Copernican turn

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This drawing in the manuscript of the work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) by Nicolaus Copernicus illustrates the starting point of the Copernican worldview: the planets move on circular orbits around the sun.

Under the Copernican turn or the Copernican revolution one understands the turning away from the geocentric (i.e. earth-related) worldview that took place in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. The turning point consisted in exploring the world beyond the immediate appearance in order to arrive at new knowledge through constructive reason.

In a narrower sense, the Copernican turn meant the end of the view that the earth rests in the center of the world and is surrounded by rotating heavenly spheres . In a broader sense, the Copernican turn encompasses the end of the far-reaching conceptions associated with this worldview in philosophy and religion of the late European Middle Ages about the position of man in the world. This understanding of the Copernican turn also served to delimit the epochs of the Middle Ages and modern times in historical studies .

In the Copernican turn the end of the interpretative sovereignty of the church manifests itself in many lifeworld and philosophical concerns of the Middle Ages. In their place came the evolving natural sciences , step by step and sometimes with heated disputes .

Since the 19th century, the term “Copernican turn” has also been used in other areas of knowledge in order to highlight a new theory or rethinking (e.g. linguistic turn , cognitive turn ) as revolutionary and momentous ( paradigm shift ). In the history of philosophy there is also talk of a “Copernican turn”, which Immanuel Kant carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) with his proposal for a transcendental philosophy . Literally, the phrase is not found in Kant's writings, but the latter said in the preface to the second edition of 1787 that an "alteration of thinking" in philosophy is also to perform as with Copernicus in cosmology or Euclid in geometry .

Starting point: heliocentric planetary system

Original edition of Copernicus' main work, printed by Johannes Petreius , Nuremberg 1543

In astronomical terms, the Copernican turning point was triggered by the major work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by Nicolaus Copernicus , which appeared in print in 1543 . Here the idea of ​​the earth at rest has been abandoned and replaced by the assumption that the earth executes a twofold movement by rotating daily on its axis and annually orbiting the sun.

In this work, Copernicus tries to convince his readers of the "harmony" of the worldview with a sun orbited by the planets. This is "easier to understand" than to see the movements of the celestial bodies as before into an "almost endless number of circles". The “wisdom of nature” would be careful not to produce anything “superfluous and useless”. Rather, "the sun, sitting on its royal throne, directs the family of the stars that encircle it". Due to its orbit “the earth receives from the sun and becomes pregnant with an annual birth”, which makes more sense than a sun that orbits the earth every day. Copernicus does not yet deviate from the stoic principle that the cosmic order is also a moral order.

This enabled Copernicus to greatly simplify the basic ideas about movements in the sky, which corresponded to the "new way of thinking" of rationalism . However, his system was no less complicated in detail: Since he strictly adhered to the Aristotelian dogma that there can only be uniform circular movements in the sky, about as many compound circular movements were required as in the geocentric system in order to be able to calculate the planetary positions with comparable accuracy. The loyalty to ancient authorities and theological considerations affirmed by Copernicus, combined with the new ideals of the Renaissance, makes him appear not as a revolutionary, but as a mediator between the old and the new.

The fact that the heliocentric system nevertheless found general recognition towards the end of the 17th century is based on further decisive simplifications that were only possible on this basis. According to Johannes Kepler , a single ellipse was sufficient for each planet to represent its movement around the sun, and according to Isaac Newton the whole planetary system could be explained within the framework of the mechanics worked out by him by a simple law of general attraction of masses . In addition, there was the confirmation of the new worldview through the first telescope observations of the planets by Galileo Galilei as well as the proof that the planetary positions calculated according to Kepler and especially according to Newton were many times more accurate than before.

The usual designation as heliocentric view of the world only applies in the strict sense to the level of development achieved by Kepler, because with Copernicus the planets and the sun itself revolved around the fictitious "mean sun" and with Newton around the barycenter of the solar system, while the The universe as such no longer had a center at all.

Turning away from prevailing tenets

Copernicus and his successors had to break a whole series of traditional doctrines . In some cases, they could refer to the authorities of the history of philosophy. The following can be cited as examples:

  1. The earth, now one of several planets, can no longer be regarded as the center of the universe. This makes the universal orientation scheme above (heaven) versus below (hell) invalid.
  2. As a result, the Aristotelian division of the movements into natural (radial from or to the center, or eternally uniform in a circle around it) and unnatural (oblique throw, etc.) is unfounded.
  3. The earth can no longer be seen as resting. The fixed star sky is now to be regarded as resting. According to the old doctrine, it should turn the fastest of all with one revolution per sidereal day and drive the planets, the sun and the moon with (on average) each decreasing speed.
  4. The rotation of the outermost celestial sphere can therefore no longer be seen as the starting point for any movement in general (and thus also for all earthly changes).
  5. The celestial phenomena above the moon are not forever unchangeable, changes of all kinds are not limited to the area near the earth (the sublunar sphere ).
  6. The fixed stars are much further from the sun than even the outermost planet. Otherwise they would have to show a star parallax due to the motion of the earth . In between there must be empty space, contrary to the prevailing idea that empty space is impossible and movement can only be transmitted through touch.
  7. Rest and movement lose their absolute meaning. The relativity principle of classical mechanics is being prepared.
  8. Copernicus still uses the arguments of the divine order and the harmony of the spheres , but sets himself apart from the syllogistic arguments of scholasticism in that he regards the simple, easily understandable as the true. With this, and because it is partly based on new observations, it becomes a pioneer for the subsequent development of the empirical sciences .

Catholic Resistance, French Enlightenment, and Absolutism

While there were both supporters and opponents of the heliocentric worldview among Catholic and Protestant scholars in the 16th and 17th centuries, the official Catholic Church reacted with increasing rejection. This was related to the disciplining measures of the Counter Reformation and had the political purpose of unifying Catholicism against the growing Protestantism . This was most clearly expressed in the Inquisition proceedings against Galileo. In 1633 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith banned by decree any cosmology in which either the "mobility" of the earth or the "immobility" of the sun is represented. It was not until 1820 that this decree was repealed by a papal decision.

Louis XIV attends the Académie des Sciences , 1671

The competition between the geocentric and the heliocentric approach to explaining the movements of the heavens became a "battle between light and darkness, truth and lies" in the French Enlightenment . The “Sun King” Louis XIV , who emancipated himself from the authority of the Catholic Church, spread models of the heliocentric worldview as diplomatic gifts and presented himself as the sun of his empire. In the Ballet de cour or through the architectural design of Versailles Palace , he let his courtiers circle around him. Under Giovanni Domenico Cassini , however, the Tychonic World Model was still represented, which allowed an orbiting sun to apply without giving up the idea of ​​a resting earth. As the orbiting sun, Ludwig embodied the climax of absolutism . In his study Die Höfische Gesellschaft (1969), the sociologist Norbert Elias presented the increasing centralization of the absolutist state as a royal mechanism . He saw the social success of the heliocentric worldview embodied in this way in a balance between “commitment and distancing”. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelles Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes , which illustrated the heliocentric worldview in the manner of a courtly spectacle, was allowed to appear in Paris in several editions since 1686. The idea of ​​humiliation of the earth towards the sun goes back to this writing: A tutor tries to explain astronomy to a marquise portrayed as naive. Fontenelle represented the victorious position of the modern in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes .

Kant's "Change of Mind"

British empiricism , which originated from Francis Bacon and culminated in Isaac Newton's experimental physics, is often presented as a counterbalance to the French-led rationalism of the early Enlightenment . While rationalism was based on the assumption that one could come to knowledge through pure thinking, empiricism took the view that knowledge is only possible through sensory experience. Immanuel Kant tried to mediate between the two positions. Although he criticized the “pure reason” of rationalism, he presented the doctrine of Copernicus as a result of pure thinking, which had opened up new possibilities by being able to lead to new knowledge through observation and later through experiments. He called this middle way transcendental philosophy .

The terms "Copernican turn" or "Copernican revolution" are not found in Kant's writings and correspondence. The central text, to which the speech of Kant's Copernican turn refers, is the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Immanuel Kant: AA III, 7-10). There the expression "revolution of the way of thinking" is found twice, however not directly related to Copernicus. However, Kant calls this the originator of a "change in the way of thinking". Nevertheless, in the literature with reference to this passage, there is talk of Kant's “Kopernikanischer Wende”.

David Hume had already stated in the introduction to his first work A Treatise of Human Nature (1739): “Even. Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of MAN ", and subsequently the concern with" extent and force of human understanding "made what in turn was called the" Copernican Revolution " is. Kant explained that mathematics, logic and the natural sciences had changed from a loose collection of discoveries to systematic sciences through a “revolution of the way of thinking”, in that they no longer sought their principles in the objects of experience but in reason. For the natural sciences, Kant names the method of first setting up theses on the basis of presumed principles and checking them through experiments . This gives a different perspective on nature.

For Kant, this natural science is embodied in Newtonian physics , which, by assuming a force in the form of an action at a distance , was able to combine Galileo's laws of fall and Kepler 's laws of planets into a system. As the starting point for this integration of a systematic cosmology into an empirically confirmed physics, he calls Copernicus' task of a geocentric world view with an immobile earth. Similarly, metaphysics has to give up the assumption that human knowledge is based entirely on objects. As a “change in the way of thinking” he recommends trying to assume that the objects are based on knowledge: in this case according to the principles of order of mathematics, with which Newton applied the unobservable but (from the perspective of his time) all explanatory forces has closed.

Misleading interpretations such as Victor Cousin's formulation that Kant had the objects of knowledge revolve around people instead of people around objects have brought the propagated upheaval into the reproach of anthropocentrism .

What exactly constitutes the change for Kant, and whether Kant's “Copernican turn” means an analogous approach in metaphysics, every revolution of a science in general, the critical separation of reason and experience, or specifically the task of geocentrism, is a question of interpretation.

According to Bertrand Russell , by placing man at the center of epistemology, Kant did not even complete the actual Copernican turn.

Philosophy of language

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg objected to Kant a priori that language precedes every statement and that all philosophy is therefore a "correction of language use". Copernicus has questioned self-evident sentences such as “the sun rises” to this day. Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein also confirmed that thinking is conditioned by its linguistic prerequisites .

In the following, events are referred to as the Copernican turn, in which the reflection of thought turns into language criticism , as in the so-called linguistic turn since the beginning of the 20th century, Fritz Mauthner's philosophy of language or Noam Chomsky's work on syntax theory.

From the linguistic concept of paradigm was Thomas Kuhn in his attempt at a general theory of Scientific Revolutions The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) from which the concept of paradigm shift has made popular.

Goethe

In the materials on the history of color theory published in 1810, Goethe wrote :

“But among all discoveries and convictions, nothing would have produced a greater effect on the human spirit than the teaching of Copernicus. Hardly was the world recognized as round and self-contained when it was to renounce the immense privilege of being the center of the universe. Perhaps there has never been a greater demand on humanity: because what did not go up in smoke and smoke through this recognition: a second paradise, a world of innocence, poetry and piety, the testimony of the senses, the conviction of a poetic-religious Belief; No wonder that they did not want to let go of all of this, that they opposed such a doctrine in every way that authorized and challenged those who accepted it to a hitherto unknown, indeed unprecedented freedom of thought and greatness of opinions. "

And in 1832 he confirmed to Chancellor von Müller that it was

"The greatest, most sublime, most momentous discovery that man has ever made, in my eyes more important than the entire Bible."

Friedrich Nietzsche and his reception

In his work Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Friedrich Nietzsche portrayed Nicolaus Copernicus as an “opponent of visual appearance ” (JGB-12). The simplification of the Ptolemaic celestial movements, which Copernicus was concerned with, was of little importance for Nietzsche. Rather, what mattered to him was the transition from the naive view of an apparently calm sky observer to a higher-level perspective that is not accessible to the senses. Nietzsche's praise for the overarching perspective was again presented by Eduard Meyer as a “Copernican act”. Kant, on the other hand, viewed the change of perspective proposed by Copernicus not as a triumph of a subject over general naivety, but as a promising experimental arrangement.

Oswald Spengler coarsened Nietzsche's statements to juxtapose naive ideas with scientific facts. He looked into the Copernican Revolution "exemptions from inspection" as the world system have completed "the Western mind towards nature" to the "only valid today," and presented by this pattern a "Copernican discovery" in the theory of history, which he The Downfall of the West (1918/22) called.

Insult and arrogance

Nietzsche's interpretation of the “Copernican” change of perspective as a change in a hierarchy and as a loss of security had significant echoes in the 20th century. It has been associated with the contradicting notions of humiliation and arrogance of man through the advancement of science.

Sigmund Freud spoke of a “cosmological offense” of man, which occupies the first place in the historical offenses of mankind ( A Difficulty of Psychoanalysis, 1917). From the mortification hypothesis, Hans Blumenberg developed a monumental image of history that combined interpretations from Kant to Nietzsche to Freud to form a Copernicus myth . The marginal position of the human being had been "compensated for by poets and thinkers with a" partly triumphant gesture ".

Bertrand Russell, on the other hand, held that subjectivity was a vice in the scientific description of the world. His thesis of a “Ptolemaic counterrevolution” by Kant, because the latter places man back with an anthropocentric way of thinking in the center from which Copernicus “dethroned” him, can hardly be understood without Nietzsche's reception.

Around 1960 Hermann Bondi took up again the talk of the loss of a special position of humans in space with the catchphrase Copernican principle . The science author John Gribbin has described the entire development of modern science since Copernicus from the point of view of how it has gradually robbed man of his assumed special position in the world.

Viktor Frankl

The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl put the concept of the Copernican turn in a therapeutic context. Man should “give the question of the meaning of life a Copernican twist: It is life itself that asks man questions. He does not have to ask, he is rather the one asked about life [...] ”. Instead of despairing that the concrete living conditions did not meet existing expectations, Frankl recommended addressing these living conditions. With this, Frankl founded a form of treatment that he called logotherapy and existential analysis.

literature

  • Owen Gingerich : The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus . Walker, 2004, ISBN 0-8027-1415-3 ( making-of ).
  • Hans Blumenberg : The Genesis of the Copernican World . Suhrkamp, ​​1975.
  • Hans Blumenberg: The Legitimacy of Modern Times . Suhrkamp 1966. (2nd edition under the title Secularization and Self-Assertion. 1974)
  • Hans Blumenberg: The Copernican Turn . Suhrkamp 1965.
  • Thomas S. Kuhn : The Copernican Revolution . Vieweg, Braunschweig 1980, ISBN 3-528-08433-2 .
  • Jürgen Klein : Astronomy and Anthropocentrism. The Copernican Turn with John Donne, John Milton, and the Cambridge Platonists . Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Bern / New York 1986, ISBN 3-8204-5639-2 .
  • Dieter Schönecker , Dennis Schulting, Niko Strobach: Kant's Copernican-Newtonian analogy. In: German magazine for philosophy. 59, 4, 2011, pp. 497-518.
  • Harry Nussbaumer: Revolution in the sky. How the Copernican Revolution changed astronomy. vdf, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-7281-3326-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans Blumenberg : The Copernican turn . Suhrkamp, ​​1965.
  2. ↑ Hans Blumenberg : The Genesis of the Copernican World . Suhrkamp, ​​1975.
  3. ↑ Arthur Koestler : Die Nachtwandler - The history of our world knowledge . 3. Edition. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Volume 579, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-518-37079-0 .
  4. ^ A b Thomas S. Kuhn : The Copernican Revolution . Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig 1981, ISBN 3-528-08433-2 .
  5. ↑ Duden online explains this transferred meaning under Copernican : a Copernican turn in the sense of a "far-reaching turn".
  6. ^ Wulff D. Rehfus: Copernican turn, in: Handwortbuch Philosophie, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht / UTB, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 978-3-8252-8208-0 . URL: [ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated December 22, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ], accessed Dec. 18, 2017. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.philosophie-woerterbuch.de
  7. ↑ Quotes from: Nicolaus Copernicus: About the circular movements of the world bodies. translated by CL Menzzer. Ernst Lambeck, Thorn 1879, First Book, Chapter 10, pp. 27f.
  8. ↑ Wolfgang Kullmann: Ancient preliminary stages of the modern concept of the natural law , in: Okko Behrends, Wolfgang Sellert (ed.): Nomos and law. Origins and Effects of Greek Legal Thought, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1995, pp. 36–111, here p. 60, ISBN 9783525825976
  9. ^ Panajotis Kondylis: The Enlightenment in the Framework of Modern Rationalism , Felix Meiner, Hamburg 2002, p. 97, ISBN 3-7873-1613-2
  10. ↑ Jürgen Teichmann : Change of the world view: Astronomy, physics and measuring technology in cultural history , 4th edition, Springer, Berlin 2013, p. 80, ISBN 978-3-322-94874-8
  11. ^ Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis : The mechanization of the world view . Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 1956, ISBN 3-540-02003-9 .
  12. ↑ Maurice A. Finocchiaro: Retrying Galileo, 1633-1992 , Univ. of California Press 2007, p. 20, ISBN 978-0-520-25387-2
  13. ^ Walter Brandmüller, Egon J. Greipl: Copernico, Galileo e la Chiesa. Fine della controversia (1820). Gli atti del Sant'uffizio , Olschki, Florenz 1992, pp. 300f, ISBN 978-88-222-3997-6
  14. ↑ Richard Schröder: Was the Copernican reform of astronomy a change in the world view? In: Christoph Markschies, Johannes Zachhuber (Ed.): The world as an image. Interdisciplinary contributions to the visuality of world views. de Gruyter, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-11-020029-4 , p. 107.
  15. ↑ Jürgen Teichmann: Change of the world view: Astronomy, physics and measurement technology in cultural history , 4th edition, Springer, Berlin 2013, pp. 159f., 191f, ISBN 978-3-322-94874-8
  16. ^ Jean-Pierre Luminet: The Reception of the Copernican Revolution Among Provençal Humanists of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries , in: Cornell Univ. Library, 2017. URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.02930.pdf
  17. ^ Annette Treibel: The sociology of Norbert Elias. An introduction to their history, systematics and perspectives. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-16081-8 , p. 40.
  18. ↑ See Hans Blumenberg: Realities in which we live , Reclam, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-15-007715-X
  19. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Collected Writings. Ed .: Vol. 1-22 Prussian Academy of Sciences, Vol. 23 German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, from Vol. 24 Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Berlin 1900ff., AA III, 7-10  / Critique of Pure Reason. Preface to the second edition 1787, B VII – XV, facsimile .
  20. ^ Georg Mohr: Kant's foundation of critical philosophy. Commentary on work and passage on the Critique of Pure Reason, the Prolegomena and the advances in metaphysics. In: Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy. Text and comment. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2004, volume 3, p. 70.
  21. ↑ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm#link2H_INTR
  22. ^ I. Bernard Cohen: Revolution in Science , Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge 1985, p. 520, ISBN 0-674-76778-0
  23. ↑ Victor Cousin: Leçons sur la philosophie de Kant , Ladrange, Paris 1844, p. 38.
  24. ↑ Smail Rapic: Knowledge and Use of Language. Lichtenberg and English empiricism. Wallstein, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-89244-331-9 , pp. 66-78.
  25. ^ Albrecht Beutel: Lichtenberg and religion. Mohr, Tübingen 1996, ISBN 3-16-146570-9 , p. 34.
  26. ↑ Carolin Kosuch: Misguided Sons: Anarchism and language criticism in the fin de siècle. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-525-37037-7 , p. 214.
  27. ↑ Otto F. Best: A Copernican turn. Noam Chomsky's revolutionary work on syntax theory. In: The time. Oct 10, 1969.
  28. ↑ Helmut Hiel: Epistemological criticism and experimental anthropology. In: Marcus Andreas Born: Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond good and bad. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-05-005674-6 , p. 40.
  29. ↑ Richard Frank, Evelyn S. Krummel: Spread and effect of Nietzsche's work in the German-speaking area up to the end of the Second World War. de Gruyter, Berlin 1998, p. 759.
  30. ↑ Michael Nerurkar: Kant's "happy idea". The epistemological and historical self-positioning of Kant in his preface to the Critique of Pure Reason. In: Filozofija i Društvo. Vol. 22, H. 4, 2011, pp. 3-21.
  31. ↑ Oswald Spengler: The fall of the occident. First volume, second chapter, Beck, Munich 1923, p. 101.
  32. ↑ Massimo Ferrari Zumbini: Sunset and Dawn. Nietzsche - Spengler - anti-Semitism. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1999, ISBN 3-8260-1523-1 , p. 47.
  33. ↑ Cf. Volker Gerhardt: Die Kopernican Wende bei Kant and Nietzsche, in: Klaus Wellner, Jörg Albertz (Ed.): Kant and Nietzsche: Prelude to a future interpretation of the world ?, Akademie Verlag, Wiesbaden 1988, ISBN 978-3-923834-06 -8 , pp. 157-182.
  34. ↑ Sandra Kluwe: Trauma and Triumph. The Copernican turn in poetry and philosophy, in: Hans Gebhardt, Helmuth Kiesel (ed.): Weltbilder, Springer, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-540-21950-7 , pp. 179–220, here p. 179.
  35. ^ Bertrand Russell: Human Knowledge. Its Scope and Limits [1948], Routledge, New York 2009, Introduction, p. 12.
  36. ^ Alfredo Ferrarin: The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of ​​Cosmic Philosophy, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago 2015, ISBN 978-0-226-24315-3 , p. 266
  37. ^ John Gribbin: Science - A History . Penguin, London 2003.
  38. ↑ Viktor E. Frankl: Medical pastoral care. Basics of Logotherapy and Existential Analysis [1946], Deuticke, Vienna 1982, p. 72.