• 1 Of course, this does not mean that in both these periods Polish territories lacked literarily dexte (...)
• 2 See: J. Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (Cambridge: 1930); idem, Eos or the Wider Aspects of Cosmogo (...)
• 3 One proof of this could be that they are often included by Jeans into the narrative of the Cosmos ( (...)
• 4 Quotation from the English edition of the book: J. Jeans, Eos or the Wider Aspects of Cosmogony (Lo (...)

2This is evident in the treatment of photographs of cosmic objects in scientific books, as well as in books designed to popularize astronomical topics (which were not as clearly distinct disciplines as they are today). This issue can be illustrated with the example of the two most well-known and eagerly read popularisers of astronomy from the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century: Camille Flammarion and Sir James Jeans.1 In Flammarion’s works, Wielość światów zamieszkiwanych [The plurality of inhabited worlds], Opowiadania o nieskończoności [Lumen by Camille Flammarion], Astronomia czyli Nauka o wszechświecie [Astronomy, or the science of the Universe] (published in Polish translations in Warsaw between 1873 and 1901), there are predominantly illustrations made by observers, based on spyglass or telescopic pictures of the Moon, planets, and stars. On the other hand, in Jeans’s works (such as The Mysterious Universe, Eos, or the Wider Aspects of Cosmogony, Through Space and Time – published in 1929–1935),2 photographs of cosmic objects play a considerable, if not key, role.3 It is not a coincidence that the author of an American review of the Eos… thesis published in the Times Literary Supplement, an excerpt of which was included in the original edition as a publicity blurb, states that sir Jeans ‘has given us in simple and attractive language a fascinating summary of his tremendous conclusions, illustrated by some stunning photographs’.4

• 5 See: J.E. Evans, E.W. Maunder, “Experiments as to the actuality of the ‘canals’ observed on Mars”, (...)

3This does not mean, however, that at the time Jeans wrote and published his books, there were no doubts over the credibility of the photographs depicting cosmic objects, especially in the case of the controversy between what could be seen with a naked eye and the photographic image. An opportunity for such reflection arose, of course, with the well-known case of the so‑called canals on Mars, supposedly discovered on that planet by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877. This gave rise to interpretations linking these structures with planned activity by intelligent beings (Martians). In the ensuing debate on the topic, the hypothesis was eventually dropped, explaining the creation of the ‘canals’ as products of the systematising (and, at the same time, illusion-creating) activity of the human eye.5 This became even more probable as Schiaparelli also discovered analogous ‘canals’ on Mercury. On this planet, life could never come into being due to the very high temperatures and lack of atmosphere.

• 7 C. Flammarion, Niebo [The Sky], transl. by M. Stefanowska (Warsaw: 1907), p. 192. [Quotation in Eng (...)

• 8 Idem, Récits de l’infini (Paris: 1872, 1873). English translation of this book was published in New (...)

6However, from the beginning of the era of development of literary popularisation of astronomy that is of interest to us here, photography functioned in those texts also as a kind of synecdoche relating to the questions of the nature of light, human vision and mind, their significance in the study of the Cosmos and the paths of their cooperation. For example, this is true in perhaps the most ‘poetic’ of Flammarion’s books, Lumen8, written in the form of dialogue, where virtually all images ‘made available’ to us by the Universe turn out to be peculiar photographs:

• 10 It is worth noting that such a possibility exists also in the light of the findings of contemporary (...)
• 11 Flammarion wrote in his book Wielość światów zamieszkiwanych [The plurality of inhabited worlds], t (...)

7The later dialogue between Quaerens and Lumen leads towards a reflection on the paradox of an observer’s ability to see (after millions or billions of years of the light’s circulation around the Cosmos) oneself (of childhood age) on the seen-again Earth.10 One can therefore propose an analogy between the human observer of the Cosmos and someone who, with melancholy, looks through old photographs in a family album and sees themselves in them. This is wholly consistent with the message of Flammarion's popularising deductions, which create an atmosphere of familiarity with the cosmic abyss, its potential inhabitation by beings (perhaps) wiser than us, and a friendly disposition towards all forms of life.11 A certain ‘untouchability’ of cosmic objects, an unattainability thereof, means that the Universe is by no means devoid of its ‘magic’ in the eyes of Flammarion.

• 12 C. Flammarion, Astronomia czyli Nauka o wszechświecie [Astronomy, or the science of the Universe], (...)

• 13 Ibidem, p. 97. The estimated time of travel from the Earth to the Moon atop a cannonball (9 days) i (...)

• 14 By dynamic development of technology, I mean, of course, military technology, expanded during the F (...)

10It turns out that the journey to the Moon (which was impossible from the perspective of the state of engineering at the time) is possible with the use of imagination, which travels at least as fast as light, and photography becomes a catalyst for it. And here we encounter another potential aspect of the flourishing of scientific and intellectual human abilities (alongside photographic technology and Einstein’s theory of relativity), which occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. Interestingly, it was an aspect that had long been forgotten and relegated to the sidelines of the history of thought and the development of science due to dramatic political events and the related dynamic development of technology.14

• 15 P. Goff, Galileo’s error. Foundations for a new science of consciousness (London: 2019), pp. 308–30 (...)

13What did the change in the cognitive paradigm of science entail, however: the change which appeared in the first half of the twentieth century, directly after the formulation of the theory of relativity and discoveries of quantum physics, and later abandoned, but not forgotten? As written bluntly by contemporary philosopher Philip Goff in the recently published Galileo’s error: ‘In 1623, Galileo took the sensory qualities out of the physical world. Three hundred years later, in 1927, Russell and Eddington finally found a way of putting them back.’15

• 16 See: Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore [1623] Excerpts from The Assayer, in: Discoveries and Opinions (...)
• 17 P. Goff, Galileo’s error… The view according to which consciousness (being a ‘receptor’ of quality) (...)
• 18 This is mostly about such simple qualities as colour, taste or smell. It is not, of course, about t (...)

14The author refers here to the work of Galileo, The Assayer, where the ‘father’ of contemporary sciences formulated the subject of its interest, which is to be merely the mathematically determined numbers and geometrical shapes, while immaterial qualities are to become, from now on, situated in the human soul and be permanently excluded from the area of scientific scholarship.16 The wide-reaching negative consequence of such an approach was, according to Goff and other scholars he cites, an exclusion of the conscience of the researcher/observer from the scholarly perspective, and thus a ‘creation of the problem of consciousness’, which has plagued Western science from that point onwards and up until today.17 This problem is not merely about the shortage of reliable studies on human consciousness. Still, it is also about the presence of an error that is hard to determine, a certain deviation from the reliable cognitive effects of the sciences, which is a product of the preclusion of that part of reality that is accessible to our senses precisely under the guise of ‘quality’.18

• 19 A classic example of this kind of solution could be the adherence of contemporary physicists (even (...)

15The weight of this issue is easily underestimated due to, among other things, a deep ‘imprinting’ of Galileo’s (and Descartes’s) templates of perceiving reality onto the Western style of thought. Such an approach, however, results primarily in stripping the object studied of any characteristics of quality, the possibility of conscious existence, and the perception of the world, and in concentrating these characteristics solely in the subject experiencing. One effect of this is not only a strengthening of the ‘subject – object’ opposition, which today constitutes an uncomfortable restriction of scientific methodologies, but also an inexplicability of phenomena, which (according to common sense evaluation) seem to be an inherent element of physical reality, and yet are pushed aside into subjectivity.19

• 20 According to Goff: ‘Nobody really knows what a superposition is, but we can think of it as a sort o (...)
• 21 Fritz London and Edmond Bauer, quoted by Goff, state: ‘When the province of physical theory was ext (...)
• 22 Goff rightly points out not just the inconsistency of this outlook (regarding a part of reality as (...)
• 23 This relates to Bertrand Russell’s book The Analysis of Matter (London: 1927). The outlook presente (...)

16The first, though very significant (according to Goff) break from the consistent depriving the phenomena of consciousness (including experience and quality) of their ‘objectivity’ was brought about by quantum mechanics, in light of which it became impossible to explain the phenomenon of ‘collapse of the state vector’. This phenomenon consists of a given elementary particle exiting the state of ‘superposition’,20 defining its momentum and location in space by the intervention of the observer’s consciousness.21 However, there have been many solutions acknowledging the possibilities of creative blurring of the ‘subject-object’ difference, proposed earlier, in the period of a certain ‘small Renaissance’ of philosophy of science in the 1920s and 1930s. This is why, in the above quotation, Philip Goff mentions the year 1927 as a symbolic end of the ‘post-Galilean era’ in science. It is in that year that well-known British philosopher and Nobel prize laureate, Bertrand Russell, proposed an innovative solution to the issue of the relationship between consciousness and the objects of cognition, which allowed for an avoidance of pitfalls of Descartes’s dualism (‘extended substance’ and ‘thinking substance’), as well as materialism, determining the qualities perceived subjectively as illusions.22 He concluded that the foundation of any physical observations, or that which matter truly is, has to be a specific substrate, different from what science considers as matter (a collection of ‘objects’ of particular characteristics and abilities to influence other objects), and from human consciousness: closer, nevertheless, to that, which constitutes our inner world (the reality of thoughts, feelings, experiences of quality and their reflective continuity), rather than to ‘matter that exists objectively’.23 The famous British astronomer, physicist, and mathematician, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, supportive of Russell in this regard, pointed to the simplicity of such a resolution, as one that enables one to move beyond the ‘tainting’ of Western science by the ‘pragmatic’ deformation of optics:

• 25 P. Goff, Galileo’s error…, p. 301 [emphasis by Philip Goff].

17The argument of a material reconstruction of reality modelled on the remnants (residuals) it leaves over the continuity of our conscious lives, goes far beyond a pragmatic template of science (to experience in order to be able to predict how material objects will behave in a given situation, or as a result to our actions). Following this argument can lead us either towards a Husserl-like phenomenology (if we take consciousness as strictly ‘subjective’ quality), or towards a particular ‘ontology of matter’ (if, showing humility, we apportion some of our subjective, conscious world of ‘qualities’ to that, which lies beyond us). According to Goff, the simplest solution, which fulfils the logic criterion of ‘Occam’s razor’, is to choose the other side: ‘the simplest hypothesis concerning the intrinsic nature of matter outside of brains is that it is continuous with the intrinsic nature of matter inside of brains, in the sense that both inside and outside of brains matter has an intrinsic nature made up of forms of consciousness’.25 In this approach, the brain (especially in humans) is not distinguished by any specific characteristics. Instead, it concentrates certain traits of a correctly understood matter, much like a lens focuses light.

• 26 This stream of thought (interdisciplinary, though inspired by quantum mechanics) appealed to such r (...)
• 27 For the history of panpsychism in Western philosophy, see the book by David F. Skrbina, Panpsychism (...)

18Regardless of the reasons behind the re-emergence of this style of thinking (referred to in the 1970s as the ‘Gnosis of Princeton’26), I believe it is worth returning, for now, to the representatives of such outlooks from the beginnings of that century and their earlier, nineteenth-century forerunners.27 It is also worth reflecting on whether the use of photography in astronomical research and its illustrative use in books on the Cosmos had any influence on the direction of progress in this discipline and its philosophical foundations. Could photography (constituting a visualisation of infinitely remote objects) have strengthened the suggestion of their radical strangeness, invoking respect and humility, subverting cognitive dogmas, or quite the opposite: did it serve the rising de-mystification of the Universe? Even the initial remarks in this article, relating to the use of photography in popular science books, suggest that the role of photography (as is the case for virtually any human invention) was ambivalent. On the one hand, images of cosmic objects, made with ever greater accuracy, made man realise the infinity of the cosmos; they distracted the reader or viewer from their ordinary chores. On the other hand, through an element of unrestrained curiosity typical of us, they suggested the possibility of undertaking a journey and conquering these spaces, thereby including them in the human ‘empire’ in a manner modelled on overseas colonies.

• 30 As physicists and science enthusiasts will know, the main issue which reveals itself in the system (...)
• 31 The issue of the indeterminate nature of an object registered through photography relates especiall (...)

21The fact that the irritating incompleteness of the image of reality (which Goff calls the ‘problem of consciousness’ in science, and which was known earlier – in the nineteenth century – as the aforementioned issue of Kant’s agnosticism) constitutes a continual area of concern for Jeans, is testament to the fact that he does not stop at the bold hypothesis of reducing any forms of matter to radiation, seeking also other explanations for the existence of this gap.30 It turns out that, in trying to eliminate areas of uncertainty (such as, for example, the issue of superposition), moving in the dark, we are almost stuck with the information relayed via photography, not knowing precisely what it actually depicts.31

• 33 The author writes: ‘Heisenberg and Bohr have suggested that electron-waves must be regarded merely (...)
• 34 On the topic of such reflections, also in the first quarter of the twentieth century, see the book (...)

22Apparently, photography here takes on the form of something of a ‘residue’ of conscious experience (which was posited by Eddington). Still, it is questioned at the same time, and accused of ‘subjectivism’.33 In endeavouring to suggest possible solutions, Jeans reaches for a different perspective, very widespread in the first quarter of the twentieth century: reflections on the higher dimensions of space, of which there could be more than four (even if we consider time as a dimension which, as it would seem, is still not a commonly accepted model today).34 The author returns here to Plato’s metaphor of the cave, quoted in the motto of the book, using it as a specific framing device for his reflections:

• 36 Idem, Through Space and Time, pp. 165–166.

23Of course, it does not mean that Jeans (together with other astronomers of his age) did not often use photography as a source of reliable information, which allows for an enrichment and completion of the image of reality for the purpose of practical science, interpreting and foreseeing events. One special role in this work was played, in his opinion, by spectroscopic photography, which allowed for the identification of chemical elements constituting distant celestial bodies, because ‘the light which travels (…) to us brings with it a message as to what substances are producing the light’.36

• 39 I refer to Eddington’s book Internal constitution of the stars (Cambridge: 1926) (see: https://euro (...)

26The intensity of philosophical-scientific ‘brainstorm’, which took part (obviously in the positive form of dialogue between scientists and honourable competition between them) in the 1920s and 1930s, is attested to by the fact that Jeans, when publishing the book Eos or the wider aspects of cosmogony in 1930, defined the nature of the most common nuclear reactions occurring in centres of stars with unwavering certainty not as the fusion of hydrogen into helium (which is the universally accepted version today, and was officially proclaimed by Arthur Eddington in 1926),39 but as a disintegration of supermassive nuclei of elements heavier than uranium, but unknown on Earth.

• 41 See, for example, term: ‘gwiazd ewolucja’ in the encyclopaedic guide, Kopernik – astronomia – astro (...)
• 42 The thing is, in the light of Hubble’s originally formulated theory of evolution of galaxies, large (...)

29From today’s perspective, however, such an outline of the evolution of nebulas (from independent, enormous gas cloud to galaxy comprising billions of stars) turns out to be false (stars originate locally, in established galaxies, and especially near their nuclei, where there are concentrated clouds of interstellar matter),41 while the error in the astronomer’s thinking occurred precisely due to the fallibility of human eyesight, weak telescopes and insufficient resolution of images.42

• 43 As Jerzy Prokopiuk writes in the introduction to the book by Carl Gustav Jung, Nowoczesny mit. O rz (...)

30It is apparent, therefore, that photography (as a tool aiding human sight and memory) also bears the cost of its role as the not entirely trustworthy ‘middleman’ between the knowledge of the Cosmos relayed to us by the benevolent ray of light and the human eye. This quirk of photography, as an unintentional message not fully controlled by consciousness, and thus susceptible to deformation and manipulation, will also return in the age when man will really walk on the Moon. I mean, of course, the ‘conspiracy theories’ (created by what can be called a ‘populist reasoning’, which is the opposite of common sense), which exploded with incredible force with the appearance of the first images and sounds sent from the surface of the Earth’s satellite.43

• 44 I refer to Jung’s book Nowoczesny mit…
• 45 In the spirit of ‘studies of objects’ (or ‘non-anthropocentric’ Humanities) one can interpret this (...)

31The root causes of the media uproar surrounding photographs from the Moon can be diagnosed in various ways: their obvious aspects can certainly be explained through social anthropology, while a psychoanalytic diagnosis proposed by Carl Gustav Jung44 should also not be ignored. I believe one can, however, lean towards the aforementioned philosophers of science (panpsychists or neutral monists), whose findings enable us to see an enormous gap in post-Galilean concept of objective knowledge: the lack of consideration for the intuition of the possible ‘answer’ of the object of cognition to the impulse from the human consciousness, different from their passive presence, vulnerable to manipulation.45

• 46 Photographs taken by the spheres move, though imperceptibly, at a speed unnoticeable to the human e (...)
• 47 This short story is often cited by critics and interpreters as a sign of Lem’s famous agnosticism, (...)

33The story distils the issues of the reliability of photography, its moral implications, and the boundaries of scientific cognition. The ‘photographs’ made by the white spheres are somewhat linked with territorial interference or aggression (this moving message was enhanced by Lem through the fact that the first victims of one of the ‘white spheres’ is a couple of young people in love, having sex ‘out in nature’), and the three-dimensional images seem to distort reality. However, they can be turned into film, which only reveals a part of the truth,46 while the ultimate purpose of their actions remains inscrutable, exposing the limitations of science and human cognition.47

• 48 Ibidem, p. 48.

• 49 The character of Lem’s story confirms this, saying (in private) to a very inquisitive young journal (...)

36A ‘multivocal roar’ of outrage, which rises in reaction to these words, cannot perhaps be justified in terms of the plot and the setting of the story, but it suggests to the reader an iconoclastic character of the allegory. This is because, if we take into consideration the symbolic meaning of the first ‘victims’ of the invaders from Space (for example via an association with Romeo and Juliet), we can realise how distorted is the image of the human civilisation, culture, ethics, all our endeavours that we see as lofty and unselfish, that the story portrays. They are all merely there to serve a mixing of genetic material, survival within the environment, and a minuscule pleasure which may accompany it.49

• 50 Sir Jeans stated, for example: ‘The future; may not be as unalterably determined by the past as we (...)
• 51 According to Philip Goff this way of determining the ‘essence’ of objects experienced (existing ind (...)

37And what does the short story say in terms of photography in the context of the previously invoked texts of culture? We can assume (with the cognitive humility of Lem’s Doctor Haines) that, regardless of what we associate the remote, peculiar objects with, objects that we get to know thanks to the benevolence of light and laws of physics (whether they be ‘gods’,50 ‘God’, ‘other forms of consciousness’, or ‘qualities not experienced by anyone’).51 They do exist and, in a sense, photograph us, too.