nature of reality

If our existence means being forever at war with ourselves and our environs, and actively contributing to the suffering of everything we encounter along the way, then it is decidedly not good to be. Life is a moral catastrophe. To exist is to be unavoidably complicit in an order that is entirely evil.

Decay, it seems, is the ultimate essence of existence, which means that our being must be understood as a mode of unbecoming.

A metaphysics that responds to the full scope of the thermodynamic revolution needs to acknowledge the dissipative and destructive function lying behind the ‘generative’ force seemingly at work within reality. To do so requires moving from the classical optimistic metaphysics of becoming to a much more pessimistic metaphysics of absolute finitude... See more

The laws of thermodynamics reveal, in other words, that what we might view as the generative power of the Universe is instead bringing about the annihilation of everything: the flourishing of life is always contributing to the eventual collapse of the cosmos.

The laws of thermodynamics encompass the whole of reality, from beginning to end, top to bottom, in origin, order and operation. We exist by virtue of heat exchange alone, and work entirely in service to the entropic decay of reality prescribed by that exchange.

Rather than something to align with, the Universe appears to be fundamentally hostile to our wellbeing.

Indeed, from Plato onwards, philosophers have generally agreed that living well means aligning with the rational order of the cosmos. ‘Live in accordance with nature,’ Marcus Aurelius urges in his Meditations. For these thinkers, nature serves as the ethical guide for our actions and the lodestone of our aesthetic ideals because it embodies... See more

we are nothing more than cups destined to shatter endlessly through time until there is nothing left to break.