The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler

by Fernand Hallyn, Donald M. Leslie (Translator)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Conceiving of their work not in terms of a history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices, Fernand Hallyn insists that these new representations of the universe cannot be explained by recourse to theories of “genius” and “intuition.”

The scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination, and the work of Copernicus and Kepler, Hallyn contends, must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Thus the new sun-centered universe is shown to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both Neoplatonism and Mannerism in the sixteenth century.

Genres: History, History Of Science

368 pages, Paperback

First published June 5, 1990

About the author

was a professor in French Literature at Ghent University. Perhaps his best-known book is La structure poétique du monde: Copernic, Kepler (Paris, Seuil, 1987), translated into English as The Poetic Structure of the World (New York, Zone Books, 1990).

Among his other books are Formes métaphoriques dans la poésie lyrique de l’âge baroque en France (Geneva, Droz, 1975), Les structures rhétoriques de la science (Paris, Seuil, 2004), Descartes: dissimulation et ironie (Geneva, Droz, 2006), Gemma Frisius, arpenteur de la terre et du ciel (Paris, Honoré Champion, 2006), and an edition and translation of Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius (Galilée: Le messager des étoiles, Paris, Seuil, 1992).

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gave up on page 168 (out of an actual 288) because it became redundant and no longer enjoyable to read. Worthwhile premise, worth the 5 bucks or so it costs on Amazon, but goes a little too in depth on specific concepts unless you are particularly interested in Kepler.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sole blurb on the back of the Zone Books edition of Fernand Hallyn’s THE POETIC STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD: COPERNICUS AND KEPLER, comes to us from the estimable French newspaper LIBÉRATION, a progressive cultural institution founded, should you not be in the know, by Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge July in the aftermath of May ’68, contemporary to the sectarian schisms experienced by the New Left in the years immediately thereafter. From its inception onward, LIBÉRATION has been very much a product of its time. An anonymous editorial voice from the paper, speaking on behalf of the paper itself, proclaims that THE POETIC STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD exists “in the best tradition of the interdisciplinary and intellectual freedom that has characterized philosophy and the human sciences since the 1960s.” As it turns out, Hallyn’s book, originally published in 1987, presents itself very much in consonance with that characterization. It is not merely interdisciplinary, it is in fact—quite explicitly—an argument on behalf of the primacy of the interdisciplinary dimension in traditionally specialized fields, throughout history. Here the historical specificity has us consider the heliocentric revolution instigated by Nicolaus Copernicus and redirected by Johannes Kepler (with Galileo edging in from the margins). I began my post-secondary liberal arts education exactly a decade after the publication of THE POETIC STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD. Even then we were talking about ourselves as students who had arrived at this particular banquet as it was winding down. I read and loved a lot of stuff from Zone Books. I recognize in Hallyn’s methodology a whole lot of what enticed me about academia in the late 1990s. Hallyn is interested in the poetics of hypothesis formation (or formulation). He borrows from Charles Pierce the notion of a broad, encompassing “abduction” that oversees and seeks to differentiate (as nonetheless coextensive) “all the operations by which theories and conceptions are given birth,” hoping thereby to foreground concerns that it is presumed ought to be of great interest to both epistemologists and to historians of science, even if these concerns would tend to enter into the picture in advance of the matters upon which these specialists would tend to focus. The emergence of fresh theories, or the radical revision of those already extant: where do such things come from? What determines their expression or indeed their expressibility? Where do hypotheses come from? Perhaps they can be traced back from the effects produced by presuppositions. If you are going to be delving into such matters, you are going to be dealing both in facts and enigmas. Hallyn is clear about this. One might at this point expect that THE POETIC STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD is going to have some similarities to Gaston Bachelard’s extraordinary and monumentally influential THE POETICS OF SPACE, but whereas Bachelard is interested in the instantaneous emergence of images (direct products of the poets’ imaginations), Hallyn for the most part takes a broader view of his territory. He does in fact reference Bachelard a couple times, though these references draw attention to his predecessor’s work on the poetic mythology of fire (in the sciences and the arts). Hallyn notes how Gerald Holton proceeds on from Bachelard, suggesting scientific inquiry grounded in core themata. This is essentially the conceptual basis of Hallyn’s project in the book presently under consideration. History is always inherently interdisciplinary, involving “a network of intersubjective relations” fielded within “social structures,” not that this essential state of affairs makes for “mechanical and necessary explanation(s) for specific constructions like science.” Where we fail to find such “mechanical and necessary explanation(s)” we may naturally expect to find enigma. Readers with a certain background may have certain suspicions aroused by the above-quoted LIBÉRATION blurb resolutely confirmed when, in his introduction, Hallyn alights upon Foucault, addressing how an archeology of knowledge vis-à-vis epistemics may “lead to the production of homologous forms of discourse in seemingly unrelated domains.” The parameters of emerging scientific theories become analogous to the work of poets, choices being made at any number of levels, evidence of what any given poet is up to arriving to us by way of the poet’s practices, prognostications regarding those practice, and, perhaps most crucially, from analysis of the texts (the poems) and their contexts. As in Bachelard, Hallyn also insists that poets (or theorists of astronomy et cetera) may have occasion to transform imaginatively that which they apprehend. Hallyn’s study strives to employ three operational modalities: inventory of topics, intertextual insertion, and tropological analysis (or exegesis). Tropology traditionally relates to exegeses on religious matters (biblical or church doctrine and so forth), and this is noteworthy, because central to the intertextual context of the heliocentric revolution are evolving theological considerations, both in terms of individual sensibility and the limits imposed by societal context. There is additionally another triad. Hallyn wishes to focus on three types of commonplaces in Copernicus and Kepler, “related respectively to representational schemas (mimesis), to the meaning of representations (semiosis), and to their truth value (telos).” Copernicus, the aesthete, a kind of enraptured astrological draughtsman, is a mimesis man. Kepler, who had proposed to write a book called GEOMETRIC CABALA, is a semiosis man, seeking to go deeper in search of concealed esoteric truths. Both men as represented in these precise terms as being characteristic of two opposed zeitgeists, Copernicus connected to the Renaissance, Kepler to Mannerism. The heliocentric model, anchored in a vertical rather than a horizontal order, is very much a semiosis supposing a poetical structure to the world. Why vertical? For both Copernicus and Kepler, God must remain topmost. Before delving into his study of both thinkers, Hallyn takes some time opposing irony and anagogy. Irony is distance and reflection. It had to emerge in its due course. It is immediately quasi-modern. Metatropological irony: “The subject is placed in a transcendent position with respect to his discourse, but only to deny the possibility of making himself the guarantor of transcendence.” Anagogy, alternatively, “constitutes an enterprise for approaching knowledge of the ultimate principles of reality itself.” In confronting the geocentric model with a heliocentric alternative, Copernicus seeks anagogical revelation by placing God at the ultimate height, but the celestial realm as 'given to' man, propter nos, such that man may exult in the sublime harmony of Creation. Later Kant will celebrate Copernicus for dispelling the geocentric worldview and introducing a more dynamic anthropocentric vision in which the idea of man being the “measure” of all things takes on its ultimate transcendental meaning. In addition to the central importance of God, the insistence that mathematics must serve cosmic harmony, proportionality, and “true symmetry,” indicates the primacy of (Renaissance) aesthetics. It is the condition of man’s relating to God that shifts. Ptolemy’s irony of resignation is supplanted. Ptolemy, in a state of helpless resignation, had advocated for “any hypotheses possible,” certain any such hypotheses will nevertheless be product of man’s pitiful station, his conditional privation. The astronomer attains a curious dignity in his hapless striving. Copernicus seeks to give the heavens back to man and thereby bring him closer to God. As a way of forestalling criticism from theologians, Osiander presented Copernicus’s theories as attractive constructions which stops short of rising to the status of truth claim. It’s a way of bringing irony in through the back door. It is Copernicus, however, who has already quite unambiguously introduced an “anagogical thrust.” Copernicus prized antiquity. Antiquity presents a case study in the regular emergence of fresh, almost completely novel theoretical frameworks. Copernicus is very much still in thrall to Plato, Pythagoras, and Euclid, though he aspires to make his own way. The heliocentric model comes to figure as a “hypertextual palimpsest” making use of perspectivist innovations (telescope, Renaissance painting). Perspectivism “implies the intervention of the understanding in the act of seeing.” There is no truth that is not a product of representation. Speech is already representation. In structuralist terms, Copernicus becomes a thinker committed to the signifier (mimesis) and to the glory of signification. Again, mathematics must serve “true symmetry.” Along with the painter Albrecht Dürer, Copernicus believes that the organic unity of man and the celestial realm “is based on number.” Hallyn has the harmonic correspondences of whole and part, genus and species, operative at any number of levels, existing in a homogenous Euclidean space, correspond to the introduction of synecdoche (above and beyond the simpler symbological metaphors of mimesis). Ultimately, Copernicus believes his system is superior to Ptolemy’s not because of his own superior mathematical calculations, but because Ptolemy’s system was not “sufficiently pleasing to the mind,” a statement that cannot help but suggest aesthetic rather than mathematical criteria. Copernicus additionally finds his astronomy more satisfactory because he believes it represents a more enlightened way of relating to God. In writing about the sun, Copernicus demonstrates “lyricism and proliferation of devices such as the rhetorical question, enumeration, asyndeton, metaphor, and comparison.” His bottom-up concentric/vertical cosmology evokes the DIVINE COMEDY. Placement of an altar in a church, a matter of the situation of symbols or signifiers within a composite order, is a major issue of his day, and curiously analogous with the the questions Copernicus is asking himself regarding how to situate celestial bodies in terms of one another, with the sun central. Kepler keeps God primary, but he deviates from Copernicus, presenting new ways of conceptualizing man’s relation to God and the heavens, Hallyn arguing that these developments indicate the heliocentric revolution’s Mannerist turn. Kepler emerges in the context of 17th century arguments concerning whether of not symmetry is a necessary precondition for beauty. Tycho Brahe doesn’t believe the heliocentric universe constitutes legitimate symmetry, whether it is “pleasing” or not. “Kepler’s work contains an uninterrupted reflection on the semiosis of a world whose figurative representation was undergoing a radical change.” Divine intention is not presented, it is to be sought and unveiled. The fundamental philological consideration is the “principle of sufficient reason” (as it will become for Spinoza in short order). Kepler believes that the sphere combines structural elements complimentary to the Holy Trinity. This is probably inspired by Nicholas of Cusa. Likewise, icosahedrons and dodecahedrons are associated with water and celestial matter respectively. He borrows from art theory of his moment: “in the sixteenth century art theory was the primary field where regular polyhedrons and the harmonious proportions of polyhedrons were studied.” The complications introduced into the intellectual/aesthetic atmosphere of the Mannerist moment reflect “an increasingly overcoded universe.” Kepler’s cosmology is one of perverse ellipses and all manner of confounding motion. “Benesch interpreted some of El Greco’s paintings in magnetic terms: transparent lines of force traverse these paintings, mystical visualizations of a species immateriata traveling through space.” Elements imported from rhetoric and literature find themselves intertextually interpolated into Kepler. From Mannerist literature we get oxymoron— something positively Hegelean about this concern with the coincidence of opposites or “the joining of contraries.” From rhetoric (and the likes of Mersenne) we receive testament to the passage “from absolute metaphors to a restrained rhetoric, aiming at varied effects in particular contexts.” Kepler says of music that it is “a construction […] so rational and natural that God the Creator has impressed it upon the relations of the celestial movements.” His equations establishing the harmonic relations of planets were subsequently transcribed into musical notation. For Robert Fludd, another Mannerist esoteric, the monochord is the central organizing symbol, equivalent to the sphere in Kepler. A dazzling passage, in which Kepler describes his own youthful influences (in the third person): “This man was born with the destiny of devoting much time to difficult things that are repulsive to others. In his childhood, he undertook versifying before the proper age. He attempted to write comedies, chose the longest psalms to learn by heart…. In poetry, he tried first to write acrostics and anagrams…. He then undertook the most difficult of diverse lyrical genres; he wrote Pindaric verses, dithyrambs. He embraced unusual subjects [such as] the sun’s repose, the source of rivers, a view of Atlantis through the clouds. He delighted in enigmas, searched out the most subtle figures of speech; he amused himself with allegories, wove the tiniest details into them and even teased them by the hair…” It hardly sounds like the stuff of hard science. In 1608, Kepler writes a dizzying bit of speculative theory—framing it as a dream, this being a literary device—in which he imagines astrology as practiced on the moon. In utilizing oxymoron and varied rhetorical methods suited to varied avenues of inquiry—alongside a proclivity for “Hermeticism, magic, and demonology”—Kepler may suggest the emergence of a new quasi-ironic, eminently modern sensibility. Hallyn stops short of putting it quite so bluntly. We have already mentioned that Hallyn likewise does not show us how hypotheses actually come to actualize themselves in a manner equivalent to Bachelard’s phenomenology of active poetic imagination. But early in THE POETIC STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD, Hallyn does essentially tells us that though you can borrow presuppositions from another field or discipline, it is always something that is internal to your process and its generation. It is this that would seem to distill for us what it might mean to do poetry by other means.

[Adrienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read with caution. This book is really, truly difficult--even my professor says this. But as I went on to other readings about Copernicus and Kepler (and many others), I found myself referring back to what Hallyn discusses about how hypotheses, etc. are formed, using the two noted scientists as examples. I appreciate Hallyn's comparative approach to science. Fascinating, actually.