Hans Blumenberg : The Myths of Enlightenment

Humans always defeat lions in paintings because there are no lion painters. With this lesson, the griot gets up to leave, as Dani Kouyaté’s Keïta! (1995) comes to an end. The film is set in late twentieth-century Burkina Faso. The aphorism culminates a series of lessons that a folk storyteller imparts to an urban youth, all cautioning that traditional knowledge must be preserved in order to survive the country’s rapid modernization. City dwellers should learn French, but also Mandinka; they should know the oral epic Sundjata as well as they know capitalism.

But the dichotomy is not so easy to draw. The griot delivers the moral in the local language, yet most viewers would recognize it as not unique to West Africa. Versions appear in Aesop and, more significantly in this context, in the fables of La Fontaine. The lesson of cultural difference becomes one of transcultural porosity. Imparting a lesson about otherness, the anecdote refuses to reveal its own nativity; instead it attests to its own capacity to inhabit multiple cultural worlds.

Few scholars devote their careers to following such stories, and those who do tend to be philologists rather than philosophers. Hans Blumenberg, who died in 1996—he might just have seen Keïta!—was the rare philosopher fascinated by such traveling anecdotes. One of his monographs discusses stories of absentminded philosophers who fall down wells; another volume studies depictions of shipwrecks and people watching them.

As he chose his subjects, Blumenberg followed careful selection criteria. The stories had to be short parables, myths, or aphorisms. They had to contain the germ of philosophical argument without quite articulating it, like metaphors with vivid vehicles but ambiguous tenors. Scholars before him would have dismissed these stories as mere illustrations, but Blumenberg claimed that they are pivotal to philosophical thinking. Indeed, they constitute the hinges on which our rational edifices rest. Through the logic of metaphor, such parables buttress otherwise shaky or implausible narratives about the world and one’s own self. They assert ties between different realms of knowledge and experience that otherwise seem threateningly disconnected. Their vividness manages to convince us when rationality fails. Indeed, it might even distract us from the scandal of its failure. When such stories emerge, time and again, across different cultures, they reveal to us some shared features of our humanity.

These are idiosyncratic ideas and a counterintuitive canon. But the interest Blumenberg’s thinking has come to garner shows their continued appeal. Since the 1980s, increasing swathes of his work have appeared in English translation. They have also been the subject of diversifying commentary. The last two years brought us Lions, a translation of his reflections on the cultural life of the king of the beasts. They also saw the translation of Blumenberg, Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s novelistic homage to him.

Blumenberg was born in 1920 in Lübeck, Germany, to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father. He began his university studies in the late 1930s; the Nazis soon interrupted them. Hitler’s government compelled him to leave university and do manual labor, some of it in a concentration camp. Finally, toward the end of the war, he was forced into hiding. Blumenberg would look back on this period with great political and personal frustration. In personal terms, he regarded it as a huge loss of time. To make up for this loss, he reduced his sleep schedule in later years, filling the extra waking hours with reading and writing. His hunger for erudition, considerable before the war, became insatiate. He finally got his degree in three fields: classics, German, and philosophy.

These early experiences haunted Blumenberg in later years. His quest for knowledge grew relentless. His interests also turned to periods of history when traditional erudition had come under threat: the late Middle Ages in its transition to the Renaissance, then the Baroque in its transition to the Enlightenment. Historians describe this interval as the site of a “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns.” Much of Western Europe began to shed Aristotelianism in favor of new, experimental science. Traditional Catholic doctrine, grown bureaucratic and simoniac, came under threat from Protestantism. Participants in these revolutionary movements described themselves as radically breaking with the past. They saw this past, and the many tomes of its learning, as a mostly failed project that is best forgotten.

Blumenberg wondered whether these transitions were quite so radical. He expresses these doubts in his first published volume, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966). Much early modern thought, retroactively praised as “secular,” was enabled by conceptual developments that began in medieval scholasticism. “This is no ‘secularization’ of man’s having been created in God’s image,” Blumenberg declares of Johannes Kepler’s and Gottfried Leibnitz’s ideas of science. “The idea of reason liberating itself from its medieval servitude,” he argues, obfuscates the huge influence the Middle Ages had on what became early modern ideas of progress and reason. Scholastic thinking itself rested on forms of knowledge that the early modern period discarded as non-rigorous, derivative, and partial. The religious myth, the aphorism, and the anecdote are not opposed to rationality. Instead, they are some of the means by which abstract thought emerges from immediate experience. Indeed, these forms’ attachment to subjectivity can never be fully transcended. Christian myths of eschatology and salvation supplied the framework within which the Enlightenment cult of reason justified itself.

Huge and magisterial, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age garnered Blumenberg rapid fame and recognition. He generalizes these views in Work on Myth (1979) and in essays translated as Paradigms for a Metaphorology (translated in 2010). These later writings offer a broad theory of metaphoric thinking through parables, myths, and anecdotes. Such small imaginative forms are necessary connectors and catalysts of innovative thought. In reaching for them, we discover limits to rationality and recognize the associative erudition by which we supplement it. These supplements are sometimes temporary, but sometimes ineradicable. Blumenberg called ineradicable metaphoric connections “absolute metaphors.”

Blumenberg’s writing was always respected but, for a long time, not exactly popular. Some of this neglect is contextual; some it has to do with his stylistic difficulty. Twentieth-century Western thought was rent by quarrels over the value of culture and the reality of selfhood. In these quarrels, Blumenberg was often on the losing side. More interested in the stories we tell about existence than in Being as a concept, he preferred Ernst Cassirer’s and Aby Warburg’s bifurcating, cross-cultural comparisons to Martin Heidegger’s generalizations. Like Cassirer and Warburg, and unlike Heidegger, he was more drawn to the works of human hands and minds than to the non-human world. Sunk deep in history, he could come across as apolitical, with his back to the present. For postmodernists, he placed too much faith in systems of knowledge. For rationalists such as Jürgen Habermas, Blumenberg was too skeptical about abstraction and simplification; he was also too mistrustful of our capacity for enlightenment and self-awareness.

On top of this contrariness, Blumenberg’s style tends toward the allusive and the gnomic. One comes to understand his arguments slowly, drawn in by a friend’s recommendation and not because a passage seduced one at a bookstore. To begin one of his books can feel like entering a lecture that has already started. (I sometimes looked, in vain, for a missing introductory chapter.) His late work collects anecdotes without much explanation or categorization; it seems to rely half on its reader’s presumed erudition and half on the anecdotes’ intrinsic charm. At their best, the books do sustain this wager. Yet the risk they thereby take is considerable.

The recently translated Lions and Blumenberg provide accessible introductions to Blumenberg’s thought. Beginning with La Fontaine’s fable about the lion painter, Lions cycles through a dozen anecdotes Blumenberg collected and commented on late in life. Most of them circle around the notion of the lion as absent or avoided. His absence or avoidance resonates with human attitudes toward natural or human others: slyness, repression, cowardice. Blumenberg traces how each anecdote travels from one author to the next. Sometimes, its emphasis changes in transition; at other times, it remains strikingly stable.

Blumenberg refuses to generalize about any “moral” these stories might collectively teach us. Indeed, he insists that part of their appeal comes from their inscrutability. We rarely know why certain bits of language appeal to us. Indeed, our attraction to them hints at the incompleteness of our self-awareness and cultural awareness. They respond to a need or relation we can articulate only obliquely, if at all.

One such lion anecdote comes from “an Arabic source.” Blumenberg finds it in Friedrich Hebbel’s quotation from the medieval encyclopedist Vincent de Beauvais:

  The lion becomes feverish at the sight of a man. To cure himself of the fever, he must devour an ape. Similia similibus.

“What might have inspired Hebbel to copy down this cryptic fable?” Blumenberg asks. His answer is almost as cryptic as the fable itself:

  The lion satisfies his feverish hunger for man, his only rival in the animal kingdom, by consuming the latter’s distorted image, his caricature: the ape. Hebbel does not comment on such discoveries. Indeed, he probably did not fully understand what it was about this vignette that had caught his attention. Did it hint at a solution to his problem? And if so, what was it?

 An absolute metaphor: by definition, it cannot be reduced to a formula.

Instead of resolving Hebbel’s confusion, Blumenberg echoes it. He draws a parallel between Hebbel’s interest in this anecdote and the older writer’s personality, but the link remains loose and correlative; it never veers into Freudian overdetermination. Instead Blumenberg marvels at how many people seem to have preceded Hebbel in his fascination. Is his interest an instance of a more universal, existential concern? Or does it have more unique, idiosyncratic sources?

Blumenberg insists that we can never fully answer such questions. What such parables do show is that the shadowy corner of experience they represent has had prior visitors. Like Hebbel and Blumenberg himself, these prior visitors were unable to bring its contents into the full light of reason. Feeling their gazes alongside one’s own, one experiences a mute intergenerational solidarity. It is almost, but not quite, a religious experience. In philosophical terms, one might describe it as a reminder of the imperfect rationality of abstractions. We do not always move into concepts through quasi-mathematical proofs. Many of them emerge from more subjective associations whose local origins and affects we cannot shed or transcend.

Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s Blumenberg approaches his thought more fantastically. An acclaimed German novelist, Lewitscharoff has authored several award-winning volumes. Many mingle realist and surrealist elements, and several feature other famous intellectual and artistic figures. Within this context, her novel about Blumenberg reads as an exploration of both his thought and Lewitscharoff’s own attraction to metaphor and magical realism.

Blumenberg takes place in the years leading up to the philosopher’s death. As Lewitscharoff’s protagonist, Blumenberg experiences a strange visitation. In his study there appears a lion that no one else can see. The lion yawns; it sleeps; it watches him. He grows used to its presence but cannot bear to touch it. Until his mind fails him, Blumenberg plumbs its depths to determine why the lion is there. He does so in the associative ways one might have expected:

    Agave’s false lion. The fable of the lion’s court. The psalmist’s lion, roaring. The lion forever vanished from the Land of Canaan. The symbolic animal of Mark the Evangelist. Mary of Egypt and her lion companion. The pious animal of Saint Jerome in his study. Who was the lion?

Meanwhile, around him, the fates of his students also veer toward death. Those of a younger generation who attend his lectures die amid illusions and quasi-mythical beliefs that are no less real to them than the lion seems to Blumenberg. Like the anecdote collectors about whom he writes, they are haunted by parables not of their own invention. One student, Hansi, collapses while delivering a raving speech on stones and lambs. “While the men dragged him towards the exit, he screamed time and again for his briefcase and his lambs. He screamed ‘It is I, I am the stone that screams!’” Another, Richard, persuades himself that he will be the savior of a teenage indigenous woman, but the woman’s family beats him to death. A third student, Gerhard, perishes like his hero Samson, in the midst of a straining academic “conquest.” Isa, whom Gerhard loves, kills herself over an obsession with Blumenberg.

Much about these plots can seem predictable, even stereotypical. But their familiarity is part of Lewitscharoff’s point. Learning does not infinitely increase our awareness and autonomy. Sometimes it only contours out our blind spots and inarticulacies. It also reminds its readers that none of us is alone in the inarticulacy and irrationality of our inner motivations. We inhabit versions of confusions other people have experienced. This knowledge cannot completely free us from illusions, but it can make us feel less alone in being beset and overcome by them. It can also, as it does for Lewitscharoff’s Blumenberg, help us accept our temporal and mental finitude with equanimity.

Not everyone will share Blumenberg’s preoccupations. But the method that leads him into the study of arcane fables is worth any reader’s attention. In today’s digital world, we often communicate through forms not unlike Blumenberg’s parables. What is a meme, after all, or a viral Facebook comment, if not such an emergent half-abstraction?

As digital data systems continue to expand, our human memories seem more anecdotal than ever. Transcultural communication reveals the subjectivity of our local thought systems with intensifying clarity. The analogies we use to move between cultures and disciplines, or between artificial intelligence and human consciousness, come to seem ever more far-fetched, like metaphors. To float in seas of such associative, anecdotal knowledge can make one feel passive. Blumenberg describes the appeal of this mode of thinking in ways that humble but also empower his reader. He helps us see its philosophical usefulness without obscuring its limits. Lions and Blumenberg lead us into his writing with gentle whimsy. Hopefully, they will inspire readers to reach for his more challenging works as well.

The Myths of Enlightenment. By  Marta Figlerowicz. Boston Review , April 9 , 2019       

Lots of people blame the way things have been going lately on ‘false consciousness’. We are, they say, trapped in a conceptual scheme which distorts the way things really are. All our ways of talking, acting and hoping are infected by these concepts. We cannot expect things to get any better until we rid ourselves of them and adopt a new form of intellectual life, one which helps to encourage the emergence of new forms of social life. On this view, we are just not with it if our highest social hopes are, for example, that Somozas and Castros will be replaced by Allendes, that larger numbers of people will lead longer, more leisured lives, and that we shall eventually get solar power and nuclear disarmament. For we are still thinking in a ‘liberal’ or ‘hegemonic’ or ‘scientistic’ or ‘technocratic’ or ‘rationalistic’ way. This way of thinking is, we are told, ‘bankrupt’. What we should be hoping for is that, in our capacity as the vanguard of human thought, we shall be able to break out of the vocabularies which we have inherited from the 19th century, and thus ‘unmask’ what is being done by people whose highest hopes are still those of John Stuart Mill.

When people who take this line are asked what alternative concepts they would recommend, they usually reply that the question is premature. Self-criticism must come first. We need to deconstruct the metaphysics of presence, or to become aware of the repressive character of the most benevolent-looking of contemporary institutions, or to see the distortions induced by innocuous-seeming linguistic expressions. Time enough to think of some new metaphysics or institutions or language when we have gotten rid of the old. This is a predictible reply, for those who accuse us of ‘false consciousness’ would risk self-refutation if they replied: ‘Right. Here are the new concepts you need.’ The danger is that the rest of us might say: ‘They sound pretty good – we’ll give them a whirl.’ Such a reply would falsify the original claim that we had all been imprisoned within old ways of thinking. If intelligible alternative concepts are available for the asking, then the old concepts were not deep and tacit and unquestioned enough to have created ‘false consciousness’. Chains that easy to break cannot count as bondage. No ‘epistemological rupture’ will be required. So people who use such notions cannot tell us what is false about our consciousness by spelling out what undistorted consciousness looks like. They have to gesture in the direction of a place where such consciousness exists or existed.

Marxists usually gesture in the direction of a working class which has not been corrupted by ‘consumerism’, and hence retains a revolutionary consciousness. Others gesture in the direction of a monastery in Ladakh, or a commune in Oregon. But mostly the gesture is towards the past. Nietzsche, at his worst, gestured towards some narcissistic and inarticulate hunks of Bronze Age beefcake. Carlyle gestured towards some contented peasants working the lands of a kindly medieval abbot. Lots of us occasionally gesture in the direction of the lost world in which our parents or our grandparents told us they grew up. Heidegger, the great master of nostalgia, kept gesturing towards those pre-Socratics whose one-liners left most room for retranslation (or, as he put it, the most open space for Being).

It is to the credit of such post-Heideggerian philosophers as Derrida and Foucault that they avoid this insistence on the belatedness of the modern age. They are trying to work out from under the notion of ‘false consciousness’ by admitting that ‘false’ is not the right term, and that ‘unmasking’ is the wrong rhetoric. They recognise that if we are going to set aside the reality-appearance distinction, typical of what Heidegger called ‘the metaphysics of presence’, we must be careful not to smuggle it back in, disguised as a distinction between the pristine old and the nasty new. So what we get from Derrida and Foucault, and from other contemporary French writers, is not so much attempts to unmask the realities of the time as warnings to eschew ‘totalisation’ – to avoid the ‘metaphysical’ impulse to place everything within one great big ‘privileged’ ahistorical context. From this point of view, Heidegger’s downbeat history of philosophy (with everything getting more impoverished and constrained and etiolated as you go along) is just Hegel stood, yet again, on his head – the inverse of Hegel’s upbeat story of everything having gotten richer and freer and more colourful. What we want, on this view, is acknowledgment of discontinuity and open-endedness and contingency, rather than either nostalgia or exuberance.

Given this state of intellectual play, about the last thing one would expect to come down the pike is a great sweeping history of the course of European thought, built on the Hegel-Heidegger scale, which has Francis Bacon as one of its heroes, speaks well of the Enlightenment (of all periods), and suggests that the future lies (of all directions) ahead. It has been a long time since anybody with pretensions to historical depth has agreed with Macaulay about Bacon. The Enlightenment has been a favourite target ever since Adorno blamed it for Los Angeles. The belief that things might well get better and better the more technological mastery we acquire has almost vanished, even from the popular press. But Blumenberg’s book makes all the things that Heidegger made look bad look good again. He turns Heidegger’s story on its head, but does not fall back into the totalising metaphysics which backed up Hegel’s story. He gives us good old-fashioned Geistesgeschichte, but without the teleology and purported inevitability characteristic of the genre, and condemned by liberals such as Popper and Berlin.

Die Legitimität der Neuzeit was published in 1966, and has been much discussed in Germany, though not much elsewhere. Badly-educated English-speaking philosophers like myself (the kind who read long books in German only if they absolutely have to, non sine ira et studio) owe a great deal to Robert Wallace. He has translated eight hundred pages of very tough German as lucidly as literalness permits. (We also owe a lot to the MIT Press series ‘Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought’, which promises more Blumenberg books in the future.) Those of us who agree with Nietzsche and Heidegger that the philosophical tradition is pretty well played out, with Carlyle and Foucault that the arts and the sciences have not been unmixed blessings, and with Marxists that we should not believe what the lying capitalist press tells us about the modern world, but whose highest hopes are still those of Mill, now have a champion. Or, if not exactly a champion, at least somebody whose upbeat history we can cite against those who revel in belatedness, and against those who fear that telling big sweeping geistesgeschichtlich stories will reinforce our bad old totalising urges.

The German mode of gearing up to think about something – starting with the Greeks and working down through, for example, Cicero, Galileo and Schelling before saying anything off your own bat – is easily parodied. But it is an explicit and conscientious way of doing something that we all do, usually tacitly and carelessly. We all carry some potted intellectual history around with us, to be spooned out as needed. Those of us who don’t do the historical work ourselves are fated to pick up, usually at several removes, somebody else’s story (for example, Augustine’s, Macaulay’s, Marx’s, H.G. Wells’s, Will Durant’s). Such stories determine our sense of what is living and what is dead in the past, and thus of when the crucial steps forward, or the crucial mistakes or ruptures, occurred.

Most intellectuals still think that the most decisive step of all came in the 17th and 18th centuries, when we got out from under prejudice, superstition and the belief in God. Since then we have been becoming freer and freer thanks to the developing natural sciences, the proliferation of new artistic forms, increasingly democratic political institutions, and similar aids to self-confidence, necessary for life in a Godless universe. The alternative, minority view (which has become the majority view among French and German intellectuals in the last few decades) is that the 17th and 18th centuries merely ‘secularised’ various religious themes. This story dismisses such visions of human progress as Mill’s, Marx’s, Dewey’s and Rawls’s as merely anthropomorphised and vulgarised versions of Christian eschatology. This view is nicely summed up by a quote from Karl Löwith, included by Wallace in his very clear and helpful ‘Translator’s Introduction’: ‘The modern mind has not made up its mind whether it should be Christian or pagan. It sees with one eye of faith and the other of reason. Hence its vision is necessarily dim in comparison with either Greek or Biblical thinking.’ From this point of view, it does not make much difference whether you prefer Socrates to Christ or conversely, as long as you despise the dim moderns. Löwith here follows Nietzsche, who was equally nasty about both Socrates and Christ, but insisted that either was infinitely preferable to us feeble late-comers. Löwith’s view chimes with Heidegger’s slogan ‘We are too late for the gods and too early for Being,’ and with similar slogans in Ortega, Strauss, Adorno etc. Whatever else these people disagree about, they unite in despising the hopes of contemporary liberals.

Blumenberg gets his book off to an unfortunately slow start with a hundred pages on the notion of ‘secularisation’, designed to under-cut the cliché that liberal belief in progress is just warmed-over Christian hope. This section is filled with arch and allusive replies to critics of the first edition of the book – replies which Wallace does his best to elucidate in footnotes, but which are often pretty confusing. Still, the drift is clear: just because we have recognised the silliness of the claim that Christianity was ‘just superstition and priestcraft’ we need not run to the other extreme and say that Enlightenment beliefs in Nature and Progress were ‘just heretical re-formulations of Christian dogma’. What the Enlightenment gave us was not ‘the transposition of authentically Christian convictions into secularised alienation from their origin, but rather ... the reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant’. That is, people still needed answers to questions like ‘What is it all for?’ but once they had given up trying to make sense of a relation between themselves and Omnipotence they found some genuinely new answers to give to this question, answers which had nothing to do with Omnipotence.

These answers consisted in variations on the claim that the point of our lives lies in our contribution to an infinite task – the acquisition of Baconian knowledge-as-power, the satisfaction of theoretical curiosity – which lies before the species as a whole. This is not a Christian heresy, any more than Christianity was ‘just’ Gnosticism plus some new proper names. The Enlightenment did not just rechristen the Incarnate Infinite ‘man’ instead of ‘Christ’. Rather, from Hobbes on ‘the infinite serves ... less to answer one of the great traditional questions than to blunt it, less to give meaning to history than to dispute the claim to be able to give it meaning.’ The substitution of an infinitely long time in which progress can occur for a pre-existent infinite which will redeem our finitude is not just a ‘transposition’. It is a leap in the dark of the same magnitude as the ‘leap’ which Kierkegaard said separates the Christian from the Socratic. Here as elsewhere in the book, Blumenberg shows us how easy and misleading it is to pick a description sufficiently abstract to encompass ancient, medieval and modern beliefs, and then to say that they are all ‘merely alternative forms’ of the same superseded way of thinking. This facile use of abstraction ignores the struggle and the labour which were required to forge these ‘alternative forms’, and the fact that no one would have gone through such struggles for the sake of a ‘transposition’.

In Part Two of the book – ‘Theological Absolutism and Human Self-Assertion’ – Blumenberg hits his stride, and swings into his story. He thinks that the Middle Ages reached a predestined crisis when the notion of Divine Omnipotence was thought through by Ockham to its bitter end. Ockham urged that there was no reason knowable to man why God actualised this possible world rather than another. This left us no alternative but Baconian pragmatism: the attitude that says: ‘Who cares how things look to God? Let us find out how they can be made to work for us.’ On this view, Ockham cleared the ground for Galileo: ‘It was not a matter of indifference which of the possible worlds God had in fact created; but since man could not hope to fathom this decision, it had to be made a matter of indifference. The search for a set of instruments for man that would be usable in any possible world provides the criterion for the elementary exertions of the modern age; the mathematising and the materialising of nature.’

To view nature as matter in motion was not, on Blumenberg’s view, a live option until the medieval dialectic had played itself out – until the hope that nature was created for the sake of man had destroyed itself from within. It is not that ‘science’ (incarnate earlier in Lucretius and reborn in Galileo) ‘discovered’ what the world was really like, and thus no longer needed the hypothesis of a divinity. Rather, there was intellectual room for what we now call ‘science’ only when another, initially more promising, alternative had been worked through.

Baconian pragmatism and what Dyksterhuis called ‘the mechanisation of the world-picture’ made possible the modern age – the age of what Blumenberg calls ‘self-assertion’. His attempt to legitimate the modern age is an attempt to defend all the things which Heidegger despised about the 20th century: its proliferating curiosity, its urge for technical mastery, its refusal to be interested in something larger than itself which contains it and makes it possible, and its consequent orientation toward an unknown future. For Blumenberg, the Romantic attempt to discredit the Enlightenment, and the continuation of this attempt by Nietzsche and Heidegger, confuse a justified criticism of the Enlightenment’s attempt at ‘self-foundation’ with an unjustified criticism of its ideal of self-assertion. The Enlightenment was, indeed, wrong to see itself as the discovery of the true, ahistorical framework of human existence – as the first occasion on which humans had seen themselves as of they truly were. But one can agree with Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s and Derrida’s criticisms of the very idea of such a framework (‘the metaphysics of presence’) without despising the mode of life which the Enlightenment made possible for us. Blumenberg wants to abandon Husserl’s nostalgic Cartesian hope to escape from history into presuppositionless philosophy (a hope still shared by many analytic philosophers). But he insists that the fact that the modern age lacks ‘foundations’ is to its credit, not a reason for mistrusting it. It is an indication of courage, not of weakness or of self-deception. The legitimacy of our modern consciousness is simply that it is the best way we have so far found to give sense to our lives. This is to say that it beats the only other two ways we know bout – the ancient attempt to find philosophical foundations, and the medieval attempt to find theological ones. So Blumenberg can pretty much agree with Heidegger’s account of the stages we have traversed since Parmenides, but whereas Heidegger sees these stages as successive fallings-away from primordial greatness, Blumenberg sees them as rational rejections of alternatives that didn’t work out. The rejections were rational not by reference to ahistorical criteria, but merely by reference to what he calls ‘sufficient rationality’ – rationality as pragmatic choice among available tools, without recourse to antecedent standards of preference. This is just enough rationality ‘to accomplish the post-medieval self-assertion and to bear the consequences of this emergency self-consolidation’. Blumenberg wants to make a virtue of what the Romantics rightly diagnosed as a necessity for those who think of empirical science as the paradigmatic human activity: viz. the abandonment of a context for human life larger than that provided by the activities of our contemporaries, and the abandonment of some more definite object of hope than the unknown fortunes of our descendants.

The story which is adumbrated in Part Two of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age is told again, at greater length and with more attention to the ancient world, in Part Three (‘The “Trial” of Theoretical Curiosity’). This is the longest part of the book, and is a series of reminders that the sentence which begins Aristotle’s Metaphysics (‘All men by nature desire to know’) has not always had the sense it has for us. It has not always meant that our curiosity about how things work is an essential and laudable part of us. For the ancients, this phrase implied both that knowledge of theoretical truth was necessary for happiness and that ‘the truth in its totality was at the disposition of the individual’ (as opposed to the race, in the course of a potentially infinite future). Our modern concept of happiness has to do (as Heidegger rightly says) with mastery rather than with contemplation or participation. It is a Baconian conception of happiness which, Blumenberg says, ‘reduced the necessary knowledge to the amount fixed by the requirements of domination over natural reality. The recovery of paradise was not supposed to yield a transparent and familiar reality but only a tamed and obedient one.’ Blumenberg tells a story of how the assumption that reality was transparent and familiar yields to ancient scepticism about both of the implications which Aristotle had drawn from his maxim. He then shows how the Sceptics’ renunciation of knowledge of reality (‘for the last time in our tradition down to Nietzsche,’ Blumenberg provocatively but dubiously says) is trumped by Tertullian’s claim that Christ has made theoretical curiosity obsolete. This claim detaches happiness from the pursuit of knowledge, and puts Christian faith in the vacancy left by the sceptical dissolution of the possibility of a contemplative life. From then on, the burden of proof was on those who (like St Thomas Aquinas) thought that Aristotle was not wholly wrong, and that curiosity might not be simply a vice (the excitation of an unruly member, the inquiring eye as homologue of the pushy penis).

Blumenberg takes very seriously indeed the episcopal condemnation of St Thomas for having cast doubt on divine omnipotence, interpreting it as an indictment for curiositas. He sees the medieval period as driven to insist on that omnipotence by the break which it had made with ancient thought. So he thinks it was fated to wind up with Ockham’s nominalist and voluntarist rejection of the Aristotelian and Thomistic claim that the human mind naturally grasps the essences of things. But this rejection leaves theoretical curiosity without excuse. Bacon’s desertion of the idea of ‘the essences of things’, and the infinitising of space and time which followed Copernicus, provided a new excuse – one which the ancients had never thought of, and which the medievals would have regarded as blasphemous. Blumenberg traces the further development of this excuse in discussions of (among others) Galileo, Descartes, Voltaire, Hume and Kant. He ends this section of the book with a sympathetic restatement of Feuerbach’s claim that ‘the future heals the pains of the past’s unsatisfied knowledge drive,’ and a sympathetic interpretation of Freud’s remark that ‘the postponement of loving until full knowledge is acquired ends in a substitution of the latter for the former.’ Both men are interpreted as recognising that ‘ancient efforts to understand the infinite, the absolute, the self-sufficient, the self-enjoying turn out to be necessarily roundabout attempts by man to grasp himself ... as having a right to self-enjoyment.’

The concluding Part Four of the book is a very beautiful diptych called ‘Aspects of the Epochal Threshold: The Cusan and the Nolan’. Blumenberg thinks that what happened between the time of Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno (of Nola) was a genuinely ‘epochal’ change, but that ‘there are no witnesses to changes of epoch. The epochal turning is an imperceptible frontier, bound to no crucial date or event.’ So he offers us the view from Cusa’s side of the threshold (‘the world as God’s self-restriction’) and from Bruno’s (‘the world as God’s’ indefinitely long and wide ‘self-exhaustion’). Here the discussion becomes much more detailed and exegetical than in earlier portions of the book, and I shall not try to summarise it. Suffice it to say that Bruno, like Bacon and Feuerbach, is one of Blumenberg’s unfashionable heroes. For Blumenberg, Bruno ‘only accepted a challenge that was historically posed. He gave it an answer that went to the root of the formation of the age that had come to an end. What was received as “joyful tidings” and in the toil of centuries had become “Scholasticism”, he experienced as trauma.’

In the sketchy plot-summaries I have been giving I have barely been able to hint at the subtlety, richness and originality of Blumenberg’s book. There is not a stale sentence in it. Everything has been thought out anew. This makes it a slow book to read, for one constantly has to chew over novel interpretations of familiar texts. (Not to mention having to deal with texts one never knew existed – like Peter Damian’s discussion of whether God can restore lost virginity.) Although the scholarship is overwhelming (and, like all scholarship, disputable and likely eventually to be corrected), one never feels that a fact or a text has been dragged in so that the author can show off. On the contrary, there is a moral earnestness about the book which is extremely impressive. Blumenberg clearly feels that the damage done to the liberal intellectuals’ self-confidence by Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s contempt for the modern needs to be undone. It took considerable courage to try to do this: to be unfashionable enough to insist that, despite all the continuities which scholarship has detected, the traditional divisions between ancient, medieval and modern are just as important as we always thought them, and then to argue that our technological civilisation has nothing to be ashamed of (even though it has a great deal to be wary of).

It should not be thought, however, that Blumenberg wants to revive Enlightenment scientism. He should not be seen as a champion of ‘reason’ against what is sometimes (misleadingly) called ‘Heideggerian irrationalism’. He rightly criticises Heidegger’s own ‘history of Being’ as a revived form of Ockhamite theology, but he is equally adamant against the idea that the modern age is the one ‘in which reason, and thus man’s natural vocation, finally prevailed’. As he says, ‘the idea of reason liberating itself from its medieval servitude made it impossible to understand how such servitude could ever have been inflicted upon the constitutive power of the human spirit ... Another dangerous implication of this explanation was that it was bound to inject doubt into the self-consciousness of reason’s definitive victory and the impossibility of a repetition of its subjection. Thus the picture of its own origins and possibility in history that the epoch of rationality made for itself remained peculiarly irrational.’ On Blumenberg’s view, the Enlightenment’s scientistic attempt to ground itself as well as to assert itself – its urge to regard itself as something more than just a further desperate attempt by the species to give itself a point – was bound to produce Heidegger’s reactive attempt to get beyond ‘grounding’ (and, also, one might add, the popular French parlour game of mettre en abîme).

It seems to follow from what he says, though Blumenberg does not make this explicit, that the way to stop the pendulum swinging between ‘irrationalism’ and ‘defences of reason’ is to let historical self-consciousness take the place of metaphysics. Such historical self-consciousness would not require ahistorical metaphysical or epistemological back-up, but merely a vocabulary which, as he says, has ‘a durability that is very great in relation to both our capacity to perceive historical events and the rate of change involved in them’. In other words, if we can tell a story about why we moderns are in better shape than the ancients and the medievals, we’ve got what he calls ‘sufficient rationality’ – the same sort of Whiggish rationality as we use when telling stories of scientific progress. We can ignore the question of whether the heuristic vocabulary we use in telling this story – the vocabulary which describes ‘the constant matrix of needs’ which humans fulfil by telling themselves philosophical and theological and historical stories is – grounded in anything. (As we ignore the question of whether the vocabulary of modern physics, which we use heuristically when writing the history of ancient physics, is more than ‘just’ our vocabulary.) If such a vocabulary makes enough sense of the past to let us avoid unanswerable riddles like ‘How did human reason let itself be repressed for so long?’ or ‘How did we ever get stuck with the “metaphysics of presence” in the first place?’ that will be justification enough.

Blumenberg resembles Foucault in his attempt to get intellectual history out from under ‘the dilemma of nominalism and realism in interpreting the validity of the concept of an epoch’. He shares Foucault’s distrust for ‘the logic of continuity’ which ‘takes as its only alternatives the constancy of what “was there all along”, or preformation extending as far back as documentation is possible’. But whereas Foucault settles for striking discontinuities, abjuring ‘totalising’ stories which cover twenty-five hundred years, Blumenberg thinks that we can keep on writing such stories if we recognise that ‘all logic ... is based on structures of dialogue.’ But the dialogue in question is one which only belatedly finds out what it has been about:

If the modern age was not the monologue beginning at point zero, of the absolute subject – as it pictures itself – but rather the system of efforts to answer in a new context questions that were posed to man in the Middle Ages, then this would entail new standards for interpreting what does in fact function as an answer to a question but does not represent itself as such an answer ... In a cartoon ... De Gaulle was pictured opening a press conference with the remark, ‘Gentlemen! Now will you please give me the questions to my answers!’ Something along these lines would serve to describe the procedure that would have to be employed in interpreting the logic of a historical epoch in relation to the one preceding it.

Here Blumenberg seems to be saying that, just as the history of science represents Aristotle as talking about inertia even though he did not believe there was such a thing, so we must read the ancients and the medievals by our own lights. We need not worry about whether those lights pick out ‘what was there all the time’, nor about whether we can translate our jargon and theirs into a common ‘neutral’ vocabulary. It is enough that we should find a story which treats our predecessors neither as heroes nor as fools, but simply as fellow inquirers who lacked the advantages of hind sight.

The first edition of Blumenberg’s book was published four years after Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and one year before Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses. But the latter book waited only six years to be translated into English. Ever since it has stood side by side with Kuhn’s on many bookshelves, profoundly affecting the way we English-speakers think about intellectual history. It is a pity that Blumenberg’s book went untranslated for 17 years. If it had been on those same shelves for the past decade our reflections on such topics as ‘progress’ and ‘rationality’ would have been greatly enriched. For Blumenberg, as aware of ‘incommensurability’ as Kuhn and of ‘ruptures’ as Foucault, helps us see that we have to keep right on being ‘Whiggish’ in our historiography, and that what matters is the subtlety and self-consciousness of our Whiggery. He thus helps us see that the demand to unmask completely, to make all things new, to start from nowhere, to substitute new true consciousness for old false consciousness, is itself an echo of the Enlightenment. It is precisely that part of the Enlightenment which really is ‘bankrupt’

Against Belatedness. By Richard Rorty.  London Review of Books , June 16, 1983.

Review of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg, translated by Robert Wallace

 MIT Press, 1983