The centuries that followed the first strike of the adventurer-seafarers were, consistently enough, initially obedient to the impulse of making the world outside safe for Europeans to move in – whether through an entrepreneurial insurance system or through philosophical sciences that provided ultimate justifications. The European experiential sciences made their own contributions to this plan. With increasing routine and optimization of marine technology, real seafaring in particular lost a significant part of its ecstasy-inducing effects, and with the reduction of the adventurous element to residual risks, it approached routinized traffic – the game of trivialized outward and homeward journeys, albeit with a shipwreck quota that would be completely unacceptable for users of transportation services in the twentieth century. We should qualify this by noting that the perfect symmetry of outward and homeward journeys (which defines the concept of traffic in its exact sense) can only be achieved on land. It was only with the advent of railway traffic that the utopia of complete control over reversible movements was largely realized; modern air traffic also strives to attain this ideal by carrying out flights along precisely defined routes. Nonetheless, the primacy of the outward journey remains the hallmark of sea voyages in the heroic age of explorations and merchant voyages.
One characteristic of European extroversion is that its decisive advances always have exodus-like qualities, even if there are no pilgrim fathers re-enacting the escape from Egypt on the Atlantic.1 The Modern Age has no shortage of chosen exodus peoples, and promised lands can be projected into all areas of the world with little difficulty.
The exploration that gives this era its name therefore constitutes the epistemological form of adventurism, which behaves like a service to truth. Once the primacy of the outward journey is brought up programmatically, long-distance voyages present themselves as expeditions. Here, the penetration of the unknown is not simply the by-product of a mercantile, missionary or military undertaking, but is carried out with direct intent. The closer we come to the hot core of typical Modern Age movements, the more obvious the expedition character of journeys to the outside becomes. And even if numerous discoveries must be attributed to Captain Nobody or Admiral Hazard, the essence of the Age of Discovery remained determined by the expedition as an entrepreneurial form – one finds because one seeks, and one seeks because one knows in what area things might be found. Until the nineteenth century, it was virtually impossible for Europeans to be ‘outside’ without, at least in some aspect, being on an expedition.
The expedition is the routine form of entrepreneurially directed seeking and finding. For its sake, the decisive movement of real globalization is not simply a case of spatial expansion; it is part of the core process of the history of truth in the Modern Age. Expansion could, of course, not take place were it not prefigured in truth-related terms – and thus in all terms – as a disclosure of what had previously been concealed. This is what Heidegger had in mind when, in his tremendous and violent 1938 essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’, he felt he could pinpoint the basic process of the Modern Age in the conquest of the world as picture:
Whenever we have a world picture, an essential decision occurs concerning beings as a whole. The being of beings is sought and found in the representedness of beings. […] The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval to a modern one; rather, that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of modernity.2
No wonder that humanism first arises where the world becomes picture. […] The name ‘anthropology’, here, does not refer to an investigation of humanity by natural science. […] It designates, rather, that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and evaluates beings as a whole from the standpoint of, and in relation to, man.3
To be ‘new’ belongs to a world that has become picture.4
The epochal keyword ‘discoveries’ – a plural that actually refers to a singular phenomenon, namely the authentically historical hyper-event of the earth's circumnavigation and quantification – thus denotes the epitome of methods whereby the unknown is transformed into the known, the unimagined into the imagined. With regard to the still largely unexplored, undepicted, undescribed and unexploited earth, this means that procedures and media had to be found to bring these into the picture as a whole and in detail. Hence the ‘Age of Discovery’ encompasses the campaign driven along by the pioneers of terrestrial globalization to replace the previous non-images with images, or chimeras with ‘recordings’; consequently, all acquisitions of land, sea and world began with pictures. Each of these images brought home by the discoverers negated the externality of the external, bringing it down to a level that was satisfactory or bearable for average Europeans. At the same time, the exploring subject stands facing the pictures provided and withdraws to the threshold of the pictorial world – seeing all while itself unseen, recording everything but predetermined only by the anonymous ‘point of view’.
Hence the Modern Age, interpreted along Heidegger's lines, was also an epoch of ‘the truth’ – an era of truth history characterized by a particular style in the production of obviousness. Once and for all, truth is now no longer understood as that which shows itself from within itself, as in the sense of the Greek physis (as the ‘growth of the seed of emergence’) or Christian revelation, where the infinitely transcendent God reveals through grace what human means of insight, left to themselves, could never have uncovered. These ancient and medieval pre-conceptions of truth were discarded in the age of research, for both understand truth as something that tends, prior to all human intervention, to step out into unconcealment in the sense of the Greek alétheia, which meant something along the lines of ‘undisguised proclamation’ – a concept that Heidegger sounded out in an attitude of cultic receptivity throughout his life. With the dawn of the Modern Age, truth itself seems to have made the transition to the age of its artificial uncoverability: from that point on, research could and had to exist as an organized theft of hiddenness. Nothing else could have been meant when the Renaissance was presented as the age of ‘the discovery of the world and man’.
‘Discoveries’ are initially a summary name for recording procedures of a geotechnical, hydrotechnical, ethnotechnical and biotechnical kind – even if these appeared, at first, very rudimentarily and randomly. When the Spanish queen sent her emissary Columbus a handwritten letter commanding him to bring her as many specimens of unknown birds as possible from the New World, one can already see – behind the mask of a royal whim – the technical impulse and the measuring grasp in play. At the end of this history of access, the zoological and botanical gardens would open their gates and integrate the animal ‘kingdom’ and the plant ‘kingdom’ into the modern exhibition system. When trained seafarers such as Abbé Incarville brought back flowering plants from Asia and the South Pacific for European gardens, the technical element – the acts of breeding and replanting – is unmistakably involved. It has too rarely been taken into account how far directed plant migrations shaped and contributed to enabling the life forms of the Modern Age.5 Even things that, in terms of how they developed, often present themselves as sheer adventurous turbulence and chaotic improvisation – the stormy crossing of the open seas, the hasty adoption of new coastal maps and countries, as well as the identification of unknown peoples – were in essence already technical processes. Heidegger's dictum can be applied without reservation to all of these gestures: ‘Technology is a mode of revealing.’6