magdes14

was tan-colored, and in the shadows of rocks and hills
it was ashen gray. To Aldrin, coming down the ladder
shortly after Armstrong, everything seemed somewhat
disorderly, but peculiarly precise. It was an emptiness
of rock and dust, lifeless. And yet the shapes affected
them, and Armstrong said, "It has a stark beauty all its
own." A few minutes later Aldrin framed the
oxymoron-like fragment: "Magnificent desolation."
This is exactly what the scientists, and anyone
conversant with post-war science and astronomy,
expected. The Moon corresponded exactly to the
theory with which it was most closely approached.
* * *
Every observation, rock and bag of dust the Apollo
11 astronauts picked up in their 2 1/2 hours of poking
around on the Moon's surface was important to the
scientists. The astronauts' bodily responses, conditions
and functions were of great interest. What the
astronauts thought and experienced while on the
Moon was of less importance.
Most of the literature on the astronauts' personal,
inner responses focuses on their feeling of being
surrounded by beauty and desolation. All the Apollo
astronauts, with few exceptions, apparently, were
greatly affected by the sight of the blue, cloud-swirling
Earth rising over the Moon's horizon. For the most
part, not much more is made of the astronauts' inner
experiences.2
This is because, except in clinical psychological terms,
the astronauts' thoughts are of little interest to science.
But Aldrin's oxymoron might be of considerable
interest to Parmenides or Socrates. Aldrin had a deep
sense that the world around him was desolate, which
is to say, empty; it was nothing. He was there to
scrutinize, as closely as he could in only a few hours,
what some inner sense was telling him is not all of
what is. At the same time, he and Armstrong both
experienced a sense of tremendous beauty. The
surface of the Moon is desolate yet magnificent.
Between desolation and magnificence, surely
magnificence is of greater interest because it clearly is:
it is the quality of the experience of desolation.
Magnificence - or in Socratic terms, Beauty - is not the
rocks and craters themselves, it is not the Earth rising
over the tan aridity of the Moon. "To think and to be
are one and the same." Magnificence indicates the
existence, not of the rocky Moon, but of the mind that
is making sense of the Moon.
The Apollo scientists, however, were intent upon the
desolation. They wanted to know about the color of
the rocks, their variety, the shape of landscapes, the
measurements of gravity, and whatever else the public
will never know about. The Moon is an object, a
concatenation of lifeless substances that have
undergone geological activities and lain silent and
locally inert for billions of years.
It's as though, after four hundred years of figuring and
re-figuring, we have focused our attention on one
aspect of reality, decided it is what is, and
systematically excluded all other aspects as what is
not. Even though it is plain even in the mouth of the

medicine, transportation (trips to the Moon!), housing,
electric lighting, food storage, information processing
and transmission, weapons and so on. But science has
also explicitly denied that other spectacular ranges of
human experience are even real. There is no God. A
dream is an evolutionary survival mechanism. Science
cannot explain the humor in a joke, and does not seek
to because humor is not objective; in a very real
scientific sense, humor is not real.
It was inevitable that the Apollo astronauts would
find a lifeless Moon. In theory they could not find
anything else. One wonders what Parmenides or
Socrates would have found, if they had been able to go
there. It would have included what Aldrin described,
but would have radically differed because they would
have approached the Sea of Tranquillity with a
completely different theory of reality. They would
have seen a reality indescribable and perhaps
unbelievable to us. They might have told stories of
guiding goddesses and firelit caves.
In one sense, we think of our time as a tremendous
Golden Age of human existence. The rise of scientific
reasoning prompted philosophers to name the
eighteenth century the Age of Enlightenment, and all
through the twentieth century, science has been
confidently described as the most accurate and
successful method for explaining and theorizing about
the universe ever devised by human beings. Given the
astonishing material comforts we now have, even in
parts of poor countries, there is much circumstantial
evidence to support the validity of this description.
Parmenides the naturalist would surely be impressed.
Our material lives seem magnificent.
In another sense, we think of our time as degenerate.
The most horrible wars and most extensive atrocities
against human beings and the planet itself have been
conducted in the last two hundred years. A general
degeneration of moral sensibilities is described again
and again, everywhere in the western world. People in
the industrialized world are bored, angry and resentful
even though they have more material comforts than
any human beings in any time. Our inner lives seem
desolate.
If science has indeed been investigating illusions, as
Parmenides' ideas suggest, then it has been returning
to us more illusions. If any of this is true, then
centuries from now (if they exist in human terms),
historians might describe the age of science as the