The Subject is a Projection of the Universe; The Universe is What the Subject Projects
The image that you’ll find at the bottom of every page on spacewhy.org—a pine forest in the Grand Portage MN reservation hanging over the starry abyss—is a photographic representation of the relative structure of what was once the hermetic mirror (as above, so below) but is now just psychological projection; that by looking up at the heavens—whether overwhelmed by the sublimity, or terrorized by the void—you are at the same time, and all the while, looking within.
The night-sky, that macros kosmos, has always been the domain of ultimate projection, not to mention the deliverer of unilateral cosmic influence, and whose contemporary version of the hermetic mirror can be found in your daily zodiac chart. But astronomers, too, project just as much as the next Sagittarius and their various projections nicely illustrate this most vast of all mirrors.
Here are two famous astrophysicists, Neil deGrass Tyson and Alan Lightman, each highly trained at ivy league schools to view the cosmos objectively, each a physicalist who sees the universe as a collection of immutable physical laws that have no goal or purpose—no teleology and no prime mover. In short, they are materialists who would deny spirit in every form. But while their education and knowledge could not be more similar, their view of the cosmos could not be more opposed.
Neil deGrass Tyson, one of the hard atheists, who denigrates religion and the humanities as mere superstition outmoded by a superior knowledge, looks up at the night sky and sees a cold and impersonal cosmos that renders us infinitesimal, if not totally meaningless; a view exemplified by his famous and now classic 2019 tweet: “The Universe is blind to our sorrows and indifferent to our pains. Have a nice day!”
Alan Lightman, by contrast, had something of a (rather cliché) mystical experience when viewing the night-sky from a small boat on the coast of Maine. In his 2018 book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, he recounts how his “world dissolved into that star littered sky.” His body disappeared as he fell into infinity. He felt an “overwhelming connection with the stars, as if I were a part of them… a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity.”
Do not these vistas make a clear depiction of each of these scientist’s projected interior world? A vision of their own intimate subjectivity, blown up to the size of the universe? The psychoanalyst is tempted to make inferences regarding character and home-life; that one scientist remains closed and heavily defended, happily alone with their sorrows and pain, barricaded behind facts; while the other is ecstatically dissolving into the cosmos, just as Freud’s speculative infant dissolved in mother’s oceanic satisfaction.
Though I can imagine that someone might argue that one view is more politically expedient than the other view, neither views are factually correct. Nevertheless they are both true; here I mean true as in the truth of desire.
From this position one might begin to comprehend the old psychonaut’s aphorism, that there are no facts, only interpretations.
