Exuberance & Extinction:
On Why Anything Matters

Instructor: Peter Wolfendale Date & Time: April 1st, 15th, 22nd, May 6th. 14:00-16:30 ET.

DESCRIPTION: Any account of value, or why we should live one way rather than another, must face the challenge posed by the possibility of extinction. Let us consider the possibility that at some point in the far future, the universe will come to an end, taking intelligent life and all its achievements with it, leaving nothing at all behind. There are even comparatively smaller catastrophes that may consume our civilization, our species, or terrestrial life in its entirety. So much of our thinking about the nature of value depends upon some substitute for immortality, some unspoken eternity, that the mere possibility of extinction is enough to force the choice between faith and nihilism that philosophy has been trying to defuse since Nietzsche. To entertain the possibility of cosmological annihilation is already to admit the disenchantment of nature insofar as it unravels every organic purpose the cosmos and every fragile creature spawned within it might have, from the cancellation of apotheosis backwards. What’s at stake here is nothing less than severing the logical order of means and ends from the temporal order of origins and endings. This is the denaturalization of value that follows upon disenchantment.

This Seminar works out the parameters of the challenge of extinction and sketches a response to it – to outline an answer to the question, ‘Why does anything matter?’ In the process, we will consider the role that personal mortality, personal autonomy, and the architecture of selfhood and desire play in securing the possibility of meaning. We will examine anti-natalist perspectives that welcome earthly extinction and pro-natalist perspectives that demand we tile our light cone with as many happy faces as we can. We will explore the contrast between the monopolization of means implied by the logic of scarcity and the proliferation of ends encouraged by the economics of abundance, confronting survival and efficiency with exuberance and excess. This will lead us to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics and ethics and to exhibit an essential connection between the value of beauty and the flourishing of freedom.

IMAGE: AI rendered nuclear explosion, NBC, 2022

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