Earth and World: Philosophy after the Apollo Missions by Kelly Oliver (review)

Decades before the Apollo mission captured the earth on film, Edmund Husserl wrote an essay that he put in an envelope marked "Overthrow of the Copernican theory in usual interpretation of a world view. The original ark, earth, does not move." If Copernicus's theory was radical because it challenged the everyday experience of the earth standing still and the sun moving around it, Husserl's essay was radical precisely because it asked the reader to hold on to that everyday experience against the accepted Copernican theory. The earth does not move, Husserl claimed, but is that in relation to which everything else moves. In fact, the earth is not a thing among other things. We must take earth as "the basis-body," or ground, since everything we know and experience is relative to our life on earth. In this sense, "[the earth] is the experiential genesis of our idea of the world" (Husserl 1981, 222–23).

Drawing on Husserl, Kelly Oliver argues in her book, Earth and World: Philosophy after the Apollo Missions, that when we saw photos of the earth for the first time, "we did not see what we thought we saw" (20). We didn't see the whole earth, which is not an object like any other that we stand apart from and can come to control and master for our purposes. What we saw, rather, were different worlds, presented in our cultural imagination as fantasies of the Whole Earth and the One World. World, explains Oliver in the opening chapter, "narrowly connotes the world of human beings or perhaps the world of particular species of beings and maybe even the unique world of each singular living being" (30–31). In other words, there are as many worlds as there are perspectives. No one can claim to have seen the Whole Earth or the One World, "for as phenomenologists teach us, the human perspective is always only partial; there is always something that is occluded and missing from our viewpoint" (20).

There is something compelling about using these photos of the earth as evidence for the human perspective being limited and partial. It's true, we haven't seen the whole earth and we never will see it, even if we were astronauts circling tirelessly around the globe. We will only ever see a fraction of the earth and then another and then another and so on. Moreover, taking pictures of these vistas, we render the three-dimensional earth into the two-dimensional space of the photographic medium. This cannot be what it means to "see the earth as it truly is," as poet Archibald MacLeish wrote in the New York Times upon reflecting on these photos (MacLeish 1968). We can never see the world as it truly is, but only how it truly is for us.

However, without further argumentation, it's difficult to accept the leap from seeing the human perspective as limited to the post-Husserlian idea that universal meaning for all human beings is impossible. Oliver does not lead the reader through the steps that would facilitate such an acceptance. Instead, she takes it as a premise that such universal meaning is impossible to attain, and those who feign to do so are caught in a fantasy. She argues: "if we can only ever take a perspective on something, then it's possible that we may have different perspectives" (22). This stance soon escalates into a philosophically induced crisis that seems to be the motivational force behind her project to ground ethics and politics in the concept of the earth. She goes on, now in conversation with Jacques Derrida: "if we have perspectives all the way down, so to speak, then the constitutive genesis of the ego as transcendental, or universal, along with its native ground, begins to tremble. Our world, if not the very earth itself, begins to quake" (22).

With one foot on each side of...