The Genesis of the Copernican World - Hans Blumenberg

Forget what you think about the Copernican revolution. Copernicus did not kick humanity out of the center of the universe. We were never fully there. Blumenberg argues that Copernicus was actually trying to restore a connection between God and humanity not destroy it. In the process, “he made the Earth a star” and opened the way for scientific knowledge to envision a homogeneous Universe sharing the same underlying laws.

For those interested in time as practice, Part IV of this work is crucial reading. Blumenberg differentiates Aristotle’s metaphysical concept of time (as the uniform, obvious, eternal, and measurable motion of the skies) from the Christian time of the Middle Ages (the creator/redeemer God made a world with a beginning and an end subject to his individual determination about how long it would last). Copernicus’ more radical innovations have to do with his interventions into the problems of temporality at the end of the fifteenth century. The Aristotelian system was under pressure as a dominant Christianity depended on a notion of time as the creation of God, not the the uniform rotation of the Heavens around the Earth. To replace Aristotelian time in the emerging systems of thought required wholesale changes to how we think of humanity living in time.

The Onlooker at Rest

To understand the change that Copernicus participates in, we need to understand Blumbenberg’s explanation of how the Greeks saw the structure of Reality. Put simply, the knowing subject is not an actor but an “onlooker at rest.” The world presents itself to the onlooker as “phenomena” that “present themselves of their own accord.” To acquire knowledge of the heavens is to observe openly what is going on around you. Reality is occurring outside the subjectivity of the onlooker. The constancy of time provides a stable guarantee that what one observes are phenomena unfolding their essences in time, and that our concepts can be an adequate correspondence between Reality’s temporal motion and our ability to comprehend it. This is the Greek notion of theory (theoria).

To be sure, this bias does not absolutely require a fixed, non-rotational Earth. Rather, a fixed Earth situated at the center of a rotating sky is a better fit for the bias. Theory requires the embracing of that same “at rest” of the Earth to let the phenomena present themselves to the onlooker at rest. This may be easier to understand by way of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as habituation (ethos). The force of NE is how the subject becomes habituated to 1) comprehend reality and 2) to act with practicality in accordance with that comprehension. The ship’s captain must recognize that the ship is damaged and sinking and act accordingly to lighten the load:

… for, in an unqualified sense, no one voluntarily jettisons cargo, but when one’s own preservation and that of the rest are at issue, everyone who has sense [nous, intellect, discernment] would do it. These sorts of actions, then, are mixed, though they are more voluntary [than involuntary], for they are choiceworthy at the time they are done and the end of the action accords with what is opportune at the moment [kairos]. (III.1 1110a 10-12; my emphasis)

To say that “the end of the action accords with what is opportune at the moment” orients time away from the individual subject as autonomous actor. It orients time, as kairos (what is opportune at the moment), as an imposition of external demands. The phrase “the end of the action” is the expression of that imposition on the captain. For something to be “choiceworthy” requires the captain’s openness to the kairos. This is crucial to understand: in this passage “choiceworthy” cannot be untethered from “the time they [the choice of actions] are done.” There are no choiceworthy actions that are separate from the demands of an opportune moment (kairos). Aristotelian ethics are bound to time as kairos such that the actor is only an actor insofar as he (always a he) is habituated to make proper choices to bring about the “end of the action” demanded by the kairos. This is why Aristotle can equivocate on whether the action of the captain is “more voluntary [than involuntary].”

Voluntary (and involuntary) do not equate to free will as we would understand it as Moderns looking backwards. For an action to be voluntary, there has to be some latitude in the choice of actions to bring about the end kairos requires. Voluntary does not mean choosing the end, only the means. Thus, there is no instrumental free will in Aristotle’s ethics that leads the process. There is no autonomous subject looking around and deciding how to impose his instrumental will on the world. Rather, there is a sequence that starts with the given kairos, the opportune moment. The ethical actor must first comprehend “the good” that the kairos demands for its resolution. Once recognized, the well-habituated subject should automatically experience a desire (boulesis) to bring about the good specific to the situation: “Now the function of desire is entirely passive. So the wish (boulesis) is what directs the soul to a reasonable end, but it is an end that is imposed upon it and that it has not chosen” (Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Tragedy, 58). We must understand here that the desire (boulesis) automatically follows from the comprehension of the good that the kairos demands. Desire does not create the situation as an expression of will. Desire follows, it does not lead.

Practical reason (phronesis, the subject of Book VI) kicks in only when the desire (boulesis) to bring about the end is established — an end that desire had no hand in affecting. Practical reason, in other words, does not chose between alternative ends. It can chose only among various means — it is not at the front of the sequence. Phronesis selects the best means once the end is given to it by desire informed by reason. The ends are given to desire if the kairos is properly comprehended by reason. Put simply, practical reason only focuses on the means, it has no place in the choice of ends. (See Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy, Myth and Tragedy, for one of the best discussions of this sequence that I’ve come across.)

At this moment we can understand a couple of Blumenberg’s very challenging sentences in Part IV Chapter 2:

The perfect is the completed stage of the object of action, not of the experienced course of the action as the path that has been traversed. That is why the ‘moment,’ the ‘now’ that is, as it were, taken out of time, does not exist. Every part of time is itself still time, and the concept of time cannot escape the problematic of the continuum. (441)

To understand this, we have to differentiate kairos (the “moment” and the “now”) from chronos (steady, constant, measurable time). Kairos is never separate from chronos in the Aristotelian worldview. Kairos is the “opportune moment” that presents itself as “the object of action.” Let’s replay Blumenberg’s sentences within Aristotle’s description of the captain’s kairos. The captain is a good captain because he is trying to bring about the “object of action” — get the ship safely to land. The kairos concentrates time to the moment of the now, which itself is happening in chronos. Aristotle has nothing to say about the experience of the captain or the crew. He only discusses the habituated response of the captain, who is simply recognizing the moment of kairos and making choices of means within chronos to bring about the “end of the action” that is required. He is not aligning his actions with his will but the other way around: his will is automatically aligned with the recognition of the kairos and how it needs to be brought to perfection. The will does not start the action, it follows later in the sequence. Thus, all aspects of this situation are oriented away from the subject to how the phenomenon is revealing itself in time and how actions are aligned to comprehension of this kairos. The role of the subject (e.g., the captain) in this situation is to correctly recognize what is the good that is called for and to let his habituated intellect follow the chain of steps from comprehension to desire to the choiceworthy action. This is emphatically not modern subjectivity that uses its will to instrumentally orchestrate events in its own interest. Modern subjectivity flows from the inside-out. Aristotle’s habituated citizen absorbs the kairos and acts accordingly. The flow of events is from the outside-in.

This is consistent with how Blumenberg discusses Aristotelian concepts. They are the mechanisms of theoria that allow for the connection between phenomena and our ability to apprehend its unfolding. Aristotelian concepts do not change the world and are not instruments. They simply reveal the essence of the thing to the consciousness of the onlooker at rest:

The Aristotelian theory of concepts does not permit one to take them as raising something to a higher degree — as an extrapolation, a limiting case. They are the result of an abstractive process that exposes the essential character that is inherent in the thing. (439-40)

For this bias to work effectively, the knowing subject must be an onlooker at rest. When it comes to the Metaphysics and On the Heavens, concepts are understood to be a letting in of the essence of the phenomena. Concepts are not instrumental devices that allow us to manipulate the phenomena. The same pattern underlies the ship’s captain who is merely comprehending the good that is required of the situation and choosing the proper means. Of course from our modern vantage point we would see the captain manipulating the situation to bring about the desired end. But from the purely Aristotelian perspective, the emphasis is on the flow of time from the situation to the actor who is habituated to respond appropriately to set it right. Within this bias of phenomena presenting their essences to the onlooker, it is easier to imagine the Heavens rotating around the Earth and not the Earth rotating underneath the Heavens. Time is external, observable, without beginning and without end so long at the Heavens keep rotating.

We see here, in Blumbenberg’s analysis, why Copernicus would be so radical with respect to overhauling time. Once the Earth takes over the rotational duties from the Heavens, the onlooker and his concepts can no longer be conceived as purely letting in essences. The onlooker becomes a knowing subject who must take positive action to overcome a constantly changing perspective that she doesn’t control. The Earth on which she seems to be resting is actually in motion — around the Sun and around its axis. Where she is matters for what she can know. We are not yet to Modernity’s instrumental knowledge, but we are at the moment when the knowing subject is having to become more active in overcoming problems of perspective: “What appears in the utmost distance of the fixed stars is produced in the utmost proximity of the motions of the observer’s standpoint” (443). The “observer’s standpoint,” in other words, is moving but it appears to be fixed. Thus what appears to be true is in fact the reverse of the situation. An appearance of the rotating Heavens is an illusion intimately bound to how the subject is traveling in space and time. Time is no longer just the given phenomenon that reveals itself to the onlooker at rest.

Time is now problematic in a way that it wasn’t for Aristotle because it is, for the late Middle Ages, immanent to how the Earth rotates and orbits. This is problematic for time because it is untethered from the single uniform and eternal rotation of the Heavens above and around the Earth. Obvious appearances of phenomena are no longer trustworthy and no longer a guarantee that knowledge can be mere onlooking. If the Heavens aren’t rotating and this rotation was responsible for the uniformity of an eternal time (without beginning and without end), time and motion must be restored to one another if we are to have a stable concept of time.

This weakening of Aristotle’s ontology of time did not happen of its own accord. Christianity issued the challenge over the course of the Middle Ages by completely undoing the Aristotelian consensus. Copernicus would take up the challenge by implicitly taking Astronomy out of the realm of a technical skill for calculating the movement of the Heavens and make it into a legitimate way of knowing within natural philosophy. But before we get to that, we need to look at how Christianity challenged the understanding of time in the Middle Ages.

The Linear and the Cyclical

In Aristotelian metaphysics, the circularity of time ensures its measurability because the rotation of the sky is uniform motion that is eternal — it has no beginning and no end. Humanity lives within time as marked and measured by the steadiness of this movement of rotation without beginning or end. The Earth does not and cannot rotate. Three things can be inferred from this. First, there is a metaphysical and ontological gap between the Earth and the Sky. They need not be bound by the same laws of physics. When we look up at the stars, we can try to predict their movement, but we can’t or shouldn’t seek to know any underlying laws that drive the motion. Time can be taken as granted (by Aristotle’s unmoved mover) and our attention can focus back down to Earth.

The second consequence is that measurable time is an ontologically observable fact inscribed in the heavens. With an at rest Earth as the foundation for the at rest onlooker, there is no controversy about what constitutes time. We can see it rotating around us. The Sun will rise again just as it always does, and the seasons will come and go just as they always have. Because of the first consequence — no need to look behind the cosmos for its Universal Laws — Astronomy will focus only on improving humanity’s ability to predict this motion and solve its little anomalies, which are emphatically not hidden Laws of Motion. They are just little signals that we haven’t quite gotten the math right. To be sure, Blumenberg is not arguing for an obviousness that was somehow obscuring the truth. Rather, he is ascribing this worldview to the bias that I described above — that of the onlooker at rest using the concepts of theoria to apprehend reality and its essences.

The third consequence is the most important for understanding Blumenberg’s analysis of Aristotelian time. This measurable steadiness allows for time to be conceived of as primarily circular and secondarily linear. It works like this. As the Heavens rotate in their uniform, steady, and predictable way, it is easy to divide the rotation into things that we can count — hours, days, years. Time and circular motion are co-dependent. There is no need for humanity to see the measurement of time as an artificial imposition on reality: “The accent is not on the act of counting as a subjective performance, but rather on the structure of countability that presents itself” (442, my emphasis). Of course, this fits nicely with the bias toward the onlooker at rest as the condition of theoretical knowledge, as well as the ship’s captain recognizing the demands of the kairos.

This circularity, because it is regular and countable, allows linearity to be equally real and substantial — not a “subjective performance,” but a structure of reality that merely “presents itself.” Years, months, days can be lined up into an unending future that is underwritten by the steadiness of the cycle:

And just this pattern of sequential units, as what can be counted, is linear. It is only in the ordinal pattern, which permits one to conceive of time as the number of motion, that the other pattern — the pattern of the circle, the cosmic-intuitive elementary unit of motion — stands behind each unit. (454, my emphasis)

In other words, the stable, observable uniformity of the rotating Heavens “stands behind” the measurable units of linear time as the guarantor of their ontological reality. Everything in the Aristotelian metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology hinges upon an essential connection between the uniform and eternal motion of the Heavens around a stable Earth at rest.

Christianity and Linearity

Christianity flips this relationship between the linear and the cyclical as it threw an enormous monkey wrench into the Aristotelian Metaphysics. Once the universe is understood to be God’s creation and in need of redemption as a definitive end, time is no longer primarily cyclical. It is primarily linear: it is stretched between Genesis and the Apocalypse. This linearity contains time within absolute bookends that come into being within the act of creation.

Blumenberg focuses on an important consequence that can only be fully understood once we’ve comprehended how bound up the measurement of time was with uniform circular motion in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Aristotle’s time is the motion of the Heavens. It is therefore obviously observable, cyclical, measurable, and wholly external to the Earth at rest. Christian time is internal to the creation. If time is the creation of an omnipotent God, then there is no guarantee that He built in reliable measurability. In other words, Christian temporality has no necessary need for time being measurable or tied to circular motion of any kind.

Three important points to draw from this about the Christian temporality of the Middle Ages. First, everything has its own time and there is no necessary and objective reference point that would synchronize all those subjective temporalities into a unity. Any unity is non-obvious and will take a tremendous amount of abstract thought and evangelizing to bring about mass sychronicity. Time is always out of joint, which is not fully conceivable or possible in the Aristotelian view of reality. Any attempt at unity will necessarily be humanity’s instrumental imposition of an artificial measurement onto the out-of-joint temporalities. It could easily be argued that this is the defining problem of Paul’s ministry well before the Middle Ages are underway.

Second, time is untethered from motion to become purely abstract duration: “The next step would be to separate the concept of time from any physical motion at all and to conceive of time as a quantity of an ongoing condition, independent of motion or rest…. undoubtedly the specific character of ‘duration’ as such first became comprehensible after the idea of creation had brought the idea of contingency in its train” (457). We are moving into the realm of abstractions that humanity can (eventually post-Copernicus) use to impose its will on the world and those living within it. The abstractions are not Aristotelian (or Platonic) concepts that are supposed to originate in a Reality that “presents itself” and therefore correspond to it. Rather, these concepts originate as explicitly human inventions to deal with practical and theoretical problems emerging from within theological and philosophical systems of thought.

The Middle Ages struggled with this contingency of time that became individualized. In the examples of Plotinus and Olivi, Blumenberg starts to show us how a unified and public time sought to make its way back into time that is inherently out of joint. Because these efforts lacked Aristotle’s “cosmic-intuitive” obviousness, humanity had to start developing more abstract and less obvious ways to reintroduce unified time. The door is open to absolute time that is purely an abstraction. Augustine would find this in Genesis as the seventh day: we exist in the time of rest after the Creation is complete. By aligning time with a rest day that “does not have an evening,” Augustine untethered time from any requirement to be tied to motion (457). It is not until “Newton’s concept of absolute time” that we get a “relapse in relation to the possibilities that were created by this destruction [of Aristotelian time], because absolute time is at the same time a pure onlooker’s time. Its protagonist is the Laplacean universal intelligence” (443, my emphasis).

Third, and derived from the second, is the realignment of circular time within linear time. One solution to the plurality of times within Christian linearity would be to reintroduce cyclical time in order to provide a regularity that keeps everyone in the salvational scheme (as well as to make trade function properly). To state this as clearly as possible: once time is made into a function of a created world in need of redemption, time becomes inherently out of joint — all things have their own time — and the work of redemption becomes the coordination and synchronization of these separate temporalities into a unity. In early Christianity, this could be accomplished through the assertion of an eschaton that was coming soon (Jesus, Paul). As chronological time drags on, the eschaton became less compelling and new modes of synchronization became necessary. Cycles re-emerge as essential to this synchronization — calendars, clocks, rituals, feast days for saints, et cetera. Modernity intensifies its obsession with time as it pushes further and further toward abstractions and mechanisms that would conceptually unify all times into one. (One could easily argue that we are seeing, in this realignment of the linearity and circularity of time, the beginning of the process of purification (the invention of stable categories like Nature, Society, and the Economy) and translation (the hybrid networks that make those categories effective in organizing the planet for human ends) that Latour identified in We Have Never Been Modern.)

Blumenberg’s argument here is crucial to understand because “the Copernican World” reconstitutes time and motion through the activation of time in all manner of rotating things — physical and spiritual. Let’s take two examples from Part IV Chapter 2: Plotinus and Augustine. We are mistaken, Blumenberg argues, if we see Plotinus and Neoplatonism as initiating the “subjectivation of the concept of time, since it makes time into a kind of accomplishment of the Soul” (460). We must remember that the Soul is not fully individualized for Plotinus. Drawing on Plato’s Timaeus, Plotinus posits the World Soul as the origin of our own individual souls. This human condition creates a temporal situation where we, as individuals, seek to realign and rejoin our souls with the World Soul. Thus time becomes both individuated — it’s my soul’s journey — but totalized in the sense that the journey is back to the World Soul that all of humanity shares. “The Soul and time are characterized, systematically, by this double description, as the unfolding of restlessness and the unsatisfiability of their demand” (461). This schema, because it has no way to tie time to motion, leaves room for another dimension of time as abstract duration. By focusing on time as the journey of the Soul through its restlessness, we don’t have a resolution to a broader concept of time that exists beyond this journey. As a consequence, cosmic time hangs around as a vestige of Aristotelian metaphysics: we can’t just forget about it. Plotinus doesn’t necessarily theorize this, but he does pose the question as a possibility, though it is non-essential to his philosophy: “he was the first to be able to pose the question of whether time would continue to exist if the heavens came to a standstill” (460).

Augustine, in his reading of Genesis, makes room for abstract time, but the physical example of the potter’s wheel is prescient for Blumenberg:

For Augustin, time is a created thing like the material world and along with it. That dependence is what matters to him, and he heightens it even further when he refers to the rotating potter’s wheel as the minimal condition of time. For in this way time becomes the creature of a creature, dependent on man’s set of tools, and far removed from the danger of itself becoming an absolute. (461-2, my emphasis).

Augustine is drawing on the potter’s wheel metaphor “that was already classical in astronomy,” but he is explicitly untethering it from the the metaphysics of time as celestial motion (462). This untethering places time into the tools of humanity as it goes about making a world it can live in. So much prescience is packed into this metaphor as Modernity, post-Copernicus, will become awash in rotating machines that will become the very embodiment, activation and management of time. The reconciliation, in other words, of time and motion will not just be Copernican science. It will be the industrialization of time as the next few centuries will surround us with all manner of rotating machines that refuse to let us “waste time.”

Scholasticism and Time

Scholasticism of the Middle Ages inherits this problem of Christianity’s “destruction of Aristotelian time.” The Scholastics sought a “harmonization of the Aristotelianism and Christian premises” (468). This harmonization had to deal with a fundamental problem in Aristotelian metaphysics — the hard (i.e., Gnostic) duality between the Heavens and the Earth. Augustine, who is equally indispensable to the Scholastics as Aristotle, “had declared it inadmissible to say that divine Providence does not extend past the region of the heavenly bodies to the Earth, because this would mean that the sublunary things could also endure on their own, without divine assistance” (465). In other words, relegating God to merely Aristotle’s unmoved mover who no longer has an active interest in his creation is not acceptable to Christianity. He needed to be pulled down into the world from the Heavens.

The problem that Scholasticism faced as it sought to repair “the disintegration of the original unity of the Aristotelian definition of time” is this: If everything is created by God and gets their individual purpose from God, each thing has its own time as the distance between its Becoming and its teleological Being. Thus everything is in some sort of motion toward its end. The sole purpose of the Heavens is to move uniformly: “The heavens accomplish nothing but their motion, in the most dependable fashion.”

But this doesn’t really solve the problem of uniform time: all that this means is that the Heavens have their own notion of time that is tied to the execution of their purpose, and why should its temporality override all others?

All other things have their own purpose, which means they have their own time as they move through Becoming to their Being. Time is thus embedded in things themselves as teleological purpose, but there is no need to specify any one of these teleologies as dominating all others.

The upshot is this: Scholasticism separates uniform measurement from a definitive and dominant motion that would be the measure of all times:

This leaves open the question of whether only one motion underlies the concept of time — and whether this is an arbitrarily chosen motion, or the set-apart guaranteed motion of the heavens, the motus regularis et certus et nobis notissimus [motion that is regular and dependable and best known to us] — or whether, in the last analysis, all motions equally make the concept of time possible, according to the formula tot tempora quot modus [there are as many times as their are motions], where the unity of the concept of time would be nothing but the abstraction of what all ‘times’ have in common. With the rudimentary notion of time as numerus motus, the concept of time and the measure of time no longer necessarily coincide. Where the measure of time receives a nominalistic interpretation, it becomes possible to trace the concept of time back to inner experience. (470-1)

We’ve returned to Augustine’s time as inner experience and the potter’s wheel from Book 11 of Confessions. We find here one of Blumenberg’s key themes that runs throughout his work: the emergence of abstractions as a way of organizing human activity in the world. Trying to restore the uniformity of measurable time — a time to rule all others — becomes one of the first ways in which Modernity trains itself in the use of abstractions as an orientation of ourselves to the world and others.

Motion and Time

Let’s now turn to Copernicus and the trajectory that Blumenberg traces through Galileo and Kepler to Newton. The trajectory follows the tenuous relationship between time and motion that Christianity introduced and that Scholasticism had to deal with.

At the heart of the challenge after Copernicus was this: for those who accepted the truth contained in Copernicus’ Revolutions, motion and human perception must be fundamentally joined.

The consequence is a new nihilism injected into Western Metaphysics. ‘The central distinctive characteristic of Aristotelian and Scholastic physics had been that it had assumed a real and realizable difference between rest and motion — that is, that it did not recognize the principle of the relativity of motion and of the equivalence of the states of rest and unaccelerated motion’ (392-3).

Copernicus had put everything in motion, which meant that what you see is not what you get. Human perception that the Earth is stable and the cosmos rotates around it is in fact completely wrong. What we intuit is illusory through and through.

The challenge for physics will become putting the cosmos back together from this fundamental assumption. Without a path to coherence, the cosmos threatens to become a vertiginous and chaotic mess of unpredictability and instability. The path that the West needed to carve was a rapprochement between Aristotelian Physics and Astronomy. With respect to Physics, the problem centered on the inability to think motion as fundamental. ‘Rest’ provided (and arguably still provides) the possibility of knowledge. Many of our assumptions about experience and knowledge are packed into the notion of rest. Mainly, we assume that what we see bares some sense of reality because when I am sitting in my chair writing this summary, my immediate surroundings appear stable. My senses do not appear to be deceived.

To put everything in motion, as Copernicus did, begins to undermine this obviousness. Knowledge and experience must be untethered from a residual positivism in the Aristotelian Physics. Reason and rationality must be increasingly abstracted from the senses. ‘Rest’ is preserved, but it becomes an experiential effect. Blumenberg does not quote John Locke, but we can see this in his understanding of knowledge from his Treatise of Human Understanding (1695):

By the Philosophical Use of Words, I mean such an use of them, as may serve to convey the precise Notions of Things, and to express, in general Propositions, certain and undoubted Truths, which the Mind may rest upon, and be satisfied with, in its search after true Knowledge. (Locke, Treatise of Human Understanding, III.IX.3)

True knowledge is attained when Words express general Propositions that capture the ‘precise Notions of Things’. When this occurs, the Mind experiences ‘rest’.

The cosmos, in this worldview, need not be at rest. Everything can be moving. The bias toward true knowledge and things needing to be ‘at rest’ is preserved by moving ‘rest’ inside the mind. This happens when our Philosophical Use of Words takes on a new power — of overcoming nihilistic motion by giving our minds the capacity to experience certainty as a pure state of abstraction. We find exactly this alliance between rest and experience in Locke’s equation of the Mind at rest and the feeling of satisfaction: ‘the Mind may rest upon, and be satisfied with, in its search after true Knowledge.’

This is thoroughly Cartesian where ‘true Knowledge’ is captured in clear, non-metaphorical propositions. A form of mental relaxation occurs when these propositions are attained.

Locke is also Newton’s contemporary, and his answer to the problem of experience, motion, and knowledge was not available to Copernicus. So, how did Copernicus keep the cosmos from flying apart into chaotic motion? He assumed that the rotations were geometrically perfect. All planets are spheres rotating on perfect axes, and all orbital motions are perfect circles holding a uniform distance from their orbital centers. In other words, he assumed that God provided perfect stability embedded in uniform motion.

The increasing power of observation and the increasing confidence in math and reason will chip away at this assumption, thus leading further and further into the nihilistic potential of the cosmos.

As Copernicus’ theories became more complicated through more detailed observations. The result was the need for ‘a different kind of experience’. This new experience became fundamentally experimental — ‘directed toward specific premises — selected and arranged in accordance with them — and placed under definite conditions: in other words, experimental experience’ (394).

For Blumenberg, this is the fundamental story of ‘experience’ with respect to Modernity:

Instead, what stands at this beginning is a distancing from the immediacy of the life-world. The suspicion arises, then, that the everyday experience that supplies us with what ‘goes without saying’ for us represents neither the ‘norm’ of physical reality nor its totality; in other words, that it could be partial and provincial, because in it simple law-governed regularities are superimposed on each other or are concealed by additional factors. (394)

If what we see is not what we get — i.e., experience is fundamentally illusory — how does Western Metaphyics keep nihilism at bay? Humanity has to re-orient experience away from explaining what appears to be obvious and start from the assumption that we are deceived.

Here is the upshot: Experience must become skeptical and ‘experimental’: ‘This type of experience never presents itself immediately, and is not exhausted in intuitive givenness’ (394). The starting point of experience is illusion, which must be overcome by bracketing our experience and subjecting it to suspicion carried out by abstract reasoning. This means that we have to find ways of controlling our rational processes, which is why the Enlightenment becomes so obsessed with Treatises and Inquires into the Nature and Causes of things, especially of the mind. The full title of Descartes most influential work captures it in total: Discourse on the Method for Conducting One’s Reason Well and Seeking Truth in the Sciences.

From the everyday perspective of ‘the life-world’, we have never really left behind the Aristotelian and Scholastic assumption that experience can be transparent to reality and that truth is always ‘at rest’. In this assumption lies a fundamental separation between scientific experience and everyday experience.

This distinction can be seen in Tycho Brahe’s assertion about falling bodies in 1596: ‘How is it possible that a lead ball, when it is dropped in the proper way from a very high tower, hits with perfect exactitude the point on the Earth that is perpendicularly beneath it?’ (cited on page 393). If the Earth were truly rotating, the ball would hit anywhere but the directly perpendicular spot beneath it at the beginning of its drop.

To understand why experience is so deceived, we must turn to scientific abstractions. We must assume that the perpendicular drop of the ball is an illusion and that we need to create an abstract model of the full situation to understand why we experience what we experience.

Science begins to take on its dominant role as the only valid ‘method’ for ‘true Knowledge’.

Galileo

Galileo’s innovation in his attempts to prove Copernicus right was to thoroughly infuse the cosmos with mechanical motion. Where Copernicus was making an intervention into Astronomy, Galileo inaugurates something quite different — physics based on mechanical laws of motion.

Copernicus had largely been concerned with correcting imperfections in Astronomical calculations, which was concerned with fully understanding, and thus making predictable, heavenly rotation. Galileo was more of a mechanic at heart, and he starts to see pendular motion everywhere.