Looking Down: A Guide to Reading
Prospect
Next week we will read a famous essay by the philosopher Martin Heidegger called "The Age of the World Picture." Heidegger's basic claim is that the modern age, of which Heidegger finds adumbrations already in Plato, "sets up" the world as a picture to be manipulated or fabricated at will. Heidegger writes of the background conditions in which the world is first disclosed to us, the conditions in which the world is made visible, as it were, in the first place. When Heidegger speaks of world, he speaks of "all that is," not just the planet or Earth or globe. Still, by next week you will have the background to test his thesis, specifically with reference to pictures of the world, whether these have taken the form of photos, computer visualizations, gamma ray images, or, as in this week, maps.
Retrospect
Last week's reading has already provided you with evidence both to confirm and contest Heidegger's hypothesis. In Blumenberg, we saw, first, how the visual experience of seeing the Earth from afar, an experience he insists could not have been imagined before it was had, irrevocably transformed the background conditions in which the Earth is disclosed to humankind. It reaffirmed pre-Copernican geocentrism and anthropocentrism, but only by taking post-Copernican eccentricity in a still more radical direction.
Blumenberg may have been right, but if so, he was right for the wrong reasons. The transformative image ("Earthrise") he did not think could be invented was invented - or at least, its transformative effect was the consequence of its alteration and reframing, as we learned two weeks ago. Its power derived in part from the fact that it showed, as Blumenberg put it, the "Earth in the sky above the moon." In other words, its power derived from a picture manipulated for popular consumption. Blumenberg's oversight suggests that in some retro-respects nothing much has changed.
Still, our other readings made it obvious that something about how the world is disclosed has changed over time - and more generally, that this is a question open to historical analysis. In Fontenelle and Voltaire, we encountered a deceptively simple discussion of whether the universe (the "plurality of worlds") is suited to the human sensorium, our eyes above all. You'll recall, for example, the remark that all philosophy is born of "curiosity and poor eyesight" - the implication being that better eyesight would reveal to us the truth of the world. This dovetailed nicely with their odd interest in intelligent space aliens - with their expectation that both reason and life are, almost literally, universal. After Earthrise, this expectation no longer holds (if we follow Blumenberg). Accordingly, neither do the post-Copernican, pre-Earthrise forms of eccentricity, in which we professed ease with the kind of cosmic condition that scared our pre-Copernican forebears only by smuggling in through the back door, in the form of universal reason, a still more powerful, anthropocentric consolation.
Looking Down?
The reading for this week enables us to pose similar questions about how the world is disclosed, but in a different key. We are still concerned with the question of how world-pictures have changed over time, and how they both represent a world and produce one (or bring one into being). The context, however, is different: less how we locate the Earth in the cosmos, and more how we locate ourselves on Earth. And we'll approach the issue by considering a few revealing moments in the history of cartography.
One question to consider is whether mapmaking is even about looking down, as this week's title suggests. On Brotton's view, the answer would seem to be no, or at least, not exclusively. Brotton makes the provocative claim that before images of the Earth from space, mapmakers relied principally on two things: the sky above and imagination. This raises at least three sets of questions. First, is world-mapmaking as much about looking up as looking down? Are mapmakers also astronoetes? Second, are world maps somehow different after Earthrise and Blue Marble? How have pictures of the Earth from space affected the mapmaker's imagination, that faculty that enabled us to look down from on high before we could get, well, high? And last, do Earthrise and Blue Marble have something maplike about them? If you were to write a chapter for Brotton's book on these pictures, what would it be called? All these questions are probably best pursued after you've immersed yourselves in the details of the maps for this week -- but try to keep them in mind as you read.
From Place to Space
In the introduction to his book, Brotton tells us that he plans to write a story divested of a sense of progress. Whether he succeeds is up for debate. If you'd like to pursue this in conference, you'd do well to think about how he invokes a series of distinctions: between science and cosmogony, between science and story, and between science and faith. Brotton's effort is interesting, in part because it implicitly seeks to undo a lachrymose meta-narrative about how human beings have oriented themselves in the world. According to this story, moderns have progressively substituted "place" with "space." Locations once imbued with meaning have given way to geometric, empty, fillable units. Maps don't tell stories anymore. At best, they give directions. At worst, they submit the rich, thickly-described lusciousness of our earthly and worldly lives to the dry abstractions of … math. Sad.
All this raises several questions. First, did you notice a trend in the maps discussed by Brotton towards progressively greater abstraction over time? and if so, when did it begin? Second, we can reverse the logic of the question by considering mappaemundi, the most aggressively "platial" of the pictures for this week. For example: is the Hereford mappamundi more true to the places it represents than the spaces marked out by rigorously mathematical projections? Or does it just produce a different set of truths? Are there stories embedded in the most geometrically spare of world-pictures, and if so, what kinds? The slides should be of use to you here.