Aristotle vs. cosmopolitans: two different cognitive perspectives

Aristotle (384 BCE–322 BCE) collected and synthesised the best astronomical theories of his day.Footnote ⁷ Following Plato's (427 BCE–347 BCE) teachings, it was clear to Aristotle that the Earth is a sphere. For Aristotle, however, the question was whether he should put the Earth or Sun at the centre of the planetary and, by implication, stellar system. From an empirical point of view, a key consideration was the lack of parallax. If Earth moved around the Sun, then one ought to be able to observe the shifting of the fixed stars in half-a-year cycle – say from spring to autumn – in relation to the background of other stars. The difference in angle from one side of the Earth's orbit around the Sun to the other side is called parallax. The shapes of star-constellations should change considerably over the course of a year; otherwise the stars are so distant that this motion remains undetectable.

Aristotle ignored the possibility of real cosmic-scale distances. As a matter of fact, the parallax angles are so tiny that they are measured in arc seconds where one second is 1/3600 of a degree (for Alpha Centauri, with a 4.3 light-years distance from the Earth, the parallax is 0.75 seconds). Therefore, stellar parallax was not detected until the early 19th century, when developments in optics and time-keeping created sufficient technological capacity for detecting effects so subtle. There were, however, other empirical anomalies in the Aristotelian system. For example, it could not explain the changes in brightness of the planets caused by a change in distance as they orbit the sun. Over time, some of Aristotle's and his followers objections to the heliocentric model started to appear increasingly superficial and confused.Footnote ⁸ The Copernican revolution occurred centuries before it was possible to detect and measure parallax empirically.

Arguably, Aristotle's and his followers' preference for a geo-centric model had roots in the cognitive perspective they took for granted. In short, Aristotle assumed that he has a privileged position to observe the world. The starting point is that the observer-theorist is at the centre of the world, and that the world revolves, literally or metaphorically, around him. In terms of figure-ground distinction, the observer-theorist forms the ground and everything else is figures that move, or are being caused, in relation to it. Sometimes, common sense misleadingly supports this assumption. If you stay awake overnight looking at the stars and planets, they indeed seem to revolve around you – even though this is merely an illusion of perspective caused by the rotation of the planet Earth.

By way of metaphoric extension, society too can be seen through an observer-centric cognitive perspective. Accordingly, Aristotle's geocentric astronomic theory is isomorphic with his ethico-political theory, that is, a structure-preserving mapping from one to the other is possible. There is a centre and a hierarchical system of layers. For Aristotle, natural slaves, women and lower-status men are essentially meant to serve the purpose of the good life of the aristocracy and free men (this is the centre, to which Aristotle himself belonged). And the outside world forms concentric circles of increasing barbarity. The further you go, the more barbarity you should expect to find.Footnote ⁹ Like the apparent rotation of planets and stars around the Earth, this kind of ethnocentrism is essentially an illusion of perspective stemming from being familiar with things that are close; from social practices that are structured to serve the purpose of a few and their sense of community; and from asymmetrical relations of power.Footnote ¹⁰ It is noteworthy that Aristotle did not support democracy – in our sense – even among the free male citizens, but rather argued for a compromise between what he called polity and aristocracy (aristoi means literally ‘best persons’). For Aristotle, the true centre consists only of the central observer and of the few that are equal to him.

In the 4th and 3rd century BCE Hellenic world, Aristotle was not quite as dominant as he may now seem to us. Aristotle was arguing against distinguished thinkers who held different views. For instance, he was opposing the influential theory of Pythagoreans that the Earth is orbiting a central fire (which would explain day and night). He was also against the atomism of Democritus (c. 460 BCE–c. 370 BCE), abhorred by Plato, but a possible a source of inspiration to the Cynics, the early cosmopolitans. Democritus held that the earth is spherical; and maintained that at first the universe comprised of nothing but separate tiny atoms, until they collided together to form larger units and structures, including the Earth and everything on it. Democritus also suggested that there are many worlds, some growing, some decaying; some with no sun or moon, some with several. Thus for Democritus, the Earth is just a world among many worlds. By a rather anti-Aristotelian implication, no Earthly observer of the universe can be privileged. No wonder Aristotle found this doctrine objectionable.

While the basic ethico-political sentiments of Democritus seem to have been more democratic than those of Aristotle, the evidence about his precise ethical and political views is scant. As far as we know, it was the Cynics (from the late 5th century BCE onwards) that challenged the importance of being a politēs, that is, of belonging to a particular polis, of being a member of a specific society with all of the benefits and commitments such membership entails.Footnote ¹¹ For the Cynics, being a kosmopolitēs meant more than just being a citizen of the world; it meant also being a part of the natural order of the universe (cosmos). The Cynics took god-nature as a source of guidance – even as a norm – about how to live. This may now appear as a fallacy, but what is important is that the Cynics adopted a different cognitive perspective from the ego-, ethno-, and geo-centric perspective of Aristotle. For the first time, cosmos provided a non-privileging perspective on human societies and thus enabled critical and self-reflexive ethico-political conclusions.

Aristarchus of Samos (310 BCE–ca. 230 BCE) was probably the first to propose a fully-fledged heliocentric model of the planetary system. The later summary of Aristarchus' theory by Archimedes is our most direct evidence of it:

Aristachus' theory was tolerated but not accepted by his contemporaries – and in spite of Archimedes was soon all but forgotten until the Copernican revolution. Why did not a basically correct theory gain more popularity and support? The lack of adequate techniques to make sufficiently accurate observations was not the only reason. It was probably more decisive that the perspective of Aristachus' NGP cosmology had the potential to challenge the moral principles of societies built upon the observer-centric horizons of: (i) the relatively few free men of republican or oligarchic communities; or (ii) the privileged groups and strata within hierarchical empires; or, later, (iii) religious and political leaders of the communities founded on grand messianic religions such as Christianity and Islam that promised after-life redemption for believers.

Some scholars maintain that it was Stoicism, or the Stoic-Christian tradition, that first articulated universal moral principles in terms of laws of nature.Footnote ¹³ Stoicism was initiated by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BCE and subsisted until the collapse of the Roman Empire. However, Zeno's ideas were originally developed from those of the Cynics. Stoicism can be seen as a de-radicalised version of the Cynic idea that cosmos – the order of nature – provides guidance as to how to live and what the laws valid for all human beings are. The Stoics believed in something reminiscent of a NPG cosmology, but in more poetic-religious and compromised terms than the followers of atomists (and possibly Aristarchus). Occasionally, they delighted, or found comfort, in the idea of a city of all humankind, but the real, practical question for Roman Stoics was how far citizenship should be extended to the subjects of the Roman Empire. The ethics of Stoicism was based on the idea that wisdom is about simultaneous obligation to do one's duty and view one's consciousness and the world more or less as unchangeable, especially hierarchical relations of power.Footnote ¹⁴ It is no coincidence that Stoicism did not generate a research programme or develop a realist scientific theory of the cosmos and its true proportions, mechanisms and processes.

There were parallel developments in the other main hubs of the Old World. In India and China, there were sporadic atomists, heliocentrists, cynics, sceptics, democrats and cosmopolitans in various forms of manifestation, but hierarchical agrarian-military empires tended to adopt and enforce ideologies that were in important ways similar to the world-views of Plato, Aristotle and/or Stoics.Footnote ¹⁵ For instance, despite noteworthy differences between Greek and Chinese cosmologies, the Chinese too were tied to a geo-centric perspective. They depicted the Earth as being surrounded by heavens, including stars and planets, and then at times added an infinite space behind the heavens (they also talked about infinite time).Footnote ¹⁶

Confucians have usually concurred with Plato and Aristotle in that everyone has a given, rightful place in society; and with the related ideas of applying the principles of freedom and tolerance to the privileged few, and of governance by virtue and practical reason rather than by force.Footnote ¹⁷ The characteristic Confucian emphasis on the authority of the ruler, father, and husband is similarly Aristotelian – or vice versa, whichever tradition should be seen as prior.Footnote ¹⁸ In these systems of thought, there is always a centre around which the whole world revolves and a hierarchy that places the centre at the top. The centre is occupied by the aristocratic (free) male who can read and write – literacy was still rare – and articulate speculative theories about nature, ethics and politics. Obviously, most ancient philosophers and scholars were beneficiaries of the rulers and aristocracy.

A cosmic perspective: the identity of human beings living on planet Earth

In 1543 CE, Nicholas Copernicus proposed to increase the accuracy and simplicity of astronomical theory by (re-)setting the Sun as the centre of the solar system. This implied a far-reaching shift of perspective: we are not observing the universe from a special position. However, the Copernican revolution – a starting point for the scientific revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries – did not automatically generate cosmopolitanism. Rather the Copernican shift in perspective created a non-centric frame for reflexive self-observation. Moreover, by challenging the established tradition, it also constituted a space for spontaneous ethico-political learning that often resulted in tolerant cosmopolitanism.

Historically, the scientific revolution was a dialectical process. The Renaissance revival of ancient philosophies – including Stoicism – and the Atlantic voyages widened the prevailing terrestrial horizons, preparing the ground for both the new Copernican cosmologyFootnote ¹⁹ and related planetary geography.Footnote ²⁰ Although the Copernican cosmology was thus neither a strictly necessary nor a sufficient condition for cosmopolitanism, it provided a clear alternative to Aristotelian centrism. Obviously, also the meanings and values ascribed to the NGP cosmology are important.Footnote ²¹ The knowledge of basic physical laws and real cosmic dimensions and relations does not in itself impose cosmopolitanism; for instance that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and that an object in uniform motion tends to stay in uniform motion unless acted upon by a net external force; that F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration); that the distance of the Earth from the Sun is 150,000,000 km; that the Sun is a main sequence G2 star that contains 99.86 per cent of the system's known mass and thus dominates it gravitationally; or that the Sun is only one of copious billions of stars in the galaxy and that galaxies themselves are equally numerous in the observable universe.

The new Copernican and Newtonian theories of the cosmic dimensions, laws and relations were enmeshed with various cultural and ethical assumptions that together formed an anti-centric myth about ‘us’ in the universe. Since then, this new planetary cosmology – in the cultural sense – has grounded criticism of the prevailing ego-centric imaginaries and related divisions and conflicts. Perhaps the best known revolutionary proponent of the Copernican cosmology was Giordano Bruno, who argued in the 16th century for an infinite universe in which every star is surrounded by its own solar system. Among other dissident ideas, Bruno also believed in cosmic pluralism, in the possibility and actuality of sentient life on other worlds, thus suggesting that humanity is a relatively insignificant part of the universe and thus creation. In 1600, in the aftermath of the French wars of religion, he was burnt at the stake as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition.Footnote ²²

However, the attitude towards the new science was soon reversed. Already in late 17th century Holland, Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) crowned his celebrated career as a modern astronomer, mathematician and physicist by writing Cosmotheoros. The celestial worlds discover'd: or, conjectures concerning the inhabitants, plants and productions of the worlds in the planets.Footnote ²³ In this book, which was published posthumously just months after Huygens' death, first in Latin and then in translations to several European languages, Huygens imagined a universe brimming with life both within our solar system as well as elsewhere. Humanity is not unique and Earth is just a planet among many. Among a few other works, this book paved the way for Kant's mid-18th century astronomical speculations and for the Enlightenment pluralist cosmopolitanism.

A good example of the Enlightenment leaps of cosmic imagination is Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), a story of a 36,000-metre tall alien Micromégas who travels from a planet circling the star Sirius and almost by coincidence realises that there is life on our insignificant planet.Footnote ²⁴ Through the perspective of Micromégas, Voltaire laughs at us silly humans who are killing each other in wars over religion. Voltaire's proto-science fiction satire thus takes moral distance from the Earthly disputes and wars. This kind of cosmic perspective enables and encourages distance from one's own identity and from the prevailing ideas and practices of one's own society. Of course, the cosmopolitanism of European Enlightenment was not based on merely a cosmic viewpoint, but also on the increasing familiarity with the existence and perspective of non-European others. Voltaire was influenced by the image of ‘noble savages’ by Baron de Lahontan's Curious Dialogues Between the Author and a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled from 1703, on the one hand; and by invocation of China as an ancient and sophisticated civilisation, on the other.Footnote ²⁵

It is no coincidence that Kant the cosmopolitan started his intellectual pursuits as a cosmologist. In his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (1755), Kant explains how one can explain the formation of the solar system from an initial state, in which matter is dispersed like a cloud, solely by means of the interaction of attractive and repulsive forces.Footnote ²⁶ In essence, Kant's view is accepted by today's astronomy. Kant is also well-known for being one of the first to develop the concept of galaxy. Drawing on an earlier work by Thomas Wright, he speculated that a galaxy might be a rotating disk of a huge number of stars, held together by gravitational forces akin to the solar system but on a much larger scale.Footnote ²⁷

Cosmopolitanism is not only tied to the idea of order in nature but also to a very wide cosmic perspective on one's identity and place. Near Kant's tomb in Kaliningrad is the following inscription in German and Russian, taken from the ‘Conclusion’ of his Critique of Practical Reason: ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within’.Footnote ²⁸ In the Critique, Kant explains further that neither of these things is beyond his horizon. On the contrary: ‘I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence’.Footnote ²⁹ He also talks about ‘universal and necessary connections’Footnote ³⁰ between the starry heavens and moral law, thus maintaining that consciousness, morality and reason – far from being arbitrary – have cosmic grounds. But, may cosmically grounded morality fail on the planet Earth? Kant was at pains to show that although there is no guarantee since we cannot have certain knowledge about the future, world history can move towards perpetual peace and human perfection. It is possible, he argued, that in the future reason and universal moral maxims will be realised through human freedom.Footnote ³¹

For a number of Enlightenment thinkers and their followers, the cosmic viewpoint puts the drama of life and human history on the planet in a very wide perspective. In one sense this is an optical effect: the longer the distance, the smaller the within-the-humanity differences appear. Moreover, distance and the non-centric Copernican perspective encourage judicious and at times ironic ethico-political sentiment towards one's own particular identity, and this sentiment is a key part of critical cosmopolitanism. In Kant's case, critical cosmopolitanism also opened up a new temporal horizon by constituting an interest in exploring possible futures that can be different – and perhaps better – than the current realities.

The cosmic vision also suggests that humans are not only dependent on each other but also on the physical processes of the planet, solar system and the universe as a whole; and on the thin sphere of life on planet Earth. Thus the new cosmological perspective encouraged scientists, philosophers, political theorists and novelists to think of all humans as part of an interdependent and fragile whole, the development of which has also given rise to consciousness, reason and morality. Awareness of the human interdependency and shared fate suggests widening the sphere within which the basic moral principles apply. Further, the idea of possible cosmic pluralism can also contribute to extending the variety of living and sentient beings with which we can identify. Any adequate form of morality has to do with the capacity to generalise normative claims in an acceptable way and, most importantly, with the ability to see things from others' point of view.Footnote ³²

Transformative cosmopolitanism: the rise of the notion of a world state

Probably the most radical idea of the French Revolution was that laws and institutions are man-made, not natural.Footnote ³³ The Revolution demonstrated that new institutions can be created and old ones abolished. Solidarity acquired a new meaning: all together for social changes! But at that stage, very few people imagined global changes. Even Kant was basically envisaging a league of nations in Europe, realised through a constitutional treaty signed by the heads of states.Footnote ³⁴

While the prototypes, metaphors, framings and related conceptions of time and space stemming from the new Copernican science suggested critical cosmopolitanism, the social conditions were not favourable to their widespread distribution and adoption in their cosmopolitan form. One-way communication or transportation within Europe took weeks and across the planet months. Constant warfare – or at least threat of war – favoured the adoption of prototypes, metaphors and framings based on the category of the nation, especially during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) and Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). Subsequently, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, various struggles against asymmetrical relations of power – not least those of the capitalist market economy –were framed in terms of rights and will of the people as a nation.Footnote ³⁵

Against all the odds, however, the idea of a global state formation emerged already during the Napoleonic wars. In 1811, an obscure German philosopher, Karl Krause proposed a world federation divided into five regional units of Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Australia. He renewed the proposal in his appeal for a united Europe in 1814. Krause was a romantic and mystical thinker that had some influence in the late-19th century and 20th century Hispanic world. Clearly, his ideal of Humanity and proposal for a Universal State extending over the whole planet stems from a cosmological framing of the human condition:

Bahá'u'lláh, the Persian founder of the Bahá'í Faith, developed similar ideas in the mid-19th century. While claiming to be a messenger of God, Bahá'u'lláh advocated religious freedom and fundamental unity of all religions. Bahá'u'lláh was familiar with the ideas of European radical and utopian writings and cultivated ideas of science, democracy and peace in the multicultural religious setting of the Ottoman Empire. What is especially noteworthy, however, is that he adopted cosmopolitanism and the idea of a world state.Footnote ³⁷ For Bahá'u'lláh, humanity is a single race. Human improvement is dependent on the evolution of all humanity. It is time to start to unify humanity into a single society and state.Footnote ³⁸

The first one to develop a systematic account of a future world state was K'ang Yu-wei, a Chinese scholar and public intellectual who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century. Like Bahá'u'lláh, K'ang Yu-wei was a well-known moderniser, whose public mission originated in a mystical vision (that occurred to him during Buddhist meditation). However, K'ang's main book Ta T'Ung Shu is not a religious text, but combines autobiography, philosophy, science, social sciences and law. Ta T'Ung Shu – variously translated into ‘The Book of Great Unity’ or ‘The One-World Book’ – was first drafted in 1884–1885 and completed in 1902.Footnote ³⁹

K'ang developed a three-stage scheme for building a strictly egalitarian world federation ruled by a global parliament. In the first stage, ‘The Age of Disorder at the Time the First Foundations of One World Are Laid’, territorial states remain sovereign and law-making powers reside with them, yet ‘the laws made by international conferences, being public law, are superior to the laws of the individual states’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Functional cooperation has evolved in various issue areas, but some states may still decide to be out of any particular arrangements. There are global legal processes, however. ‘All cases of international litigation are sent to the international conferences for litigation.’Footnote ⁴¹

In stage two, in ‘The Age of Increasing Peace-and-Equality, When One World Is Gradually Coming into Being’, the states are gradually subsumed under the authority of global bodies. ‘The laws made by the public parliament certify the laws made by the individual states’.Footnote ⁴² Parts of the world such as high seas – amounting to areas of the planet that Ambassador Arvid Pardo of Malta half a century later, in his 1967 speech at the UN, called ‘the common heritage of mankind’Footnote ⁴³ – would be at this point directly governed by global public bodies. Furthermore, ‘there is the public government and the public parliament to deliberate on cases of undecided and divergent laws of the individual states, including cases in which the laws are defective or erroneous’.Footnote ⁴⁴ K'ang's stage three, ‘The Age of Complete Peace-and-Equality When One World has been Achieved’ is a detailed description of a world state, run by a global parliament elected by means of universal ‘one person-one vote’ elections. K'ang envisages a Jacobinite world from which all borders and differences have been absolutely eliminated. All men would be equal, all property held in common, and all citizens cared for by the twenty ministries of the omnipotent world bureaucracy.Footnote ⁴⁵

What is especially interesting from the point of view of my main thesis, however, is the way K'ang frames his three-stage model of movement towards a unified world state. K'ang starts from an ethical discussion on how he has been touched by slaughters in wars ranging from a battle in the era of the Warring States to the Franco-German war of 1870–1871. He then moves on to a Confucian discussion how everything – Air, Heaven, Earth and Human – is connected. ‘[T]hey are all but parts of the all-embracing ch'i of the ultimate beginnings of the universe.’Footnote ⁴⁶ The ensuing brief discussion is not only compatible with some readings of quantum mechanics (articulated as a scientific theory only decades after Ta T'Ung Shu was written), but K'ang's related account of the need for an ever widening horizon of moral identification is explicitly based on modern cosmology and also refers twice to the hypothesis of cosmic pluralism. K'ang was struggling with how to be able to act on his cosmic identification:

In Victorian England, similar ideas were maturing, especially through the persona of H. G. Wells. From 1902 until his death in 1946, H. G. Wells preached the necessity of unifying the human species and building a world state.Footnote ⁴⁸ In his ‘scientific romances’ of the 1890s such as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells stretched out and expanded upon the prevailing sense of time, space and evolutionary and technological possibilities.Footnote ⁴⁹ In The Time Machine, Wells takes his readers hundreds of thousands and, then, millions years ahead in time – in a setting of the solar system as a whole. The Island of Doctor Moreau discusses the ethics of biotechnologies; and The Invisible Man suggests the possibility of a fifth dimension. The War of the Worlds envisages a planetary invasion by desperate Martians whose own planet is dying.Footnote ⁵⁰ These works popularised modern scientific ideas in an exciting and easily understandable way, by giving cultural meanings to the non-centric cosmology and evolutionary account of the planet.

But Wells did not write only fiction. His 1902 bestseller Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought was probably the first work in systematic and analytical futures studies. While discussing manifold social and technological trends and possibilities, ultimately Anticipations was written for the political end of ‘developing New Republic – a Republic that must ultimately become a World State of capable rational men, developing amidst the fading contours and colours of our existing nations and institutions’.Footnote ⁵¹ This became the key theme of the bulk of Wells' writings throughout the catastrophes of the 20th century. In The Outline of History, which was written immediately after, and in response to, the First World War, Wells summarised his vision of the philosophical and religious spirit of a world state, almost verging on desperation:

After the Second World War, and after decades of trying his best to convince people about the necessity of a world state, Wells was giving up. He receded back to the Darwinist pessimism inherent in some of his early ‘scientific romances’.Footnote ⁵³ Talking about the divergence between his own aspirations and actual world history, he declared that ‘the more he weighted the realities before him the less he was able to detect any convergence whatever’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Perhaps humanity is indeed just an accident that will be wiped out by its own stupidity and short-sightedness?

The reaction against the Copernican perspective: Nietzsche, etc

The story of the cosmological sources of critical cosmopolitanism would be incomplete without at least a brief discussion on the 19th and 20th century reaction against critical cosmopolitanism and its interpretation of the meaning of the new Copernican horizon. Krause, Bahá'u'lláh, K'ang, and (most of the time) Wells, as well as Kant before them, ascribed positive and forward-looking cultural meanings and values to the NGP cosmology. They all agreed that humanity is a morally significant part of a very wide whole; that morality is not an accident but has somehow emerged from the cosmic evolution, as an essential part of it; and that our fate is shared and lies in the possibility of collective progress.

However, these meanings and values do not follow from empirical science. On the face of it, the value-neutral technical procedures of modern science would seem to entail thorough scepticism.Footnote ⁵⁵ David Hume explained that we should trust only our sense-perceptions and be sceptical about anything else.Footnote ⁵⁶ Friedrich Nietzsche was among the first to fully articulate the devastating impact of the positivist or empiricist sentiment (while being an empiricist himself, at least in the letter).Footnote ⁵⁷ God is dead! We are alone on this insignificant planet. Nietzsche proclaimed, moreover, that no universal perspective is possible. Christianity, Kantianism, and utilitarianism are mere slave-moralities; we should be looking for something better. What is coming in the history of the next two centuries is the ‘advent of nihilism’.Footnote ⁵⁸

However, Nietzsche took critical distance from the nihilism implicit in the new Copernican cosmology and the 19th century Darwinian framework of explaining the origins of humanity. A view of a planet orbiting sun in a huge void, in which the sun itself is located and moving, makes us lose our sense of direction and place. This is spatial nihilism. ‘Are we not straying as if through an infinite nothing?’Footnote ⁵⁹ At times Nietzsche displayed nostalgia for the world of ancient Greece; at other times he was suggesting the possibility of new values of life and vitality and introducing concepts such as ‘overhuman’, and ‘will to power’.

Either way, Nietzsche's reaction was basically about going back to the ego – and geo-centric perspective of Aristotle, albeit in a more desperate way and at a new level of critical reflexivity. Nietzsche's reflections centered on the vitality, values and will-to-power of the aristoi (‘best persons’). The perspectives of those who can differentiate themselves from the ‘herds’ must define relevant knowledge. Moreover, by being critical of the ‘spatial nihilism’ of the NPG cosmology, Nietzsche evoked a desire for a concept of worldliness, or being-in-a-place, which would overcome that nihilism. In the 20th century, this idea has been explored by various phenomenologists, Heidegger, later Wittgenstein and their followers. These explorations have at times resulted in the construction of a terrestrial ontology of earthliness that involves a territorial conception of politics.Footnote ⁶⁰

The effects of the implicit nihilism of Copernicus and Darwin have not been confined to those who have read and reflected upon Nietzsche. Rather, Nietzsche has provided a genuine insight into the cultural undercurrents of modernity. The subjectivist value-theory of neo-classical economics, for instance, comes close to what Nietzsche meant by nihilism (the marginalist theory was articulated at the time of Nietzsche).Footnote ⁶¹ Another illuminating example of the sense of nihilism is Louis Althusser, a key ideologue of the French Communist Party in the 1960s and 1970s, whose life turned into a disaster when he killed his wife in Paris in 1980. Althusser's commitment to the true meaning of Marx's theory, his ‘anti-humanism’, and his loyalty to the Communist PartyFootnote ⁶² despite its hierarchies, exclusions and violence can be plausibly read as a desperate existentialist ethico-political commitment in an otherwise nihilist world.Footnote ⁶³ Althusser's life-struggle was about trying to sustain hope by cultivating a rather orthodox, scientistic Marxian reading of societal developments that will inevitably lead to socialism and communism – to be realised through the institutions of a territorial state.