Group Members took part in the International Conference «Worldview / World Picture: Milestones of Intellectual History»
On November 28-30, the International Conference «Worldview / World Picture: Milestones of Intellectual History» was held in St. Petersburg, where the group presented some of the results of their work.
The collective paper by Varvara Kukushkina, Ilona Svetlikova, and Pavel Yushin was entitled «Why Sherlock Holmes Forgot About Copernicus: Contexts of Perception of Heliocentrism in the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries»; Nikita Kalinovsky, Ilona Svetlikova, and Maria Fesenko made a presentation entitled «The Renaissance and Modern Cosmology in the Early 20th Century Historical Imagination». Both presentations dealt with the same historical problem: in the second half of the 19th century there was a tendency to view the Copernican world picture as factually incorrect and/or detrimental to the human self-perception and development of society. Here are their abstracts:
Why Sherlock Holmes Forgot About Copernicus: Contexts of Perception of Heliocentrism in the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
At the beginning of his acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson is surprised to find out that his new neighbor is ignorant of the Copernican system. «That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun, — Watson recounts, — appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it». Holmes explains his ignorance pragmatically: he does not care whether the earth travels around the sun or otherwise because it does not make any difference to his work, while the memory of unnecessary facts prevents him from retaining necessary ones. This well-known episode from Arthur Conan Doyle’s «A Study in Scarlet» (1887) is a good illustration of the problem which we are interested in and which, as far as we know, was not noticed by Conan Doyle's commentators, who paid due attention to the fact that in other stories Holmes betrays considerable knowledge of astronomy but did not explain why he ignores Copernicus. Meanwhile, Holmes’s reaction is not accidental. It does not amount to the denial of heliocentrism but represents one of the contemporary attitudes towards it, which, as we shall try to show, has grown on the favorable ground for its denial.
In order to explore this intellectual ground, it is convenient to start with an author who, at a first glance, seems to be very far from Conan Doyle. Carl Schöpfer (1819–1876) was a prolific German writer and almost a champion among German authors of the 19th century in terms of the number of pseudonyms he used. According to Schöpfer’s own preface to his book «Contradictions in Astronomy» (Die Widersprüche in der Astronomie, 1869), where he described the persecution he was subjected to, many considered him a common charlatan. However, his attacks on the Copernican system managed to gain prominence, the scale of which turns them into an important historical fact (he was translated into English by Blavatsky, discussed — ironically — by Mendeleev, read by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, etc.) Schöpfer’s fame was due to his rhetorical skills: in his writings, traditional arguments, which by the middle of the 19th century came to be enriched with new meanings, were employed in a novel fashion. Among the most important was a reference to the authority of the Holy Scriptures, a call to overthrow the yoke of scientific prejudice, and an indication that heliocentrism is alien to the human senses. The latter argument, in which we are primarily interested, had long been used in criticism of the Copernican system. It was based on the Aristotelian tradition within which sense-data forms the basis of knowledge that is, in turn, deemed impossible without sense perception (but notably ignored the role of the mind, which, according to Aristotle, should correct the raw data acquired by the senses). In the 19th century, the idea that scientific findings should conform directly to the senses was reinforced by the widespread empiricism and experimental science. As a result, Aristotle could be seen as a precursor to both.
A particularly important example of such a view is provided by the Vatican. The establishment of Thomas Aquinas as the official philosopher of the Catholic Church in 1879 was accompanied by an attempt to modernize Aristotle-based scholasticism. Thus, in a book called «The Philosophy of St. Thomas V. Aquinas and Its Meaning for the Present» (Die Philosophie des Hl. Thomas V. Aquin und Ihre Bedeutung für die Gegenwart, 1881) Catholic philosopher Mathias Schneid argued that scholastics were, in fact, empiricists keen on the experimental method, who did not engage with natural sciences due to the lack of required instruments and proper scientific collections. At the same time, since the 1820s, when «De revolutionibus orbium coelestium» was removed from the Index, the Catholic Church was trying to underscore its agreement with modern cosmological ideas. In a contemporary biography written by a catholic historian of science, Galileo was called «un illustre savant catholique», while the library of the Vatican observatory served as a source of knowledge about ancient heliocentric theories. Some Catholics, however — including quite influential ones — did not agree with this official position: the Warsaw clergy did not show up for the opening of the Copernicus monument in 1829, and the Roman clergy opposed the erection of the monument to Giordano Bruno in 1889.
A counterpart to these Catholic attitudes (which will lead us back to both Schöpfer and Conan Doyle) can be found in Auguste Comte’s positivism. Comte, for whom astronomy was one of the most important sciences, famously believed that its field of inquiry should be limited to the observable solar system because knowledge of the stars that are inaccessible to the senses has no practical use. Although he did not deny heliocentrism, his ideas about astronomy and its objectives could prompt those whom he influenced to deny it. Apart from Schöpfer, who was certainly acquainted with Comte’s works, this was the case with several other 19th century critics of heliocentrism, such as the Hungarian astronomer Károly Nagy or Saint-Petersburg-born writer August Tischner. From their point of view, astronomy had to get rid of imaginary cosmological theories and turn into «the science of observation» («die Wissenschaft der Beobachtung»). Holmes’s renowned power of observation is an obvious tribute to the spirit of positivist science, with which (as the scholars repeatedly noted) Conan Doyle sympathized, and it is this positivist context that helps to see in Holmes's ignorance of the Copernican system the manifestation of a certain position formed within the framework of positivism. When he says that the knowledge of whether the earth revolves around the sun or otherwise is useless in his work, he continues the line of Comte, who did not deny the infinity, but believed that mankind does not need to know what is inaccessible to perception.
Another problem related to the question of the reliability of the senses, which was acutely felt at the time: how to explain the Copernican system to children? Several critics of heliocentrism, including Schöpfer, discussed teaching. Instruction in the Copernican system posed obvious difficulties, which were aggravated not only by religious education but also by the findings of child psychologists, who noted that children tend to portray «the sky as a tilted cup» (J. Sully). Such observations have become particularly relevant due to the wide interest in the theory of recapitulation. It was supposed that children, like the first «observers of deep antiquity», should study the sky directly — as one author put it, «babies need facts from the time of the "infancy of science"». Scientific pedagogy, which started with Comenius and was based on the same Aristotelian view of the nature of knowledge, only made things worse. According to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, the founder of the method of «Anschauung», extremely popular throughout the 19th century, «when objects are removed from my senses, they are a source of confusion and error for me, and hence also a source of vices».
In the last part of our paper, we concentrate on the traces of reflection on the harm of astronomy (or, more precisely, a certain kind of astronomy) to be found in the latter half of the 19th – beginning of the 20th centuries.
The Renaissance and Modern Cosmology in the Early 20th Century Historical Imagination
In the first half of the 20th century, the world of Copernican cosmology could be perceived as adverse to humans. This sentiment is famously reflected in Leo Spitzer’s works («Milieu and Ambiance», 1942; «Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony», 1963). Interestingly, Spitzer’s views are paralleled by those of Auguste Comte (sympathetically mentioned in «Milieu and Ambiance»), who was deeply interested in the history of astronomy and regarded astronomy as an important instrument of social development.
We will concentrate on another close parallel to Spitzer found in the writings of Alexander Blok, particularly in his 1912 poem «Miri letiat» (Worlds Fly) that presents a chaotic and frightening vision of modern cosmology. A reader of popular works on astronomy, Blok imbues the poem with astronomical references that serve to emphasize the difference between the new image of the world (deprived of its central and stationary position, nervously spinning, and rushing forth with an unhealthy train-like speed) and the old one, recognized by the ancient and medieval cosmology.
Furthermore, Blok’s treatment of the Copernican system should also be regarded within the context of the 19th-century historiography of the Renaissance. He was an attentive reader of Jakob Burckhardt’s «Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien» (1860/1906) and Wilhelm Windelband’s «Geschichte der neueren Philosophie» (Bd. I. Von der Renaissance bis Kant, 1878/1902), whose notion of Renaissance was strongly influenced by Burckhardt. Significant traces of this reading are to be found in Blok’s poem.
Blok uses the history of cosmology in «Miry letiat» as a metonymy for the history of culture and society, which reflects a contemporary growth of interest in astronomy and a tendency to consider its history as a crucial part of the history of culture (from Friedrich von Bezold and Aby Warburg to Frederik Troels-Lund).