Copernicus did not demote humanity 5 Dec 2009 Stephen Jay Gould was fond of observing that of the two revolutions identified by Freud as having dethroned humanity – Copernicus, and Darwin’s – that Darwin’s was the more revolutionary, because (as he put it) Copernicus and Galileo merely changed our real estate, while Darwin changed our essence. But it is common to say something like this: … the Catholic Church fought tooth and nail to suppress Galileo’s finding that the earth was not the center of the universe, because they believed that’s where humanity ought to be. This is a deep misunderstanding. Copernicus did not demote humanity by making the earth not the centre of the universe; he promoted us. In the Ptolemaic system, a physics had been partially inherited, although it was at its heart inconsistent with it. According to the “two-sphere” universe of Aristotle, the outer sphere was the stars’ firmament, and the only motion that was possible in the universe was circular motion, for that was the only eternal motion, and the heavens, being as close to perfect as it was possible to be, were eternal, neither corrupting nor generating. The place in the universe where things generated and corrupted, grew and decayed, was within the lunar sphere that surrounded the earth. All partial or temporary motion occurred there, for a simple reason: in the heavens there was only a fifth element, later called the quintessence, and it would neither rise nor fall, since it was where it was supposed to be. In the sublunary sphere, our part of the world, things were composed of one of four essences: earth, air, fire and water. Air and fire were light elements and sought their place by rising or staying where they were; water and earth were heavy elements and would tend towards the centre of the universe. Since the sublunary sphere was where temporary motion could occur, it was in effect the least perfect part of the cosmos. In other words, the earth was the cosmic rubbish dump. Generation and corruption were marks of things that were least eternal and therefore least important. By making the earth go around the sun, Copernicus challenged two thousand years of physics (although many others, especially the later scholastics, had done this too). Ptolemy’s cosmography had heavenly things going in circles, but they were increasingly not the centre of the universe, what with equants and epicycles and deferents. Copernicus retained the idea of circular motion (not until Kepler were elliptical orbits accepted), but fundamentally he had undercut the whole rational for Aristotelian physics, as Galileo argued a couple of centuriesy or so later. Copernicus implied that the universe and we were of the same stuff. Galileo made this explicit. This was not, contrary to the Freudian myth, a demotion. It was in fact a radical promotion to star stuff, as Sagan later put it so eloquently. History Philosophy Science
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This was not . . . a demotion. It was in fact a radical promotion to star stuff. Yeah, but stars became mere garbage dumps too. It was a demotion of the celestial.
Pedantry time: “…Galileo argued a couple of centuries later.” Before one century had passed after Copernicus was published, Galileo had been published and depublished already. As to the point, it’s an interesting one, but Physicalist has a point too. Really, the change was to reduce everything to mediocrity. But since we care about being promoted to star stuff and the stars don’t, we still seem to have got the better of it.
I was always slightly concerned by Gould’s apparent reverence for Freud, which seemed strange in an otherwise wonderfully sensible man. As Gould points out somewhere or other, Freud was more than hinting that he saw himself as the third great revolutionary to knock mankind of its lofty pedestal. Sigmund Who?
Bah! Philosophers! Always insisting on sticking to the facts! Wait a minute … I was thinking about scientists, wasn’t I? 😉
I’ve just been working through (for a paper for a required course in medieval philosophy… sigh…) the rather outlandish conjecture that the *real* people who made this precise philosophical move, rather than the Copernicans, were the neo-Platonists. After all, if you’re an emanationist, you don’t have much room for saying that the stars are somehow *normatively* better than the sublunary sphere. Strikes right at the heart of the Aristotelian value-hierarchy. I rather like how it sounds, though I (obviously enough) don’t have a whole lot invested in neo-Platonism.
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