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9. Metaphorized Cosmology
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IX Metaphorized Cosmology The impression might arise that our lengthy exemplification of the ‘transition’ from metaphors to concepts (and thus our entire attempt at a typology of metaphor histories ) remains beholden to a primitive evolutionary schema. We shall seek to dispel this impression by surveying a type of metaphor history that proceeds in the opposite direction, from concepts to metaphors. With respect to the evidence presented, we must fear having to hear the same reproach once leveled by Lessing against Privy Counselor Klotz: “And how many of them do you suppose that he cites? In all, summa summarum, rightly counted—one.”1 But we think this piece of historical evidence weighty enough to withstand the objection. In 1543 there appeared in Nuremberg a work in six books by the Frauenburg canon Nicolas Copernicus, who died in the same year, entitled “De revolutionibus orbium caelestium” [On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres]. This work is a sober theoretical treatise that, where it does not define the terms with which it operates, borrows terms long since defined by others. It seeks to overcome the difficulties arising from the traditional Ptolemaic system for the phoronomic explanation of observational data by constructing a new model of the universe, bolstering its claim to legitimacy by pointing in good humanist fashion to a row of ancient 1. und wie viele meinen Sie, daß er deren anführt? In allen, summa summarum, richtig gerechnet,—einen. 100 Paradigms for a Metaphorology precursors. There is not the slightest hint that this new astronomical conception— for all that its author wanted it to be taken as a true account of the divinely created cosmos, rather than as a theoretical model for calculations—was destined, more than anything else, to provide a new formula for how humans perceived themselves and their place in the universe.2 The virulence with which a purely theoretical process could seize hold of people’s imaginations was made explicit, at the very latest, when Goethe famously asserted in his “Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre ” [Materials on the History of the Theory of Color] that “of all discoveries and opinions, none may have exerted a greater effect on the human spirit” than this astronomical restructuring of the universe. Goethe, to be sure, saw in this a “demand made on mankind,” disclosing a “freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown, indeed not even dreamed of,” after mankind’s supposed securities and certainties had gone up in mist and smoke.3 Yet Nietzsche took a diametrically opposed view of the same shift in self-awareness. For him, “the self-diminution of man” begins with Copernicus: “his faith in his dignity, uniqueness, irreplaceableness in the rank-ordering of beings” has gone; through the “defeat of theological astronomy,” human existence has become “still more arbitrary, peripheral, and dispensable in the visible order of things.”4 That has been the prevailing tone of Copernican self-understanding ever since.5 Even and especially where its scientific and theoretical consequences are embraced, the significance of the cosmological revolution for mankind is seen to lie in the fact “that the earth, humanity, the individual self, are all dethroned,” that “man is no longer important for astronomy, at most for himself.”6 By a not entirely fortuitous historical irony, another work of seminal importance for the modern spirit was published in Basel in the same year, 1543, Vesalius’s “Humani corporis fabrica” [On the Fabric of the Human Body], so that it was now easy to say that one had diminished and demeaned man (under 2. See Hans Blumenberg, “Der kopernikanische Umsturz und die Weltstellung des Menschen: Eine Studie zum Zusammenhang von Naturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte,” Studium Generale VIII (1955): 637–48. [See also, and above all, Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).] 3. unter allen Entdeckungen und Überzeugungen . . . nichts eine größere Wirkung auf den menschlichen Geist hervorgebracht . . . Forderung an die Menschheit . . . bisher unbekannten, ja ungeahnten Denkfreiheit und Großheit der Gesinnungen. [Trans. cited in Stephen Hawking, introduction to On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, by Copernicus (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2003), xvi.] 4. Selbstverkleinerung des Menschen . . . der Glaube an seine Würde, Einzigkeit, Unersetzlichkeit in der Rangabfolge der Wesen . . . Niederlage der theologischen Astronomie . . . noch beliebiger, eckensteherischer, entbehrlicher in der sichtbaren Ordnung der Dinge. Zur Genealogie der Moral (Ges. Werke, Musarion ed., XV, 438, 440). [Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115; translation...