/lit/ - Literature

>>12000098
The thought of the Modern Age, which presented itself for so long under the naiVe name of "Enlightenment" and the even more naIve programmatic word "progress," is characterized by an innate movement: wherever it follows its typical forward motion, it achieves the breakthrough of the intellect out of the caves of human illusion into the nonhuman world outsi:de. It is no coincidence that the cosmological turn named after Coper- nicus marks the start of the newer history of knowledge and disappointment. It brought the people of the Fi:rst World the loss of the cosmological center, and subsequently set off an age of progressive decentralizations. From that point on, earth's citizens, the old mortals, could bid farewell to all illusions about their position in the lap of the cosmos, even if such i:deas cling to us like inborn illusions. Copernicus' heliocentric theory ini- tiated a series of research eruptions into the deserted outer teaches, extending to the inhumanly remote galaxies and the most ghostly components of matter. The cold new breath from outside was sensed early on, and a number of the pioneers of the revolutionarily changed knowledge about the pOSition of the earth in space did not conceal their unease in the i:nfinity now imposed on them; rhus even Kepler objected to Bruno's doctrine of the endless universe with the words that "this very cogitation carries with it I don't know what secret, hidden horror; indeed one finds oneself wandering in this immensity, to which are denied limits and center and therefore all determinate places.") Evasions to the outermost realms were followed by irruptions of coldness from the cosmic and technical ice worlds into the human inner sphere. Since the start of the Modern Age, the human world has constantly-every cenmry, every decade, every year and every day-had to learn to accept and integrate new truths about an outside not related to humans. From the seventeenth century on, starting with the European educated classes and increasingly affecting the informed masses of the First World, the new psycho-cosmologically relevant sentiment spread that humans were not the concern of evolution, the indifferent goddess of becoming. Every view into the earthly factory and the extraterrestrial spaces provided increasing evidence that mankind is towered above on all sides by monstrous externalities that breathe on it with stellar coldness and extra-human complexity. The old nature of homo sapiens is not up to these provocations by the outside.

-from the Introduction to Spheres 1: Bubbles, Sloterdijk

>>11782793
Here.