Last week, the University of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center held a three-day conference on creation, brought together more than a hundred leading thinkers to discuss ethics, culture, and public policy from the points of view of a range of disciplines: theology, philosophy, political theory, law, history, economics, and the social sciences, as well as the natural sciences, literature, and the arts.
The keynote address that launched the conference was Stanford’s Robert Pogue Harrison, of Entitled Opinions fame, and his talk was entitled, “The Thin Blue Line.” About a thousand people attended in-house, with hundreds more virtually – a big turnout by just about any standards. Artur Rosman, editor of Notre Dame’s online Church-Life Journal (we’ve written about that effort here and here) was glowing about the Stanford professor’s talk afterwards: “‘The Thin Blue Line,’ on what he calls sacramental geocentrism, was perhaps the single best, and most deliciously surprising, conference talk I’ve ever heard. I mean, the whole thing rocks. The whole notion of a sacramental geocentrism blew everyone’s minds. It’s a great provocation.” You’ll hear all about “sacramental geocentrism” during the last ten minutes of the Youtube video here.
For this year’s conference, the De Nicola Center partnered with Stanford University’s “Boundaries of Humanity” project, which seeks to advance dialogue on “human place and purpose in the cosmos, particularly with respect to conceptions of human uniqueness and choices around biotechnological enhancement.”
But back to the talk. Here’s how Robert Harrison began:
“One month after NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photos of Earth from the moon’s orbit on August 23, 1966, Martin Heidegger sat down with two journalists from the German magazine Der Spiegel to answer some pointed questions about his thought and his involvement with the Nazi regime in the 1930s. Late in the interview, which was published after his death in 1976, Heidegger decried modern technology’s deracinating effects on humanity, claiming that technology is not a tool and that humankind ‘has not yet found a way to respond to the essence of technicity.’ That essence, as Heidegger understood it, consists in an unmastered will to master nature by rendering all things orderable, fungible, and reproducible through objectification and manipulation. Somewhat perplexed, the interviewers declared: ‘But someone might object very naively: what must be mastered? 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?’ A perfectly reasonable query, to which Heidegger responded as follows:
Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is uncanny, 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. (Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, 1981).
“Whereas the popular imagination at the time saw in those photos a wondrous revelation of our mother planet and cosmic home, Heidegger saw in them stark evidence of modern technology’s deterrestrialization of the human species – its increasing alienation from, and loss of essential relations with, the earth.”
You can watch the whole talk on Youtube, here.
Tags: Artur Sebastian Rosman, Martin Heidegger, Robert Pogue Harrison
November 18th, 2022 at 7:24 am
Robert Harrison and “sacramental geocentrism” – absolutely stunning.
Thank you, Cynthia Haven, for drawing attention to this unique . . . profundity!
Bill Green
November 22nd, 2022 at 11:33 am
Yes, indeed, stunning. Is there any chance he will publish it…or can one obtain a copy?
I did watch it over again, but so many interesting references. A truly stellar performance.
Thank you for sharing.
November 24th, 2022 at 9:47 pm
The claim cuts both ways. It also says that heliocentrism is just as good as geocentrism, as is the frame of reference relative to any other planet around any other star. It says that geocentrism is correct only if you choose to interpret it that way. Some people may want to interpret it that way, but they cannot then claim that others are wrong. The earth still moves.
November 25th, 2022 at 3:53 pm
Stay tuned, Margaret.