Four Views of Earth from the Moon

Stewart Brand, Martin Heidegger, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ivan Illich each saw something different.

1.

You may know about the first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog, the original seed for internet culture before the internet. Stewart Brand put the late William Anders' famous Apollo 8 "Earthrise" photo on the cover, and inside proclaimed:

"We are as gods and might as well get used to it."

Later issues say, "...we might as well get good at it."

Issue #1 of the Whole Earth Catalog (1968)

Brand's point was that the power of technology was being distributed to individuals (at first by mail order) instead of being monopolized by large governments and corporations.

Brand's pragmatic Promethean view.

2.

As he entered the last decade of life, the philosopher Martin Heidegger allowed a private interview on the condition it would be published only after his death. It was titled "Only a God Can Save Us" in the 1976 issue of Der Spiegel. At the time of the interview, Heidegger had just seen the first images of Earth from the moon in August 1966, and he described the shock and dismay he felt over it to the interviewer.

I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] — the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an Earth that man lives today.” —Martin Heidegger

The images he saw would have included this one from NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1. Earlier, a patchwork of images from the edge of space had been taken from captured Nazi V-2 rockets launched by the United States military after the war. These were not made public until relatively recently, so they never entered the public imagination.

NASA's Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first images of the earth as seen from the moon.

At this point in the interview, Heidegger discusses the problem of modern societies confronting (or failing to curb) what he called technicity — “the attempt of modern man to dominate the earth by controlling beings that are considered as objects.”

SPIEGEL: But someone might object very naively: what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning. More and more electric power companies are being built. Production is up. In highly technologized parts of the earth, people are well cared for. We are living in a state of prosperity. What really is lacking to us?

HEIDEGGER: Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is uncanny [Unheimlich], that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don't know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] — the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today. Recently I had a long dialogue in Provence with René Char — a poet and resistance fighter, as you know. In Provence now, launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion. This poet, who certainly is open to no suspicion of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of man that is now taking place is the end [of everything human], unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power.

Heidegger’s point was that technology has transformed our relationship with Earth — which he did not see as an advance in a story of progress. In his view, our relationship with our planetary home has been reduced and debased as merely instrumental, extractive, and technical.

3.

In Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hugo, Locus, and Nebula-winning novel, The Dispossessed (1974), there's a well-known passage at the end of the sixth chapter that's spoken by the novel's protagonist, Shevek. Shevek was based on J. Robert Oppenheimer, a personal friend of Le Guin's parents:

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."

Some things are lost when novels are misquoted and taken out of context.

If we read this as Le Guin talking about our earth and moon — and that's how this quotation tends to be read — it's a solid insight. But in the context of The Dispossessed, it's not about our solar system. From Shevek's perspective, "the moon" is a verdant but war-torn (capitalist) twin planet, Urras, and “the earth” is his bleak, desert-like, and ambiguously utopian (anarcho-communist) homeworld, Annares, colonized by political outcasts from Urras.* (“An Ambiguous Utopia” is the novel's subtitle.)

When Shevek travels to Urras, this perspective is reversed, but in the quoted passage, he is on Annares and responding to his partner, Takver. She has been musing how Urras can look so beautiful when it is full of war, poverty, and authoritarianism.

In the book — as opposed to quotations taken from it — Shevek actually says, “The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon.” As the moon, not from the moon — as people on Urras see Annares, as their moon. Takver doesn't like this and retorts: "That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon — I don't want it!"

I think Shevek (and Le Guin) are proposing a radically uprooted perspective here — it goes beyond seeing the beauty of the familiar from afar, of your home when you are away. Shevek seems to say we don't fully see our familiar world and home until we experience it as unfamiliar and alien, the moon rather than the earth, the periphery rather than the center.

4.

In 1972, two, let us say, “philosophers” or “social thinkers,” Ivan Illich and Jean-Marie Domenach, were filmed in conversation together in a park in Paris. Domenach played the role of interviewer, and Illich reprised some of his recent work, mainly “The Dawn of Epimethean Man,” which was first published in 1971 in a Festschrift for Erich Fromm and also a revised version that forms the last chapter of DeSchooling Society, “Rebirth of Epimethean Man.” With this latter publication, Illich became an internationally acclaimed author.

At about six minutes into the film (5:50), Illich says (of computers) with a big grin, “It’s the end of the world — the final ultimate conclusion we’ve reached. By substituting [the Delphic oracle] Pythia,” which he’s just discussed, “for the ancient Mother Earth that we now see … as the blue star that we gaze upon with nostalgia from the moon.”

It’s just a passing comment, but Illich is clearly thinking of something like Sagan’s “pale blue dot,” which lay 20 years in the future. Illich seems to associate this image of the earth from the moon with youth and idealism in 1972, and he identifies himself with this youthful, hopeful vision.

Illich’s larger commentary is quite bleak, however. What he says about Pandora and Pythia is part of a larger point about the mythical and historical roots of Pandora-Gaia and her infamous “box,” originally a pithos (πίθος) or ceramic jar.

These figures in Greek mythology bring problematic gifts to the world—technology and knowledge, utter chaos, and the ability to predict future outcomes.

Illich recounts how Pandora-Gaia, as the first woman and bringer of hope in a pithos, was replaced in history by the Pythia or high priestess of the Delphic oracle — originally a drugged, kidnapped girl controlled by male “priests.”

In Illich’s view, Pandora and later Eve and the Virgin Mary were Western replacements for Gaia / Mother Earth, whose generative gifts or blessings of life and hope were sullied in retellings where Pandora and her “box” (originally a clay vessel) became problematic as curses and evils. Illich suggests this has something to do with how Gaia / Mother Earth and the feminine, like the Pythia, came to be controlled and exploited by institutionalized, professional rape gangs of (originally male elites), from the church to the modern state and similar institutions. (Yes, Illich’s language is that graphic. When he makes these points, he stops smiling, chooses his words carefully, and seems rather pained.)

That sums up capitalism, colonialism, and Western modernity for Illich at possibly the most optimistic and hopeful moment in his career, considering the ending of Deschooling Society and “Rebirth of Epimethean Man.” There, Illich wrote:

Prometheus is usually thought to mean “foresight,” or sometimes even “he who makes the North Star progress.” He tricked the gods out of their monopoly of fire, taught men to use it in the forging of iron, became the god of technologists, and wound up in iron chains.

The Pythia of Delphi has now been replaced by a computer which hovers above panels and punch cards. The hexameters of the oracle have given way to sixteen-bit codes of instructions. Man the helmsman has turned the rudder over to the cybernetic machine. The ultimate machine emerges to direct our destinies. Children phantasize flying their spacecrafts away from a crepuscular earth.

From the perspectives of the Man on the Moon, Prometheus could recognize sparkling blue Gaia as the planet of Hope and as the Arc of Mankind. A new sense of the finiteness of the Earth and a new nostalgia now can open man’s eyes to the choice of his brother Epimetheus to wed the Earth with Pandora.

At this point the Greek myth turns into hopeful prophecy because it tells us that the son of Prometheus was Deucalion, the Helmsman of the Ark who like Noah outrode the Flood to become the father of a new mankind which he made from the earth with Pyrrha, the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. We are gaining insight into the meaning of the Pythos which Pandora brought from the gods as being the inverse of the Box: our Vessel and Ark.

We now need a name for those who value hope above expectations. We need a name for those who love people more than products, those who believe that

No people are uninteresting. 
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. 
Nothing in them is not particular, 
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

We need a name for those who love the earth on which each can meet the other,

And if a man lived in obscurity 
making his friends in that obscurity,
obscurity is not uninteresting.

We need a name for those who collaborate with their Promethean brother in the lighting of the fire and the shaping of iron but who do so to enhance their ability to tend and care and wait upon the other, knowing that

to each his world is private, 
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.**

I suggest that these hopeful brothers and sisters be called Epimethean men.

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Notes

* In an interesting article entitled, “‘Shevek’ in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed: A Profile in Heideggerian Authentic Selfhood,” Norman K. Swazo sees in Shevek a good example of authenticity, as Heidegger envisioned it.

** The three quotations are from “People’ from the book Selected Poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Translated and with Introduction by Robin Milner Gulland and Peter Levi. Published by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1962, and reprinted with their permission.