Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century
272
Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century
272Hardcover
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Overview
A work that speaks to the history of science and literary studies, Fictions of the Cosmos explores the evolving relationship that ensued between fiction and astronomical authority. By examining writings of Kepler, Godwin, Hooke, Cyrano, Cavendish, Fontenelle, and others, Frédérique Aït-Touati shows that it was through the telling of stories—such as through accounts of celestial journeys—that the Copernican hypothesis, for example, found an ontological weight that its geometric models did not provide. Aït-Touati draws from both cosmological treatises and fictions of travel and knowledge, as well as personal correspondences, drawings, and instruments, to emphasize the multiple borrowings between scientific and literary discourses. This volume sheds new light on the practices of scientific invention, experimentation, and hypothesis formation by situating them according to their fictional or factual tendencies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226011226 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2011 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
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FICTIONS of the COSMOS
Science and Literature in the Seventeenth CenturyBy FRÉDÉRIQUE AÏT-TOUATI
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2011 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-01122-6
Chapter One
Kepler Sets the Earth in Motion
From the philosophical flight evoked by Pierre Hadot to the burlesque of it dramatized by Thomas Shadwell, we can notice how the theme has spread. If Shadwell mocks it, it is because the motif had been constantly taken up throughout the century and closely associated with the defense of the Copernican system; moving away from the Earth through the fiction of lunar flight allows one to observe it and to demonstrate, fictionally, the Earth's movement. In the cosmological corpus, the theme of flight has a particular role to play, on the one hand because it is the bearer of a philosophical tradition that astronomers can usefully claim and on the other because it allows a provisional response to one of the major questions posed by the polemic over the Copernican system: what makes the Earth turn? I would like to start with the paradox that the most powerful texts for establishing the truth of the new astronomy are fictions. In other words, the truth and the credibility of the cosmological discourse are not constructed (only) in opposition to but with fiction. These two first chapters come back to the classic issue of the combination of knowledge and fiction by interrogating it on two levels:
• within texts, when they mix knowledge and fiction, by examining the combination of the two discourses and the presence of their respective markers or limits; and
• external to texts, in the confrontation of texts that present themselves at first sight as fictional or as theoretical.
The tales of lunar voyages provide a good focus for my exposition, since they are the site of a kind of knowledge still to be fully established: the new astronomy and Copernican cosmology. The genre of the Scholastic treatise, as unsuitable as a method as it is as of a vision of the world, became inadequate and so the traditional astronomy treatise no longer sufficed. It is in this context that fiction intervenes; it allows the adoption of a distanced viewpoint in order to describe the cosmos afresh. Such is the origin of the singular poetics of the cosmological journey, heir of the tradition started by Lucian and the Italian Renaissance, but reactivated by the cosmological debates and the necessity of finding new arguments in favor of Copernicanism. This first section will show how the poetics of the cosmological journey took shape as it attempted to transform the fabulous tradition of the lunar voyage into a possible journey, in order that it be associated with the defense of the Copernican system.
* * *
In the cosmology of Ptolemy, following Aristotelian physics, the world is composed of two regions: an elementary sublunar region that includes the four elements ordered from lowest to highest (earth, water, air, and fire) and an ethereal supralunar region that surrounds the sublunar and includes nine heavens or crystalline spheres—that is to say, solid and transparent orbs—turning around the Earth. Beyond that lies the Empyrean, the dwelling of the blessed. The materiality of these orbs was the subject of numerous discussions in the sixteenth century, but it was generally accepted; Copernicus conserves in his system the structure of solid orbs. It was the observation of the comet of 1577 by Tycho Brahe that enabled the definitive refutation of this conception of the universe: by observing a body in movement between planets, Tycho rendered the old model of solid orbs obsolete. In the Copernican system as it was understood and interpreted in the seventeenth century, spheres are no longer present, fixed stars are an infinity of other Suns situated at an extraordinary distance from the Earth, the space beyond the fixed stars is no longer an inconceivable space, but rather an infinite distance ("indefinite," as Descartes put it rather prudently) separates worlds, as far as thought can reach. Alexandre Koyré has described our period as that of the shift from the closed world to the infinite universe. From our perspective here, the question might be reformulated, very concretely, as the shift from the heavens to the sky, from the solidity of the Aristotelian cosmos to the planets moving along the intangible orbits of Keplerian cosmology.
But if Tycho overturned the Aristotelian cosmos, he himself did not accept any of the three movements of the Earth postulated by Copernicus (diurnal rotation, annual rotation around the Sun, and oscillation on its axis). So how could the Earth be put into motion against the upholders of geostatism? This was one of the principal labors that preoccupied Copernican astronomers at the start of the seventeenth century. To accomplish such an upheaval, the tools of traditional astronomy were not sufficient, for in the domain of astronomy, recourse to the immediate experience of the senses was misleading—everybody could "see" that the Sun turned around the Earth—and recourse to physical experiment was impossible. In this context, visual and fictional figuration played a central role, substituting a new mental image of the cosmos for the old one. Nothing could be ruled out that might contribute to the vast enterprise of this restructuring of cosmology—which was above all a restructuring of the representations of the cosmos.
In 1609, when Kepler began to write the Dream based on elements of his dissertation written in Tübingen in 1593, seventy-five years had passed since the publication of De Revolutionibus, but heliocentrism had not yet been accepted among astronomers. In fact, Kepler was one of the first, along with Galileo, to defend it openly. An astronomer had to grapple not only with the theoretical space of Copernican cosmology, but also with a tangible space, not an abstract space of hypotheses, but a very concrete space through which the planets move. This issue runs through Kepler's whole oeuvre. We will see that the Dream is inseparable from this context and belongs to the vast Keplerian enterprise of defending Copernicanism, while occupying a singular place that must be elucidated. Kepler himself gives some clues in his footnotes about the specific bearing of this text on others: given the pointlessness of logical arguments to convince certain obstinate anti-Copernicans, there remains only derision or fable. In one of his jokes (which were quite serious and to which we shall return), he wittily lambasts those who wanted to read De Revolutionibus "after first removing discussion of the Earth's movement. This amounts to the same thing as saying that it must not be read before it has been reduced to ashes." Faced with anti-Copernican astronomers, any kind of logical argument is in vain: "It occurred to me that these people should be refuted not with arguments but through mockey, and so I composed the following epigram:
They were able to castrate The bard lest he fornicate; He survived without any testicles. Alas, O Pythagoras, Whose thinking wore out iron chains; They spare you your life, But first they get rid of your brains."
This is an important clue to the Dream's enunciative strategy: ridiculing one vision of the world before demonstrating a new one. An "argument" can have more than a logical form.
It is within this framework that the recourse to fiction must be understood. From the start, we may rule out the hypothesis of Kepler's prudent dissimulation: he had already published Astronomia Nova (1609) and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicae (1617–1621) and had no need to veil his Copernicanism or to adopt a cautious rhetoric about a hypothesis that he had already openly defended at length. On the contrary, the Dream's thesis—the Earth's movement—was explicitly formulated many times: "The purpose of my Dream is to use the example of the Moon to build up an argument in favor of the motion of the Earth, or rather to overcome objections taken from the universal opposition of mankind."
GENEALOGY OF THE DREAM: FROM LUDUS PHILOSOPHICUS TO THE GAME OF FICTION
As he had done with his previous astronomical texts, Kepler included his sources in the Dream, a treasure for the commentator who finds among the many notes references to books, anecdotes, explanations of onomastics, and astronomical theory—but the notes also complicate the reading enormously. From the second note, the issue becomes confused. Kepler states that he wrote his Dream "in imitation of philosophical writings," in particular works that by means of a myth or dream make the nature of the universe known. While he mentions in passing two founding models of the philosophical dream genre, Plato and Cicero, he lingers over two other authors whose use of this genre is at least questionable: Plutarch and Lucian.
The Genre of the Dream, or Philosophical Flight
The first classical tradition alluded to is the philosophical fable: the ludus philosophicus of Plato's Atlantides in the Timeas and Critius, and of Scipio's dream in book 6 of Cicero's De Republica. Cicero has Scipio, one of the speakers in the dialogue, recount the dream he had when he was in Africa. He thinks he sees his father, Scipio Africanus, the victor over Hannibal, who tells him that there exists in heaven a place reserved for all those who have served their country well, and then explains the structure of the universe and the harmony of the spheres. On the threshold of his own Dream, Kepler claims the lineage of a "genre" (genere scriptionis, he calls it) whose conventions might well illuminate his choice of writing style.
Known essentially through the commentary given by Macrobius, the Dream of Scipio invites a neo-Platonist interpretation. "The neo-Platonic perspective," explains Sylvie Ballestra-Puech, "justifies the allegorical character of the dream. Furthermore, because it belongs to the category of somnium, one of five types of dream that Macrobius diff erentiates in his prologue, it is susceptible to interpretation." In the poetics of the allegorical dream as it developed over the course of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it seems that the production and the interpretation of the allegory go hand in hand, and in fact are part of the expectations of the genre. Thus understood, the genre to which Kepler's text belongs explains the importance granted to the commentary. Not only—as Macrobius indicates—does the allegorical dream require an explanation, but over time this explanation gradually becomes part of the genre itself. A second aspect of the Macrobian interpretation of the genre might shed light on Kepler's use of it. Macrobius stresses the proximity of the somnium to the fabula, thus inscribing Scipio's Dream in the line of Platonic myths (and this is how Kepler understands it). Thus the dream becomes the paradigm of a particular type of fable that is related to the truth; it is partly the tradition in which the Dream belongs that explains and justifies the inclusion of an extended hermeneutic apparatus and the recourse to fable as access to truth.
If Cicero's explicit model is the myth of Er the Pamphylian at the end of book 10 of Plato's Republic, one of the diff erences from the Greek source lies in the introduction to the dream, which replaces the direct vision of Er in Plato. According to Macrobius, Cicero substituted the dream for a vision in order to escape the critiques that were targeted at Plato's text (Cicero preferred waking up his narrator to resuscitating him). According to Georges Forestier, the dream was a means of safeguarding appearances, in that it "ensures an acceptable shift from the human world to supernatural worlds." But Kepler does not introduce a supernatural world; he is making the link between two "natural" worlds that are equivalent, even if not similar from a physical viewpoint. In adopting the dream genre, right away Kepler alters the stakes. The two authoritative references are mentioned only as a point of departure, in the primary sense of the term: they justify the choice of an island for launching the story of Duracotus. For the dream itself and for the flight, Kepler calls upon two other models, especially Plutarch, whose De Facie in Orbe Lunae he translates as an appendix to his own text.
Plutarch serves as a model in several respects. First, he offers the example for a "geographic" study of the Moon. If in Aristotelian physics the Moon has a central place as boundary between the sublunary and superlunary worlds, this position makes it not only incorruptible, but also unknowable. For Plutarch, on the other hand, the Moon is studied in the same way as the Earth, whose relief and climate can be described. Moreover, Plutarch is a rare example of the association between such a physical discussion and fiction, and it is with respect to Plutarch that Kepler makes the link between the dream and the fable: "Every time I reread this book by Plutarch, I am exceedingly amazed and keep wondering by what chance it happened that our dreams or fables coincided so closely." But the articulation of fable and knowledge is even more complicated, because Kepler places alongside these Roman tutelary figures the Greek author Lucian of Samosata.
Lucian as Paradoxical Source
Lucian takes aim precisely at such a tradition associating the extraordinary voyage with philosophy when in the opening of the True History he mocks the philosophers who resort to fables:
However, when I read all these writers I didn't blame them greatly for their lying, as I'd already seen that it was habitual even to those professing philosophy. But what did surprise me was that they thought they could report untruths and get away with it. So, as I too was vain enough to want to leave something to posterity, and did not want to be the only one denied the right to flights of fancy, and since I had nothing truthful to report (not having experienced anything worth recording), I turned to lying. But I am much more honest in this than the others: at least in one respect I shall be truthful, in admitting that I am lying. Thus I think that by freely admitting that nothing I say is true, I can avoid being accused of it by other people. So, I am writing about things I neither saw nor experienced nor heard about from others, and which, moreover, do not exist, and in any case could not exist. My readers must therefore entirely disbelieve them.
Such a provocative declaration was to leave a significant legacy in the history of fiction. Denying the historians their autopsy, and refusing the strategies of falsehood of the first sophists, Lucian's fiction opens the way to modern fiction by exhibiting its status as fiction. Kepler offers a surprising reading of this famous overture: "this highly daring tale, which nevertheless offered some indications about the nature of the entire universe, as Lucian himself announces in his introduction." If Plutarch's story followed a treatise on different conceptions of the Moon, it is difficult to attribute such scholarly content to Lucian's True History. Lucian was sometimes considered as a "serious" author in the Renaissance, but this was for the elements of Cynic philosophy present in his satires, not for his astronomical or physical reflections.
Kepler directs his reading of Lucian toward philosophy and renounces the satiric and utopian part of the tradition of the lunar voyage. Such an interpretation makes sense given that Kepler is trying to combine two contradictory traditions: a philosophical flight by means of a dream, and a fictional flight in the tradition of the trip to the Moon. Kepler's originality lies in his combination of the two, to make the fabulous voyage to the Moon in the mode of Lucian the basis for real astronomical reflection. In doing so, he gives the lunar fable an epistemic weight—and ontological weight, as we shall see—which it did not have before.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from FICTIONS of the COSMOS by FRÉDÉRIQUE AÏT-TOUATI Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
IntroductionPART ONE * COSMIC IMAGINATION
1 Kepler Sets the Earth in Motion
Genealogy of the Dream: From Ludus Philosophicus to the Game of Fiction * The Dynamics of the Voyage: A Thought-Experiment * Vision in the Voyage * The Place of Fiction
2 Godwin, Wilkins, Cyrano: From the Optical Voyage to Mechanical Voyage
The Man in the Moone * A World in the Moon * From Heavens to the Sky: Cyrano’s Other World * Conclusion: Dreams and Fictions
PART TWO * CONJECTURAL MACHINES
3 Fontenelle: Unveiling the Spectacle of the World
Machine and Spectacle * Order of the Narrative, Harmony of the World * Fontenelle’s Visions
4 Huygens: The Theoretical Voyage of the Cosmotheoros
Hypotheses, Conjectures, Fictions * Architectonics of the Narrative * Conclusion: Hypotheses and Narratives
PART THREE * OBSERVING MONSTERS
5 Robert Hooke: “The Armed Eye”
Micrographia * From Enargeia to Evidence * Hooke the Astronomer * Poetics of Proof * Conclusion: Instruments and Images
6 Margaret Cavendish: The Battle of Instruments
“A High Heel to a Short Leg” * A Teratology of Knowledge * The Empire of Fiction * Conclusion
Conclusion
Notes * Bibliography * Index