When Greek philosophers and geometricians began to measure the universe mathematically two and a half thousand years ago, they were following a strong formal intuition: that all things ultimately moved in circles. Their interest in the totality of the world was kindled by the easy constructibility and symmetrical perfection of the spherical form. For them, the simplest form was at once the most integral, complete and beautiful. The cosmologists who gathered in the ancient Academy and other places of learned quarrelling were now considered not only the greatest rationalists, but also the most distinguished of aesthetes. Anyone who was not a geometrician or an ontologist was no longer of any use as a connoisseur of beautiful things. For what was the most beautiful thing – the sky – if not the material realization of the best, namely the whole? The Greek prejudice in favour of rounded totality would survive until the days of German Idealism: ‘Do you know its name? The name of that which is one and is all? Its name is Beauty’ (Hölderlin, Hyperion).1
From that point on, then, the name for the perfectly beautiful – sphaira – was formulated geometrically. This rise of the world form over the world material was guided by an aesthetics of completion that remained in force until modern Europe implemented a different set of rules concerning the beautiful and the un-beautiful. If the subtle and the massive cosmos were ever to be integrated into a single conception, it had – as was thought at the time – to be in the notional shape of the orb. It was in the sublime nature of this super-object to remain unrecognizable to ordinary eyes: there is an orb that is too large for trivial perception and too sublime for sensory comprehension. This is hardly surprising; since philosophy started its war against the sensuality of the people's opinion, invisibility has always been presented as the foremost hallmark of deeper realities.2 What reveals itself to the senses is, according to the philosophers, mere illusion and example, while the enduringly essential appears only in conceptual thought. Regardless of whether it is an ideal construct or a manifest phenomenon, however, no object since has succeeded in satisfying and humbling its contemplators like the all-encompassing orb, which continues to shine from afar, bearing its dual name of cosmos and uranos, long after disappearing into the archive of disused ideas.
As soon as the concern was to formulate a concept – or rather an image – of the planet's globalization, however, it was the aesthetic of the ugly that had to assert its jurisdiction. The decisive aspect of this process was not that the spherical form of the earth had been ascertained, and that it was permissible – even before clerics – to speak of the earth's curves; it was the fact that the particularities of the earth's form, its edges and corners, were now in the foreground. These alone are informative for science, for only the non-perfect – which cannot be constructed geometrically – permits and requires empirical research. The beautiful in its pure form can safely be left to the idealists, while the half-beautiful and the ugly occupy empiricists. While perfection can be designed without recourse to experience, facts and imperfections cannot be deduced without it. That is why uranian-cosmic and morphological globalization had primarily been a matter for philosophers and geometricians; terrestrial globalization, by contrast, would become a problem for cartographers and a nautical adventure, and later also a matter for economic politicians, climatologists, ecologists, terror specialists and other experts in the uneven and entangled.
It is easy to explain why this could not be any other way: in the metaphysical age, it was impossible and impermissible for the planet to present itself in a more distinguished light than its position in the cosmos allowed. In the Aristotelian-Catholic plan of the spheres, the earth, being most distant from the encompassing firmament, had the humblest status. Its placement at the centre of the cosmos thus entailed, as paradoxical as it may sound, a relegation to the lower extreme of the cosmic hierarchy.3 Its encasement in a layered system of ethereal domes did provide security within a dense totality, but also shut it off from the upper regions where perfection resided. Hence the metaphysical references to the ‘earthly’ and its haughty condescension towards the non-perfect down here, on the dimly lit fringe of the heavens. One must concede that the metaphysicists knew what they were talking about: what is one to think about a place where it is night half the time, and where death and decay await all that lives? The ancients were so impressed by the contrast between form and mortality that they had to separate off a deathless world on high from the death-affected depths. Thus they became increasingly infused with a dualistic nation of the cosmos: whatever happens beneath the moon will always remain marked by failure and dissolution, for this domain is ruled by the linear, finite and exhaustible movements that, in the view of antiquity, could never lead to any good. The indestructible forms and rotations of the eternal ether, on the other hand, are at home in the spaces above the moon. The strangeness of the human situation stems from the fact that mortals, despite their condemnation to heaviness, exist as denizens of both spaces. Each individual consciousness bears the faultlines of those old tremors of separation after which the intact supra-lunar spheres broke away from the corrupt zones beneath the moon. This banishment from perfection left every sub-lunar object with cracks, scars and irregularities. Humans feel the crack in their souls as a homesickness for the better state. It reminds them of brighter, rounder, ethereal days.
What contributed to the attractiveness of the metaphysical regime despite the cosmic demotion of the earth was the circumstance that above and below were clearly separated within it; it offered the inestimable advantage of a clarity that can only be provided by hierarchy. While the lower realm was naturally unable to move upwards under its own power, it remained the privilege of the upper to pervade the lower at will. That is why in ancient times, to think always meant to think from the position of the sky, as if one could get away from earth with the aid of logic. In the old days, a thinker was someone who transcended and looked down – as Dante illustrated on his ascent to paradise. Even Eichendorff's lines from the poem ‘Mondnacht’ – ‘It seemed as if heaven / Had quietly kissed the earth’ – still read like a swan song for a schema that had moulded the habitus of being-in-the-world among Europeans for an entire age, which included the confidence that unworldliness could be learned. The poet, admittedly, already lived in a time when heaven only had pretend kisses for the earth, and in which the soul flew through silent lands as if the vehicle of the metaphor could enable it to find the way home from a beautiful foreign place.
In reality, the weakened world of the living in Eichendorff's time had not exercised its droit du seigneur with the earth for a long time. Centuries had passed since modern physics discovered empty space and did away with the mythical enclosure of the firmament. Not everyone found it so easy to renounce completion from above, however; one can sense the sorrow over a world without heaven until Heidegger – an earth that, it was said, was ‘being-historically the wandering star’. We recall that this phrase, which sounds rather distinctive and sombre today, refers not to any given planet, but rather to the one on which the question of truth and the meaning of being arose. The wandering state of Heidegger's earth-dwellers and their star is the last trace of the lost chance to be encompassed by a heaven.
Even while the earth was still lying in the ethereal domes, however, long before its nautical circumnavigation and its cosmic dis-mantling, it presented itself in thanatological terms as the star on which people died scientifically. Its vague roundness was not an immune barrier that repelled death; it delineated the site on which the fall into time had taken place, that event after which everything that came into being owed its origins a death. That is why, on earth, everything that was made to exist must end – without exception; here clocks tick irreversibly, fuses burn towards ignition points (which is significant for the ‘historical consciousness’ as soon as one understands that the thought figure of the ‘bang’ is more suitable for endings than beginnings). Anyone on earth who understands their situation faces the fact that no one leaves this place alive. People on this gloomy orb must practise – which, in the jargon of later philosophy, meant running ahead into one's death. That is why, since then, it has been better not to call humans mortals, as was customary among the ancients, but rather the provisional ones. If a historian were asked to say from the perspective of an imagined evolutionary end what human collectives, viewed as a whole, did with their respective times, they would have to respond that humans organized free-for-all runs to their death: as humble processions, Dionysian hunts, progress projects, cynical-naturalistic elimination battles, or ecological reconciliation exercises. The surface of a body in the cosmos on which humans spend their days with futile precautions against the inescapable, then, cannot be a regular one. Perfect smoothness is only possible in idealizations, while the rough and the real converge.
It is scarcely a coincidence that the first systematic utterance concerning an ‘aesthetics of ugliness’ – in the book of the same name by Hegel's student Karl Rosenkranz, written in 1853 – addressed the real earth as an uneven surface at the very beginning of its argumentation. In this new, non-idealistic theory of perception, the home of humans was afforded the privilege of serving as an example leading towards a theory of natural ugliness.
Mere raw mass, in so far as it is dominated only by the law of gravity, presents us with what one could call a neutral state. It is not necessarily beautiful, but neither is it necessarily ugly; it is coincidental. If we take our earth, for example, it would have to be a perfect sphere in order to be beautiful as a mass; but it is not. It is flattened at the poles and swollen at the equator, and its surface is of the greatest irregularity in its elevation. A profile of the earth's crust, viewed purely stereometrically, shows the most coincidental muddle of elevations and depressions with the most unpredictable outlines.4
If one follows this thought to its conclusion, the central principle of a post-idealistic aesthetics of the earth can be formulated thus: as a real body, the geographically quantified globe is not beautiful, but rather interesting – and an interesting thing is halfway to ugliness. A momentary unease returns about the sub-lunar humiliation, known in our time by the watchword ‘the human condition’. Then, however, the tide turns: the irregular becomes newly attractive for observation. The modern aesthetics of the interesting and the ugly not only ally themselves aggressively with empirical research, which is by nature concerned with things coincidentally grown together – literally the concrete – and with the asymmetrical; they also make disappointment palatable, thus releasing forces for the counterattack. In this way, they assist disinhibition, known in its heyday as ‘praxis’. The concept of disinhibition, without which no convincing theory of modernity is possible, gathers together the motives that drive us to intervene in the imperfect and disagreeable.
If one grasps the local disadvantages of existence on the earth's surface soberly enough, one can shake off the restraints that had previously curbed the anger of mortals at the impositions of existence in the unpleasant. As a result, the advent of modernity saw outrage acquire its licence as a basic stance – on a raison de se révolter [it is right to rebel]; Prometheus now became the titan of the hour, and Philoctetes his secretary.5 Now that the avoidance of the coincidental, the thinking away of the burdensome and the mental adjustment of the disturbing – all advisable in the metaphysical regime – were rapidly losing their orientation by the orderly world above, it was necessary to remain in the unpleasant, to rest among the grotesque and amorphous, to hold out beside the base and adverse. Describing it turns the object of description against itself: the new aesthetics absorbs the cracks, turbulences, ruptures and irregularities into the picture – it even competes with the real for repulsive effects.
In aesthetic terms, terrestrial globalization brings the victory of the interesting over the ideal. Its result, the now-known earth, is the orb, which disappoints as a form but attracts attention as an interesting body. To expect everything of it – and of the remaining bodies on this one – would constitute the wisdom of our age. As far as the history of aesthetics is concerned, the modern experience of art is tied to the attempt to open the eye, numbed for too long by geometrical simplifications, to the perceptual charms of the irregular.