Looking Up: A Guide to Reading
Blumenberg
Blumenberg is the least accessible of our authors, and so a few words by way of background are in order (on Fontenelle, pp. xiv-xx of the introduction to Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds are sufficient, and I suspect most, if not all of you, are familiar with Voltaire, whose story, "Micromegas," was written in part as a response to Fontenelle's "Conversations").
The most important thing you need to know about Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) is that he is awesome! If you are as impressed with Blumenberg as I am, you may wish to join the "Hans Blumenberg is Awesome!" facebook group. The second most important thing you need to know about him is that I once had the opportunity to work at his desk -- it is very, very big.
A few other, less important facts: he was a German philosopher and historian of ideas, with special interests in medieval and early-modern theology and science. And to make up for time lost in the war, he decided to spend one of every seven days without sleep. The consequence: an enormous body of writing that is still in the process of publication, several decades after his death.
His corpus ranged from the eclectic and whimsical (books comprised of short, lovely glosses on lions, shipwrecks, and "exits from caves" or Hoehlenausgaenge) to the forbidding and profound (a trilogy on the origins of the modern age, a monumental treatise on the genesis of the copernican world, extensive writings on the concept of myth, and the development of an entire historical-critical method, called metaphorology).
In a book called The Plenitude of the Stars (untranslated, unfortunately), he invented a name -- astronoetics -- for the age-old tradition of contemplative reflection upon the cosmos of which astronautics has been a recent aid. Astronoetics derives from noesis, thought or intellection, and among the ancients was sometimes contrasted with aisthesis, sensation (the distinction plays an important role in his discussion in Genesis). This course is in some respects an exercise in astronoetics.
Here's the story -- perhaps apocryphal -- behind it all. Blumenberg coined the term in 1958, when he was a thirty-eight year-old professor at the Christian-Albrecht University in Kiel. When the launch of Sputnik unleashed concerns about a "research gap," German government officials posed the question -- what do we have that is comparable? -- and demanded an answer from their universities. Blumenberg therefore proposed to do what Sputnik could not. He decided he would explore the dark side of the moon by means of "pure thought" alone. Astronoetics would hardly fill the lecture halls, he reasoned. Nor would it compete for monies devoted to the physical exploration of space. It was best suited for those consigned to the group of Daheimgebliebenen, those whom astronautics had left behind at home. It was suited for those more content to contemplate and to dream than to do, those who preferred noesis to nautes, reflection to travel, who preferred to sail the seas of the stars by means of the seas of the mind. It is suited, that is, for people like us.
The Earth as Picture
Our dramatic rehearsal of the first words uttered at the sight of an Earthrise perhaps did most to bring this problem into view. We noted how the Apollo 8 astronauts instinctively made recourse to the hackneyed language of tourists angling for the perfect shot to show to their drinking buddies back home. Say cheese! Moon cheese, that is.
The Blumenberg, Fontenelle and Voltaire provide us with wonderful material to consider this issue. In a gorgeous, stunning few lines, Blumenberg reflects on the "miracle" of visibility: that we can see, that the atmosphere is thick enough to sustain life, but made of a medium through which the astral light can shine -- a miracle suggesting that the cosmos is peculiarly suited, even perfectly suited to the human sensorium.
His discussion of Galileo, however, threatens to reverse that conclusion. Telescopics may enable us to see more, but comes at an ironic price: the realization that there is infinitely more to see, both large and small. What we see, even with technical prostheses, is nothing compared to the abyss of this double infinity. What are the consequences of this realization, or of this kind of exercise more generally, which Blumenberg calls "Reflexive Telescopics" -- turning the telescope back on ourselves? (For an interesting filmic investigation of this phenomenon, see "Powers of Ten").
All this raises the question of how the Earth "discloses" itself to us, or is "set up" by us -- which is to say, the conditions in which we are able to see it in the first place. The instance of the Apollo 8 astronauts suggests that the Earth is disclosed as a picture, as something we make and manipulate. Does the discussion of the cosmos and the suitability of the human sensorium confirm or contest that view? What do the pictures of Earth as seen through "gamma ray" eyes suggest about this issue?
Copernicanism
Copernicanism is often associated with a metaphysical "trauma" -- it hurt, this story goes, when we realized we weren't at the center of things. But towards the end of his book, Poole suggests that this trauma was healed by the experience of seeing Earth from afar. Blumenberg appears to echo this view: somehow the images of Earth from space yoked the Earth back to the center of our frame of reference. For Poole, this is a happy story -- we've rediscovered the Earth. Does the same hold for Blumenberg? Or does "geotropic astronautics" leave us with a different kind of story to tell?
One way to get at these questions is to consider Blumenberg's discussion of "true copernicanism" -- should the fact that humans can reason lead to the expectation that somewhere out there other life-forms can reason, too? or does true copernicanism suggest that the fact of human reason may well be an even more radical instance of earthly and human ec-centricity?
Just these questions are taken up by Fontenelle and Voltaire. Speculations about life on other worlds in the Enlightenment era seem bound up with the question of whether reason is truly "universal" -- that is, not an Earth-bound phenomenon. Kant, for example, was careful to speak of rational beings, not human beings, when he outlined his metaphysics of morals. First, what do Fontenelle and Voltaire seem to think about the issue? Second, you might consider how this issue is related to that of Copernicanism: how it raises similar questions about geocentrism, anthropocentrism, and, for lack of a better word, noocentrism (the centrality of mind or reason). See the last sentence of the book for some cryptic remarks on this count.
Earth, World, Globe, Planet: What's in a Name?
Some of our discussions last week hinged on the question: which, if any, of the words (earth, world, globe), functioned as a "master term" to which the others were instinctively reduced.
This sort of reduction elicited anxieties in our authors from last week. Mitchell worried that the globe of globalization theory has triumphed, and looked to alternatives like "vortex," "plane," and "region." Cosgrove worried over the aims embodied (or as the case may be, disembodied) in the apollonian gaze.
Does the reading for this week shed any light on the issue? For example, do we get a sense for how these terms (globe, world, earth) evolved, and which, if any, was a master term in different historical periods? Are we presented with any new alternatives we might use to contest the globe of globalization theory?
Here are two Blumenberg quotes from The Plenitude of the Stars that might help you think about these questions:
When the first photos from space showed the earth glimmering blue in the universe, there were perhaps others like me who were momentarily astonished to see nothing of the net of latitude and longitude, nothing of the line of the equator, as every globe had impressed it in the photographic memory
Every globe, even the most artful of globes illuminated from within, would forever more appear with a hitherto unremarked wretchedness, for the simple reason that a star can't look like that -- only a construct.
Here are some images to help you assess the plausibility of Blumenberg's remarks.