Chapter 1 told the history of ASTP from the perspective of the principal political and diplomatic actors who attempted to use the supposedly neutral sphere of space science and engineering to reset superpower relations. This chapter covers similar terrain but reverses the order of analysis by examining the perspective of the engineers and how they attempted to design a technical solution to the political challenges of détente. Put another way, I discuss the engineering and design of technological fixes to solve the political problem of averting mutual assured destruction (MAD). The goal is to determine how well those fixes functioned politically (as a way to de-escalate tensions between the superpowers) and technically (by enhancing the safety and effectiveness of human habitation in space).

The term “technological fix” was coined in the 1960s by the director of Oakridge National Laboratories, Alvin Weinberg. The basic idea was hardly new. Modern faith in technology had produced a mania for technological fixes, a belief that “solutions founded on technological innovation may be innately superior for addressing issues traditionally defined as social, political, or cultural.” The main attraction of the technological fix is that it promises to bypass the cultural and political challenges of changing behaviors and attitudes by shifting the problem to the supposedly objective realm of technical problem-solving, and to the experts and engineers who supposedly have only technical rather than partisan goals. For example, advocates of nuclear power in the 1960s, like solar or wind power today, presented it as a solution to the economic and political dilemmas of fossil-fuel dependence. If it worked as planned, politicians would avoid the hard work of changing deeply entrenched behaviors of energy consumption, providing a cheap way to produce and consume power that would also protect the environment. It was a case of having your cake (energy independence and a cheap power source) and eating it too (blissfully tapping into the electric grid without destroying the environment).

ASTP was a technological fix designed to make superpower relations less dangerous and more secure, and it had the added benefit of advancing the cause of space exploration. Up to that point, with US troops mired in Vietnam and Soviet troops blasting away hopes of reforming communism in Czechoslovakia, little else seemed to be working to mitigate the literally explosive potential of superpower relations.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Blake modifies and elaborates on the metaphysical and epistemological principles set forth in the tractates. Here, however, Blake conveys his philosophy via an abundance of heterogeneous literary forms—from blank verse to Menippean satire to aphoristic proverbs to prose narratives—as well as illuminated designs. Martin K. Nurmi claims that, after the tractates, The Marriage “is the second statement of [Blake’s] philosophical countersystem.” In addition to countering, Blake also adopts from a varied set of philosophical traditions, just as he eclectically absorbed and refashioned a range of literary styles in order to articulate a monist pantheism that departs from several premises of his own earlier tractates.

This chapter focuses on three sets of philosophical “contraries” introduced in The Marriage: soul/body, God/material world and imagination (Poetic Genius)/sensory perception. I focus on how Blake's work, and the philosophical tradition informing it, reveals an interdependence between these ostensible oppositions. Such an interplay is evident in the culmination of No Natural Religion, in which God and man become one, without a negation of either entity. The title of Blake's Marriage then heralds a similar dissolution of dualistic metaphysics—a marriage of contraries—and a proclamation of monism. Kathleen Raine calls The Marriage “a manifesto of the philosophy of Paracelsus and Boehme, of the ‘one thing’ in which contraries are resolved.” While she is not alone in recognizing the monistic aspects of the work, no previous commentators have emphasized the pantheistic nature of this monism.

1. John McDowell presents a reading of Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following which sets out to absolve Wittgenstein from the charge that he puts forward what McDowell sees as an untenable view, namely, that when it comes to applying a rule in a new case, what counts as correct is somehow determined by the responses that the members of the relevant speech community are inclined to make. McDowell argues that this conception of what counts as correct in a new case is not only revisionary of our common-sense view that the pattern of application of our concepts is independent of our ratification of it but destroys the very idea that there is any such thing as someone's meaning something by the words he utters. McDowell further points out that the revisionary aspect of what is known as the communitarian interpretation is at odds with Wittgenstein's conception of his philosophical method: that one should not try ‘to advance theses in philosophy’ (PI §128).

I share McDowell's dissatisfaction with the communitarian reading, and I am generally sympathetic with his concern to find a reading of Wittgenstein's remarks which avoids committing him to a communitarian account of what constitutes the correct result of applying a rule in a new case. However, there is a question whether McDowell's reading simply reinstates a form of platonism which Wittgenstein's reflections show to be problematic. McDowell argues that this objection to his reading reflects an implicit commitment to the demand for a constructive account of what meaning and understanding consist in and leads inevitably to the communitarian account he claims is untenable. On his reading, Wittgenstein does not intend to put what he calls our common-sense conception of what it is to grasp a rule in question; rather he reminds us of our common conception in an attempt to overcome problems and paradoxes that arise from a certain mistaken idea of what it is to go by a rule.

The dispute between McDowell and the communitarian has the following form: McDowell asserts that Wittgenstein defends the correctness of our common-sense view and the communitarian claims that he shows it to be untenable and in need of revision.

Blake's tractates and The Marriage together convey the development of his metaphysics from panpsychist panentheism to monist pantheism. In this and the following chapter I examine how these ideas manifest in several of his narrative, illuminated poems created between 1788 and the end of 1795. We have already seen how the Memorable Fancies of The Marriage afford Blake an opportunity to anecdotally, dialogically and visually expand on his metaphysical principles; he moves beyond simply stating propositions, as he does in the tractates, to creatively depicting how ontology and epistemology affect one's lived interactions with particular beings. As this chapter shows, the illustrated narrative poems that dominate Blake's output during this early period engage with the same philosophical questions that drive the works already discussed, and in each poem Blake recasts the metaphysical issues that are central to his art. Although a monist materialism can be discerned in each of the illuminated books examined here, Blake poetically dramatizes what he sees as the negative consequences of his age's embrace of its dualist competitor: the “Philosophy of Five Senses” as it is called in The Song of Los. In essence, this philosophy is no different from the empirical deism attacked in the early tractates, and in the dystopian continental prophecies and Urizen books Blake contrasts natural religion with a pantheist metaphysics that celebrates the divine world of infinite sensory delight, which Blake introduces even before The Marriage, in The Book of Thel (1789).

This chapter focuses on Blake's first illuminated narrative poem, The Book of Thel, and two of the three continental prophecies, Europe A Prophecy (1794) and The Song of Los (1795), discussing them in relation to the philosophical principles in the works examined in the first two chapters, as well as to the work of a popular contemporary of Blake's who was also working through natural-philosophical ideas via the medium of narrative poetry: Erasmus Darwin. In his best-selling The Loves of the Plants (1789) and The Economy of Vegetation (1791), which were published together as The Botanic Garden (1791), Darwin also exhibits an eclectic materialism verging on panpsychism and pantheism.

Faced with the tragic events of his time, Raymond Aron has always been concerned with thinking of the action, trying to recapture the whole density of human drama, against the illusions that promised its erasure or inciting inversely to resign to it fatalistically, thus contributing to its worsening. This led him to give to the international problem a primordial scope that went beyond the sole interest in the study of international relations, in order to grasp the whole unity of the political problem and shed light on the complexity of the human problem. Aron believes that one cannot understand politics satisfactorily without thinking about international relations and vice versa. However, could Aron, by his “classical way” of approaching the political problem, be inclined to underestimate the dynamics of progress of societies and modern liberal democracies in their ability to overcome the tragic horizon which influenced his vision of the international challenge? It is by trying to understand the philosophical significance of the lessons he derived from these exceptional circumstances that he witnessed in the twentieth century that we will be able to measure the correctness of his conception of the political problem.

The Machiavellian Problem and the Question of the Best Political Regime: The Distinction between Foreign and Domestic Policies

Raymond Aron was always concerned with extracting timeless lessons on the conduct of human affairs from the careful examination of the singular crisis of his time. He thus sought to understand the deployment of the unprecedented from a permanent core which makes this possible, while questioning what these new disruptions indicate about our human condition. Recapturing the singularity of the drama of his century, following the terrible cataclysm of the First World War, following the thread of the international problem, through the chain of wars and the failure of peace between States, Aron rediscovers the Thucydides perspective highlighting the decisive importance of the question of the outside, that of the relations between independent political entities, of the alternation between peace and war without a foreseeable term, which places human societies before a necessarily uncertain and tragic horizon.

1. Wittgenstein's choice of the quotation from Nestroy as the motto for the PI signals his work's critical relation to contemporary Western thought, which he suggests is characterized by the word ‘progress’ (CV 9). One reading of the motto – ‘It is in the nature of all progress that it looks much greater than it really is’ – is that it is intended to alert us to the danger of our almost exclusive concern with progress, which, Wittgenstein remarks, ‘typically […] constructs’ (CV 9). The spirit of progress, which is characteristic of our age, expresses itself in, among other things, our attitude to science. The method of science ‘elbows all others aside’ (CV 69), and we ‘are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does’ (BB 18). We have the idea in philosophy that we need to arrive at ‘new, unheard of elucidations’ (BT 309). The clear implication of the motto is that this is not the spirit in which PI itself is written; the kind of enquiry Wittgenstein is concerned with is undertaken in a quite different spirit from the one which finds expression in the novel, constructive, explanatory goals of science.

Wittgenstein's repudiation of the methods and aims of science as a model for his philosophy is not, however, a rejection of the central importance of the concept of nature for his philosophical enquiry. Appeals to nature, and an emphasis on describing what is there before our eyes, are a recurring theme of Wittgenstein's remarks from 1930 onwards. The concept of nature which Wittgenstein has in mind is clearly not the one associated with what is described using the conceptual resources of the special sciences. It is implicitly a more open conception of nature as something that we encounter: ‘Just let nature speak’ (CV 3); ‘Things are right before our eyes, not covered by any veil’ (CV 8), remarks from 1929 and 1930, respectively. This conception of nature is one that Wittgenstein finds in the works of Goethe, and it is no doubt significant that he considered taking a quotation from a Goethe poem as his motto for PI: ‘Nature has neither core nor husk.’

Great Yet Forgotten?

Though no longer included in an ever-shorter list of canonical thinkers whom apprentice social theorists must be persuaded to read, Raymond Aron has not slipped entirely from view, as have other superior societal analysts, such as Franklin Giddings, Harold Lasswell, Robert MacIver, Gaetano Mosca, Max Scheler, Alfred Schutz, Albion Small, Pitirim Sorokin, Herbert Spencer, W. I. Thomas or Florian Znaniecki—each of whom, like Aron, applauded in his time as a theorist of enduring importance. In fact, Aron's expositors, though less numerous now than during the 1960s and 1970s, continue to keep his flame lit, pursuing his far-flung scholarly and political interests along lines that he would have found faithful to his “domain assumptions” (Gouldner 1970, 31). In addition to a clutch of anglophone monographs and collections (Adair-Toteff 2019; Anderson 1997; Colen and Dutartre-Michaut 2015; Davis 2009; Frost and Mahoney 2011; Mahoney 1991; Schmitt 2018; Stewart 2019), several dozen articles are also regularly brought to the attention of interested readers that take on this or that Aronian topic with skill and the requisite depth (e.g., Baehr 2013; Campbell 1989; Davis 2008; Frost 1996, 1997; Haine 2019; Hall 2011; Hoffmann 1985; Horowitz 2006; Kerkvliet 1968; McConnell 1984; Richter 1984; Scott 2011; Shils 1985; Strong 1972; Yalem 1971).

A subgenre has for some time been probing an obvious question: “If Aron was truly as brilliant and creative as his admirers claim, why has his name and his 40 books been eased out of scholarly or journalistic discourse these 37 years after his death?” A question easier posed than answered, for he does have his champions. That singular arbiter of scholarly reputation, Edward Shils, begins his unique memorial to Aron without inhibition:

Space exploration, as noted in the introduction, was driven by tensions between cosmopolitics and utopian visions of a new global community. In the words of the Dutch astronomer H. C. van de Hulst, recipient of the 1990 Planetary Award at the Association of Space Explorers annual conference in the Netherlands: “When a system without frontiers, such as science, meets a system with frontiers, such as politics […] a dialogue between the political and scientific systems must take place in order to minimize the turbulence which could be encountered.” The world was at the center of this turbulence zone, transformed into a staging ground for Cold War military competition. Yet the same processes of militarization also created the sense of urgency that inspired new experiments in cosmic and terrestrial collaboration. The first part of the chapter discusses early ideas about global forms of consciousness and their connection to space travel, pacificism, and transnational utopias. It then turns to two areas that became launching pads for further acts of collaboration. The first was a joint US–USSR moon-mapping project and the second the formation in 1985 of a nongovernmental organization in Paris called the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), founded by many of the principal actors of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). ASE considered itself to be a vanguard of a peace-loving and ecologically aware transnational community to which all people, they hoped, would soon belong.

The Cosmic Perspective

Historian Robert Poole has commented on the iconic image snapped on Christmas Eve 1968 from Apollo 8. “Looking back,” wrote Poole, “it is possible to see that Earthrise marked the tipping point, the moment when the sense of the space age flipped from what it meant for space to what it meant for the Earth.” Yet even before the Earthrise moment of the late 1960s, competing urges to escape into space (as a way of transcending human limitations) and to recognize the need to confront those challenges on Earth had a long pedigree. Like the astrofuturist ideal pursued in the West by science fiction writers such as Arthur Clarke and engineers like Wernher von Braun, the Russian cosmists at the beginning of the twentieth century believed the survival of the species required the colonization of other planets. Space colonization, in their view, was both the solution to terrestrial problems and the culminating point and rationale for human development.

1. Wittgenstein describes the kind of investigation he is engaged in in the PI as ‘a grammatical one’ (PI §90). He speaks of looking for ‘grammatical difference[s] ‘ (PI, PPF §62) and of ‘the rules of grammar’ (PI §497); and he makes a distinction between the ‘surface grammar’ of a word and its ‘depth grammar’ (PI §664). He traces the misunderstandings which he holds to lie at the root of philosophical problems and paradoxes to ‘grammatical illusions’ (PI §110) and to the creation of ‘grammatical fiction[s]’ (PI §307). It is clear that he places the concept of grammar and grammatical investigation at the heart of his understanding of the aims and methods of his later philosophy. Understanding what he means by the terms ‘grammar’, ‘depth grammar’ and ‘grammatical investigation’ is therefore fundamental to an understanding of PI. ‘What is Wittgenstein's conception of grammar, depth grammar and grammatical investigation?’ is one of the most important questions to ask when approaching the task of understanding his later work.

One issue raised by this question is how Wittgenstein's conception of grammar and grammatical investigation relates to the traditional understanding of the notion of grammar. It is clear that Wittgenstein does not use the term ‘grammar’ in a way which implies a clear separation between syntax (grammar) and semantics (meaning). The conception of grammar associated with the traditional grammatical categories – sentence, noun, noun phrase, adjective, transitive and intransitive verbs, adverb and so on – and their permitted concatenations is one that abstracts from the meaning of words. Wittgenstein, by contrast, ‘want[s] to say the place of a word in grammar is its meaning’ (PG §59). This linking together of grammar and semantics is not, however, unique to Wittgenstein. There is a conception of a ‘philosophical grammar’ which is concerned with the general semantic types that are correlated with the syntactic categories of traditional grammar, and with their potential for combination in significant sentences. The aim of such a grammar is to identify the basic types of logico-semantic elements which comprise our conceptual scheme – for example, individual substance, property of an individual substance, event, property of an event, state of affairs and so on – and which might be held to underpin distinctions in syntactic category.