.\u00a0 Its transcendence of all utility and disutility entails that its benevolence is not contaminated or polluted with the interests of any particular beings or kinds of being.\u00a0 Free from such pollution, its benevolence is pure, and that purity is holy. Only something that is pure in this way, that is holy in this way, is worthy of agape love.\u00a0 The ancient pagan Platonists referred to this holy power, which aims at the Good, as the One.\u00a0 The One is not a thing, not some being among beings.\u00a0 The One is the power of being-itself.\u00a0 So the One, which deserves our gratitude for freely giving us existence, also deserves our love.\u00a0 But the only appropriate love for the One is agape love.\u00a0 The fact that the One transcends all human interests also implies that it disregards those interests.\u00a0 The One does not have an extrinsic love for you.\u00a0 It is not some heavenly caring parent.\u00a0 As an entirely mindless power, the One doesn\u2019t know you exist.\u00a0 It will destroy you, destroy your planet, destroy your universe.\u00a0 From the wreckage of that destruction, it will bring new forms of complexity into existence.\u00a0 According to the concept of agape love, which here is pure love, the One is probably the only proper object of agape love.\u00a0 But this love is very hard.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Eric Steinhart Painting by Elmer Wachtel, Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum We humans often love other humans.\u00a0 We love our family members and our friends.\u00a0 And we often have more abstract kinds of love, like love for our communities and our countries.\u00a0 We might have love for non-human animals like cats and dogs.\u00a0 Humans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1269,"featured_media":1133,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[568,186],"class_list":["post-1971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spiritual-naturalism","tag-love","tag-nature"],"yoast_head":"\nCan You Love Nature?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We humans often love other humans.\u00a0 We love our family members and our friends.\u00a0 \u00a0But can we love nature?\u00a0 And can nature love us?\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta 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