Look Straight at the Sun

Cal Revely-Calder Considers Our Solar Familiar

Our Founding Editor tells us that once, long ago, he was employed at a university that sought to coerce him into teaching a course on the “philosophy of sport”. “I don’t think,” he said, “that that is an important enough topic for there to be a philosophy of it.” His higher-ups explained that it is sufficiently important, since every human culture participates in sport, giving it something of the status of a “universal”. He proposed instead to introduce a course on the “philosophy of the Sun”, but was told that there could not be such a course, since the Sun is only one thing, an individual, a res singularis, a hapax, a one-off, and philosophy does not typically descend to that level. And yet, he then pointed out, there has never been, and never will be, any occurrence of “sport” that did not entirely depend on the Sun —no Sun, no sport—, so plainly this distinction between the universal and the particular doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps we need to devise an intermediate category, for those entities that are in truth, at the cosmic scale, as common and unexceptional as grains of sand on the beach, but that nonetheless entirely determine the horizon and shape of human existence, of life, indeed of everything we know. An exception should be made, as Hinternet associate editor Cal Revely-Calder discerns, and in eras more attuned than our own to the real conditions of Earthly existence has been made, for a philosophy of the Sun. Consider this our contribution to your “summer reading”, or at least the closest thing you’re going to get to that from us. —The Hinternet

I

If you spoke to the Sun, what would you say?

II

We’re forbidden, as children, from staring up at it. Its power lies beyond safe measure. It dominates our world: all our cultures, all our lives. Every second it generates billions of times more energy than our species uses in a year. We exist as a rounding error in its flow, a tiny after-effect. In that sense, the only concept the Sun resembles, philosophically, is God. And those artists, writers and theorists who’ve tried to deal with the Sun, even to speak back to it, seem haunted by the same sense of incommensurate scale – by the knowledge of their powerlessness and enthrallment to a higher power.

III

We hide from sunlight by making corners. In any city built on a grid, or at monuments from Abu Simbel to Stonehenge, the Sun will twice a year be perfectly framed. Thus, Le Corbusier, in Vers une architecture (1923): “Architecture is the learned, correct, and magnificent game of volumes assembled beneath the light.”