“The earth is round.” It would be possible to contest this commonplace affirmation and to claim that the earth is flat instead, like a disc. Yet today almost nobody would contest the fact that the earth is round.
Still, if it may be true that the earth is round, it is not clear whether the earth is round or whether it can be something else or even not be round at all. Nor is it clear whether it is the earth that it is round, or something else that only improperly is called the “earth.” Nor is it clear what the words “true” and “fact” mean when we say: “it is true that the earth is round, it is a fact.”
In which way is the earth round, to begin with? Is it round, for example, in the same way that we say that she is the “mother of all the gods,” or that she is “Demeter, who sometimes appears to be happy, and other times appears to be sad.”
Gaia is the earth in her quality of mother of all the living. Demeter, the earth in her quality of fruitful life, and thus often called a vegetation goddess.(*) Demeter loses her daughter Kore to Hades in the underworld. Saddened by this, she withholds warm weather and plant growth. The people starve and, subsequently, Kore’s release is agreed upon by the gods. However, Kore illicitly partakes of food in the underworld and is forced to return to Hades’s domain for one portion of every year. Therefore, part of every year is warm and fruitful, whereas the other part is fruitless and cold.
Evidently, this myth does not explain seasonal change in the way it is explained by modern science. But it is doubtful that it aims at explaining seasonal change in the first place, if by explaining we understand to elucidate and expound the causes of something. For the world of myth is always a lived world in which what counts and is remembered, therefore, is the fact that, and the ways in which, things are experienced. It is their experience, therefore, that is reflected/retold in the myth. Thus Kore’s myth presents seasonal change in terms of mood: in it, the sadness of the winter months is contrasted with the joy of the spring.
Myth thereby makes things shine forth as they are lived and experienced. It involves perception and cognition as much as it involves affectivity and imagination. The modern view that it only displays phantasy tells us more about the modern approach to myth than about the type of thinking at play in mythical thought, which is also true (if we keep in mind that, originally, “truth” was thought of in Greece as ἀλήθεια [aletheia]: “disclosure,” “unconcealment”) and based on (experienced) facts.
How, then, does mythical thought differ from philosophy and science? It differs from philosophy, which, nonetheless, focusses too on the lived and experienced, in that, unlike philosophy, the purpose of mythical thought is not just to conceptualise the experienced. For although all mythical characters are perception-based concepts (hence cognitive stuff in their own way) they are first and foremost poetic figures susceptible of being experienced in affective terms. And it differs from modern science in that the latter substitutes the livable by the calculations of the experimentable: one cannot experience the earth’s roundness, except by circumnavigating it, which would anyway be a livable way of doing so.
The problem is that replacing the lived by the experimentable betrays a mentality that, unless conveniently restraint by education on the dangers of what the Ancient-Greeks called ὕβρις (hybris) or “excess,” presents the risk of making utterly impossible to dwell on the earth. For to dwell on the earth requires to world it, and to world it usually entails turning its experience into concepts and figures susceptible of being affectively experienced by us. Put differently: there is no world without myth – this, at least, is what comparative anthropology shows.
Modernity is the exception. It has its own myths of course: freedom, progress, etc. But they are of a different kind. For instead of worlding the earth, they have unworlded it: rather than poetising the earth to make it shine forth as a world, they endarken it; rather than tales and figures springing from a reflectively-lived experience of the earth, they are chimeras imposed on the earth that short-circuit any reflective experience of it; rather than helping us dwell on the earth, they legitimate its domination. Modern science is the device such mentality has given itself to carry out that domination to the end.(**)
It is not the earth, then, but the unworlded earth that is round. Round means: appearing in its roundness. But for it the earth must first be called to appear as the object of mathematical and physical calculation (as computable shaped matter) through a calling which, therefore, determines its beingness beforehand.
Is the earth round? It would be possible to contest this assertion and to claim instead that the earth is flat, since we experience its flatness, among other things, every day. But what is really important is to ask what do we say about the earth when we affirm that it is round.
(*) On what gods and goddesses are and what they are not, see further here and here. On other Ancient-Greek goddesses and the earth, see here in turn.
(**) With some self-complacency it would seem, as we discussed in our last post.
The earth, as seen from nearby our home a few evenings ago – or Eos’s (dawn’s) “rosy fingers,” as Homer says…