Aerial Spatial Revolution
x:
y:

Emanuel Tandler
UNIFR
[17/10/2024]


Astronoetics

or Hans Blumenberg's glossary of a cosmological phenomenology of the lifeworld



  • October 4th, 1957: The invention of astronoetics after launching Sputnik 1
  • A guide to close reading Blumenberg's Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (1997) (The Completeness of the Stars).01
  • Relevance & extension of astronoetics for planetary thinking in the 21st century


I. «Astronoetics»: An invention in & out of its time
Fig. 1: "WE ARE SERIOUS, BUT WITH SMILES" in: LIFE-Magazine (21.10.1957, p.24).


On October 4th 1957, the first artificial ‘satellite’ – after Kepler (1611) lat. satelles or russ. sputnik for a ‘celestial body accompanying a planet’ – was launched by the Soviet Union into a lower elliptical orbit around the earth. Two days later, the American news program CBS News Special began with 18 seconds of the recorded beep signal that Sputnik 1 – with its iconic radio antennas mounted on the spherical aluminium body (Fig.1) – sent to earth. “Until two days ago”, the anchor Douglas Edwards proclaimed after this special opening jingle, “that sound had never been heard on this Earth. Suddenly, it has become as much part of 20th century life as the whirr of your vacuum cleaner.”02

The anchor's comparison between Sputnik 1 and a vacuum cleaner, repeated and amplified with a variety of images and sounds in television, radio and print media, is an appropriate example of what Alfred Schütz, founder of the phenomenological sociology, called “thinking as usual” back in 1944: “This ‘thinking as usual’, as we may call it, (…) includes the "of-course" relevant to a particular social group which Robert S. Lynd describes in such a masterly way – together with their inherent contradictions and ambivalence – as the "Middletown-spirit". Thinking as usual may be maintained as long as some basic assumptions hold true, namely: that life and especially social life will continue to be the same as it has been so far, that is to say, that the same problems requiring the same solutions will recur and that, therefore, our former experiences will suffice for mastering future situation.”03 That the kind of ‘suddenness’ and ‘strangeness’ of the Sputnik 1 case could not simply be absorbed or completely dissolved in an ‘of-course’ attitude, and that even Lynd’s "Middletown-spirit" could not simply undermine the open questions, is shown in one of Hans Blumenberg’s commentaries – which he called “glosses”04 –  in his book Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (1997) under the heading XV. Everything as before - everything as always?: “In October 1957, one of the three largest nations in the world was crestfallen and humiliated because a tiny and meaningless device from near-Earth space was emitting beeping sounds over radio waves that no one knew for sure whether they really meant anything [...]. It was an annoying sound, multiplied by the media and in everyone's ear who could not have heard it directly. 

The consequences of this simple fact were unbelievable and remain so to this day. It was the foundation of an institution of rivalry».05  The enervating effect on Blumenberg’s ears apparently did not lead him to minimise the beeping as a usual disturbance in everyday life. On the contrary: he captured it both in the uncertainty of its lifeworld interpretation and in the ‘unbelievable’ consequence of an institutionalized geopolitical rivalry. Blumenberg specifies ‘rivalry’ as a continuation of war by other means. It becomes an arena of the proxy battle between the superpowers USA and USSR at a time when a ‘real’ battle is out of the question. According to Blumenberg, astronautics is comparable to the Olympics and other sporting events: What counts are records. It doesn't matter what the astronauts or the ‘Russian’ dog Laika do and experience up in their space capsules, the only thing that is interesting is “the durability of the stay and the clear countability of its size as duration.”06  Both Blumenberg’s concern and observation are reflected in the TIME Magazine of October 21st, 1957, with its headline – COLD WAR: The Beeper's Message – and its conclusion: “The Russians had scored heavily.”07  And the lead reads: “As Sputnik whirled serenely overhead, a startled world looked at Russia with new respect.” Remarkable is the wide variety of reactions that the TIME Magazine listed apart from those of the two superpowers: they came from Bangkok, Beirut, London, Paris, Indonesia and the non-aligned Afro-Asian nations. From Bonn they quoted the growling Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer: “Five hundred and sixty miles is only the distance from Bonn to Vienna. It does not prove they can fire anything parallel to the earth over a distance of many thousand miles.”08  

Adenauer’s reaction not only points to the collective fear in people’s minds that the “tiny and pointless” beeping device above their heads could soon have turned into an intercontinental weapon, but also how Robert S. Lynd’s so-called "Middletown-spirit"  was nevertheless also evident in West Germany, with the attempt to break down the extraordinary dimensions to the more familiar geography of Bonn-Vienna. However, Adenauer's downsizing-strategy did not seem to present a long-term ‘as usual’ solution, as the mood of upheaval in the scientific birthplace of Hans Blumenberg's astronoetics showed. 

The “Sputnik-shock” also reached the small university town of Kiel. Wolfgang Bargmann, the President of Kiel University, brain anatomist and also Vice President of the German Research Foundation, called on his local colleagues to step up their efforts and overcome this technological “disgrace”,  what Hans Blumenberg's echoed in his very last gloss of Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne: “The circulars were notorious in which he called for programs and grant applications, and they took on a new, more urgent tone in October 1957, when the first false comet, the beeping artificial moon called ‘Sputnik’ orbited the earth, triggering the so-called Sputnik-Schock.”09

The philosopher did not want to evade this appeal and invented with his neologism “astronoetics” a cunning response to Bargmann's slogan “Let's catch up!”. It was “the ironic answer to the question asked everywhere: “And what do we have in comparison?”.10  However, where brain physiology could attempt to obtain expensive microscopes, the philosopher was left without such tools: “Anyone who was embarrassed by the inadequacy of bare brain functions ultimately had to use them; at least to simulate the catch-up process. The author gave in to this urge and applied for an undetermined amount of funding for the purpose of exploring the dark side of the moon through pure thinking.” 11

Fig. 2: "WE ARE SERIOUS, BUT WITH SMILES". In: LIFE-magazine (21.10.1957, p.25).


The fact that the general plight called for ‘invention’ and ‘irony’, ‘false comets’ and ‘beeping artificial moons’ did not make the philosopher Blumenberg an isolated case, but another contemporary witness with wit: WE ARE SERIOUS, BUT WITH SMILES was the title of Life magazine's Sputnik reports (s. again Fig.1). Less than two weeks had passed when the magazine not only mentioned the new Sputnik cocktail, based on vodka of course, but also photographed the first “Space Fashions” for adults and children. New York’s department stores Macy’s even dressed its employees in self-designed space suits, who then presented new  “Space Toys” to the young costumers (Fig.2). In addition to a common thinking-as-usual, people also developed their very own mechanisms for appropriating the new – and in reality so distant – situation in order to render or make it tangible and thus less frightening. Blumenberg as well asks in his last gloss: «What was left for the astronauts who stayed at home? Certainly not only to make glosses, but also as cheerful compensation for the fact that this home did not want to become more cosy.»12 Guided by politics, media, science and consumerism, and furthermore supplied with the rivalry between two superpowers, the public thus crossed the threshold into a new, very real and uncomfortable dimension of collective world-space-imagination. The Historian Angela Schwarz describes this new dimension as a multi-layered “battle for the cosmos”: “The battle of ideologies, social systems, armies and technologies had been expanded to include the battlefield of ideas about the appropriation of the cosmos.” 13 

II. Thinking as astronoeticians In the midst of these battles and agitations, Blumenberg places his “wavering figure of astronoetics” in the form and style of a cheerful and polemical gloss: “Between pastoral idyll, protective pathos and the bare armouring of precise knowledge, the position of this wavering figure of astronoetics asserts or loses itself.”14   The “in-between” is decisive here and is anything but an unstable, fluctuating post-modern preposition, but rather the art of ‘noetics’ that neither falls into the gap of the supposedly precise separation of humanities and natural science like Charles P. Snow's The Two Cultures And The Scientific Revolution (1959) claimed, nor falls prey to the political or pastoral birth of a pathos of security or a humanity as an idyllic “flock of sheep”: “Our increase in knowledge and ability has had only a disproportionately small influence on our thinking: this applies not only to the weighing up of “technological assessments”, it also applies to the assessment of knowledge, which seems to have to do with more harmless things. But also does have to do with such?»15 Blumenberg “does” this by using Edmund Husserl's understanding of ‘noetics’ to subject the pros and cons of the respective harmless, metaphysical or scientific “consciousness of reason to an intuitive phenomenological investigation”.16 In doing so, he does not depart from his time, but rather simulates, scrutinises and explores its increase in knowledge with an eye for its lifeworld: Blumenberg thus succeeds, for example, in reflecting on current ‘considerations of the consequences of technology’ with a comparative leap into another time: “In 1781, William Herschel discovered Uranus. For the first time since antiquity, indeed since the astronomy of the Babylonians, the number of visible planets had been increased by a telescopic one – an almost blasphemous discovery of the first order against the canonical world order. One could again expect something from the heavens.”17 However, in the gesture of the question posed in the title’s gloss, Blumenberg immediately inserts a critical ‘assessment’ of or for the lifeworld: More planets or less pain? And the gloss continues the story, when Herschel’s Uranus news also reached the Göttingen observatory and the astronomer and writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, whom Blumenberg himself described as an ‘astronoetician avant la lettre’. He then quotes the following entry of Lichtenberg’s Sudelheft: “To invent an infallible remedy for toothache, which would relieve it in an instant, would probably be worth as much, and more, than discovering another planet.”18 What is shown anecdotally in nuce is an astronoetician’s pensiveness about how to proceed with “technology-assessment” through a historical step-aside-perspective: “What we call reason must be able to prove itself as a reversibility of perspective, as detachable from the contingent conditions of the starting point that we hold.”19 It is important to note that this kind of astronoetic reasoning is phenomenological, intuitive, historical, anecdotal and specially glossatorically free in opening unusual perspectives. Nevertheless, it also proceeds methodically and systematically. This is already signalled in the book’s title, which is not dedicated to the ‘infinity’ of the stars, but to their ‘completeness’. However, this method and systematic approach is not immediately recogniseable when you consider that the reader only comes across the title What is astronoetics? in the very last gloss and pages of the book. Therefore, three reading spectacles alongside examples will be provided in the following paragraph to sharpen astronoetic curiosity and support the lexical endeavor. 

1. Variations - A year and a half after Blumenberg’s death, The Completeness of the Stars was published in 1997 and comprises a collection of around 150 often very short glosses. The author himself organized them into 22 sections with titles such as V. A look back at the earth's inhabitants, VIII. Space-lust - before take-off, IX. Einstein, XII. The intensified view into space, XVII. What remains is the environment or XIX. Lunar physics etcetera. What connects the glosses and sections methodically is said in reference to Husserl's phenomenology: “Astronoetics does not consist of any science fiction, but rather of thought experiments that can be assigned to the phenomenological method of free variation (...)”.20 Quite inconspicuously and in the silence of a night-time-reading, The Completeness of the Stars begins with Two Nocturnes by Hans Carossa. And already in the second gloss with the title-giving headline, we learn what constitutes the specificality of astronoetic variations: «Carossa, as Goethe's successor, would have had the choice between excess and infiniteness [of the stars]. He brought them to the measure, to the completeness of the stars.(...) Stubbornness regardless of Goethe».21 Carossa's example – contrary to Goethe's pathos formulae – makes it clear on a small scale how Blumenberg, in the sense of the poetic function à la Roman Jakobson, always provides a rubric of meaning as a paradigm in order to vary it freely on the syntagmatic axis in the following glosses22.  Like an observational satellite, Blumenberg orbits e.g. in the rubric II. Vertical Drop Studies with a single Wittgenstein sentence - Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe - and varies it with glosses on Thales of Miletus, the mythological fall of Icarus, Voltaire's version of Newton's apple story or surprises at the end of the section with the gloss: Was Freud also the Newton of the soul?23 With each case and “falling”, the horizon and angle of view varies; with each new shot, something becomes sharper or gains in contrast. As a further example, in the rubric VI. Under the moon with the gloss The moon as a poetic phenomenon, Blumenberg states in comparison to the ‘despotic sun’ pointedly and pragmatically: “So we need neither moon creams nor moonglasses.”24 

2. Thought experiments – Without being noticed by Gagarin, Armstrong and their colleagues, Blumenberg maintained his ground station for over three decades – well beyond the long decade of space travel from the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1958 to the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. As a newspaper reader, television viewer and radio listener, he logged and archived the ‘mixed messages’ of the news agencies on The Space Race and used their data for his thought experiments. These experiments are anything but unrealistic or limited to the latest NASA reports. Blumenberg's astronoetic explorations are always a Socratic means for him to reflect on the relationships in the lifeworld above the stars and among the stars. 

Fig. 3: "SPACESHIP EARTH”- Epcot-Park (Florida). In: Sarasota Herlad-Tribune (1982).


In his mind’s eye, he entered e.g. the geodesic dome (Fig. 3) of the Spaceship Earth at Walt Disney’s Park ‘Magic Kingdom’ (Florida) and got involved in its entertainment value: “The center and signature of this social artefact is a huge sphere flashing with aluminum scales, which, according to the concept and will of its designers, is intended to symbolize the earth as a spaceship. Within this sphere, a railway travels through the history of humanity into its future within a quarter of an hour.”25 On the one hand, Blumenberg acknowledges that every great event in human history, such as the moon landing, has its own entertainment value and recognises the necessary relief from reality in his technical simulation in the amusement park; on the other hand he also analyses its price in the next paragraph: “Spaceship Earth is a slander. Earth is the very place where all spaceships return to, unless they are mere robots or probes. Earth is the opposite of a spaceship. It is the zero point of all coordinate systems in which conscious space journeys can move. The sensation of Florida, to see the earth itself from the outside, as it were, is bought with the falsification of its ground function.”26 

3. Leitmotif - What Blumenberg corrects here with Earth as the “zero-point” can be understood as an astronoetical continuation of Husserl’s manuscript series, which are usually named with the short title The earth does not move (1934). ( Husserl's unmoving and flying ark). Although the earth can be understood metaphorically as a ship and since Copernicus and Galileo, theoretically and telescopically as a moving body, for our consciousness and our intuition of movement and orientation, the general rotation of the earth remains an “ark”, that does not move: “The earth itself in its original conceptual form does not move and does not rest; only in relation to it do rest and movement have meaning.”27 The sense of orientation therefore only comes into play when we perceive the earth as a necessarily motionless ‘ground’. Using Husserl’s second dominant metaphor of the ‘horizon’, this means: “I can always continue to walk on my ground and experience its physical being in a certain way ever more fully; it has its horizon in the fact that I can walk on it and experience more and more of it and everything that is on it.”28 In simple words: We experience the earth as ground and not as a rotating celestial body, and we explore it at every turn with a view towards a horizon. In Blumenberg’s words: “All of man's adventures around the world presuppose that he can stand on a piece of solid ground again and again at some point.”29 From this common fixed point, Blumenberg's astronoetics can be interpreted on the one hand as an adaptation of Husserl's geocentric-cosmological phenomenology, and on the other hand as their further development with new reference points as set by The Space Race in the 20th century. “One can say,” as Alberto Fragio Gistau describes Husserl's life-world phenomenology through Blumenberg's cosmological lense, “that the first man on the moon and the accompanying change in the ground of experience was not just a small step for man, but a giant leap for the phenomenology of the lifeworld.”30 The moon landing was an effective crossing of the terrestrial ‘lifeworld-threshold’, and not a telescopic one: “However, it was one thing to observe the moon through a telescope and quite another to walk on its surface. The central question now revolved around the historical transformation of the terrestrial lifeworld of the contemplator caeli into the lunar lifeworld of the astronaut, which involved not only a factual expansion or extension of the human lifeworld, but a real transfiguration of the sense of the earth».31 Although Blumenberg often commented sarcastically on astronautical journeys to the stars because of their disproportion between travelling time and living time, between physical exertion and gaining knowledge, his art and the leitmotif of astronoetics consists in making visible the lines of conflict between the familiar horizon of lifeworld-experience and the new view of the Earth on the lunar horizon; in order to gain the advantages and disadvantages for the former – as an assessment for the lifeworld – in a astronoetic way. 

III. Astronoetics in the future In short, one could conclude that Blumenberg's astronoetics has left us a cosmological phenomenology of the lifeworld of and for the 21st century. The Completeness of the Stars is a treasure trove of glosses that establish points of view that need to be scrutinized and rewritten for current and future, horizontal and vertical points of references and perspectives. 

Fig. 4: Cambodia-Landsat-image from 1995 and 2009 before & after the floods.


We are currently witnessing patterns of human use of the earth that are bringing about a transformation of the earth system that is no longer merely ecological, but geological: they are short-circuiting and changing the condition of the planet. At the same time, earth-spanning systems of data aggregation and calculation enable researchers to track these changes in simulated real time and thus put “planetarity” on our (mental) map (s. Fig.4)32. The architect couple Eyal and Ines Weizman e.g. use before & after satellite-images to show how cleared forests, contaminated areas and melting icebergs are the consequences of overexploitation, war and climate change. What is missing in these images from a vertical perspective from above are two things: on the one hand, the event itself, and on the other, the story behind it: “Such a spatial observation attempts to fill the gap between the images by means of a narrative - but this is neither simple nor clear.”33 A gap and a problem – as Blumenberg glosses aside on The World Second of an event in general – that has long accompanied the vertical perspective: “The epic form of movement is horizontal. All can be reached by all on paths, even if they are sea or air routes. Even when the hero goes to the underworld, he does not overcome the distance by falling or on a rope. Jesus can only be told about when he is wandering (...). That is why the Ascension, as the vertical final event, falls outside all frames of narratability.”34

With their publication Thinking planets, the authors Armen Avanessian and Daniel Felb aim to shed new light on this kind of narrative difficulties with an astrobiologically informed theory that grasps Earth just as one data point in an almost infinite series of planets and planetary histories. For them, astrobiology makes it even possible to temporalize the transition of an unmoved earthly “ark”: “We think we could be in the beginning stages of a so-called Transition 9. 

By that we mean another Major Evolutionary Transition as theorized by biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, describing how evolution over time adds new mechanisms and agencies to its toolbox, from multicellularity to social insects to human language.”35 Common model representations of planets, which are placed next to each other like differently colored glass spheres, convey a reductive and inanimate planetary image. The same applies to Google Earth, which confuses the Earth with a digitally assembled patchwork of present-day snapshots of a fully mapped and static globe: “To astrobiologically informed eyes, planets appear less as inert lumps of matter or as snapshots, but rather as time sequences and time figures.”36 Astrobiology becomes the “ultimate horizon” for them (s. Fig.5). 

Fig. 5: Image generated by Daniel Falb using DALL-E with the prompt “A number of radically different Earths that have succeeded each other in time.” (25 Sept. 2024)


Instead of always looking at the one story of one Earth, this theoretical horizon operates with serialization and simultaneity of stories of the Earth-Planet: “Instead, we are fascinated by the space of all possible histories of the Earth: we love the planetary model. It is what we want, and in a sense we are much more willing to inhabit this model space than the abyss of the one sequence of events that took place. In this way, astrobiology gives us quality of life.”37 

Hans Blumenberg would not be a spoiler of such efforts to integrate theory into that kind of informed lifeworld, but he points out: “The theory of the lifeworld is always also one of the shallow penetration of theory into its consciousness.”38 And he does this by pointing out that it is no coincidence that language in general and specifically Kant and Husserl do not provide us with a plural in relation to reason or the singular of lifeworld. Meanwhile, the two authors would like to believe in the philosophy of Benjamin Bratton's planetary scale computed “sapience" and quote him as follows: “You would see something unusual: the sprouting of clouds of satellites, and the wrapping of the land and seas wires made of metal and glass. You would see the sudden appearance of an intricate artificial planetary crust capable of tremendous feats of communication and calculation, enabling planetary self-awareness – indeed, planetary sapience.”39  In terms of profile, Blumenberg would probably weigh up the pros and cons of such “planetary sapience” in two ways: Both with a gloss for An Academy for Processing the Disappointments of Reason40  and a sober plea for “pensiveness”. “The Academy” would ask questions like: What can we hope for and think when knowledge no longer fulfills our demands for meaning? What happens when a planetary event itself no longer occurs and mediated with an 18-seconds recorded beep-signal? When a tremendous planetary event transcends the concepts of understanding and develops technically, gradually and continuously unnoticed? How can space in general and lifeworldly be grasped when earth appears as a technological matter with a planetary scale? Altough as a measurable thing, but no longer as easy manageable and stowable like a vacuum cleaner? 

The world does not want to become more comfortable at home, Blumenberg said at the end of The Completeness of the Stars, and added the sober plea in his speech for the Sigmund Freud Prize in 1980: “Pensiveness means: not everything remains as self-evident as it was. That is all.”41 In a free variation, astronoeticians would add from a cosmological point of view: That's almost everything – and add in a nuanced, but also confident manner of an astronoetica activa – or not everything yet.


Notes

  1. All English translations of the following German sources are by the author (ET).
  2. Watch the recording of the CBS News Special broadcast on: https://tinyurl.com/yyqk6b6b (last seen on October 13th 2024)
  3. Schütz (1944), p. 502.
  4. According to OxfordLanguages a “short [polemical] commen-tary (in the press, radio or television) on current events or problems”.
  5. Blumenberg (2011), p. 414.
  6. Ibid. p. 414. 
  7. Time-Magazine (1957), p. 28. 
  8. Ibid. p. 28. 
  9. Blumenberg (2011), p. 547. 
  10. Ibid. p. 548. 
  11. Ibid. p. 548. 
  12. Ibid. p. 549.
  13. Schwarz (2009), p. 55.
  14. Blumenberg (2011), p. 548.
  15. Ibid. p. 549.
  16. Cf. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Bd. 6, Basel 1984. Section 874.
  17.  Ibid. p. 188.
  18. Ibid. p. 188.
  19. Ibid. p. 321. 
  20. Ibid. 321.
  21. Ibid. p. 18f.
  22. Jakobson (1979), p. 94.
  23. Cf. all the “drop”-glosses in Blumenberg (2011) p. 42-76.
  24. Ibid. p. 177.
  25. Ibid. p. 538.
  26. Ibid. p. 539.
  27. Husserl (1940), p. 312. 
  28. Ibid. p. 312
  29. Blumenberg (2011), p. 482.
  30. Fragio Gistau (2023) p. 114. 
  31. Ibid. p. 115. 
  32. Cf. Weizman & Weizman (2024), p. 36: "The third major wave of destruction in Cambodia is a direct result of climate change. Recent studies of Landsat-images show that the Khmer Rouge's irrigation system is not only functional, but has also been steadi-ly expanded. Thanks to these developments, supported by the World Bank and other international organisations, agricultural yields and self-sufficiency in Cambodia have increased.” Ibid.
  33. Weizman&Weizman (2024), p. 8. 
  34. Blumenberg (2011), p.34. 
  35. Cf. the interview with  Daniel Falb, one of the authours of Thinking Planets, including the reference and ideas to the image (Fig.5): https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-philosophy-of-nature-40 (last seen: 14 October 2024) 
  36. Avanessian & Falb 2024, p. 40. 
  37. Avanessian & Falb 2024, p. 43. 
  38. Blumenberg (2011), p.482.
  39. Avanessian & Falb 2024. p. 17. 
  40. Blumenberg (2011), p.501–504. 
  41. Blumenberg (1981), p. 61.


Bibliography

Avannessian, Armen & Falb, Daniel (2024): Planeten Denken. Leipzig: Merve Verlag.

Blumenberg Hans (1981) “Nachdenklichkeit”. Dankrede. In: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (II/1980). Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, pp. 57–61.

Blumenberg, Hans (2011): Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Fragio Gistau, Alberto (2023): Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie des Kosmos. Baden-Baden: Karl-Alber-Verlag.

Husserl, Edmund (1940): Grundlegende Untersuchun-gen zum phänomenologischen Ursprung der Räumlich-keit der Natur. In: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, hrsg. von Marvin Farber. Harvard Uni-versity Press: Cambridge, Mass., pp. 307-326.

Jakobson, Roman (1979): Poetik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Schuetz, Alfred (1944): The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology. In: American Journal of Sociology. May 1944, Vol. 49, No. 6, pp. 499- 507.

Schwarz, Angela (2009): Das Tor in eine neue Dimensi-on? Sputnik, Schock und die Popularität der Naturwis-senschaften. In: Die Spur des Sputnik. Kulturhistorische Expeditionen ins kosmische Zeitalter, hrsg. v. Igor J. Polianski und Matthias Schwartz. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 31–55.

Snow, C.P. (1961): The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Weizman, Eyal & Ines (2024): Vorher und Nachher. Die Architektur der Katastrophe. Zürich: Diaphanes.


Further readings

Meyer, Martin F. (1999): HANS BLUMENBERG: Die Voll-zähligkeit der Sterne. In: Philosophischer Literaturanzei-ger, 52(2). Meisenheim: pp. 120–125.

Zill, Rüdiger (2009): “Die Erforschung der Rückseite des Mondes durch reines Denken: Technikphilosophie zwi-schen Sputnik 1 und Apollo 11” In: Die Spur des Sputnik. Kulturhistorische Expeditionen ins kosmische Zeitalter, hg. v. Igor J. Polianski und Matthias Schwartz. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 332–349.

Zill, Rüdiger (2011): “Zu den Sternen und zurück. Die Entstehung des Weltalls als Erfahrungsraum und die Inversion des menschlichen Erwartungshorizonts” In: Michael Moxter (Hrsg,): Erinnerung an das Humane. Beiträge zur phänomenologischen Anthropologie Hans Blumenbergs. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 300–326.


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