In Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds the marquise, the prototype of the female with a thirst for knowledge and enlightenment who recurs in many Enlightenment treatises, receives her elementary instruction in astronomy and speculative cosmology. Among the many subjects proposed for reflection in it are the difficulties that curious moon inhabitants would encounter during a visit to the earth. The earthly atmosphere is so heavy and thick in comparison with that of the moon as water is in comparison with air; thus, lunar astronauts coming into our atmosphere would drown and fall dead onto the earth. Confronted with this possibility, the marquise’s curiosity plunges on: “Oh, how I wish some great shipwreck would occur that scattered a lot of those people here, so that we could easily go look at their extraordinary shapes!” But the philosopher must also warn her about these beings of loftier origin, for one must always be aware that they may be able to reverse the relationship of spectator and object. The lunar voyagers could do this very easily “if they were clever enough to sail along the outer layer of our air, and thus look down on us out of curiosity, angling for us like fish.” It is characteristic of the theoretical audacity of the newly invented female Enlightenment character that the marquise does not shy away from this risk either; as an object, she is still at least to some degree a spectator, and she might go willingly into the alien fishermen’s net, “just to have the pleasure of seeing the beings that had caught me.” The Enlightenment philosopher, finding himself unexpectedly forced to calm his pupil’s curiosity, must enter into an elaborate argument to talk her out of this.

From Hans Blumenberg’s Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The MIT Press, 1997 (first published in 1979), p. 33.