JWST’s cosmic revelations will change our interior lives too

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
– from Critique of Practical Reason (1788) by Immanuel Kant

Enlightenment philosophers were vexed that their expanding empirical science of the external, material world collided with long-standing religious and moral traditions premised solely on internal, a priori knowledge. But for Immanuel Kant, the 'sensible world' of appearances emerged from cognitive faculties of the human mind, constitutive of observations gained through human experience. 'We can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them,' he wrote. Kant analogised his reframing of metaphysics to Copernicus's heliocentrism, in which the astronomer's observations made sense only when he placed the Sun, rather than Earth, at the centre. 'An object of the senses' like a new planet observed from a telescope, wrote Kant, 'conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition', resolving the perceived discrepancy between the observable world and the mind's contemplation of it.

The Enlightenment's radical political philosophy, shifting Europeans' governance from aristocratic absolutism to freedom gained through reason, dovetailed with Kant's philosophy of science. Observations of a band of stars that appeared to enring the sky led him to surmise that the solar system was shaped like a disc around the Sun. 'Matter [is] … bound to certain laws, and when it is freely abandoned to those laws, it must necessarily bring forth beautiful combinations,' he wrote in 1755. 'There is a God just because nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.' A reasoned universe and a reasoned mind operated together.

Kant's 'sensible world' of the 18th century was Earth, the solar system and the stars in the sky. If Kant's philosophy holds true, then anticipated astrophysical phenomena of the observable cosmos must continue to be integrated into humans' self-emplacement in an ever-expanding internal universe as well. Increasingly sophisticated technologies of visual perception – from Galileo's spyglass to ground- and then space-based telescopes – mediate our entwined expanding astrophysical and moral universes.

Data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began returning images in July 2022, and is poised to deepen humans' sensibility of the cosmos and ourselves. Astronomers expect that it will reveal novel astrophysical phenomena both one step beyond the familiar and the presently unimaginable. With its 6.5-metre gold-coated primary mirror and unprecedented sensitivity to long infrared wavelengths, the telescope's deep field resolves distant star clusters in unparalleled detail. These images could help astronomers model the 'cosmic spring' that led to the formation of galaxies through gravitational mechanisms and life itself. The JWST could also pave the way to realise NASA scientists' long-quested goal to detect extraterrestrial life, expanding beyond microbes on the surface of Mars or in the Venusian atmosphere, which would shore up a generalised theory of biology and evolution. The apprehension of biosignatures – indications of life in exoplanetary atmospheres – would demand a reordering, not only of how humans perceive the Universe, but of ourselves as living, if perhaps not lonely, beings within it... Aeon