Taking a View from Above

In March 2025, I practiced a wonderful philosophical exercise called the “View from Above”. It consists in using reason and imagination to picture human affairs as seen from a great height, such as, for instance, picturing the Earth and its inhabitants from the point of view of the Moon. As Pierre Hadot says, it is an “extraordinarily rich tradition”¹ and you can only hope to touch on a “few aspects” of it in a brief text, such as this blog post. His study “The View from Above”² is an excellent primer on this topic. I cannot hope to do the topic as much justice as he did, but I am very excited to tell you a bit about this, to hopefully kindle your curiosity.

How to practice the View from Above:

From time to time, take a moment to consider something you are familiar with from a different point of view: a bird’s-eye view. For example, think about the places you frequent as they would be seen from the sky, or the region you live in as it would be seen from the Moon. From this vantage point, you might feel moved in interesting ways. However, you will not feel moved if you do not strive to perform the exercise properly. There’s a bit of an art to it. You must perform this change of perspective by using your understanding of Nature and your imagination, but your understanding and imagination are initially insufficient. They require the help of scientific and artistic documents, whose purpose is to sensitize you to awe and wonder. Science and art together are the two aids you need. Science is needed for accuracy, as you are trying to understand, as objectively as possible, the place of the Earth in the wider Cosmos. Art, on the other hand, is needed for “rhetorical amplification”: the way an objective piece of information is enriched by making clear its philosophical & personal significance for the listener. I am using the term “rhetorical amplification” in a broad sense. I do not only think of literary devices but also of all the ways an objective piece of information is revealed to be significant for you. I often think of the way pictures of outer space are colorized so that they can be legible. It is tailored to you. In any case, if you start practicing the exercise, you can notice that your effort is already shaped by the scientific and artistic information that you have been exposed to over the course of your life. Exposing yourself to even more of this is the way to go if you want to successfully be moved by viewing things from above.

The point is to be moved

The point of the practice is to experience awe and wonder, and to let those feelings inform how you think about your original object of attention (the thing that seemed so familiar a moment ago). Here, it is useful to consider Helen de Cruz’s definitions of those emotions:

“Awe is the emotion we sense when we perceive or conceptualize vastness, combined with a need for cognitive accommodation. Cognitive accommodation means we want to make space in our minds for this vast thing. Vastness can be physical (sheer size) or conceptual (e.g., complexity). Exemplars of things we can be in awe of include the night sky, a monumental, high building such as a temple or pyramid, a great and encompassing theory, superlative feats by a living being, and an astonishing mathematical result.

Wonder is the emotion that arises from a glimpse at the unknown terrain which lies just beyond the fringes of our current understanding. Like awe, it prompts a need for cognitive accommodation, but it does not necessarily have the dimension of vastness. Examples of elicitors include the intricacy of an insect seen under a microscope, an unusual fossil or strangely shaped crystal, and an unexpected astronomical event.”³

Those two feelings, and in particular the way that they can snowball dramatically (each of these feelings call for answers and accommodations, thus forcing us to seek more knowledge and to radically put things in perspective, but that knowledge & wisdom, in turn, will lead us to notice more and more things that will be new occasions for awe & wonder!)⁴… those two feelings, I was saying, move us to see differently our original object of attention. Originally, we felt familiar with it in an unreflective way, but after that, we felt it was surprising and unfamiliar. And then, after a process of habituation to the strange, we manage to become familiar with it again! But now, hopefully, our complacency and unreflectiveness have been made fragile: we become more and more prone to notice how little we know and to be moved by the unknown again and again. So that new familiarity can be challenged too, and so on and so forth. By the end of the philosophical exercise, you are moved to certain philosophical conclusions. Hopefully you are moved to a (renewed) commitment to epistemic humility. It is not unusual too, to no longer care about certain things that now seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, or – on the contrary – to care more about the things that seemed to matter even in the grand scheme of things (those that resisted trivialization).

Finding good scientific and artistic documents

In “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”, a series of scientific documentaries, Carl Sagan is depicted as piloting the fictional “Ship of Imagination” to explore the universe, explain it to us, and sensitize us to cosmic wonder.

I mentioned how important it was to be exposed to certain scientific and artistic documents in order to be able to do the exercise. One big obstacle to the practice is how echoes of those documents might have reached you already in the form of clichés that make you cringe. As with a lot of wise practices, it is important to defrost those clichés, by getting straight to the beating heart in them. Usually you can do that, by going back and forth between relying on your own faculties – doing the exercise “solo” – and getting acquainted with works of art that try, very skillfully, to convey the same intuition that the exercise is getting at. A lot of works of art are there to sensitize you to cosmic awe and wonder: that helps a lot!

For this exercise, I really recommend that you watch Carl Sagan’s series of documentaries called “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”. It is absolutely brilliant, and it could not be more on point. In this series, Carl Sagan flies in a fictional spaceship called the “Ship of the Imagination” and does a tour of the Cosmos. It is a scientific documentary that explains all we know about space & celestial objects, as well as how we have come to know those things throughout history. This is not a boring rattling of facts at all: it is a lot of scientific information deliberately, artfully, skilfully packaged in delightful “rhetorical amplification”. The visuals are gorgeous, the music is gorgeous, and the metaphors (that of the cosmic ocean) are gorgeous too. The entire show is full of care. And it is interesting to see how this documentary series is a very obvious attempt to convince people not to destroy themselves during the Cold War: it uses awe and wonder to make you care about your planet and your place in the universe, hoping that it might show that the Cold War and mutual atomic weapon destruction is ridiculous, when put in the perspective of the scale and beauty of the universe.

I want to finish the post by giving you a few other documents that can be used as support for your practice. Let’s start with a few quotes from philosophers. Think about them this way: do not hesitate to think about them throughout the day. You can read them as many times as you would like. You can copy them by hand, or expand on them in your journal by imitating their style, etc. You can do whatever you need to incorporate them in your practice. They are here to help.

First, a quote from Philo of Alexandria, who describes philosophers in reference to the exercise of the View from Above:

“As their goal is a life of peace and serenity, they contemplate nature and everything found within her: they attentively explore the earth, the sea, the air, the sky, and every nature found therein. In thought, they accompany the moon, the sun, and the rotations of the other stars, whether fixed or wandering. Their bodies remain on earth, but they give wings to their souls, so that, rising into the ether, they may observe the powers which dwell there, as is fitting for those who have truly become citizens of the world.”⁵

Secondly, two quotes from Marcus Aurelius who, as you can see, also uses the stylistic device of enumeration to paint a vivid picture of the world considered in its entirety, hoping that this would trigger in him “greatness of soul”: detachment over minute details and a greater love for the whole of the world:

"Look upon earthly things below as if from some place above them – herds, armies, farms, weddings, divorces, births, deaths, the noise of law courts, lonely places, various foreign nations, festivals, mournings, market places: a mixture of everything and an order composed of contraries."⁶

"'Look from above’ at the spectacle of myriad herds, myriad rites, and manifold journeyings in storm and calm; diversities of creatures who are being born, coming together, passing away."⁷

And finally, let’s end this post on an image to meditate upon:

The swirling masses of light in the picture above are all galaxies. “The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is a deep-field image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, containing an estimated 10,000 galaxies.”⁸ It is not even an exhaustive look at the universe, but only an in depth look in one particular direction. A very narrow glimpse. Our galaxy is merely one galaxy among so many. Our planet merely one planet among so many.

Those dizzying sights are the lifeblood of the View from Above exercise. I hope that I have given you a taste of what is on offer here, if I may put this in such a pedestrian way. There is an entire world out there of artful and scientific glimpses into reality as seen from above. And as Lucretius puts it “nothing is more delightful than to possess well fortified sanctuaries serene, built up by the teachings of the wise”⁹, as they afford you a view from on high and the sense that you have traded an unexamined & painful way of life for a better one, full of awareness, equanimity, awe and wonder.

(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. Last time, we took the plunge into Spinoza’s metaphysical deduction. Another time, we experimented with The Joyful Practice of Stoic Death Writing. Take a look around the blog for more exercises!)

(15/04/2025)

Pierrick Simon

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

NOTES:

1p.248.

2Hadot, Pierre (1995). Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Edited by Arnold I. Davidson. p.238

3De Cruz, Helen (2024). Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p.4.

4A point made by Helen de Cruz in Wonderstruck.

5Philo Judaeus, On the Special la111s, 2, 44 (as quoted in Pierre Hadot’s The View from Above, pp.243-244.)

6Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7, 48. (as quoted in Pierre Hadot’s The View from Above, p.245.)

7Ibid, 9, 30. (as quoted in Pierre Hadot’s The View from Above, p.245.)

8https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field

9Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 2, 7 ff. (as quoted in Pierre Hadot’s The View from Above, p.245)