Chapter 5: Ptolemy’s Revenge
- Contrary to what is often claimed, the end of Ptolemaic astronomy does
not mean that humanity felt itself humiliated because it could no longer think of itself as occupying the centre of the world. In actuality, the centrality of the earth was then considered to be a shameful rather than glorious position in the cosmos – a kind of sublunary rubbish dump. On this point cf. Rémi Brague (2004), The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought, tr. T. Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). The successive upheavals brought about by the mathematization of nature are better understood as resulting from the loss of every privileged point of view and from the dissolution of the ontological hierarchization of places. Humanity becomes unable to invest the world with the meaning that had hitherto allowed it to inhabit its environment – the world can do without humanity, and consequently the latter becomes ‘superfluous’, as Sartre puts it. We should also add that when we speak of ‘Galileism’ we have in mind the general movement of the mathematization of nature initiated by Galileo, rather than the ideas of the latter per se, since these continued to be suffused with Platonism and did not by themselves represent a complete break with the conception of the cosmos held by the Ancients. On both these points – the mathematization of nature in the modern era and the thought of Galileo – the work of Alexandre Koyré remains indispensable. See in particular Koyré
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(1968), From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins), and Koyré (1985), Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (Paris: Gallimard).
-
Cf. Kant (1929), p. 25, Bxxiii.
-
On this point, see for example Renaut (1997), pp. 68–9. 4. Concerning Husserl’s eternalization of the ego, see Husserl (2002),
‘Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spaciality of Nature: The Originary Ark: The Earth Does Not Move’, in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, L. Lawlor and B. Bergo (eds) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). This is a highly significant text because it clearly exhibits the Ptolemaic reduction of science’s Copernicanism which is inherent in every correlationist approach. Of particular relevance here is the passage concerning the phenomenological interpretation of the hypothesis of the destruction of all life on earth following a stellar impact: ‘What sense could the collapsing masses in space, in one space constructed a priori as absolutely homogenous, have, if the constituting life were eliminated? Indeed, does that elimination itself have the sense, if it has any at all, of an elimination of and in the constituting subjectivity? The ego lives and precedes all actual and possible beings [. . .]’ Husserl (2002), p. 131.
- Obviously, what we have in mind here is primarily – but not exclusively
– Heidegger’s conception of temporality. It should also be mentioned here that Heidegger’s debt to phenomenology – a debt that he never entirely discharged – seems to have driven him towards a highly problematic ‘correlationism of finitude’ wherein the world and our relation-to-the-world, man and nature, being and its shepherd, are construed as fundamentally indissociable terms, destined to ‘subsist’ or (perhaps?) perish together. In this regard, it seems apposite to quote the following enigmatic but also telling observation by Heidegger: ‘I often ask myself – this has for a long time been a fundamental question for me – what nature would be without man – must it not resonate through him [hindurchschwingen] in order to attain its ownmost potency?’ Letter dated 11 October 1931 to Elizabeth Blochmann in Martin Heidegger – Elisabeth Blochmann. Briefwechsel 1918–1969, Joachim W. Storck (ed.) (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsches Literatur-Archiv), p. 44, 1990.
- These analyses probably bear some resemblance to those developed at
much greater length in the first section of the fourth part of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative: Vol. III, tr. D. Pellauer and K. Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), which is entitled ‘The Aporetics of Temporality’. Nevertheless, any reader consulting Ricoeur’s text should
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have little difficulty noticing the fundamental differences between our two perspectives (most notably with regard to the interpretation of Kant), the most important of which is also the most obvious – viz., that while Ricoeur’s approach is aporetic, ours is speculative.
- This is a ‘catastrophe’ whose ramifications would need to be studied
within Kant’s work itself, and principally through the tension that the 1st Critique (1781) retrospectively imparts onto our understanding of Kant’s Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, tr. S. L. Jaki (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), published in 1755 and conceived during his pre-Critical period. Kant’s cosmogony of 1755 assumed that the cosmos had a history anterior to every witness – except for God and his angels. But having taken the Critical turn, how is Kant to conceive of the truth of such a history, given that God is no longer an object of theoretical knowledge? This difficulty cannot be obviated by claiming that this truth is to be construed merely as a regulative Idea, for the intelligible content of this Idea is that of a world un-witnessed by any human subject (given that the initial conditions of matter at the beginnings of the world obviously rule out the possibility of human existence). Consequently, either this Idea refers back to a mechanical spatio-temporal occurrence devoid of any subject for whom this space-time constitutes a possible form of intuition, which is to say that this occurrence simply becomes unintelligible from the perspective of the Critical philosophy; or it is a condition of its intelligibility that it indexes the presence of an eternal witness capable of converting it into a correlational occurrence. But since such a witness becomes inaccessible to theoretical cognition after 1781, only practical reason, which is the moral guarantor for the existence of God – in other words, only the 2nd Critique – can preserve the intelligibility of this cosmogony. Descartes claimed that an atheist mathematician could never be absolutely certain of her demonstrations; similarly, would it not be necessary to claim that a Kantian astronomer who was insufficiently moral to believe in God would be incapable of founding the validity of her science . . .? On the relations between Kant’s Critique and his Universal Natural History, cf. Paul Clavier (1997), Kant. Les idées cosmologiques (Paris: PUF).
- Kant (1950), Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, L. W. Beck (ed.) (New
York: Liberal Arts Press), p. 8.
- Michel Puech (1990) questions the historical value of such an avowal –
without undermining its philosophical relevance – in Kant et la causalité. Étude sur la formation du sytème critique (Paris: Vrin).
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