Celestial Democracy: From Geocentric Ecology to Planetary Philosophy

The earth is not a planet. This is the strange denial that runs through a good deal of ecological thinking and, more generally, culturally dominant representations of the earth. I use the term denial in the Freudian sense of Verneinung to designate an unconscious knowledge that recognizes what it denies through the very act of negation. This denial can translate as follows: Obscurely, I know very well that the earth is a planet among other planets in the universe, but I am nevertheless going to represent it quite differently, in terms that negate the planetary dimension of the earth, erasing its cosmological inscription in order to make it incomparable, so that it refers only to its own conditions of existence. I will call it Gaia, a critical zone, ecosystem of ecosystems, but also a technosphere, a mediasphere, and even a world or globe, unless I decide to call it, like Edmund Husserl, an “originary ark” that “does not move” (117–31).Heidegger offers a paradigmatic illustration of this denial. What the word Earth means, Heidegger writes in his 1935–36 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “is far removed from the idea of a mass of matter and from the merely astronomical idea of a planet” (21). In the interpretation that I propose, the adverb merely is the trace of an a priori erasure of the astronomical dimension. The status of the earth as a planet would thus be a kind of evanescent knowledge, rejected as soon as it is recognized. Why this rejection? Why is it so difficult to recognize and symbolize, in the long term, at the subjective and collective level, the planetarity of the earth, that is to say the fact that the earth is at the same time an ecological, technological, and social entity as well as a cosmological entity? What danger, or perhaps conversely what demanding promise, does this knowledge of the planetary condition of the earth hold—a condition that applies not only to the earth, but also to the forms of existence, living and nonliving, that accompany it?These questions came to me as I was studying environmental issues in recent years. The last chapter of my book The Unconstructable Earth (2018) led me in a direction I had not anticipated. This drift registered in that book’s last chapter, which offers a “dialectic of Gravity and Interstellar” (175–77). All of my work should have invited me to reject the aspirations expressed in Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar—where the exile of humanity onto another planet is proposed as a solution to a global epidemic, which is to say a denial of ecological discourse—and to take sides with Alfonso Cuarón’s film Gravity—which advocates a return to Earth after the wandering of a hopeless life among satellites. Yet I found myself questioning the way in which Gravity represents the rebirth of a human body after the catastrophic fall of a satellite on the earth’s ground. On the one hand, this rebirth reenacts the Christian scene of a postlapsarian incarnation. Yet, after the publication of The Unconstructable Earth, I also understood this rebirth evoked an older scene, one framed by ancient Greek philosophy, where falling bodies are supposed to return to their natural “place,” as Aristotle posited (Physics 4.4.212a20–21). In 1957, Hannah Arendt reenacted Aristotle’s philosophical scene when she posed the fall of the first Sputnik as the manifestation of an unsurpassable ontological fate. As an “earth-born object,” Arendt writes, the arrogant machine “had been admitted tentatively to [the] sublime company [of the heavenly bodies],” but it was doomed to fall back to Earth (1). Like Arendt’s The Human Condition, the film Gravity has the great advantage of reminding us of our terrestrial situation, and we need it in these times of accelerated ecocide. However, this reminder comes at the price of repressing any engagement with the earth’s stellar environment.1 Now I can name more clearly the rejection I see at play in Gravity: it is the rejection of the astronomical revolution initiated by Copernicus—that is to say, the refusal to acknowledge the planetarity that the earth shares with other planets.Giving flesh to this reading of Gravity and Arendt’s perspective, the first part of this article shows how dominant ecological thought, by rejecting the astronomical revolution initiated by Copernicus, has denied the planetarity of the earth. To put it in polemical terms, contemporary ecological thought is fundamentally geocentric. It remains to be seen what the origins of this geocentrism are in ecological epistemology. If some founding texts of ecological thinking recognize the relation of the earth to the universe (think here of Vladimir Vernadsky’s solar ecology), the fundamental tendency is to isolate the terrestrial sphere, as Bruno Latour’s eco-theory illustrates.Yet, as the second part of my article will attempt to show, it would be wrong to hold ecological thought solely responsible for such geocentrism. From the lamentations of poet John Donne to contemporary philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s description of the Galilean world as “a glacial world,” “indifferent” to us, “in which there is no longer any up or down, center or periphery, nor anything else that might make it a world designed for humans” (115), the astronomical revolution has been interpreted as a dis-aster, literally: a collapse of the heavens onto the earth—as another fall. I will show that this is a complete misinterpretation, insofar as Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, and Galileo were fundamentally seeking to promote the earth to the rank of “noble star,” to quote Nicholas of Cusa’s anticipatory expression (Koyré, From the Closed World 20). Celestial democracy can be seen as resulting from an “anarchist” act having abolished the ontological difference between the government of humans on earth and the celebration of divine presences in the heavens. The term anarchist refers here to a moment in the astronomical revolution during which thinkers rejected the ontological hierarchy at stake in the Ptolemean cosmos.2 Ultimately, I maintain that only a philosophy based on the planetarity of the earth—that is, on the cosmologization of terrestrial ecology—might achieve a celestial democracy.Fortunately, a planetary philosophy capable of thinking together the ecological emergency and the cosmological dimension is developing today. The recent works of Dipesh Chakrabarty devoted to the “climate of history in a planetary age” as well as the socio-geographical studies of Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski concerning “planetary social thought,” to which we can add Lukáš Likavčan’s proposal for a “comparative planetology,” are examples of this eco-cosmological conjunction that I will outline in the third section of this article. Comparing this nascent planetary philosophy with the seminal work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Paul Gilroy on planetarity as a legacy of the astronomical revolution turned into a postcolonial political resource, I show how planetary thinking has passed from a metaphorical engagement with outer space to a one in Earth the social and that and humans as well as the earth a planet of and a of to any planetary philosophy to the of environmental and in the political of a In the celestial democracy from the of the earth can of an to in the of the of an word to one planet among to the as it were a name to celestial a that together are together into a have a have a I with this quote from a book by in the it the denial of planetarity I will word Earth, to one planet among as for a part of contemporary thought that his Earth is an that be from what it is for a name that clearly from It to like a great a I to call on this Earth and on this or to on this be the or It is that a has on and has the of a between the and the what is and what is this between Earth and the universe is If there is on one the earth and on the other the universe, where is the To the am there is no other for a terrestrial of the and such terms, in the for the trace by this great between what is the and the of the Aristotle’s In this return to Earth, the is All that remains is a that has been an which will be by to the status of is, the of that from to the of the is not an or an in contemporary ecological It to one of the fundamental of ecological epistemology. 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to human and their ecological, and planetary thought is a thought by the cosmological dimension of planetary that is metaphorical and It is from this cosmological dimension that it is to the earth. 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