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Images of the Sky (A Chronicle)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Maria Villela-Petit
Maria Villela-Petit*
Affiliation:
CNRS, Paris
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Extract

Does living on Earth not also for human beings mean being open to the sky? Watching day alternate with night, relying on the seasonal cycle, finding their way according to the position of the stars, humans have always been aware of their dependence on the sky and tried to understand the origin of life in relation to it. And it is up to the sky again that their imagination and thoughts fly whenever they feel cramped in their earthly habitat. Following the axis of their own vertical position, the earth that is the floor for humans is seen as a ‘down here’ by opposition to an ‘up there’, the sky, towards which they turn their heads and raise their eyes. Up there is the origin of the metaphorical figure and /or dream image of the flight up into the high heavens, or the journey to other stars, or to a spiritual land beyond.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 47 , Issue 188 , December 1999 , pp. 98 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 1999

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References

Notes

1. This account relates to the following works: Marc Lachièze-Rey and Jean-Pierre Luminet (1998), Figures du ciel: de l'harmonie des sphères à la conquête spatiale (Paris: Seuil/Bibliothèque Nationale de France); Cosmos: Du Romantisme à l'Avant-Garde, directed by Jean Clair (Gallimard/Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal), 1999; Marcelo Gleiser (1998), The Dancing Universe: From Creation to the Big Bang (Plume); Christianisme et conquête spatiale, directed by Alexandre Vigne (forthcoming).

2. In 1994 in the USA he received the ‘Presidential Faculty Fellows Award' for his work in cosmology and his excellence as a teacher. Gleiser's vocation was fostered by family stories about Albert Einstein's visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1925. Two principal hosts had been appointed by the Jewish community: the Ashkenazi representative was Jacob Schneider, Gleiser's maternal grandfather, and the Sephardic representative was Isidoro Kohn, whose niece became his father's second wife.

3. Op. cit., 128 et seq.

4. Another exhibition entitled Couleurs de la Terre continued the theme of Figures du ciel.

5. This exhibition was mounted again at the Barcelona Centro de Cultura Contemporánea from 23 November 1999 to 20 February 2000.

6. All this has been remarkably well demonstrated by that great connoisseur of ancient thought Pierre Hadot. See ‘La Terre vue d'en-haut et le voyage cosmique: le point de vue du poète, du philosophe et de l'historien' in Jean Schneider & Monique Léger-Orine (eds, 1988), Frontiers and Space Conquest/Frontières et Conquête Spatiale: La philosophie a l'épreuve (Kluwer Academic Press), 31-39.

7. Einstein himself acknowledged that he was inspired by a passage in the Critique of Pure Reason where Kant speaks about light.