The Thinker 109
and Words worth, all of whom seek ideals in the natu ral world,
seem antiquated and even childish.
But one might stop and won der. Isn’t it a touch suspicious that
our reigning account of Nature rhymes so well with our lowest
common denominator version of life? In the Darwinian view, Na-
ture is all Self and no Soul. Creatures in the natu ral world behave
with the same competitive verve, the same lack of compassion, the
same absence of disinterested courage, that current citizens of the
bourgeois world are often inclined to do. If Nature is a realm of Self,
no human being can genuinely be blamed for pursuing his own ends
and shoving others out of the way in the pro cess. He is acting nat-
urally. He is behaving according to instinct. We need, perhaps, to
remind ourselves of Emerson’s observation in the late essay, “Fate.”
Having said all he can for the forces of Nature in its harshest guise,
he turns and observes that, “Man is not order of nature, sack and
sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor any ignominious bag-
gage, but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles
of the Universe” (779). The forces of Self are no doubt great, but in
the universe as Emerson sees it, there is more than mere Self.
The Darwinian consensus under which most educated people
live has all but closed off Nature as a scene of possi ble revelation.
(Nietz sche, for instance, detested Darwin. He could not believe that
the strug gle in the natu ral world was about the war between species.
Rather, the confl ict was about the strug gle of certain individuals
to ascend above the rest. Nietz sche maintained what he thought of as
a Homeric theory of the natu ral world.) To us Nature is rather ex-
clusively about the competitive strug gle for survival.
It is as though we have deci ded as a culture that we know the
meanings of all books yet published— they are, let us say, all about
power. They are all about the modalities of domination and sub-
mission. We need no more interpretation, no more reading. All
books have become one book. So Nature is now a closed system,