by Kenneth WHITE

1.

« In each age of the world distinguished by high activity », says Whitehead in Adventures of Ideas, « there will be found at its culmination, and among the agencies leading to that culmination, some profound cosmological outlook, implicitly accepted, impressing its own type upon the current springs of action. »

If we’re willing to admit the hypothesis that there exist, in the present age, at least some fields of « high activity », it may be interesting to see what « cosmological thought » is in the air, giving its shape to our mental space.

In his studies on the spiritual crisis and revolution of the seventeenth century (From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe) Alexander Koyré reduces the changes made at that time in the conception of the world to two main elements : the destruction of the notion of Cosmos and the geometrisation of space. This new cosmology set aside the geocentric world of the Greeks (the original kosmos), and the anthropocentrically structured world of the Middle Ages, replacing them with the decentred world of modernity. The consequences of such a fundamental transformation were many, two of the main ones being the displacement of the mind from contemplation and teleological philosophy to the mechanistic mastery over nature, and the rise of modern subjectivity accompanied by a sense, more or less vague, of having somehow lost the world. The poet of the crisis is John Donne, a sharp and subtle mind, who declares : « 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, all just supply and all relation. » The typical writer of the new age, swimming sceptically in the waters of his (learned) ignorance, enjoying, despite everything, the divagations of his floating personality, is Montaigne.