Kirsty Harris
Man, as the most advanced and privileged member of the
animal kingdom, is using the sciences to demolish nature from within, as if the world’s ecosystems, of which
humanity is only a component, are bristling with energy
that overflows in the service of human dominance. After
all, an explosion is nothing more than the laws of physics
and chemistry behaving as they should, so the vast cloud
of smoke that rises in the wake of the bomb is nature itself at its most incendiary. One is reminded of Heidegger’s
fourfold of earth, sky, divinities and mortals: the bomb
expresses the difficult unity of the fourfold as a metaphor
for human endeavour and striving – mortals, in their quixotic quest for divine powers, build a bomb that closes the
gap between the earth and the sky in a cloud of radiation.