Myth and the Human Sciences

Hans Blumenberg's Theory of Myth

Angus Nicholls

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415885492
• eBook ISBN: 9781317817215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This is the first book-length critical analysis in any language of Hans Blumenberg's theory of myth. Blumenberg can be regarded as the most important German theorist of myth of the second half of the twentieth century, and his Work on Myth (1979) has resonated across disciplines ranging from literary theory, via philosophy, religious studies and anthropology, to the history and philosophy of science.

Nicholls introduces Anglophone readers to Blumenberg's biography and to his philosophical contexts. He elucidates Blumenberg's theory of myth by relating it to three important developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German philosophy (hermeneutics, phenomenology and philosophical anthropology), while also comparing Blumenberg's ideas with those of other prominent theorists of myth such as Vico, Hume, Schelling, Max Müller, Frazer, Sorel, Freud, Cassirer, Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno. According to Nicholls, Blumenberg's theory of myth can only be understood in relation to the 'human sciences, ' since it emerges from a speculative hypothesis concerning the emergence of the earliest human beings. For Blumenberg, myth was originally a cultural adaptation that constituted the human attempt to deal with anxieties concerning the threatening forces of nature by anthropomorphizing those forces into mythic images.

In the final two chapters, Blumenberg's theory of myth is placed within the post-war political context of West Germany. Through a consideration of Blumenberg's exchanges with Carl Schmitt, as well as by analysing unpublished correspondence and parts of the original Work of Myth manuscript that Blumenberg held back from publication, Nicholls shows that Blumenberg's theory of myth also amounted to a reckoning with the legacy of National Socialism.

1
Hans Blumenberg

An Introduction

Hans Blumenberg was an interpreter of literary fiction—which Plato referred to as myths—who was at the same time a professional philosopher. The agonistic struggle between literature and philosophy announced in Plato’s attack on the myth-makers in Book Ten of the Republic is a theme to which Blumenberg implicitly devoted his attention from the very beginning of his career, most explicitly in Paradigms for a Metaphorology (Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, 1960), in which the so-called literary device of metaphor is seen as conditioning the existence of philosophical concepts. Blumenberg’s interpretations of ‘Goethe’ in Part IV of Work on Myth, which in their sheer audacity make this most culturally over-burdened of German authors once more fresh and exciting, show his keen awareness of the fact that the stories which an author writes may become intertwined with the stories about his or her life. ‘Goethe’ means not just the real historical person named Johann Wolfgang Goethe who lived from 1749–1832, but also the biographical anecdotes, conversations, and legends, many of which are neither completely true or false, which accompany and to some extent even define the works. “Is there another life that we have ever seen spread out before us in such multifarious relation to reality and illusion?” asks Blumenberg in Work on Myth (WOM, 399–400; AM, 435). And his subsequent analysis shows that the distinction between Goethe and ‘Goethe,’ between reality and its semi-fictional reconstruction, is not altogether an easy one to make.

In a moment of ironic and not-so-private megalomania, Hans Blumenberg once fantasised about the day upon which a telegram would arrive at his house, informing him that half of humanity had read one of his books. His imagined response: “What are the other half doing?”¹ Blumenberg would surely not have compared himself with Goethe, but his ambitions, like his longer books, were not modest. Would the educated reading public have been likely to read, say, a tome of 827 pages devoted to the cave metaphor in Western thought? This is the challenge laid down by Cave Exits (Höhlenausgänge, 1989), the last of Blumenberg’s long studies. The other massive works by Blumenberg—The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Die Legitimität der Neuzeit 1966/1974), The Genesis of the Copernican World (Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt, 1975), Work on Myth (Arbeit am Mythos, 1979), and The Legibility of the World (Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, 1981), Lifetime and World-Time (Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, 1986)—are equally daunting in their erudition and their tendency towards anecdote and digression.

A good deal of this might be put down to Blumenberg’s working methods, probably in use since the 1940s, which consisted of transcribing quotations from primary sources onto index-cards, titled according to the various projects upon which he was working simultaneously at any given time. Some index cards also have cut-out passages from newspaper or journal articles pasted onto them, or are accompanied by related images from magazines. These index cards would then thematically be assembled and worked through during the phase of writing, before being marked with a red pen as erledigt, or ‘used.’ At least since the 1960s, Blumenberg’s writing process consisted of speaking—both with the assistance of his index cards and also freely—into a tape recorder or Dictaphone, the transcript of which would later be typed up by his secretary, before finally being edited by hand by Blumenberg himself. In terms of method, Blumenberg was a ‘materialist,’ not in the philosophical sense of being focused on the physical world, but in the sense that his arguments seem to have been built from the ground up, based on his astonishingly wide reading of primary sources from all periods of Western culture. This pile of material now lies in the bunkers of the German Literary Archive (Deutsches Literaturarchiv) in Marbach am Neckar, the home of Blumenberg’s Nachlass (papers and manuscript remains), in which circa 30,000 index cards can be found.²

As one of Blumenberg’s closest interlocutors—Henning Ritter (1943–2013),³ former editor of the humanities pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—recently observed, all of this has become the stuff of legend, even of literary fiction. In an article that describes Blumenberg as “the great unknown of German philosophy,” Ritter reflects on the ways in which the anthropological insights of Blumenberg’s published works have been applied to his life. Such as when Blumenberg’s study at his home in Altenberge, near Münster—to which he increasingly retreated during the latter stages of his career, and where he would work through his index cards at night “like Marcel Proust, insulated from the external world”⁴—is compared by Odo Marquard to the cave, described in Cave Exits as the sanctum of culture in which prehistoric humans sought refuge from the dangers of the open savannah. Blumenberg’s night-owl tendencies even extended, according to Marquard, to only sleeping six nights per week in order to make up for the lost years of National Socialism, during which university study was forbidden to him. And Marquard relates this habit to the central phenomenological theme of Blumenberg’s Lifetime and World-Time: that once we take departure from the certainties and routines of everyday pre-theoretical existence as embodied in Edmund Husserl’s concept of the life-world, we become increasingly aware of the vast expanse of world-time and of the brevity of our lives in comparison to it.⁵

Further parallels between Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology and his biography have been noted. Such as when Henning Ritter interprets Blumenberg’s desire not to be photographed (only two public photos of him exist) in relation to the theme of seeing and being seen, characterised by Blumenberg in Description of Man as the central anthropological factor in the development of our distant ancestors when they moved onto the open savannah as their forested habitat shrank (BDM, 777). Or the alacrity with which Blumenberg, the defender of the achievements of scientific modernity in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, used the technology of the Dicta-phone in order to compose his works, for it is technology and more broadly culture—again distantly embodied in the first stone purportedly thrown by our pre-human ancestor to defend himself, a primordial scene of self-assertion that is also restaged in Description of Man—that for Blumenberg make us human. It is not coincidental, then, that the novel loosely based on Blumenberg and an entirely fictional circle of his students in Münster, Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s Blumenberg (2011), makes much of Blumenberg’s legendary nightshifts, and begins with the following sentence: “Blumenberg had just taken hold of a new cassette, in order to place it into the Dictaphone.”⁶

Thus, the irony of Henning Ritter’s feature article on Blumenberg (which is accompanied by a large photograph of the man), is that Blumenberg is now anything but unknown: today he counts among the most renowned philosophers in Germany, is the subject of a critically acclaimed novel, and features regularly in German newspapers. It seems that Blumenberg’s late retreat from public life, a less extreme version of that undertaken by Thomas Pynchon or J. D. Salinger in the United States, has even added something to his allure. Yet outside of Germany and especially in the Anglophone world, his profile does not begin to approach that of his immediate forbears and contemporaries like Theodor W. Adorno, Hans-Georg Gadamer or Jürgen Habermas.

Research on Hans Blumenberg remains in its infancy in both the German-speaking and the Anglophone worlds. In recent years, a series of German-language monographs have outlined Blumenberg’s position within the history of German philosophy—some of them provide an overview at an introductory level,⁷ while others go into much greater philosophical depth.⁸ Important edited volumes have also examined Blumenberg’s writings and intellectual legacy in general,⁹ as well as particular themes in his work such as those of philosophical anthropology¹⁰ and the theory of metaphor.¹¹ Other studies have focused upon Blumenberg’s importance for theological discourses.¹² There is only one existing monograph on Blumenberg in English: Elizabeth Brient’s The Immanence of the Infinite, which focuses primarily on the theological dimensions of Blumenberg’s theory of modernity as outlined in the Legitimacy of the Modern Age.¹³ No comprehensive introduction to Blumenberg’s works exists in English, with the closest approximations being Robert M. Wallace’s highly informative introductions to his monumental translations of three key works by Blumenberg.¹⁴ A further general introductory essay by Wallace (concentrating primarily on Work on Myth), as well as four special issues of Anglophone journals, may provide the Anglophone reader with some general orientation.¹⁵

A major recent development in Blumenberg research has been the acquisition of his Nachlass by the German Literary Archive in Marbach am Neckar, which has led to a number of important book publications based on Nachlass materials. While a general introduction to all of Blumenberg’s works is far beyond the scope and primary focus of the present study, Chapters 1 and 7 endeavour to offer an overview of important institutional and political aspects of his life and academic career. Blumenberg poses a particular problem for a purely theoretical or philosophical approach to intellectual history. This is because his early life coincided with and was indelibly marked by the years of National Socialism (1933–45), as well as by the subsequent post-war efforts to deal with that period both institutionally and philosophically. There is no sense in which Blumenberg’s thought in general, and his theory of myth in particular, can be reduced to purely historical or biographical readings. But at the same time, Blumenberg’s thought and especially his theory of myth cannot be separated from this historical context, especially since myth is one of the most politically loaded notions in modern German thought. Blumenberg scholarship has until now by and large neglected to historicise Blumenberg’s works in both institutional and political terms, and the image of ‘Blumenberg’ as the withdrawn and reticent scholar depicted by Henning Ritter, Odo Marquard, and Sibylle Lewitscharoff might suggest that philosophy or theory can take place in the hermetic confines of one’s study, unaffected by history and institutional politics.

This, indeed, may at times have even been Blumenberg’s wish. Writing to his friend Hans Jonas in 1955 in an attempt to convince Jonas to return to Germany, Blumenberg remarked that it is “easier to be finished with the past here than abroad,” referring to the “successful overcoming of the ideological residuum” of National Socialism.¹⁶ As both Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 of this volume will demonstrate, it is doubtful in the extreme whether this ‘residuum’ had in any way been ‘overcome’ in Germany by 1955. Indeed, in Work on Myth and elsewhere, Blumenberg often takes up positions in relation to political debates marked by the legacy of National Socialism without necessarily always naming or citing his interlocutors. This is the case with respect to his near contemporaries in the tradition of German philosophical anthropology—especially Erich Rothacker and Arnold Gehlen—as well as with regard to thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, not to mention those who are very explicitly associated with the politics of National Socialism, such as Carl Schmitt. Our task will therefore be to investigate the philosophical networks and debates within which Blumenberg’s writing on myth is situated, which means that Blumenberg’s historical context is of the utmost importance.

What experiences did Blumenberg undergo during the period of National Socialism? What were the institutional circumstances of Blumenberg’s early research career? What are the key aspects of Blumenberg’s theory of myth? Do they continue to deserve serious consideration today, and if so, why? And how might Anglophone readers approach this most eminently German of writers and thinkers? These are some of the questions to be addressed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Sources
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: A Story about the Telling of Stories
• 1 Hans Blumenberg: An Introduction
• 2 Myth and the Human Sciences during the Sattelzeit
• 3 German Philosophy and the ‘Will to Science’
• 4 Davos and After, or the Function of Anthropology
• 5 Promethean Anthropologies
• 6 Goethe’s ‘Prometheus,’ or on Cultural Selection
• 7 ‘After the Work on Myth’: The Political Reception of Work on Myth
• 8 Conclusion: Political Myth in the Blumenberg Nachlass
• Index