History, Metaphors, Fables

A Hans Blumenberg Reader

Hans Blumenberg, Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, Joe Paul Kroll

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501747991
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

History, Metaphors, and Fables collects the central writings by Hans Blumenberg and covers topics such as on the philosophy of language, metaphor theory, non-conceptuality, aesthetics, politics, and literary studies. This landmark volume demonstrates Blumenberg's intellectual breadth and gives an overview of his thematic and stylistic range over four decades. Blumenberg's early philosophy of technology becomes tangible, as does his critique of linguistic perfectibility and conceptual thought, his theory of history as successive concepts of reality", his anthropology, or his studies of literature. History, Metaphors, Fables allows readers to discover a master thinker whose role in the German intellectual post-war scene can hardly be overestimated.

PART I

HISTORY, SECULARIZATION, AND REALITY

1

THE LINGUISTIC REALITY OF PHILOSOPHY

(1946/1947)

Both in gaining and expanding knowledge of one’s field, the questions of the primary and universal foundation of our cognition and our relationship to the world cannot be passed over like an unhewn and unheeded rock. Whoever today turns with an alert and responsible awareness of this fact toward the efforts of philosophical clarification and engagement with the work that has been done on these problems is to be confronted with an often discouraging resistance, a recalcitrance of philosophical ideas, which the disheartened all too often interpret as exclusivity or esotericism on behalf of philosophical thought. This resistance emanates essentially from the linguistic reality into which the philosophical body of ideas has entered. In discussing it, we can leave aside a difficulty that appears in other realms of knowledge and in poetry: that some, and often the, basic achievements offer themselves only through the medium of a foreign language, and that no translation [Übersetzung] can replace [ersetzen] the encounter with the original document. The basic problems of the linguistic reality of philosophy, however, will arise in every linguistic guise.

These problems make themselves known, to articulate it provisionally, in that the philosophical reality of language shatters and transgresses the terminology not only of everyday life but also of that with which the scholar is intimately familiar. To this we have to add an aspect that causes frustration, and indeed fundamental concern, in anyone familiar with the complex terminology of the natural sciences: that philosophy as a science appears to possess nothing resembling a uniform terminology and by that fact alone largely stands out against the other spheres of the exact analysis of reality. Even where the consistent use of concepts seems to suggest such uniformity, a closer look soon reveals contradictions and differentiations of meaning.

Language as articulation of thought appears to have two basic possibilities at its disposal: one monological and the other dialogical. Mere vocalization, relieving oneself of the burden of thought, being confronted with oneself by means of language, and presenting thought to oneself with the goal of clarifying and shaping it—all this describes the monological mode. The dialogical mode contains communication, the creative transmission [Hinüberzeugen] of a thought, coperforming [Mitvollzug] it and objectifying it into commonality, and confronting objections, while what is said must be something definite held in common. There is no doubt and no denying that the language of philosophical thought is bound to the claim of objective validity and dialogical communication. A philosopher’s monologue cannot oblige us to heed and engage with it. In monologue, a thinker retreats from the sphere in which a matter is regarded jointly and in which one asserts valid claims about it; this is a retreat from the sphere of science in its very form.

Does the linguistic reality of philosophy mentioned above not prove the failure of this basic demand for dialogical statements? Should not philosophy, as the science of the most universally valid norms, structures, and attitudes, by necessity and by its essence also arrive at a valid linguistic form? Does the failure of linguistic objectivity therefore not in effect mean a verdict against philosophy’s claim to being scientific? In our situation, in which so much depends on a positive encounter with the philosophical spirit, these questions are worth examining. In this enterprise, we should be led not by premature programmatic demands but only by the will to understand the deeper sources of the problem touched upon, and to propose it as a topic of discussion and reflection in the first place.

To begin with, the linguistic reality of philosophizing is rooted in the human mind’s millennia-long process of attaining consciousness. The Greeks coined many lasting concepts by taking on the most decisive basic problems. It is both highly appealing and relevant for understanding the whole problematic of philosophical language to pursue these conceptual origins with the help of the documents still available to us. Characteristic of these origins is that they stem from quotidian or poetic speech about the world. For example, at the beginning of pre-Socratic thought, reflection on the basic form of assertion—the existential proposition [Seinsaussage]—leads to the central concept of “being.” This primordial [ursprünglich] thought conceives of human speech as a vessel of truth; truth is only comprehensible as judgment where one element (the subject) is determined through another (the predicate). Already in Heraclitus, this basic form stands in opposition to the disorder of isolated words; it is the logos, in which the agonal structure of reality, the world-law, announces itself. With the exception of the development that leads from Sophism to skepticism, Greek thought orients itself by the form of language, all the way through to Aristotle’s development of the doctrine of the categories. It is precisely through close contact with the most universal elements of language use that concepts are coined. In Aristotle’s categories, to give just one example, the status of concept is still recognizable in that strange intermediate position between isolation from the living context of dialogical speech and independence gained through substantivization. The notion that language immediately springs from the understanding of being keeps Greek terminology, in its main lineage, within the validity of living language use. Only the increasing specialization of the scientific disciplines in late antiquity, in the formation of grammar and dialectics, for instance, tends to obscure this cohesion.

Yet only after the reception of Greek thought in the realm of the Latin language, by patristics and medieval thought, are we confronted with the first moment that detached philosophical language critically from its primordial rootedness in general validity: the translation of philosophical terminology into Latin. This translation—and this is significant—occurred by empathically reenacting the primordial linguistic sense, but from the petrified, in effect technical, meaning that stemmed from its use within the Scholastic traditions. To this should be added the shifts in meaning that important concepts underwent within the Arabic-Islamic or Jewish intellectual sphere. The conceptual artistry of the Middle Ages, dialectical and tradition-bound, did its part to prevent any recourse to the primordial linguistic content, let alone the creation of new concepts from new motives of thought.

This does not yet reveal the full genetic burden of the linguistic reality of philosophy. The extent of this burden is unique compared to all other sciences and is founded in the unrepeatable continuity of questioning and researching. Thus, the general and exemplary validity of the concrete issues reveals itself to be the true source of the linguistic problematic, and it instructs us to catch sight of the problem of the things themselves in it. The most cumbersome part of the genetic burden that rests on language is the fact that the concepts that were adopted and translated from Greek entered Western philosophy’s bifurcating lineages of thought as fixed ciphers, so that despite being based on diametrically opposed world pictures [Weltbilder] and understandings of being [Seinsverständnisse], they appeared in identical linguistic shape. Be it the naturalism of the Averroists or the personalist metaphysics of the Thomists, the realism of transcendentals or medieval nominalism—they all use the same conceptual apparatus. The modern age, too—no matter whether one understands it to be a revolt against Scholasticism or its successor—adopts the preformed and preburdened language of philosophy. The consequence is an immense relativization of concepts. Traditional terminology serves the intellectual achievements of the realist systems no less than those of the critique of knowledge and of idealist metaphysics. One need only think of the protean change in meaning undergone by concepts such as the transcendental, substance, or indeed matter itself!

It is astonishing, despite fundamental upheavals in thought, how few innovations and primordial approaches the conceptual language of philosophy has accomplished since the reception of its ancient foundations. In the present, however, this seems to have changed in one fell swoop. Certain prominent works by contemporary thinkers constitute a downright attack on the ossified and overburdened conceptual edifice of tradition that has become so ambiguous. Since the call “to the things themselves!” rang out, providing a new impulse to philosophical investigation, we have seen a downright eruption of conceptual innovations. Between this new understanding of things and the old one of traditional terminology, there seem to be no correspondences whatsoever. But nor can we recognize many interconnections to our commonplace understanding; quotidian terms in particular are called into question as distorting and obscuring. Generally valid language, it is said, is too heavily predetermined by traditional interpretations to be an organ suitable to a primordial approach to the facts. Some thinkers try to establish a novel philosophical idiom by constantly and repeatedly regarding these things anew. But here the dilemma of our understanding is no less severe than in traditional language, albeit of a different nature. Admittedly, at times it seems to us as if the commonality of a primordial understanding shines through in a new conceptual coinage, but on the whole we are obliged to determine the meaning of concepts through laborious textual interpretation so that we can handle them like formulae.

How can we explain this linguistic eruption in contemporary philosophy? What is the relationship between its intentions and our basic problem of communication [Verständigung]?

Edmund Husserl, whose phenomenological method was the key factor that launched these conceptual innovations, grappled with these questions in his 1910 essay “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.”¹ That a thought directed at the things themselves might begin with deductions from concepts, as Scholasticism still contended, is out of the question today. Husserl, however, stresses that language has an important initial function even for phenomenological analysis in that it points out phenomena in the first place and encourages the explanation of things through the formation of words. Indeed, the phenomenon finds its clarification in the, as it were, “fully intuitional realization of experiential concepts.”² But in all these “stimulations” and “indications” we can already see that the phenomenon’s full intuitiveness exceeds the scope of the “stimulating” or “indicating” word or sentence; if the phenomenon is to be described, that is, linguistically captured, then it is impossible to simply fall back on the original concept. Instead, the expressions that suffice for designating the phenomenon at the beginning of the investigation become, in its course, “fluid and ambiguous.”³ What is characteristic for the progress of such an analysis is that a multitude of “equivocations” [Äquivokationen], both coarse and fine, emerge and become visible. Should they be captured conceptually, then neologisms are inevitable. It is obvious, however, that such an analytic method is bound to progressively multiply the number of neologisms in accordance with the progressive discovery of equivocations, so that the stock of language that is available to the commonly valid understanding cannot be enough to include the results of these ever-expanding clarifications.

But we must ask ourselves: Is there a rigorous methodology that allows us to fix the found elements of intuition in language? And is it even possible to complete this task, or would we one day find ourselves stuck and discouraged in a plethora of uncovered equivocations too immense to oversee? On this question, Husserl himself may be quoted and his assertion offered up for consideration: “A definitive fixation of scientific language presupposes the complete analysis of phenomena—a goal that lies in the dim distance—and so long as this has not been accomplished, the progress of the investigation, too, looked at from the outside, moves to a great extent in the form of demonstrating new ambiguities, distinguishable now for the first time, ambiguities in the very concepts that presumably were already fixed in the preceding investigations. That is obviously inevitable, because it is rooted in the nature of things.”⁴

The impressiveness of this passage, which it remains for us only to acknowledge, lies in the assurance that although we are only at the beginning, we have at our disposal a method that is qualified ultimately to accomplish the exact fixation of conceptuality that hitherto has eluded philosophy—even if it may lie in the “dim distance.” In our effort to confront the resistance of philosophical language today, we will have to keep this approach in view and make it the measure of our achievements.

Translated by Hannes Bajohr

Originally published as “Die sprachliche Wirklichkeit der Philosophie” in Hamburger Akademische Rundschau 1, no. 10 (1946/47): 428–431.

1. 1. [Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 71–148.]
2. 2. [Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” 96; translation altered.]
3. 3. [Husserl, 96.]
4. 4. [Husserl, 96.]

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