I’ve been working with some other people in an astrobiology initiative on problems related to the ethics of space exploration. That made me think about the word “exploration” itself (dissociating during zoom meeting, searching out the nearest handhold to avoid ego death, etc.) Soon the word started to look strange. I could figure out its etymology easily enough – ex+plorare, “cry out” – but then I couldn’t for the life of me understand how you got from the etymological meaning to the one it has now (and, actually, had in classical Latin too.) Luckily, Festus’ 2nd c etymological dictionary has an entry for it:
“antiquos pro exclamare usos, sed postea prospicere et certum cognoscere coepit significare. itaque speculator ab exploratore hoc distat, quod speculator hostilia silentio perspicit, explorator pacata clamore cognoscit.”
(The ancients used it as a synonym for “shout,” but later it started to mean “look into” and “get to know for sure.” So a speculator is different than an explorer in this way, that a speculator looks into the enemy’s business in silence, an explorer comes to know pacified things while making noise.)
So the notional connection between “crying out” and the modern sense of the word “explore” is that one investigates pacified affairs by shouting out. Or one shows that one comes in peace by shouting. Or one shows one has pacified (i.e. conquered) something by investigating it noisily. Festus’ dictionary survives only in epitomized form, so we’re missing some important diacritics between these alternatives. It also bears mentioning that the distinction to which Festus points here seems to have been ignored by most Latin writers. It’s good to think with nonetheless, especially because English usage does respect something like Festus’ distinction between the words “explore” and “scout.”
In English, like in Latin, exploration is a cognitive procedure for getting new knowledge. What distinguishes it from scouting is that, notionally at least, one goes about it openly and in the service of universal knowing – though any reader of Burton or Thesiger will know how much duplicity and stealth went into the exploration of Africa and the Near East. Another way of putting it is that one scouts in fear over territories where enemies have the power to stop you, while one explores in confidence where the land is pacata – whether that means peaceful or pacified. Scouting and exploration are spatial concepts that apply to territories, and one could draw a map that divided the world up between them. Scouting would correspond to “Europe” – with due allowance being made for the admission of North America at one end and the removal of the Ottoman domains at the other – while exploration would characterize everywhere else, that is to say the nations and peoples seen from an anglophone perspective as ripe for colonization.
It matters what we plan to do in space. Are we quietly scouting a territory we suspect is hostile? Are we noisily exploring something that we regard as already ours? I ask these questions knowing that most of us (especially the people that matter) have already settled on the second alternative, but hoping that the lag between our futurism and its realization may make room for meaningful reflection. The problem is, after all, not just ethical but acutely pragmatic. Exploration expresses a confidence in our knowledge, our abilities – our power, in short – that may be not at all justified. The nascent field of astrobiology might be able to help us resolve those pragmatic uncertainties, given time. One more reason not to rush to the stars.