(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
When we face a major crisis, such as the ecological imbalance on the planet, it is decisive what basis and understanding we act upon when we are going to solve the crisis. Understanding what we are actually dealing with will affect our solutions. How do we understand the world we live in? What kind of character is it? How did man get where it is today? What is our future role on the planet? The answer to these questions will affect how we act. And who we are. The strong of the vest, truth-seeking science culture has made us one of the first thoroughly secularized cultures in the world; we are the first culture on the planet that tries to manage us completely without a metaphysics, without a religious superstructure, without a body outside ourselves that tells us what the world is like, how to think and act, what we can and what we cannot do. It has allowed us to ask a number of questions that humans have not been able to ask in the past, and it has opened up to asking old questions in ways that our world of imagination previously prevented us from. Hand in hand with this has the same enlightened, Western culture has been at the forefront of a raw exploitation of the planet's non-renewable resources; eradication of biotopes, animal species and human cultures; caused two genocides in its midst, the American and the European, and laid the groundwork for an impending temperature rise with subsequent unhealthy human and animal disorders. The West is in a special position today: How to think and act access? In the essay Silence and storytelling (Forlaget Oktober, 2013) and in subsequent essays published in Aftenposten, Morgenbladet, Klassekampen and Ny Tid, among others, I have proposed silence as a basic condition in the world, combined with demanding a basis for values, an instance to act on in the alarming situation we are in. 
In the essay Hybris – and stillness afterwards, published in Ny Tid November 2015, Arne Johan Vetlesen answers by describing what he believes is the cause of the ecological crisis. He brings up the sought-after quest for a new foundation of values, while at the same time opposing my assertion of silence as the world's basic conditions. It may seem that Vetlesen and the undersigned agree quite well that history has brought our culture to a type of nihilism we have not yet been able to answer. And when it comes to attempts at solutions that have emerged, we also share the understanding that we cannot find anchorage for meaning and value in the outer world or in nature – that this is an illusion that the post-metaphysical man has left behind. I can only agree when Vetlesen writes that "the body of value cannot – freely and authentically – be produced by the individual or found in something that exists and is the way it is outside it, regardless of it". In order to establish what he believes can be a starting point for value, Vetlesen must refute the undersigned's assertion of silence as the basic conditions of the world: What meets us when we look beyond is not silence, he writes, but "the sound of everything that lives, of the world as living "; What meets us is a world full of sounds and life, and it is our job to open ourselves to this life. The basic conditions of the world are for Vetlesen "about the vulnerability and mortality of all living things, and about the cross-species mutual dependencies that ecocentrism – unlike anthropocentrism – recognizes them." Nor in this position it is very much what sets us apart. But in the answers to the questions that naturally follow – is empathy enough to create value? and how does Vetlesen embed value in the nature of the world? – there is a fundamental disagreement between us, which I think has to do with our understanding of the world and man very differently. It seems to me that Vetlesen is trapped by cultural conditions – such as being within a hermeneutic circle, an interpretive horizon – which prevents him from seeing the problem we face in a larger perspective, in seeing the world as it is. In his description of why we have suffered an ecological crisis, why the situation on the planet has become as bad as it has become, Vetlesen in the above essay goes to Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian heritage, and to psychoanalysis, to find answers . At Plato and in the books of Moses he finds a criticism of violence, which in short is about how by practicing external violence against nature we also practice violence against ourselves and our own inner. It is well seen, and it is an important insight. But then, in his further rationale, he highlights metaphysical magnitudes such as evil, hybris, unbridled lust and concepts such as overpowering, aggression, punishment and guilt, as explanations. In his latest book, The Denial of Nature (Routledge, 2015), he argues that our behavior towards the biotope is aggressive and violent in such a way that it must be compared to the child's aggression against the mother, which the child is totally dependent on. Vetlesen cites human infantility, narcissism, the take over and the madman madness, moral frailty and failure, evil and hybris, as reasons for our destruction of the planet. We read a decaying story in the Christian-Platonic tradition where man has harmed his soul, has sinned and been hurt. And behold, now it destroys creation, upon which it depends. And he asks in the above essay: "Who would say today, as in ancient times, that catastrophes must be understood as divine retaliation, and as punishments for human empowerment, godlessness and boundlessness?" His implied answer is no, and at the same time, perhaps we should See in that direction, however, that we have received as we have lived. The reason for the crisis is, in Vetlesen's view, a "failure in the interior", and the crisis could have been prevented had only the people done the "inner work", "work with themselves and mature to acknowledge andres uniqueness, the needs of others ”. Understand: If we had only listened to the wisdom of the ancient and Judeo-Christian texts, and developed our empathy, we would not have been where we are today. We are talking about a rather brief, exploding biological history. And we're in the middle of that explosion. Now, in countless newspaper articles, and not least in his latest book, Vetlesen has also cited other, more systemic causes of the ecological crisis, such as rationalism's transformation of nature into a dead object, capitalism's cynical profit chase, and human technology addiction. And that, along with the criticism of violence, is great and important done. Yet Vetlesen places the human causes of the crisis – and its solutions – in a local, Greek-Christian horizon. This is a horizon that has great qualities. Yet it is this horizon that, in my view, prevents him from seeing a bigger picture. I think there are other and equally important reasons why the planet has come into disrepute than Vetlesen states – causes that will also require solutions other than those argued. My view of the human desire is not linked to sin, it is basically undividedly positive. Lust without direction quickly leads to violence, yes. But lust in itself is not wrong. It is our ability and desire to cope – our desire for life, our desire to live – that makes us live, and that has made us successful in this way. Our genes have worked as genes should, we propagated, in a critical situation we developed the ability to make tools, we reshaped and utilized nature so that we could do our best. We gained awareness, the ability to see ourselves from the outside, and with that we could organize ourselves even better. Before we knew it, it turns out that our actions threaten the basis of life on the planet. But we did not get there out of sin and evil, we are largely innocent, we got there primarily out of ignorance. Because there's more: We have a story. The planet we inhabit came into being about four and a half billion years ago. The first organic life originated about three and a half billion years ago. The random evolution of life on planet Earth took three billion years. The human beast appeared on the scene just two – 2 – million years ago; and with about the same genes and intelligence we have today, just 200 years ago. And with its revolutionary Neolithic-Theocratic culture: just 000 years ago. From being flocks of living creatures in more or less balance and struggle with their surroundings, we transformed in a few thousand years into a flock of aggressive dominants. Another technological revolution was to follow. Only 10 years ago, industrialism started a true explosion, where our exploitation of the globe – with its ideological roots in theocracy; put the globe under you – in a short time took the form of pure plunder of the planet, combined with the extinction of all other, competing species. We are talking about a rather short, exploding biological history. And we are in the middle of that explosion. But there is more: We now know that our world has come into being without cause, and that it can cease without cause. There is no deeper reason why we are here, or why we will one day no longer be here. We live in a world that exists regardless of whether we exist or not, that was here before we came, and that will be when we are no longer here. And in that world, beyond our narratives, it is completely silent. No opinion. No direction. Nothing. We are a random, distinctive biological variant in a sea of matter whose truth consists in eating and being eaten, of being born, reproducing and disappearing. We can't To interpret the complex and intricate ecological context in which we are – and adapt to it – the form we know as ourselves, man, homo sapiens, can cease to exist, and that which is us and our species will disappear. Should that happen, the mountains and the water, the air and the earth, the animals and the flowers will still be here, untouched by our absence. For example, had we existed when a meteor struck the globe 65 million years ago, and became extinct just like the dinosaurs, nature would no longer have been able to ask stuttering, incomplete questions to itself, as we now do. There was no language before we came, no sense, nor any will or desire that we should come. We are a local, random variation, with a local dialect, which may not even understand itself. Although at some point we were able to see life on the planet from the outside and obtain information about the planet, we may not have true knowledge. There was no point in the world before we arrived. Just silence. Dark matter. Blind nature. It will also make no sense when we are possibly no longer here, only bizarre traces of us, which no one should interpret. The silence, from which my words break and want to return, has no message. The silence itself is neither something to live for nor to die for. It just is, as the universe, matter and nature are. It can just as easily break out in a work of art as in violence. If I do not get a grip on the silence, it will have the grip on me. I do not have a higher self and a lower self, as classical metaphysics presupposes. What I have is a simple, material, nature-created body, created and formed by its surroundings, and eventually absorbed by its surroundings. I am thinking nature. My idea belongs to the community. I enter into the community, join the community, and I leave my mark on it when I die. What I have thought and done lives on in the community to the extent that the community wants it to live on.
There was no point in the world before we arrived. Just silence. Dark matter. Blind nature. It will also make no sense when we are possibly no longer here, only bizarre traces of us, which no one should interpret.
Life, and the world, has no outside. There is nothing outside. No outside consciousness sees us. Everything is here, now. My body and my knowledge have sprung from the same nature, the same dust, the universe and the ecosystem that I am now trying to understand. The stories I have, I've found myself. And they have serious shortcomings. One day too about 200 years ago, a random mutation causes the animal to see itself from the outside, and I understand that I'm dying. Why am I here? Around me, and in me, life is sewing. But nature is silent. It just is, as it always has been. Also, the universe is silent, of course. No one answers my questions. I align myself with a symbolic order in the world of silence. The thin, temporary, symbolic order we spin around our existence is probably an illusion, but it is what we have. Yes, the sounds, the animals, the life er out there, like life, but that life was – and is – completely silent, until the human animal makes sense, and determines, as it has always done, guided by its biological needs, what is food, what is not food, what to live, what not to live. So it is still quiet. Completely still. It can be experienced as impotence. But the recognition of silence as the basic conditions of the world simultaneously opens up an opportunity. The silence, this absence of any language before us, every meaning, cause, every instance, every metaphysics that science has exposed to us, opens, for the first time in history, that we can create in full consciousness a metaphysics, an instance – or instances – devoid of any external instance. We are and become nature. With silence as the basic condition, in a world without meaning and cause, in radical nihilism, we as thinking animals may find our only freedom. The freedom that we can decide that something is sacred. We can turn nature into non-nature by deciding something as untouchable, inviolable, irreplaceable, by doing something – a waterfall, a forest, a tree, an ocean, an action, a way of life, a place – ontologically, to something it is not, by deciding it as the current. A sacred being, which, because it is of this world, is at the same time subject to change. And this saint – if we are to avoid repeating the story – can neither defend with law nor violence, but alone with our vulnerable bodies and helpless languages. It is so difficult and so easy for civil society to regain power over one's own life and living conditions. When we accept that others trample or spit on the sacred, we let it happen to preserve the sacred. Should we begin to defend the Holy One with weapons, the silence breaks loose again.
