Paradigms for a metaphorology.pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

108 Paradigms for a Metaphorology
sisting on the stars’ quasi-divine special nature; this was still causing headaches for
Tycho Brahe when he came to interpret the ‘new star’ (Stella Nova) that appeared
in Cassiopeia in 1572. This mythic status plays into the metaphor of the earth’s
stellarization, which a more sober appraisal of the methodological situation would
have greater cause to describe as a tellurization of the stars. After all, the assumption
that the laws governing the universe are homogeneous with the stuff from
which the universe is made meant that terrestrial findings could now be projected
onto extraterrestrial phenomena. But the metaphor is unconcerned with theoretically
verifiable problems, such as those that could be settled by sending astronauts
on fact-finding missions into outer space; it wants to know ‘more’ than any space
probe will ever be able to ascertain. The earth as a ‘star among stars’ is primarily a
metaphysical index. Nicolaus of Cusa first made it as much in the twelfth chapter
of book II of his “Docta ignorantia” [Of Learned Ignorance], where he lists the two
characteristics that, for Galileo, would guarantee the earth’s stellar essence: motion
and brightness (or receptivity to light). For Cusanus, it is no longer true “that this
earth is the basest and lowest planet.” 23 To an observer from some other planet, the
earth would appear no less luminous a body than the sun, since the fiery mantle
that, for us, is hidden from view can only be seen from outside. “The earth, then,
is a brilliant star having a light, heat and influence distinctively its own”—even the
earth’s astrological equality, its power to shape the destiny of beings on other stars, is
taken into account, as the technical term influentia suggests. 24 Precisely the illusion
that we stand at the center of the universe is what first gave rise to the impression
that the earth is only passively influenced by these other stars and does not exert an
influence of its own: “We have no knowledge from experience of that influence,
since we have no experience beyond that of our existence in the center where the
influences merge.” 25 Having become one star among others, the earth forfeits any
special qualities that man could refer to himself and his standing in the universe.
Cusanus puts an end to the earth’s relegation within the Aristotelian system of elements,
but no new trait has been won in the process. For Cusanus, however, that is
the decisive advance: the earth’s cosmological neutrality as a star among stars now
allows man to grace this one star with the metaphysical distinction of his presence:
“Rather than think that so many stars and parts of the heavens are uninhabited
and that this earth of ours alone is peopled—and that with beings, perhaps, of an
inferior type—we will suppose that in every region there are inhabitants, differing
in nature by rank and all owing their origin to God, who is the center and circumference
of all stellar regions. Now, even if inhabitants of another kind should exist
23. quod terra ista sit vilissima et infima. [Nicholas of Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance, trans. Germain
Heron (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), 112.]
24. Est igitur terra stella nobilis, quae lumen et calorem et influentiam habet. [Nicholas of Cusa, Of
Learned Ignorance, trans. Heron, 113.]
25. et cum non experiamur nos aliter quam in centro esse, in quo confluunt influentiae, de ista refluentia
nihil experimur. [Nicholas of Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance, trans. Heron, 114.]