The ways of stargazing: Newtonian metaphoricity in American foreign policy

This excerpt from Honoré de Balzac’s novel opens Eugène Minkowski’s discussion of man’s poetic encounter with nature in his Vers une cosmologie (1936: 163-72). What the quoted dialogue reveals are two contrasting ways of stargazing: on the one hand, there is the scientific way, that is, seeing the heavenly bodies in their objective materiality. On the other hand, there is the poetic way, that is, looking at the stars in a manner that frees the gaze from the confines of the heavenly bodies’ tangible existence. These are the ways of the astronomer and the poet, representing the two ideas that delimit our dealings with the metaphorical relevance of nature and science to politics.