Dust in an Infinite Sky: Did Copernicus Displace and so Devalue Humanity?
What, then, is man in the midst of two infinities? Nothing in comparison to the universe; infinite in comparison to the atomic. … The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.
—Pascal, Pensées, sec. 2 no. 206.
Why Galileo? Why condemn him? If, as textbooks and articles and documents often represent it, the issue was truly about heliocentrism—the idea that the sun, and not the earth, was at the center of our solar system—why did the church not persecute Copernicus, whose work On the Revolution of the Spheres clearly did challenge the Aristotelianism of many in the church, and by the time of Galileo’s condemnation had been circulating for nearly ninety years? The answer has to do with the fact that Galileo’s condemnation was in fact not as it is popularly represented. But, again to no one’s surprise, it has taken the form we are so familiar with—that of Galileo persecuted for his science—because of retellings that occurred in the Enlightenment, which were magnified and mythologized even further in the X-Club and the debates surrounding the professionalization of science during reception of Darwin.
[...]
The “Why Galileo?” question becomes even more curious when we turn to the rank and file of astronomy 101 textbooks, where popular historical reviews, public opinion, and even a good deal of dictionaries and encyclopedias that Nicolaus Copernicus, by discovering that the sun and not the earth was in the center of our solar system, displaced and reduced the dignity of humanity as traditionally held in the church. Surely, if this was the case, the church should have been up in arms about Copernicus and those following him well before Galileo? But they were not. This did not stop such a story from spreading. Not only were we not the center, or so goes the story—Copernicus discovered that there was no such thing as a center. We were adrift like dust in an infinite sky, from nowhere to nowhere, amounting to nothing.
No one more succinctly and famously embodies this understanding than Sigmund Freud in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. It perhaps seems odd that a figure in astronomy should appear in a text on psychology, and yet, Freud claims, Copernicus is one of three men who are in essence responsible for contemporary anxiety. Science, he alleged, had inflicted upon humanity “two great outrages upon its naïve self-love.” The first was Copernicus, who caused humanity to clutch its collective pearls in horror “when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of magnitude hardly conceivable.” The second shock was Charles Darwin, demonstrating that we had descended from animals. A third shock in this same lineage was Freud himself, showing that our waking life was little more than the flotsam that washed up on the shores of our minds from the depths of irrational subconscious desires and urges.[1]
Orienting all of world history around an event or three is perhaps at this point hardly remarkable, given how often we have already seen it done. Yet, we must not underplay how influential Freud’s schema of the world and its history through these three great humiliations has been. Showing up in a text on psychology is perhaps the least startling place Copernicus has been invited to appear—indeed an entire cosmology, and entire metaphysics has been conjured from the man, and how Freud linked him to Darwin and to himself. “We should revel in our newfound [lowly] status,” writes biologist Stephen Jay Gould in reference to the humiliating trifecta of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, “[we need to cherish the idea] that we must construct meaning for ourselves.”[2] In one sense there is nothing wrong with turning this into a metaphysics—the problem is that no one seems to acknowledge that is what they are doing.
Orienting all of world history around an event or three is perhaps at this point hardly remarkable, given how often we have already seen it done. Yet, we must not underplay how influential Freud’s schema of the world and its history through these three great humiliations has been. Showing up in a text on psychology is perhaps the least startling place Copernicus has been invited to appear—indeed an entire cosmology, and entire metaphysics has been conjured from the man, and how Freud linked him to Darwin and to himself. “We should revel in our newfound [lowly] status,” writes biologist Stephen Jay Gould in reference to the humiliating trifecta of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, “[we need to cherish the idea] that we must construct meaning for ourselves.”[2] In one sense there is nothing wrong with turning this into a metaphysics—the problem is that no one seems to acknowledge that is what they are doing.
Rather, Freud’s history and the vision of the world attached to it is taken as a plain truth spoken by redoubtable advocates for objective science. Carl Sagan, taking his cue directly from Freud, spread this historical periodization far and wide by declaring that Copernicus was the first of several “Great Demotions … to human pride.”[3] In what is perhaps one of the most famous pictures ever taken, Sagan embroidered this history with the image of the earth as a “pale blue dot.” Taken by the probe Voyager 1 as it turned back to face the earth while it was flying out on its lonely interstellar journey, what it captured from 3.7 billion miles away was a remarkable picture of the Earth, just about the size of a dust mote. Hanging there in a pale ray of cosmic light, warming itself against the immense dark surrounding it, one almost hears Sagan’s steady, learned voice tell us “that’s here, that’s home, that’s us.” Beautiful, and too true. But behind it lurks a deep meaninglessness that continues to ring long after the wizened timber of Sagan’s voice, assuring us that it will all be ok, has dissolved into that same unroofed sky of his moralizing.
It is quite easy to flip Sagan's optimism into its opposite. “Once upon a time,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, “in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.” And then between a single tick of the world-clock, it disappeared. “That [invention of knowing] was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history’ but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.”[4] Sagan’s consolation for cooler, scientific heads to prevail is easily deconstructed into Nietzsche’s tale. Here too, though, we are not far from Christianity. If one were to read The Wisdom of Solomon 2:2-23, Nietzsche comes off less antagonistic than ironically pious: “We were born by mere chance; hereafter we shall be as though we had never been. Because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is but a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts. When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes. And the spirit will dissolve like empty air.” It might be asked as well how far Freud, and psychoanalysis themselves are forms of "orthodoxy ... a subtle reconstruction in a challenging and modern form of some of the most ancient forms of the most ancient religious doctrines and sexual ideologies." (Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong, 5). More on that in a moment.
[…]
What historians stumbled upon as a few trepid explorers made their way past the veils of our typical mythologies, the displacement of the earth from the center of the universe was hardly an assault upon the theological concept of humanity by a scientific one. In fact, it was initially based upon theological reasoning wrought by earlier scholastics and ultimately executed by a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, Nicolas of Cusa. For traditional thought, moreover, the center was far from the best location. For Aristotle, for example, instead of prime real estate the center was a place of heaviness, where the refuse of the world naturally and necessarily accumulated. For Dante, the center of the universe was, in fact, quite literally hell itself. And again, this was necessarily so. The unusual historical discovery (or reminder) of late was the fact that for many in the Copernican debates, far from Freud’s demotion, “heliocentrism was seen as ‘exalting’ the position of humankind in the universe … and conversely placing the divinely associated sun into the central yet tainted location.”[5]
It is quite easy to flip Sagan's optimism into its opposite. “Once upon a time,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, “in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.” And then between a single tick of the world-clock, it disappeared. “That [invention of knowing] was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history’ but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.”[4] Sagan’s consolation for cooler, scientific heads to prevail is easily deconstructed into Nietzsche’s tale. Here too, though, we are not far from Christianity. If one were to read The Wisdom of Solomon 2:2-23, Nietzsche comes off less antagonistic than ironically pious: “We were born by mere chance; hereafter we shall be as though we had never been. Because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is but a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts. When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes. And the spirit will dissolve like empty air.” It might be asked as well how far Freud, and psychoanalysis themselves are forms of "orthodoxy ... a subtle reconstruction in a challenging and modern form of some of the most ancient forms of the most ancient religious doctrines and sexual ideologies." (Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong, 5). More on that in a moment.
[…]
What historians stumbled upon as a few trepid explorers made their way past the veils of our typical mythologies, the displacement of the earth from the center of the universe was hardly an assault upon the theological concept of humanity by a scientific one. In fact, it was initially based upon theological reasoning wrought by earlier scholastics and ultimately executed by a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, Nicolas of Cusa. For traditional thought, moreover, the center was far from the best location. For Aristotle, for example, instead of prime real estate the center was a place of heaviness, where the refuse of the world naturally and necessarily accumulated. For Dante, the center of the universe was, in fact, quite literally hell itself. And again, this was necessarily so. The unusual historical discovery (or reminder) of late was the fact that for many in the Copernican debates, far from Freud’s demotion, “heliocentrism was seen as ‘exalting’ the position of humankind in the universe … and conversely placing the divinely associated sun into the central yet tainted location.”[5]
One’s reaction thus varied accordingly. The deep irony that was discovered about Freud’s claim is that of the initial complaints surrounding Copernicus and Galileo was, in fact, that by moving the earth to where the sun used to be, we were in fact demoting the sun and exalting the earth! And that is where Copernicanism had even taken hold. Even a quarter century after Copernicus published, a thinker like Michel de Montaigne could still write that “we are lodged here in the dirt and the filth of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, the lowest story of the house, and most remote from the heavenly arch.”[6] Galileo, conversely, noted that “as for the earth, we seek to ennoble and to perfect it, when we strive to make it like the celestial bodies and, as it were, place it in heaven from whence your philosophers [the Aristotelians] have banished it.”[7]So successful was Copernicus’ “strenuous revaluing and refurbishing of the center [in which he placed the sun]” along with the exaltation of humanity by making us participants in the heavenly spheres, “that we have ever since been blinded to how Copernicus’ predecessors truly viewed the central location.”[8] This leads, in fact to a very curious historical rewriting:
Moreover, Freud’s combination of this new story with Darwin and then ultimately himself, was likewise no accident. Nor was Freud the first to make this equation between the two great men. After Darwin’s death in 1883 Ernst Haeckel, a biologist that can for convenience be seen as Huxley’s German counterpart, became perhaps the most influential advocate for a thoroughly anti-Christian materialist interpretation of Darwinism after his wife died. Her passing left him with the deep burden of a feeling that all meaning had fled the world, to be replaced only by tragedy. One is reminded of the similar death of Michelet’s wife, and his reevaluation of the middle ages once held so dear, now descending into an evening bordered by no dawn. Like his contemporaries Goethe and Humboldt, Haeckel’s science was “transported by deep currents of aesthetic inspiration,” and was profoundly affected by the tides of a movement known as German Romanticism. For the Romantics, nature was a display of the attributes of God, a God who was now in hiding. Tragedy was in some sense a metaphysical principle, it resided within the heart of the Hidden God—or The Absolute—and endlessly repeated itself here below.[10] The death of God was, of course, a deeply Christian theme. As early as Melito of Sardis in his homily on Passover, expressions like “God is murdered,” were pious phrases of hymnody. In Romanticism, instead, the death of God was turned in one way or another into a cosmic principle, and likewise was imprinted deeply upon their interpretations of nature and society. The materialist implications of evolution that Haeckel championed often therefore echoed with “the speculative land of gothic dreams.” And because of his great personal tragedy, evolution was the lance to thrust into the heart of the world, the backbone of his theological campaign to display his new and profound sense of the great calamity of the world.[11]
More than Huxley, more than Darwin himself, Haeckel nearly single-handedly created the “Darwin industry” as we know it today. “The controversial implications of evolutionary theory for human life—for man’s nature, for ethics, and for religion—would not have the same urgency they still hold today had Haeckel not written.”[12] Indeed, had Haeckel never lived—or perhaps had his wife never died—one historian, through an intensely detailed studied of his life and thought, can claim “certain non-essential aspects of modern evolutionary theory, namely its materialistic and anti-religious features” would have hardly found the prevalence they did. Haeckel’s own version of “Darwinian theory would have lost its markedly hostile features, and these features would not have bled over to the face turned toward the public.” Nonetheless, after Haeckel’s wife passed, he took up his crusade “and the cultural representations of evolutionary doctrine took a different cast: evolutionary theory became popularly understood as materialistic and a-theistic, if not atheistic. … It was Haeckel’s formulations that … created the texture of modern evolutionary theory as a cultural product.”[13]
More to the point, Haeckel was one of the first to connect the Copernican cliché to Darwin in order to detail his materialist vision: Copernicus’ heliocentrism “led to the most decisive revolution in the thought of the world of his day” because it destroyed the assumed place of man in nature. Similarly, one thinks, notes Haeckel, of the “theory of Darwin and the extraordinary stir that it has occasioned. … [Darwin] puts in the place of a conscious creative force, building and arranging the organic bodies of animals and plants on a designed plan, a series of natural forces working blindly … without aim, without design.” Elsewhere, Haeckel could put it simply that Copernicanism and Darwinism corrected the two great errors of the book of Genesis regarding the cosmic centrality of man, and his separation from the lower animals. As one scholar who unearthed this legacy of Haeckel for the Copernican cliché has noted:
Once the center was seen as being occupied by the royal Sun, that location did appear to be a very special place. Thus we anachronistically read the physical center’s post-Copernican excellence back into the pre-Copernican world picture—and so turn it upside down. [In this manner] the Copernican cliché is in some respects more than just an innocent confusion. Rather, it functions as a self-congratulatory story that materialist modernism recites to itself as a means of displacing its own hubris onto what it likes to call the ‘Dark Ages.’ When [Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757)] and his successors [e.g. the philosophes] tell the tale [which it seems they also invented], it is clear that they are making no disinterested point; they make no secret of the fact that they are ‘extremely pleased’ with the demotion they read into the accomplishments of Copernicus [because it is a direct attack on their newly invented straw-man of Church history].[9]
Moreover, Freud’s combination of this new story with Darwin and then ultimately himself, was likewise no accident. Nor was Freud the first to make this equation between the two great men. After Darwin’s death in 1883 Ernst Haeckel, a biologist that can for convenience be seen as Huxley’s German counterpart, became perhaps the most influential advocate for a thoroughly anti-Christian materialist interpretation of Darwinism after his wife died. Her passing left him with the deep burden of a feeling that all meaning had fled the world, to be replaced only by tragedy. One is reminded of the similar death of Michelet’s wife, and his reevaluation of the middle ages once held so dear, now descending into an evening bordered by no dawn. Like his contemporaries Goethe and Humboldt, Haeckel’s science was “transported by deep currents of aesthetic inspiration,” and was profoundly affected by the tides of a movement known as German Romanticism. For the Romantics, nature was a display of the attributes of God, a God who was now in hiding. Tragedy was in some sense a metaphysical principle, it resided within the heart of the Hidden God—or The Absolute—and endlessly repeated itself here below.[10] The death of God was, of course, a deeply Christian theme. As early as Melito of Sardis in his homily on Passover, expressions like “God is murdered,” were pious phrases of hymnody. In Romanticism, instead, the death of God was turned in one way or another into a cosmic principle, and likewise was imprinted deeply upon their interpretations of nature and society. The materialist implications of evolution that Haeckel championed often therefore echoed with “the speculative land of gothic dreams.” And because of his great personal tragedy, evolution was the lance to thrust into the heart of the world, the backbone of his theological campaign to display his new and profound sense of the great calamity of the world.[11]
More than Huxley, more than Darwin himself, Haeckel nearly single-handedly created the “Darwin industry” as we know it today. “The controversial implications of evolutionary theory for human life—for man’s nature, for ethics, and for religion—would not have the same urgency they still hold today had Haeckel not written.”[12] Indeed, had Haeckel never lived—or perhaps had his wife never died—one historian, through an intensely detailed studied of his life and thought, can claim “certain non-essential aspects of modern evolutionary theory, namely its materialistic and anti-religious features” would have hardly found the prevalence they did. Haeckel’s own version of “Darwinian theory would have lost its markedly hostile features, and these features would not have bled over to the face turned toward the public.” Nonetheless, after Haeckel’s wife passed, he took up his crusade “and the cultural representations of evolutionary doctrine took a different cast: evolutionary theory became popularly understood as materialistic and a-theistic, if not atheistic. … It was Haeckel’s formulations that … created the texture of modern evolutionary theory as a cultural product.”[13]
More to the point, Haeckel was one of the first to connect the Copernican cliché to Darwin in order to detail his materialist vision: Copernicus’ heliocentrism “led to the most decisive revolution in the thought of the world of his day” because it destroyed the assumed place of man in nature. Similarly, one thinks, notes Haeckel, of the “theory of Darwin and the extraordinary stir that it has occasioned. … [Darwin] puts in the place of a conscious creative force, building and arranging the organic bodies of animals and plants on a designed plan, a series of natural forces working blindly … without aim, without design.” Elsewhere, Haeckel could put it simply that Copernicanism and Darwinism corrected the two great errors of the book of Genesis regarding the cosmic centrality of man, and his separation from the lower animals. As one scholar who unearthed this legacy of Haeckel for the Copernican cliché has noted:
Whether or not Freud was informed by Haeckel … is beside the point. What is important to recognize is that the … evolutionist [was] articulating a connection between Copernicus and Darwin that was quite similar to the observation made by Freud [and was most likely the first to note] … that Darwin continued a process of decentering humanity that was begun by Copernicus and modern astronomy.[14]Haeckel’s tragic world gained a history. The problem was that in the late nineteenth-century up through the late twentieth century, these stories migrated into textbooks everywhere. Indeed, after the Harvard astronomer Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) inserted the cliché into her Introduction to Astronomy (1954), the myth received another new life and a legion of others followed suit.[15] Even Peter Bowler—a historian of evolutionary theory who has spearheaded many of the revisions that play into our story—opens his own (extremely good) introduction to the history of evolution by noting “for historians of science, the ‘Darwinian Revolution’ has always ranked alongside the ‘Copernican revolution,’ as an episode in which a new scientific theory symbolized a wholesale change in cultural values.”[16] Without the overt polemic, then, Bowler proceeds in essence to repeat Haeckel and Freud’s framework for the course of history—and this amidst the same few paragraphs where Bowler also goes out of his way to debunk the warfare thesis! It survives unscathed by Bowler’s many keen insights about striking an even keeled approach to the history of science and religion. Freud’s framework is as such, one imagines, made stronger and driven even deeper by that which did not kill it. In philosophy, too, Haeckel's vision intersected with Nietzsche, who likewise relied upon the Copernican cliche:
Has the self-belittlement of man, his will to self-belittlement, not progressed irresistibly since Copernicus? Alas, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past--he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God...Since Copernicus man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane--now he is slipping faster and faster from the center into--what? Into nothingness? Very well!
This is incredibly important for the Scopes Trial, as we shall see, as both Nietzsche and this particular Haeckelian interpretation of evolution overcrowd the transcripts as historian Brandon Konoval expertly records in a recent essay, "What Has Dayton to do with Sils-Maria?" For now, though, we are led to ask: why was an obvious falsehood so popular amidst rhetoric of objectivity, the quest for truth, and the like? It was precisely because it embodied, in astronomer Owen Gingerich’s phrase, the ethical “principle of mediocrity” that was in many cases driving the anti-theological materialistic visions of science.
In the twentieth century it has become increasingly popular to refer to a ‘Copernican Principle,’ namely: We should not consider ourselves to be on a special planet circling round a special star that has a special place in a special galaxy. With respect to the cosmos, we should not be considered special creatures, even though we clearly are with respect to life on earth. In full dress, this is the principle of mediocrity, and Copernicus would have been shocked to find his name associated with it.[17]We might say this is in some sense a tamed variation of the wild laments that the Romantics built into the heart of nature, along with a continuing pessimism of humanity in various strains of Christianity in the notion of original sin. They show up now in the most unlikely of places, and through a sleight of hand appear as the platitude of “objective” scientific reason. As historians ran the courses of their detective work, in other words, it was revealed that a quite peculiar ethos had been trailing the historical facts behind it. At this point we should not be surprised, perhaps. But the question “Why Galileo?” nonetheless still lingers. Now all the more.
[1] Freud, Introductory Letters on Psycho-Analysis, 240-241.
[2] Gould, Life’s Grandeur, 18.
[3] Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 26.
[4] Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Unmoral Sense,” 79.
[5] Danielson, “Myth 6,” 54.
[6] Quoted in Danielson, “Copernican Cliché,” 1031.
[7] Danielson, “Copernican Cliché.”
[8] Danielson, “Copernican Cliché,” 1032.
[9] Danielson, “Copernican Cliché,” 1033.
[10] Krell, The Tragic Absolute, e.g. 104-209.
[11] On romanticism, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, esp. 197-252.
[12] Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life, 8.
[13] Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life, 13-16.
[14] Hesketh, “From Copernicus to Darwin to You,” 195.
[15] Keas, Unbelievable, 99.
[16] Bowler, Evolution, 1-3.
[17] Gingerich, God’s Universe, 14-15.
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