Astronoetics: "Anticipation of Spaceflight as Metaphor"
Translation from Hans Blumenberg's Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (1997).
Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) was a German philosopher and intellectual historian whose work spanned conceptual history, philosophical anthropology, metaphorology and myth, the history of science, and the legitimacy of modernity. Astronoetics is his ironic name for reflective and speculative engagements with outer space from the side of thought rather than technical accomplishment. In contraposition to astronautics, understood as actual space travel and the material capacities that make it possible, astronoetics names a kind of “thought-spaceflight,” an attempt to think through humanity’s relation to the cosmos even insofar as one remains earthbound. Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (1997, perhaps best translated as The Fullness of the Stars) gathers the results of this project in the form of what Blumenberg calls “astronoetische Glossen.” He writes:
The texts collected in this book took shape over nearly three decades as the quiet tracing of an orbit around the concept of theory, emerging from practical exclusion from astronautics and the fading spectacle of the Space Age: How was one to situate oneself in this world of worlds, and in relation to it? What remained for those left behind by astronautics? Certainly not only the writing of glosses, but that, too, as cheerful compensation for the fact that home refused to become any more comfortable.
Hans Blumenberg. 1997. Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. 210-11. Translation mine.
Before spaceflight had even begun, it had already been conceived as a metaphor.
What is surprising is not the desire to move more freely in space and time than earthly dimensions allow. More striking is the anticipatory substitution of spiritual vehicles for technical ones (although this does not imply any esoteric sense): “Comforting as ever, books remain light, reliable ships for journeys through time and space – and beyond. So long as one still has a book at hand and leisure for reading, the situation cannot be desperate, cannot be wholly unfree” (n. 5).
The reversal of the metaphor shows that spaceflight takes on symbolic force when it is finally realized, a decade after this note of July 24, 1945 – still unanticipated at the time, despite the rocket works at Peenemünde. Spaceflight becomes the symbol of a freedom long understood as freedom from bondage to the earth, even when figured as the transmigration of souls or ascension to heaven. When Christianity, uniquely within its surrounding world, included the body in resurrection unto judgment, it had already surpassed the mere separation of soul from body and the flight of souls released from the prison of the flesh. It is therefore a consequence of almost ritual force that, in Christian posterity, in the post-Christian world, there should emerge a breakout from terrestrial captivity in a sense no longer ascetic, apocalyptic, or transcendent. Theoretically, the final departure into space posed less of a problem than the assurance of return, and this was something these voyagers to heaven were even less willing to forgo. The Voyager probes left the solar system bearing a message, but without a crew. The artifact that has escaped forever the fate of the species that invented it will prove immortal. And yet the mere possibility – granted, even if declined – of leaving the earth without passing through death already exceeds the boldest expectations of any spirituality.
Out of the old Platonism of thought in its imperishability there has emerged a Platonism of the technical object, which under earthly conditions would have been exposed to the decay that affects all things, but now traverses space, where the likelihood of ruin is infinitely smaller. For space, as the condition of this kind of Platonism, is almost empty.
Footnote 5: Ernst Jünger: Leben und Werk in Bildern und Texten, ed. H. Schwilk, Stuttgart 1988, 220. [Editorial note: Blumenberg is quoting from an illustrated biographical companion to Ernst Jünger’s life and work that assembles documents, excerpts, and excerpts from Jünger’s papers. Schwilk was a German journalist and author known for his long engagement with Jünger’s life and writings.]
