Next semester I’ll be taking my “lab science” : astronomy. I love the fact that my lab involves staring at stars. But more than that, I’m fascinated by the development of the meaning of the study of astronomy. I hope to study and write about that; but even now, before it has become a conscious object of research, common knowledge and simple current observation demonstrate the huge change in the significance of astronomy.

Of course my terms are already improper. “Astronomy” is properly the (bracketed) scientific study of celestial bodies, whereas the trajectory of human life that I am thinking of involves things like astrology, mythology, alchemy, navigation, etc. But in another sense nothing demonstrates my (pre-research-)thesis better than the word itself. Precisely the fact that astronomy is now a bracketed scientific study of celestial bodies—as if they were cells, invisible without microscopes—highlights our alienation from the world in which the celestial bodies were wrapped up in so much more of life and believed to be involved so much more closely in the affairs of men.

Formerly, the stars served as night clocks (replaced with the digital clock that glows in the corner), as navigational instruments (replaced with the gps, the precise map, the satellite overview), as changeless surfaces to inscribe world-shaping stories upon for the instruction of future generations (replaced with history books, and with the world-shaping liturgies of the sit-com), and even as omens for the events of individual lives (replaced with pop-psychological self-mastery). But—just as the clock has alienated us from light—these replacements have alienated us from the sky. We are fundamentally changed from animals who stop, rendering ourselves vulnerable by our fascinated staring upward, to animals who always look down: down at the watch, down at the map, down at the book, down into the psyche.

There is something good about the vulnerability of a Thales, for example, who reputedly injured his philosophic dignity by falling into a ditch because he was gazing too fixedly at the sky.

Thus my opening notes toward a phenomenology of the star-gazer. Expect more on this theme later…