Accordingly, in the Modern Age, the task of designing the new image of the world no longer fell to the metaphysicists, but rather to the geographers and seafarers. It was their mission to present the last orb in pictorial form. Of all large round bodies, only shell-less humanity's own planet would henceforth have any meaning. The world-navigators, cartographers, conquistadors, world traders, even the Christian missionaries and their following of aid workers who exported goodwill and tourists who spent money on experiences at remote locations – they all behaved as if they had understood that, after the destruction of heaven, it was the earth itself that had to take over its function as the last vault. This physically real earth, as an irregularly layered, chaotically folded, storm-eroded body, now had to be circumnavigated and quantified. Thus the new image of the earth, the terrestrial globe, rose to become the central icon of the modern world picture. Beginning with the Behaim Globe from Nuremberg, made in 1492 – the oldest surviving example of its kind – and continuing up until NASA's photograms of the earth and pictures taken from the space station Mir, the cosmological process of modernity is characterized by the changes of shape and refinements in the earth's image in its diverse technical media. At no time, however – not even in the age of space travel – could the project of visualizing the earth deny its semi-metaphysical quality. Anyone who wished to attempt a portrait of the whole earth following the downfall of heaven stood, knowingly or not, in the tradition of sublime cosmography. In order to implement the new procedures for providing a conception of the world, however, gravity had to be overcome no longer only in the imagination, but also technologically.
It is symptomatic of this that Alexander von Humboldt could still dare to give his magnum opus, which was published in five volumes between 1845 and 1862 (the last ones posthumously) and became the foremost scientific bestseller of its century, the openly anachronistic title Cosmos. It was, as one realizes in retrospect, the historically conditioned chance for this monumentally holistic ‘physical description of the world’ to compensate with the resources of aesthetic education for what modern Europeans had endured through the loss of the firmament and cosmic clôture [(en)closure]. Humboldt had wagered that he could present this metaphysical loss as a cultural gain – and he seems to have been successful, at least with the audience of his time. In panoramic nature paintings, the aesthetic observation of the whole replaced its lost safety in the vaulted universe. The beauty of physics made the tableau of the holy circles dispensable. It is telling that in his world fresco, Humboldt, who has perhaps rightly been called the last cosmographer, no longer chose the earth as the vantage point from which to look out into the expansive space. Instead, in keeping with the spirit of his time and ours, he took up an arbitrary position in the external space from which to approach the earth like a visitor from a foreign planet.
I propose to begin with the depths of space and the remotest nebulae, and thence gradually to descend through the starry region to which our solar system belongs, to the consideration of the terrestrial spheroid with its aerial and liquid coverings, its form, its temperature and magnetic tension, and the fullness of organic life expanding and moving over its surface under the vivifying influence of light.1
Here, therefore, we do not proceed from the subjective point of view of human interest: the terrestrial is treated only as a part of the whole, and in its due subordination. The view of nature should be general, grand, and free; not narrowed by proximity, sympathy, or relative utility. A physical cosmography, or picture of the universe, should begin, therefore, not with the earth, but with the regions of space. But as the sphere of contemplation contracts in dimension, our perceptions and knowledge of the richness of details, of the fullness of physical phenomena, and of the qualitative heterogeneity of substances, augment. From the regions in which we recognize only the dominion of the laws of gravitation, we descend to our own planet, and to the intricate play of terrestrial forces.2
What counts here is the descending motion: it no longer belongs to the metaphysical regime, which had taught a methodical condescension towards earthly things. Instead, it already presents an astronautical perspective. It becomes clear from his way of returning to earth that, despite his holistic and consolatory habitus, the world-connoisseur Alexander von Humboldt sides with the Modern Age in the decisive point, deciding against the enchantment of earth-dwellers in the illusory casings of the sense of proximity. Like all globe-makers and cosmographers since Behaim, Schöner, Waldseemüller, Apian and Mercator senior and junior, he imposes the view of their planet on them from without, refusing to admit that the outer spaces are merely extensions of a regionally confined, herd-like, domestic and socio-uterine imagination.
This opening up into the infinite heightens the risk of modern localizations. Humans know, albeit only in a confused and indirect fashion at first, that they are contained or lost – which now amounts to virtually the same thing – somewhere in the boundless. They understand that they can no longer rely on anything except the indifference of the homogeneous infinite space. The outside expands, ignoring the postulate of proximity in the humane spheres, as a foreign entity in its own right; its first and only principle seems to be its lack of interest in humanity. The delusions of mortals that they must seek something outside – recall the space travel ideologies of the Americans and the Russians – necessarily remain very unstable, shakeable, auto-hypnotic projects against a background of futility. What is certainly true is that the externalized, neutralized and homogenized space is the primal condition of the modern natural sciences. The principle of the primacy of the outside provides the axiom for the human sciences.
This is the starting point for the development of a radically altered sense of human localization. The earth now becomes the star to which one returns – no matter how distant from it one has become. The outside is the general From-where of all possible returns. It was in the cosmographic field that thought concerning the outside was first elevated to the norm. The space from which the new and inevitable encounter-from-outside with the earth occurs is no longer the naïve vault of heaven from the age before Thomas Digges and Giordano Bruno. It is that eternally silent space, the infinity of physicists – of which Pascal, warning of the new atheistic physics, admitted that it put him in a state of terror. When Dante, looking down on the earth from the heaven of fixed stars on his journey through the spheres of paradise, had to smile involuntarily at its tiny form (vil semblante), this emotion was very different from the amazement that accompanied Humboldt's descent from the bleak outer spaces to an earth teeming with life. The Modern Age gained the vertical in a completely different way from the metaphysical age. Notions of flying replaced the ancient and medieval ones of ‘ascending’; the airport earth, where one starts and lands, replaced the ascension earth, from which one propels oneself and which at some point, after a final flight, is left for good. The view from outside results not from a transcendence of the noetic soul into the extra- and supra-terrestrial, but rather from the development of the physical-technical, aero- and astronautical imagination – whose literary and cartographical manifestations, furthermore, were always ahead of the technological ones.
When Humboldt's Cosmos was published, of course, there had not been any talk of the planetary domes or the all-encompassing heaven of fixed stars for centuries. That old medium of edifying astronomy, the uranian globe – a common learning tool in traditional cosmology from Alcuin to Hegel – had already been out of use for a generation by the time of Humboldt's later years, and stargazing had long since developed into an independent discipline in the spectrum of the triumphant natural sciences. With the consolidation of astrophysics, the science of the outermost spaces and the bodies contained in them, that knowledge of the mythical constellations which had made the heavenly landscapes legible since antiquity went into rapid decline. Anyone still wishing to pursue astronomy had to do so in the knowledge that they were looking up to an anthropo-fugal space in whose emptiness our hopes and projections go astray without any echo.
Just as the earth retained its special status as the star to which one returns, however, European ‘humanity’ – especially after its cosmological, ethnological and psychological enlightenments – preserved its distinction as the intelligent nerve cell in the cosmos that must be a point of reference under all circumstances and in all situations. Alexander von Humboldt had been given the mission of formulating the return from cosmic exteriority to the self-reflexive world of humans in exemplary fashion. A generation earlier, Immanuel Kant had characterized the human mind's capacity to return to itself from the enormous, the utmost and the most foreign as the sense of the sublime – what he considered sublime was the human consciousness of one's own dignity, resisting all temptations to abandon oneself in the overwhelming.3 By enacting the return from the terrible expanse of nature, the astral and oceanic dimensions, into the educated salons with edifying thoroughness, Humboldt's picture of the world offered his contemporaries a final initiation into the cosmologically sublime. A view of the world on the largest possible scale here became an emergency of aesthetic life.4 This meant the continuation of the vita contemplativa by bourgeois, and thus ultimately consumptive means. If humans wanted to be ‘moved’ and ‘deeply feel the monstrous’, they now had to seek this in their own interiors. It was Walter Benjamin who summed up the meaning of bourgeois solitudes: ‘For the private individual, the private environment represents the universe. In it he gathers remote places and the past. His drawing room is a box in the world theatre.’5
Where cosmic safety has become unattainable, humans are left to reflect on their situation in a space in which they must come back to themselves from any distant place – preferably without leaving their own ‘four walls’. Hence the exemplary human of modernity is Homo habitans, with the accompanying bodily extensions and touristic extensions. Even if the essential transcendence and the dream of a true home in the world above were irretrievably lost for Modern Age humans, the transcendental, on the other hand, the self-reference of thinking and dwelling subjects as the condition of possibility for a return from the external to the own, emerges all the more distinctly in nineteenth-century thought. The transcendental turn – the turn of the cognizer towards their own cognitive apparatus and the local cognitive situation – is the heart of Humboldt's description of the world, as well as the designs for philosophical systems among idealistic and post-idealistic thinkers. It is the figure that shaped all further anthropological thought by following on from the precepts from the founding days of the human sciences in the late eighteenth century.
The natural scientist is also confronted with a concept of the earth with a discreet philosophical shading: it is now the transcendental star that comes into play as the locational condition for all self-reflections.6 It is the exemplary hybrid in which the empirical is unified with the transcendental – on the one hand, an ordinary object of ordinary research, and on the other hand, the singular carrier of singular intelligences. As the star on which the theory of stars appeared, the earth shines with self-generated phosphorescence. When its strange, knowing inhabitants cast their thoughts into the homogeneous emptiness, it is not least to return to their place from far outside. Modernized dwelling is the condition of possibility for modern cognition. When Humboldt brings the term ‘spheres’ into play, then, he is naturally no longer speaking of the imaginary celestial domes of the Aristotelian bimillennium, but rather the transcendental ‘spheres of perception’, which refer not to cosmic realities but to the schemata, auxiliary concepts and radii of space-imagining reason.
In the twentieth century, what had been a thought figure in Humboldt's century would become concrete as a movement in the physically real space: the astronaut Edwin Aldrin, who became the second human to set foot on the moon on 21 July 1969, shortly after Neil Armstrong, took stock of his life as an astronaut in a book with the title Return to Earth.7