I agree that nature produced and currently sustains life. So those are natural processes, involving the use of solar energy, plants, oxygen, and so on. But that's far from the total of what nature is. Nature as a whole is absurd in that it's inhuman; it far surpasses our intuitions, expectations, agendas. It mocks what I call in an upcoming article on absurdity, our "lifeworld" (borrowing that term from sociology).

We seem to be talking about the same thing, though, but from different perspectives, because in calling human "progress" absurd, you're assuming the same dualism I'm working with in my writings. Sure, we'd be absurd from nature's perspective, as it were, since we'd be anomalous.

But natural norms are absurd from our perspective, because they're so different from ours. Natural regularities are mindless, amoral, godless, and monstrous or zombie-like in their animation. I view civilized artificiality as being based on an existential revolt against the wilderness. That revolt may indeed be unwise, vain, and futile. But its value is a separate point from whether it's happening.

Again, we both seem to be talking about the same duality. But we're assigning different values to the two sides. And we should distinguish the descriptive question from the prescriptive one.