Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger and Cassirer

Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger and Cassirer V i d a P av e s i ch

davo s : p h i l o s o p h i c a l s ta r t i n g p o i n t s a n d g o a l s between 1928 and 1931, davos, switzerland was the site of a colloquium series dedicated to promoting cooperation between nations and peoples in post-war Europe. The colloquium is remembered primarily for the famous confrontation in 1929 between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer over the proper interpretation of Kant and neo-Kantianism, a confrontation that also registered the ascendance of Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics and the devaluation of Cassirer’s more traditionally Enlightenment view of civilization as progress from mythos to logos. Cassirer was the last representative of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, and Heidegger was the rising star who had recently published Being and Time. When Heidegger discounted the emphasis placed by the Marburg neo-Kantians on the structuring role played by reason in experience and Cassirer’s insistence on the objectivity of symbolic forms, he challenged everything this represented. The Davos disputation was one more forum for Heidegger to launch his fundamental ontology and to publicly assert his place to the younger generation of philosophers over against a neo-Kantianism in decline. For many, this encounter was an absolute watershed: it is of historical and philosophical importance, and it had political, ethical, and existential ramifications based on very different interpretations of Kant.1 Less widely studied are Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s divergent attitudes toward philosophical anthropology, which was a subtheme at Davos, and in their works generally during this period. In the 1920s and 1930s, the German philosophical 1 See, for example, Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2000), 1; Geoffrey Waite, “On Esotericism: Heidegger and/or Cassirer at Davos,” Political Theory 26 (1998), 610; and Wayne Cristaudo, “Heidegger and Cassirer: Being, Knowing, and Politics,” Kant-Studien 82 (1991): 469–83.

Vida Pavesich is Lecturer in Philosophy at California State University, East Bay. Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 3 (2008) 421–48

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anthropologists, such as Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen, maintained that anthropology, understood as a study of the invariant conditions of human existence, should be the central concern of philosophy. As such, philosophical anthropology was distinguished from empirical disciplines such as ethnology and physical anthropology. Philosophical anthropology did not aim for an essentialist conception of human nature, but focused on orientation problems faced by all members of the human species. In 1928, in Man’s Place in Nature, Max Scheler set the tone for philosophical anthropology by proclaiming that “man is more of a problem to himself at the present time than ever before in recorded history.”2 The anthropologists claimed that solving critical social and political problems entailed resolving fundamental philosophical questions about the type of creature a human being is. In varying ways, the anthropologists—and Heidegger—were influenced by Dilthey’s philosophy of life and advances in the sciences, particularly biology. At Davos and in Being and Time (§10), Heidegger claimed that philosophical anthropology was anthropocentric and reductive, because it made man the center of philosophy.3 And even though he did not wholly reject the idea of a philosophical anthropology, Heidegger cautioned against understanding Dasein anthropologically. Furthermore, he regarded Cassirer’s formalist philosophy of symbolic forms as an anthropocentric anthropology. Although Cassirer denied the charge of anthropocentrism, he had no quarrel with the label “philosophical anthropologist.” 4 Indeed, in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (vol. 4), written during the same period, he affirmed that “the fundamental answer to the question of the ‘essential concept’ of mankind . . . can come only from a ‘philosophy of symbolic forms.’”5 This subtheme at Davos concerns the relation between the question “What is man?” and philosophical inquiry, a legacy of Kant’s famous fourth question. In Lectures on Logic, Kant had asserted that all issues in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics ultimately lead back to this question, although he was skeptical about formulating a suitable answer. At Davos, and immediately after in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), Heidegger explicitly connected his project with a reinterpretation of Kant’s fourth question—a question that in his view had become “questionable,” but must not be answered anthropologically.6 The questionableness of “man” was also a theme for the philosophical anthropologists, but Heidegger insisted that his questioning was more fundamental. Given Heidegger’s subsequent influence on the course of modern philosophy and contemporary suspicions about seeking normative conceptions of human nature, it behooves us to take a fresh look at Davos from this perspective. This will be the entering wedge for examining Hans Blumenberg’s possible contribution to these issues. I contend that the Davos debate obscured a Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Noonday, 1961), 4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). 4 “Davos Lectures” [“Davos”] reprinted as Appendix III to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics [KPM], trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 199, 202, 204, 205 / Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik [GA 3] (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1973), 283, 288, 291, 292. 5 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, trans. John Michael Krois, ed., John Michael Krois, Donald Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 37–38. 6 “Davos,” 202 / GA 3, 288. 2 3

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middle position that can mediate between Heideggerian groundlessness, on the one hand, and Cassirer’s claims that culture and symbolic forms fully express a given human nature, on the other hand. In my view, Blumenberg’s post-Heideggerian reinterpretation of Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms supports an argument for a minimalist, “decentered” anthropology that has the potential to provide a normative reference point organically rooted in human needs. This is important not solely to mediate between Heidegger and Cassirer, but to offer an alternative to antihumanist and pragmatist (Rorty) repudiations of conceptions of human nature, as well as to contemporary scientistic reductionisms—all of which are rightly suspicious of inflated, question-begging notions of human nature, some of which may be implicated in pernicious ethnocentrisms. Due to length considerations, I must omit the historical contextualization of these anthropological themes, which would lead back to disputes between Kant and Herder, for whom the problem of human orientation arose as a practical, moral, intellectual, and for Herder, also a biological problem. Gehlen declared that he was merely updating Herder with the tools of modern science. Here I will focus on a small portion of the interchange between Heidegger and Cassirer that goes to the heart of the differences between the two as it relates to the link between conceptions of human existence and the starting points and goals of philosophy. After much skirmishing between Heidegger and Cassirer about the meaning of neo-Kantianism, freedom, and ethics during the first half of the debate, the Dutch philosopher Hendrik Pos interjected that the two men were speaking entirely different languages.7 Sympathetic to Cassirer, Pos suggested finding terms for “Dasein,” “ontic,” and “Being” that could be translated into Cassirer’s language to facilitate communication. It is here that Heidegger drew attention to their conflicting ideas about the starting points and goals of philosophy: for Cassirer “the terminus ad quem [goal] is the whole of a philosophy of culture in the sense of an elucidation of the wholeness of the forms of the shaping consciousness.” That is, Cassirer’s philosophical goal is a determination of the logic of symbolic forms (how one acquires a world-view and the specific logics of myth, language, science, and so on). Heidegger goes on to say that Cassirer is concerned with only “a certain dimension of the shaping powers” of consciousness, all of which leaves the question of his terminus a quo [the starting point, which Heidegger claims is essentially connected with human finitude] “utterly problematical.” Heidegger adds: “My position is the reverse: The terminus a quo is my central problematic, the one I develop. For me, this occurs not in the whole of a Philosophy of Culture, but in the question tí tó Æon, or rather: what in general is called Being?”8 Heidegger will emphatically reiterate the same view in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. No anthropology which understands its own particular questioning and the presuppositions thereof can even claim to develop the problem of a laying of the ground for metaphysics, let alone carry it out. The necessary question for a laying of the ground of metaphysics, namely, that of what man is, is taken over by a metaphysics of Dasein.9 “Davos,” 202 / GA 3, 287. “Davos,” 202 / GA 3, 288. 9 Heidegger, KPM, 162 / GA 3, 231. 7 8

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Or, as he states in one of his Davos lectures: the starting point of philosophy involves posing the question of the essence of human beings in a way that is “prior to all philosophical anthropology and cultural philosophy.”10 Although Heidegger suggests that his own terminus ad quem, or goal, may not be clear, he understands his project as aiming for liberating answers to the question of Being, resident in Dasein’s finitude rather than the “progress of spirit unfettered by a body or its finitude.” This latter remark was directed to Cassirer’s view that symbolic forms such as language, myth, and science are vehicles of progressive liberation. Heidegger clarifies his position by drawing on Kant: in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, in his subjective deduction, was “pressed in a way that makes the proper foundation [of metaphysics] an abyss.”11 For Heidegger, it is not at all self-evident—as he says it must seem to Cassirer—that we should start from a concept of reason and ground metaphysics uncritically in a concept of logos. From Heidegger’s perspective, Cassirer can only be following a philosophical tendency that began with Descartes and continued in neo-Kantianism of separating the knower from the world and then interpreting everything from this point of view, i.e., anthropocentrically. Consequently, Heidegger refused Pos’s attempt at reconciliation: “I believe that what I describe by Dasein [as nothingness, or terminus a quo] does not allow translation into a concept of Cassirer’s.” 12 For Heidegger, Cassirer’s exclusive focus on expressiveness and culture precludes theorizing a proper terminus a quo. Heidegger stresses the ontological importance of anxiety for identifying the terminus a quo. Earlier in the debate Cassirer had claimed that the path to infinitude is through the realm of form: “man must transform everything in him which is lived experience into some objective shape.”13 This assumes that there is a human nature that can be expressed unproblematically, and it also means that Cassirer has no room for the elements of our makeup that might either motivate or resist this transformation. Heidegger’s challenge suggests that it may not be possible to express everything in language, myth, or any of the other symbolic forms. Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Jaspers had already drawn attention to limit situations or extremes (signaled in states of anxiety). Even Cassirer acknowledged this in volume four of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, portions of which were written during the late 1920s. For example, he recognized that human beings have a basic capacity for distancing themselves from their drives.14 Yet, Cassirer’s model for distancing is drawn from Kant’s Critique of Judgment: it is aesthetic distancing—a detachment “from dependence on [our] actions and sufferings.”15 At Davos, Cassirer resists when Heidegger asks whether the task of philosophy is not to surrender man radically to anxiety. Cassirer responds that “anxiety throws the earthly away from us” and that philosophy should free man “from anxiety as a mere disposition” as part of the process of progressive transformation. In volume four of Symbolic KPM, 192 / GA 3, 273. “Davos,” 202 / GA 3, 288. 12 “Davos,” 203 / GA 3, 289. 13 “Davos,” 201 (emphasis added) / GA 3, 286. 14 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, 208. 15 Ibid., 45. 10 11


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Forms, Cassirer’s response to Heidegger is more ascerbic: the antidote to anxiety is Stoic ethics, which liberates us from the dread of death and raises life “above the realm of mere care.”16 In my view, despite Heidegger’s reticence about anthropology, he has clarified its task by linking the terminus a quo (in the double sense of philosophical starting point and feature of human existence) with anxiety and nothingness, and by drawing attention to a blind spot in Cassirer’s position.17 At Davos, following the Pos interjection, Heidegger asserted that “what man is” must be posed as the “central question” of philosophy, even though it must not be posed anthropocentrically. He also grants that this central question could yield a philosophical anthropology, but it must be one in which the “philosopher disregards himself” and sees the “eccentric character of man” at the same time as standing within the totality of beings in general.18 In this context, Heidegger seems to be equating his ontology of Dasein with a kind of philosophical anthropology, and yet he has claimed that the question of what man is must be prior to all philosophical anthropology. In The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (1928), a lecture course that Heidegger gave between the publication of Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics—where Heidegger once again cautions against understanding Dasein anthropologically—he introduces the controversial idea of a “metontology,” which proposes a study of the ontic foundations of fundamental ontology.19 In other words, Heidegger considers a study of how Dasein’s understanding of being, which presupposes the factical existence of Dasein, is in turn “entangled” in nature empirically. Metontology would take beings as a whole as the object of study in a metaphysics or a philosophical cosmology from the perspective of Dasein. Even though Heidegger drops this idea, the question of how to understand such a “Davos,” 201 / GA 3, 286. Since finishing revisions to this article, a posthumous book by Blumenberg—part of the copious writings in the Nachlass—has appeared, entitled Beschreibung des Menschen [BM], (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006). Here Blumenberg affirms this insight when he refers directly to Heidegger’s destruction of traditional metaphysics and traditional anthropology, which he claims paved the way for a renewal of philosophical anthropology (217). Presumably, he is referring to a renewal that addresses Heidegger’s criticisms. 18 “Davos,” 204 / GA 3, 291. 19 Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic [MFL], trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 140, 144, 154–59 / Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik [GA 26] (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978), 176, 184, 196–203. Steven Galt Crowell provides a clear, concise review of the debates over the status of metontology among Heidegger’s commentators. He also presents his view of its place—or lack of place—in Heidegger’s work during this period in “Metaphysics, Metontology, and the End of Being and Time,” in his Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 222–43. Crowell claims that metontology reflects how Heidegger was stimulated by Max Scheler’s questions about man’s place in the cosmos and so developed an interest in philosophical cosmology. However, Crowell argues that as a metaphysical inquiry, metontology is inconsistent with the phenomenological project of Being and Time, which seeks to bracket the ontic. See also Jean Grondin, “Prolegomena to an Understanding of Heidegger’s Turn,” in Sources of Hermeneutics (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1995), 72–73. Grondin also links metontology to a metaphysics of existence, to ontology’s return “to the ontical metaphysics in which it was already implicitly located.” It was to make up for the “deficiencies” of fundamental ontology, which had remained “too formal or schematic.” Otto Pöggeler connects metontology to Scheler’s influence on Heidegger as well and likens it, suggestively, to a “met-anthropology” in “Heidegger on Art,” in Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology, ed. Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamme (New York: Holmes and Meyer), 116. 16 17

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study has some bearing on conceptualizing a philosophical anthropology in Blumenbergian terms, one that offers a countermodel to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Given this suggestive cluster of ideas, the question now is how to mine them, link Heidegger’s insight that Cassirer has failed to adequately account for his own terminus a quo, and articulate an anthropology that is not reductive, relativistic, or anthropocentric. The further question concerns whether it is possible to salvage a logic of symbolic form that incorporates Heidegger’s insights and yet retains and rethinks the rationality and objectivity valued by Cassirer. Obviously, I cannot reconstruct fully Blumenberg’s logic in a brief paper or consider in detail Heidegger’s complex relationship to philosophical anthropology. My focus will be on articulating Blumenberg’s anthropological premises, fleshing out the conception of human existence that follows from his assumptions, and sketching in the logic of orientation dependant on those assumptions. I will add here that Blumenberg—known primarily as a philosopher of history for The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,20 and as a theorist of metaphor and myth for Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Paradigms for a Metaphorology) and Work on Myth21—does not present a systematic working out of his anthropology, even though it is the methodological key to understanding his argumentative point of view generally, especially in his mature work.22 But how it is key is also an issue for a separate study. Before con20 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983) / Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966). For the most complete bibliography of Blumenberg’s prodigious output, at least up to 1999, see Die Kunst des Überlebens: Nachdenken über Hans Blumenberg [Die Kunst des Überlebens], ed. Franz Josef Wetz and Hermann Timm (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 427–51. Since Blumenberg’s death in 1996, many works have been published, and according to Felix Heidenreich (Mensch und Moderne bei Hans Blumenberg [München: Wilhelm Fink, 2005], 20), there are still 20,000 pages of unpublished material. 21 Hans Blumenberg, “Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 6 (1960): 7–142; Work on Myth [WM], trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985) / Arbeit am Mythos [AM] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979). 22 Blumenberg’s commentators usually refer to the fact that Blumenberg has been influenced by philosophical anthropology, but the magnitude of its importance has not been fully appreciated or not developed by most of his readers. David Adams’s seminal article, “Metaphors for Mankind: The Development of Hans Blumenberg’s Anthropological Metaphorology” [“Metaphors for Mankind”] (Journal of the History of Ideas 52 [1991]: 152–66) is the best effort in English at linking anthropology to Blumenberg’s overall philosophical vision. Commentators writing in German, until recently, simply take Blumenberg’s anthropology for granted as the point of departure for his hermeneutics. See, for example, the collection, Die Kunst des Überlebens: Nachdenken über Hans Blumenberg, ed., Franz Josef Wetz and Hermann Timm (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999). As I was finishing the revisions to this article, I discovered two valuable recent books on Blumenberg, both of which provide interpretations of Blumenberg’s anthropology that converge with mine. Oliver Müller’s Sorge um die Vernunft: Hans Blumenbergs phänomenologische Anthropologie [Sorge um die Vernunft] (Paderborn: Mentis, 2005) covers material from Blumenberg’s dissertation (“Beiträge zum Problem der Ursprünglichkeit der mittelalterlichscholastischen Ontologie,” 1947) and Habilitationsschrift (“Ontologischen Distanz: Eine Untersuchung über die Krisis der Phänomenologie Husserls,” 1950), and many other works that include criticisms of both Husserl and Heidegger. Müller (Sorge um die Vernunft, 414–15, 321–24) emphasizes how anthropology is primarily a methodological point of view for Blumenberg, one whose fundamental point of departure is our ongoing need to distance ourselves from absolutes. Felix Heidenreich’s Mensch und Moderne bei Hans Blumenberg includes two sections on philosophical anthropology: “Eine anthropologische phänomenologie,” and “Der Mensch als Distanzwesen.” Neither book reconstructs a definition of human existence. (See my section entitled “Blumenberg’s Definition of Human Existence: Limit Concepts and Limit Conditions” below.) Most important is the recent publication of Blumenberg’s BM, probably his most explicit defense of philosophical anthropology—although, again, there is no explicit definition. I have found no discrepancies in my construction of Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology and the view presented in BM.


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sidering Blumenberg’s anthropology, it will be helpful to provide some historical context by briefly examining the contributions to this topic made by the German philosophical anthropologists mentioned earlier.

max scheler and helmuth plessner: t h e n e e d f o r o r i e n t a t i o n 23 Scheler and Plessner explicitly thematize philosophical anthropology as a problem of human orientation, which they understand as the central philosophical problematic. Modern conditions—the collapse and lack of traditional supports and the increasing rationalization of the world—make philosophical anthropology indispensable because these losses lead us to question our place in the world. The intervening work in biology and ethnology since Kant and the compelling influence of the philosophy of life conditioned how the anthropologists were to conceptualize this philosophical anthropology. All, to varying degrees, took up the issue of biological nonviability that Herder had first emphasized. They moved away from ideas of fixed human essences and highlighted the human need for orientation by emphasizing human plasticity and coping mechanisms, which were to become central for Blumenberg as well. In Man’s Place in Nature, published in 1928, Max Scheler began by saying that we are problems to ourselves as never before. He also observes that we have inherited a number of incompatible ideas of human nature drawn from philosophy, theology, and the sciences, a “multiplicity” that conceals rather than reveals man’s nature. Scheler addressed this problem by first plotting a trajectory from plants to animals to human beings, construing this as a developmental process but sharply distinguishing man from animals by claiming that only man can say no to his impulses and affects and become “spirit.”24 Scheler rejects naturalism even though he acknowledges a continuum with nature, because he argues that man’s place is not given; the “spiritual” results from transcending “life” in the most general sense. Echoing Heidegger, Scheler adds toward the end of the book that man’s separation from nature leads to anxiety, the awareness of nothingness.25 The world-openness that accompanies anxiety and the capacity for transcendence makes human beings metaphysically unique; it means that they are capable of objectifying the world, of reflexive self-consciousness, freedom, choice, love, and kindness, as well as self-destruction.26 Spirit as transcendence requires for its actualization a voluntary inhibition such that impulse can be sublimated and redirected in light of the images human beings choose. Coping with the loss of traditional supports entails selecting images appropriate for channeling the energy generated Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen are the most well known of the philosophical anthropologists, but as Honneth and Joas point out, many others worked within the framework of philosophical anthropology, such as Blumenberg’s post-war colleague, Erich Rothäcker, and Paul Ludwig Landsberg, Viktor von Weizsäcker, and Ernst Cassirer (Social Action and Human Nature, 47). Drawing on Blumenberg’s textual interlocutors, Wayne Hudson (“After Blumenberg: historicism and philosophical anthropology,” History of the Human Sciences 6 [1993], 110–11) includes others with close ties to the anthropologists: Blumenberg’s long time friend Hans Jonas, Adolf Portman, Paul Alsberg, Hannah Arendt, Eric Vögelin, Kurt Goldstein, and Odo Marquard. 24 Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, 4, 6, 7, 40, 46. 25 Ibid., 89. 26 Ibid., 36. 23

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by sublimation.27 With the aid of philosophical anthropology, Scheler attempts to refute mechanistic, reductively naturalistic, and purely formal accounts of human nature and to reconcile life-philosophy with phenomenology, but he ends up with a radical, uneasy disjunction between answers to the problem of human orientation that could be given by the empirical sciences and transcendentally oriented philosophy. Helmuth Plessner accepts Scheler’s diagnosis of the modern condition, but he rejects Scheler’s idealism of spirit. In Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (The Levels of Organic Being and Man), published in 1928, Plessner formulates the biological deficiency thesis as humanity’s “eccentricity” or “positionality.” That is, human beings are distinct from animals in that they are simultaneously embedded in and discontinuous from nature and their socio-historical setting. Whereas animals have a “centric” existence, guided by instinct, human beings are underdetermined (instinctually poor) and must compensate, which means always trying to strike a balance between embodiment and the lack of pre-given orientation. For Plessner, this constitutional rupture is the defining characteristic of the human being. To achieve balance, human beings become conscious, enlanguaged, and expressive in speech and gesture. Thus, the phenomenological method will be a naturalistic hermeneutics that describes the human being and its behavioral possibilities as it tries to negotiate its environment in relation to bodily constraints.28 Conflicts with corporeality reveal the limits—”which defy all spiritual and historical change”—that prescribe this behavioral latitude, limits experienced especially in the distinctly human experiences of laughing and crying that are breakdowns of customary modes of orientation (e.g., language).29 To the charges of reductionism, which stemmed largely from Heidegger, Plessner argues that philosophical anthropology emerges from an overlap between a “comprehensive philosophy” and a “comprehensive anthropology.” Unlike Heidegger, we must not abstract from man’s organismal embodiment.30 Heidegger would ask whether this view reduces all philosophical questions to a study of man or a subdiscipline of biology and therefore renders the relation between anthropology and ontology problematic.

arnold gehlen: the creature of deficiencies To proceed further, one more conceptual element is necessary: philosophical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen’s notion of the Mängelwesen, or “creature of deficiencies,” an idea that originated with Herder, resurfaced in Scheler and Plessner, and will be taken up by Blumenberg. In Man: His Nature and Place in the World (1940), Gehlen offers his most complete account of his anthropology. Unlike Scheler Ibid., 54, 68. Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 181–83. 29 Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, trans. James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Green (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 10. 30 Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany: 1831–1933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 221. Because of this abstraction, Plessner argued that Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein was too narrow. More biting is the criticism that “Heidegger’s philosophy takes no more notice of the human being’s nature than it needs for dying” (quoted in Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 73, 45). 27 28


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and Plessner, Gehlen proposed constructing an empirical philosophy of human nature based on the observation that human beings are creatures of instinctual deficit: they are incomplete, “world open,” and therefore overburdened with stimuli from which they need relief. Animals have environments, but man needs a world and must act rather than react to achieve this.31 To have a basis for action, human beings develop what Gehlen calls “institutions,” or cultural constants that reduce the arbitrariness of human existence. For Gehlen, the term institutions does not refer to consciously set up forums such as a congress or a judiciary, but to habitual patterns of thought and behavior and mundane forms of social organization, including language, manners, and morals, that can supply a platform for a self-directed process of development. This is necessary because stimulus-response behavior does not solve the problem of world openness. Gehlen argues that institutions reestablish the “lost link between instinct and response-triggering stimulus on the higher plane of behavioral patterns that [become] so routinized that they have become analogous to instinctual behavior.”32 Action requires something akin to the reliability afforded by instinct. Blumenberg appropriates Gehlen’s ideas of underdetermination, action, and institutions, but he rejects what he calls Gehlen’s “absolutism of institutions,” an idea connected with the contemporaneous revival of Hobbes. Gehlen’s radical cultural conservatism supported decisionistic political theories that blended easily with National Socialism. Although Blumenberg agrees with Gehlen that contemporary institutions have been degraded by the accelerated pace of change in modernity, he does not think that they should be preserved indiscriminately and at all costs. From Blumenberg’s perspective, Gehlen’s “decisionism” precludes rationally distinguishing between institutions that continue to serve us well and those that do not and therefore absolves us of responsibility to think for ourselves. Furthermore, Gehlen is not faithful to his own premises: human existence is essentially risky and this risk is a precondition of the possibility of conscious choice and autonomy.

hans blumenberg: the

terminus a quo

Blumenberg puts to new uses the key insight that human contingency must be understood as a radical need for orientation. Focusing on the contradiction between 31 In an unpublished manuscript, Lenny Moss (“Detachment, Genomics, and the Nature of Being Human”) employs the term ‘detachment’ in his work on the warrants for an empirically updated philosophical anthropology that accounts for human flexibility in the spirit of the early twentiethcentury anthropologists. For Moss, the term refers to the “relative independence of an entity from a larger milieu . . . [indicating increasing] internal degrees of freedom in an organism” as it becomes more complex. Moss’s enterprise is to track this increasing detachment from a molecular to a human level. “To say that humans are the most detached entities in nature is to suggest that humans are less at the beck and call of any particular stimulus.” As a result, human attention can be directed toward a multiplicity of objects. As a result of the pain of detachment, humans construct cultural niches (Gehlen’s “institutions”), or a normatively structured socio-cultural life-world, which itself is “the result of structured participation in processes of shared attention.” Cultural niches are a hedge against “world openness.” Moss argues against evolutionary psychologists who locate the capacity for human skills either in domain specific functional modules or genes that prescript such modules. 32 Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 76.

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world openness and continued existence, Blumenberg states: “The first proposition of an anthropology would then be [that it] cannot be taken for granted that man is able to exist . . . [man’s] ‘natural’ condition contradicts the conditions of the possibility of physical existence.”33 In other words, human existence is not selfevident. Blumenberg places Gehlen’s notion of underdetermination, which can be understood as a certain amount of “loose play,” in the conceptual slot marked out by Heidegger’s terminus a quo, and links it to the formation of culture through an account of the human need for prostheses, such as metaphor, and institutions such as myth and language (i.e., a “life-world”).34 It should be noted here that Blumenberg’s term for the entire constellation of symbolic means, which includes metaphor, myth, and all institutions that make up what philosophers commonly term the “life world,” and which therefore makes human existence possible, is “rhetoric.” I will use the term ‘rhetoric’ as shorthand to refer to this constellation. Another note: metaphor is a key element of rhetoric and a fundamental orienting vehicle for Blumenberg; the need for metaphor is a consequence of the fact that human beings have neither a vocabulary adequate to reality nor definitive pregiven orientations. I will return to a discussion of metaphor and rhetoric at a later point. The upshot is a conception of human existence that references a universal problem: the fact of human detachment and underdetermination. This insight has interesting philosophical consequences: it means that “life” (Dilthey), “Beingin-the-World,” (Heidegger), a life-world (Husserl, Habermas, etc.), or a full-blown theory of symbolic forms (Cassirer) cannot be taken for granted because these are already forms of orientation, which for Blumenberg conceal anxiety-provoking threats to viability. Even though, for all practical purposes, we begin with something like a life-world, orientation is not part of the preconditions of existence. In what may be a response to Heidegger’s charges, Blumenberg points out that Cassirer does not account for why symbolic forms are set up when he assumes an unquestioned biological support for his theory of symbolic forms.35 The deficiency

Blumenberg, “An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric” [“AC”], in After Philosophy: End or Transformation, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 438 / ”Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der Rhetorik” [“AR”], in Rhetorik, Band 2: Wirkungsgeschichte der Rhetorik (Darmstadt: Wissenshaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991), 294. This work was originally published in Wirklickeiten, in denen wir leben: Aufsätze und eine Rede (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1981). 34 I do not deny that human beings may have more genetically-conditioned hardwiring than either Gehlen discusses or Blumenberg refers to in these earlier works. However, the basic point that human beings are “world open,” or more detached from the environment, still stands. Approached from the perspective of evolutionary biology, we might say that human beings are hardwired to be flexible. The question remains: how do we cope with this plasticity, which is the source of both our creativity and our propensity to self-destruct? In BM (esp. 490–91, 539–49), Blumenberg delves more deeply into evolutionary biology, paleontology, cognitive psychology, and various other sciences relevant to understanding the origins and development of homo sapiens. He continues to maintain that the life-world, reason, and cultural achievements are efforts of the human organism to compensate for its organically-based plasticity. He also continues to resist reductive naturalisms as well as Husserl and Heidegger’s attempts to evacuate philosophical anthropology from philosophy. Blumenberg’s exploration of possible empirical corroboration for his anthropological assumptions would be a study in its own right. 35 “AC,” 438 / “AR,” 294. 33


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thesis allows Blumenberg to ask how, given our lack of self-evidence, it is possible to account for existence and what role culture and customary practices (i.e., “rhetoric”) play in supporting it. “The animal symbolicum masters the reality that was originally lethal for him by letting it be represented; he looks away from what is uncanny or uncomfortable for him and toward what is familiar.”36 As a result, human beings survive through indirection, by forming a compensatory culture, as Cassirer might have it, had he thought through the implications of his assumptions. Of course, this de-idealizes (and historicizes) the theory of symbolic forms, which are now given a distinctly pragmatic turn, as we shall see. Blumenberg, unlike Gehlen, is not interested in formulating an empirical philosophy of human nature or in making anthropology the central concern of philosophy. To leave things at this level would afford no immunity from Heidegger’s charge of anthropocentrism, and Blumenberg would be no more than an anachronism. Rather, Blumenberg operates with what might be called an “anthropological optic” based on his formulation of a terminus a quo—a minimalist, deflationary anthropology that straddles the space between a concept of human nature and an ontology of human existence. For Blumenberg, this optic is based on features of human existence, but its function is to delimit a sphere of inquiry by reminding human beings of their limitations and capacities both as actors and as philosophers: there are no final actions or definitive truths, just as there is no fixed human essence. Even so, it is possible to say more about his implied conception of human existence by examining the elements of this optic before returning briefly to the questions of rationality, objectivity, and anthropocentrism.

blumenberg’s definition of human existence: limit concepts and limit conditions Let me begin with the reconstructed definition: human existence is a potentially self-assertive [intentional or “emergent”] autonomy that is constrained by anthropological limits and stabilized and humanized by institutions, which by forming a livable world limit arbitrariness and make action and reflection possible. This definition is a result of parsing Blumenberg’s ‘terminus a quo’, which refers to radical contingency on the one hand and what he calls the “absolutism of reality” on the other.37 The counterpart to a total lack of orientation would be a wholly indifferent reality beyond our control.38 At the limit of existence, reality poses an absolute threat to “AC,” 440 / “AR,” 296. WM, 3–5 / AM, 9–10. 38 For Blumenberg, metaphor and myth are the enabling vehicles of human thought; hence his recourse to thought models, which Joseph Leo Koerner likens to “philosophical fables” (“Ideas About the Thing, Not the Thing Itself: Han’s Blumenberg’s style,” History of the Human Sciences 6 [1993], 2). In many of his books, Blumenberg works with thought models that remind us of our contingency. For example, in The Genesis of the Copernican World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), human beings confront their orientation needs in infinite space. In Work on Myth, to be discussed in this paper, Blumenberg tells a story of anthropogenesis in relation to “the absolutism of reality.” In Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Lifetime and Worldtime) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), this existential dilemma plays out as the contradiction between life time and world time. Höhlenausgänge (Exiting from Caves) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), which builds on Plato’s “Grundmythos,” underscores the continuing but ultimately futile effort to definitively exit from caves (i.e., have a total view). We cannot prove our ultimate assumptions, we have no God’s-eye view or absolutely stable reference point, we have no fixed human nature, and we 36 37

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survival. It is a condition without parameters: “the indifference of space [which] is the equivalence of every location in space without respect to all others” and the indifference of time, which is “the equivalence of every moment with respect to all others”39—an anxiety-provoking “state of nature” without rules, customs, laws, ethics, or order of any kind. At this limit there is no we. The terminus a quo is a limit concept that refers to this limit situation and to our subjective experience of it. So, the vanishing point of existence would coincide with a state of pure anxiety—a nothingness that we must move away from, not toward (Heidegger), in order to remain viable.40 Blumenberg’s task then is to account for orientation vis-à-vis this limit. He argues that rhetoric or “symbolic forms,” such as language and myth, are the cultural constants that make action and reflection, or autonomy, possible by compensating for a life-threatening deficit. To imagine this state of affairs, Blumenberg uses a “thought model,” which he claims is similar in function to state of nature concepts. In Work on Myth, he asks what lies behind the formation of culture, or the “past’s past,” claiming that we do not know what happened, but such a story can be justified “within the accepted theories of anthropogenesis, the confines of our current conceptual apparatus, vocabulary, research, and inference . . . we must posit that some such problem [i.e., a failure of “instinct”] induced the ‘prehuman creature’ to adapt by forming what we would call a culture.” By adopting an upright posture, this creature confronts a world no longer amenable to stimulus-response or right or flight behavior. “The absolutism of reality designates a condition, continually receding into the past in which man came close to not having control over the conditions of his existence, and what is more important, believed that he simply lacked control of them.”41 This objective state of affairs correlates with the beginnings of self-awareness. The absolutism of reality is, as Barbara Merker claims, a phenomenon of consciousness, known (represented) only because we have coped with the loss it represents, largely through the formation of myths.42 As Blumenberg puts it, there is no direct relation to “reality”; the only reality we can know is one we have interpreted. Hence, the functional importance of symbols, myths, and metaphors. To return briefly to a suggestion raised earlier: it is possible to view Blumenberg’s anthropology in response to Heidegger’s notion of a metontology. A complete treatment of this topic is beyond the scope of this paper, and Blumenberg does not to my knowledge mention metontology, so my speculation here is based on his criticisms of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. In Work on Myth, for example, Blumenberg acknowledges that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology offers “guidance”

always begin in mediis rebus. So we must use what we do have: analogy and metaphor. Blumenberg would justify his thought models by what they can explain, arguing that settling for provisional accounts is necessary because existence itself is provisional. He acknowledges the desire for certainty, but he insists that it is possible to function with unfulfilled desires. Claims of certainty lead to unfounded or unexamined assumptions, each with its own unintended and sometimes disastrous consequences. 39 WM, 98 / AM, 111. 40 WM, 9 / AM, 15. 41 WM, 3–4 / AM, 9–10. 42 Barbara Merker, “Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit: Zwischen Lebenswelt und Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit” [“Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit”] in Die Kunst des Überlebens, 81. I have borrowed Merker’s framing, i.e., approaching Blumenberg in terms of the two primary limit concepts.


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for understanding what is meant by the work of myth.43 First of all, ‘work of myth’ refers to the work that myth initially accomplishes: the simultaneous emergence of myth and the human form of existence as a confrontation with an overpowering reality that must be “reduced” or symbolized such that a story (myth) can be told. This confrontation is the source of a compensatory “significance” [Bedeutsamkeit]. By giving shape and form to existence, human beings distance themselves from their own contingency, from an immediate relation to reality. Work on myth, in contrast, presupposes the work of myth and refers to the ongoing historical reception of mythical themes, much like themes and variations in music. If we assume that a metontology would be a kind of “met-anthropology,” as Otto Pöggeler suggests,44 and if it would examine the existentiell grounds of fundamental ontology, then it is instructive to examine two sections of Heidegger’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic that bear on this issue: (1) where he discusses Aristotle’s conception of first or “genuine philosophy” and the brief account of how Heidegger understands this philosophy to overlap with concepts in Being and Time; and (2) the passages where he proposes a metontology. Heidegger points out that “first philosophy”—the possibility of which is present in the highest creature, man—is designated by Aristotle as qeologeîn, which is the study of the kósmos. “Tó qeîon means simply beings—the heavens: the encompassing and overpowering, that under and upon which we are thrown, that which dazzles us and takes us by surprise, the overwhelming.” This study has a “twofold character . . . which corresponds to the twofold in Being and Time of existence and thrownness.”45 Steven Galt Crowell links metontology to the earlier passages about first philosophy and suggests that we might understand metontology as an investigation of the “ontic ground of the ontological project.”46 Blumenberg takes up this challenge by presenting something like a “philosophical cosmology” developed on the basis of the relationship between thrownness and our anxiety-filled experience of the overwhelming (absolutism of reality). By means of his thought model,47 Blumenberg lays out the problem posed by thrownness, which would correspond to a radical need for orientation, plus a functional account of how significance reduces that which overwhelms. From Blumenberg’s point of view, Heidegger takes significance (being-in-the-world) for granted (and in abstraction from finitude) without explaining the functional relation between anxiety—our reaction to thrownness—and significance. It is worth quoting a long passage from Work on Myth wherein Blumenberg takes up WM, 110 / AM, 124–25. Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger on Art,” in Martin Heidegger, Politics, Art, and Technology, ed. Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamme (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994), 106–24, at 116 n. 17. 45 GA 26, 12–13 / MFL, 10–11. 46 Crowell, “Metaphysics, Metontology, and the End of Being and Time,” n. 17. I do not claim that Blumenberg provides a solution for Heidegger’s project. However, I do think he capitalizes on what he sees as its shortcomings when he develops a philosophical anthropology that can provide a starting point for philosophy. Blumenberg rejects the idea of a fundamental ontology as Heidegger conceives of it because it would be one more instance of what it means to “forget” human beings. 47 In MFL 148 / GA 26, Heidegger acknowledges that some things can “only be made clear through the use of a myth.” In this context, he is referring to Plato’s use of myth in the Phaedrus, where Heidegger understands Plato to be clarifying the relation of “the understanding-of-being to time.” Blumenberg would agree: given the inadequacy of our faculties for comprehending reality, we necessarily make use of thought models, metaphors, and “philosophical myths” (MFL, 148 / GA 26, 186). 43 44

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questions raised by Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Beginning with the claim that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology offers orientation “for efforts to gain access to the ‘work of myth,” he goes on to say: The intertwining of significance and familiarity is a foreground appearance and disguises something that one is not supposed to become aware of in its subjective-objective ambivalence: the way they correspond to nullity [Nichtigkeit] and the production of anxiety [Ängstigung]. If significance is the quality of the world as it would not have originally been for men, then it is wrung from a situation that produces anxiety, the forcing of which into concealment is brought about and confirmed by that very significance. Significance is the form in which the background of nothing [des Nichts], as that which produces anxiety, has been put at a distance, whereby, without this “prehistory,” the function of what is significant remains uncomprehended, though present. For the need for significance is rooted in the fact that we are conscious of never being definitively exempted from the production of anxiety [because we are never wholly exempt from the absolutism of reality]. Care, as the “Being of Dasein,” which is supposed to be disclosed especially in the basic state of mind of anxiety, is the source not only of the totality of the structure of Dasein but of its wanting significance in the world, in its experience, in history. The “naked truth” is not what life can live with; for, let us not forget, this life is the result of a long history of complete congruence between [man’s] environment and “signification”—congruence that is only shattered in its most recent phase. In this history life itself continually deprives itself of an immediate relation to its abysses, to what would make it impossible, and thus refuses to obey the summons of its terrifying “authenticity.”48

From Blumenberg’s perspective, Heidegger has ignored how Dasein’s “prehistory” is a condition of survival, how being-in-the-world is a result of this prehistory. The life of complete congruence is instinctual life; this congruence is shattered by the change in biotope, or the emergence of the human form of existence, which is “eccentric” in something like Plessner’s sense. We must presuppose the millennia-long work of myth that has stabilized human life by means of the significance and institutions (Gehlen) that allow us to get on with the practical business of life. The function of significance remains “uncomprehended” in Heidegger’s work. Crudely put, from Blumenberg’s perspective, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is wrongheaded in large part because it is ahistorical and because it overlooks fundamental human needs. No account of human existence would be accurate if it ignored the need for the temporal distancing from the “absolutism of reality” via “symbolic forms.” Nor would it be accurate if it omitted the self-assertion [Selbstbehauptung] necessary to achieve this distance. Self-assertion is made necessary precisely because of “finitude,”49 which implies that it makes no sense to bracket the ontic. Blumenberg thus offers a kind of “met-anthropology,” a view of the relation between human existence and “reality” whose function, moreover, determines how the hermeneutic method can function.50 (More on Blumenberg’s use of the term ‘self-assertion’ later.) WM, 110 / AM, 125. In his discussion of the Davos debates, Oliver Müller (Sorge um die Vernunft, 393) characterizes the differences between Blumenberg, Heidegger, and Cassirer. For Heidegger, human beings become free for the finitude of Dasein; for Cassirer, human beings become free from the finitude of Dasein. He adds: for Blumenberg there is pathos in the notion of freedom: through self-assertion, human beings cope with finitude and renounce their claims to an impossible, unalloyed freedom. 50 In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg comments on Heidegger during a discussion of hermeneutics. While critiquing the concept of secularization, Blumenberg distinguishes his version 48 49


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Critics have objected that Blumenberg professes knowledge of origins and engages in just the sort of “grand speculation” he claims is impossible,51 that he posits a prehuman “state,” or indulges in metaphysics.52 He may also seem to assume the deep meaning presupposed by some hermeneuticists. However, rather than the definitive account of origins, Blumenberg offers only an “account that satisfies our need for such stories,” insofar as we live in a narrated world.53 No matter which starting point we take up, we will always already be on this side of what the absolutism of reality concept designates. The initial situation is not the “deep meaning” contained in mythical origins, because meaning or significance is already by definition always on this side of the abyss. Because the past’s past is unknowable, no hermeneutic recovery is possible. Contingency (“thrownness”) equals meaninglessness. So far, Blumenberg’s account of the human condition is the terminus a quo and the evolving cultural constants (a “provisional” life-world) that provide traction in an alien environment. Thus Blumenberg’s view of anxiety differs markedly from Heidegger’s: for Blumenberg anxiety “is never realistic”; rather than a harbinger of authenticity, it signals the breakdown of orientation. By means of form, “life itself continually deprives itself of an immediate relation to its abysses.”54 Ideally, anxiety is a transitional moment (Cassirer), one that either degenerates into destructive reactive behavior or prompts us to give shape to our experience through symbolic mediation. I will say more about the process of orientation following the introduction of Blumenberg’s other main limit concept.55 Human existence must occur between the two limits of no orientation and perfect orientation. The ideal life-world or utopia of our imagination—which attempts to bypass contingency—is the other primary limit concept, one put in place by the absolutism of reality notion. Blumenberg thus uses the concept of the life-world in two ways; it is the idea of a livable world, similar to that of philosophers such as Habermas, who defines it as “a storehouse of unquestioned cultural givens from which those participating in communication draw on agreed-upon

of hermeneutics from that of Gadamer. Gadamer has claimed that the concept of secularization “contributes a whole dimension of hidden meaning to the self-comprehension of what has come to be and presently exists, and shows in this way that what presently exists is and means far more than it knows of itself,” and that a concept legitimizes its hermeneutic function by what it produces. Blumenberg counters: when discussing how the hermeneutic method should function, it is important to ask how “hidden meaning” got there in the first place; this will determine how the “hermeneutic method will operate.” As an aside, he claims that Heidegger is an example of the hidden-meaning problem: Heidegger starts with the assumption that “‘Dasein’s understanding of Being’ is essential to it and yet ‘in the first instance and for the most part’ hidden and withdrawn from it” (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 17). Blumenberg deconstructs these connections hermeneutically by providing a functional account of significance. The permanent problem that we are to ourselves thus determines how the hermeneutic method can operate. 51 Robert Segal, “Blumenberg as Theorist of Myth,” Annals of Scholarship 15 (1987), 93. 52 J. M. Fritzman, “Blumenberg and the Rationality of Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 10 (1992): 423–35. 53 Adams, “Metaphors for Mankind,” 161. 54 WM, 110 / AM, 125. It would be more accurate to say that human beings are anxious about not being in the world. 55 Blumenberg operates with other limit concepts, such as “final myth” or a myth that attempts to end all myths. I omit consideration of these concepts because in essence a final myth would be the story of perfect life-world, i.e., perfect orientation.

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patterns of interpretation for use in their interpretive efforts.”56 However, as a limit concept, the life-world represents the human longing to be free of contingency, the wish for perfect congruence between the organism and its environment, the perfect satisfaction of human needs, as well as a perfect fit between thought and its objects—all goals of mythical thinking. It would be a world devoid of chaos, misery, or disappointment. From Blumenberg’s perspective, Husserl, Habermas, and others do not recognize the unexamined presupposition of a pregiven congruity contained in the life-world concept, which is related to their assumption that it is an unproblematic starting point.57 Nonetheless, even though Blumenberg deconstructs this “neo-romantic,” idealistic moment, he acknowledges the (always) thwarted need for the world intended by this moment. Given this schema, culture and history are the atmosphere that makes it possible to breathe. The mundane life-world is a consequence of our need for self-preservation. It refers to rhetoric and taken-for-granted behavior patterns from the perspective of their function. In essence, Blumenberg substitutes an implied theory of limits for a traditional account of human nature that allows us to delineate the parameters of existence. “What remains as the subject matter of philosophical anthropology is a ‘human nature’ that has never been ‘nature’ and never will be.”58 But this does not mean that everything is arbitrary or that there is no logic to experience. Blumenberg believes that modern philosophy has “forgotten man” (not Being), and so he offers a reminder of what is necessary to maintain the human form of existence, a reminder that human existence is risky, that it makes its appearance in “metaphorical disguise” and is always an achievement. Hence the importance of what he calls “self-assertion,” a feature of the definition given earlier, which requires limits and stabilization. Facts about us provide guidelines. Initially, the life-world is a product of myth—a story that familiarizes and humanizes reality, whose origins are always receding into the past and are therefore unknowable. For example, Prometheus is the story of the “self-assertion” that produces civilization: the story’s ongoing reception history—accessed by realizing that myth must always be retold from the perspective of the present—records changes in self and world conceptions.59 As provisional creatures, we always have what Blumenberg calls an “affinity for myth,” which is a constitutive need consciousness has to discover constant meanings,60 despite the fact that there are no constant meanings. The implied argument in Blumenberg’s Work on Myth, about which I will have more to say later, is that myth represents our need for varying degrees of self-evidence (institutions) in order to function at all. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 135. 57 For Blumenberg, the phenomenological method must begin with the realization of the contingency of consciousness; see discussion in Heidenreich, Mensch und Moderne bei Hans Blumenberg, 30. 58 “AC,” 456 / “AR,” 312. 59 As Chiara Bottini (A Philosophy of Political Myth [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 129) points out, for Blumenberg, myth represents our need to provide significance in constantly changing circumstances. Hence, Bottini rejects accounts of myth such as Mircea Eliade’s that rest on formulating unchanging paradigms. Bottini argues, in concert with Blumenberg, that we never leave our need for myth behind, and that conditions of modernity—rapid change and disorientation—aggravate this need. She goes on to base her analysis of the rise of modern “unmediated” or totalitarian myths on Blumenberg’s account of myth’s anthropological function. 60 WM, 51 / AM, 60. 56


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the logic of the life-world: self-assertion, metaphor, and intentionality There is a certain logic to the formation of a life-world (understood here in the first sense, as a livable world) that will add density to Blumenberg’s implied conception of human existence. It is best captured by examining the relation between self-assertion, metaphor, intentionality, and existential limits (terminus a quo), connections that are neither obvious nor fully explained by Blumenberg. References to these ideas are scattered throughout his works, but my main sources here will be Work on Myth and “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality.” First, Blumenberg rejects Husserl’s assumption that intentionality is always paired with an object or that there can be a free-floating theoretical subject. Blumenberg’s critique of Husserl’s concept of intentionality in Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Lifetime and Worldtime) is a study in its own right.61 I restrict myself here to elucidating Blumenberg’s view of the matter as it applies to his conception of human existence. For Blumenberg, intentionality is an act of self-assertion over against the terminus a quo,62 a protest against the inhuman limit of reality’s indifference. That is, intentionality is an expression of the need consciousness has to be paired with meaning, given that detached creatures need to establish horizons that circumscribe possibilities; self-assertion therefore refers to the impulse toward self-preservation that potentially will take the form of a humanly relevant world.63 On this account, intentionality can be understood as a vehicle for expanding horizons pragmatically in the interest of self-preservation.64 Blumenberg also claims that intentionality and the horizons that form a livable world have a “metaphorical” structure in the sense that metaphor, by carrying meaning over from one context to another orients human beings. Blumenberg can be counted as part of the contemporary metaphor renaissance that began with the collapse of naïve scientific realism and the rejection of a correspondence theory of meaning. This has led to a revival of interest in rhetoric and an emphasis on metaphor’s transformative, inventive function. Ernst Cassirer initiated much of this change with his explorations of the formative and constitutive role of meta61 Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit. Blumenberg also draws attention to Husserl’s theoretical subject in Beschreibung des Menschen, where he claims that Husserl speaks of consciousness but not human consciousness, i.e., consciousness circumscribed by human limits (BM, 9). In this book, Blumenberg returns to themes that occupied him during his student years, but he makes more explicit the anthropological basis of his critiques of Husserl and Heidegger. He claims that Husserl’s ban on anthropology functions like an apotropaic device to defend the position of the transcendental observer (Zuschauer) (ibid., 91). 62 Blumenberg, “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality” [“PT”], in Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 98 / “Ausblick auf eine Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit” [“AT”], in Theorie der Metapher, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 451. See also, BM, 206, where Blumenberg claims self-assertion is primarily a response to the consciousness of contingency. 63 In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg claims that self-assertion is the principle of modernity, but it is important not to overlook the anthropological dimension that is the basis for his critique of the metaphysical humanism that strives for radical self-grounding, a humanism that fails to recognize the elementary human orientation needs that can be specified by Blumenberg’s conception of philosophical anthropology. In this way, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age offers a mitigated defense of modernity, one that underwrites a limited conception of scientific progress and a scaled-down idea of autonomy appropriate to our limits. 64 Or, as he states in BM, 76, intentionality is a system of self-stabilization and self-regulation.

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phorical language for thinking generally. Analytic philosophers, structuralists, and hermeneuticists have disputed over how this origination is accomplished, whether and what kind of cognitive force can be assigned to metaphor, the relation between literal and metaphorical language, and whether metaphor refers only to other linguistic contexts. Blumenberg, who fits best in the hermeneutic camp, provides an existential rationale for metaphor’s central place in the construction of our sense of reality, one that assumes metaphor’s cognitive function rests on how metaphor facilitates coping with detachment. This coping is simultaneously a process by which consciousness fulfills its need for meaning. That is, under the pressure to make sense of a reality that always exceeds our grasp, we use metaphors, or “substitutes,” to integrate the “unknown into a system of the known.” Blumenberg claims: “Metaphor is not only a chapter in the discussion of rhetorical means, it is a distinctive element of rhetoric, in which rhetoric’s function can be displayed and expressed in terms of its relation to anthropology.”65 Blumenberg’s extension of the usual sense of the term, ‘figure of speech’, to address existential needs follows directly from the deficiency thesis, which prescribes an indirect relation to reality. Since intentionality implies a gap between consciousness and possible objects and presses toward substitution as a way of linking up with already existing meaning contexts (life-world or rhetoric) in order to project a new orientation, metaphor is the orienting edge of intentionality. For example, when Romeo says that Juliet is the sun, this is based on a previous disruption of Romeo’s customary ways of behaving and his attempt to assimilate a passionate new experience. As a result, a new pertinence comes into being based on connecting two heterogeneous ideas. The actor makes things similar through an insight, which occurs in spite of the differences. Dissonance is then embraced within a new congruity. In all of this, there is, as Paul Ricoeur might say, an “iconic moment” produced by how the absent thing has been assimilated such that its meaning is read on the image to which it is pictorially bound.66 Juliet is now bound to the image of the sun. Romeo draws on familiar symbolism associated with the sun, which dazzles everything and is the source and center of life. Like Plato’s form of the good, Juliet confers reality and intelligibility on his life, and so on. Anthropologically, resorting to metaphor implies that harmony (lifeworldly orientations that no longer work, have become rationalized, routinized, and so on) has been disrupted and a new orientation is called for. Metaphors are directed “back toward the connections with the life-world as the constant moving support.”67 Metaphors are not true or false but appropriate or inappropriate. The logic of Blumenberg’s position rests on the view that metaphor and consciousness would be unnecessary in a state of perfect harmony, such as the stimulus-response behavior that guides other species more reliably or a perfectly congruent life-world. The only reality over which we could possibly experience our own influence is a familiar reality, one within the scope of our possible goals and practices. Only a detour, a metaphor, puts this familiarity within our grasp. In all “AC,” 440 / “AR,” 296. “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 142. 67 “PT,” 81 / “AT,” 438. 65 66


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of this, metaphor is itself a metaphor that allows us to construct an understanding of orientation, one that is underwritten by the contingency of all orientations. There is one more important element in this reconstruction of Blumenberg’s conception of intentionality: its link to affect. Blumenberg understands affect as the bodily registering of limits. That is, one dimension of our experience of limits takes the form of affect. The state of nature story in Work on Myth contains an abbreviated account of how intentionality, affect, and metaphor work together in the process of self- and world-formation. The thought model contains the resources to extrapolate how and that we interiorize the connection between self and world through feeling, which anchors an enlarged horizon in what has now become (or is), as a result of our world openness, an alien and dreaded, or “uncanny” world. Coping with world openness must involve resolving troublesome relations to our affects. Specific affects—such as anger, fear, joy, and so on—particularize and focus the imagination. However, since the account that follows attempts to capture how affect is related to existential limits, anxiety will be the point of reference for displaying how objects are particularized and introjected through feeling. Anxiety is our response to the loss of orientation—either “instinctual” (the state of nature scenario) or when institutions fail us (the life-world as livable world). To cope with anxiety, consciousness must become consciousness of something. Blumenberg is referring to anxiety when he states that affect is first a kind of despecified agitation and a condition of paying attention “that had to take over the position of a habitual adaptive system.” He then draws out the implications: Affect is the inclusive bracket that unites partial actions that work against the absolutism of reality. Intentionality—the coordination of parts into a whole, of qualities into an object, of things into a world—may be the cooled off aggregate condition of such early accomplishments of consciousness, accomplishments that led the way out of the bracketing together of stimulus and response and that were at the same time the outcome of this exodus. To that extent there is something in the classical idea that emotion is the unclarity of the mind feeling its way forward. This schema of accomplishment is filled not only by sensation and perception but also by names, figures, and stories, the rituals and machinations that are bracketed together by the one still-undefined affective condition of overwhelming power [absolutism of reality].68

If stimulus and response are “originally” bracketed together in the “prehuman creature,” for which the world’s relevances were given, then world openness is equivalent to the uncoupling of stimulus and response. This dissonance is the possibility of conscious behavior because it is also the possibility of consciousness with an object and therefore a horizon—at which point particularization and introjection occur. (Having seen Juliet as the sun, Romeo feels that she is his, or at least that she is the most significant iconic object in his world: a new congruence emerges.) Dissonance is therefore also the possibility of the “metaphorical” substitution of one thing for another in an attempt to integrate the unknown into our experience of the known. We feel this uncoupling in states of disorienting anxiety. The emergent world openness and experience of lack is also a need for compensatory meaning, which particular affects, such as fear, stabilize into objects. WM, 21 / AM, 28.

68

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This stabilization reduces an anxiety-provoking chaos by eliminating much of the stimuli coming from the environment. Fear of something substitutes for anxiety, which can then be named, and this anticipates symbolic, and therefore rational, behavior. That is, in order to focus our attention onto an object, we must distance ourselves from what Cassirer and Scheler called our drives, or from the uncanny awareness of the totality of the wholly other, a totality that is always only partially digested through symbols, language, and narratives. Stimulus-response or purely reactive behavior is not conscious and is not emotion, because it involves no interiorization. The consciousness of contingency coupled with interiorization occurs over against the anxious awareness of the nonnecessity of existing. At this point, some threads can be connected. We have a life-world because we need it. This world comes into being as a function of a double-sided, affectively-tinged horizon that mediates existence in reference to its limits. The horizon is double-sided because intentionality can be either with or without an object: Blumenberg has built his anthropological insights about human risk and contingency into his understanding of intentionality. Anxiety is intentionality whose horizon lacks an object and is therefore inherently unstable. Only when intentionality is paired with a meaning does this instability begin to be resolved. In a state of anxiety, our nonnecessity (lack of a meaningful world) is lived through lack and dread, and this unstable horizon can be defined as “the sum of directions from which one has to be prepared for the appearance of undefined things”—a state that cannot be maintained indefinitely.69 Our limits are also a condition of our achievements. Over against this radical instability is the possibility of intentionality with an object. Intentionality in this sense presupposes filtering out excess stimuli, reducing anxiety, and focusing on specific possibilities. In this case, the horizon is the “sum of the directions to which anticipation of possibilities and reaching out toward them is oriented,”70 which is directed by metaphor and bound together by specific feelings. This double-sided concept of intentionality suggests that we are an oscillation between two extremes defined by a need for a trusted platform (rhetoric) in the midst of a hostile or unfamiliar set of circumstances (state of nature) to which specific affects and the expectations they generate are or can be attached. This need is expressed in an “I do not yet have” or “I desire” a particular object or state of affairs. The specific face the world shows is necessarily perspectival, and this perspective is related to the affective state of the subject.71 The horizon is filled with nothing or everything (anxiety), or it is filled with dreams and actual possibilities, which are colored subjectively by joy, fear, anger, shame, and so on. Emotions particularize, or are the “face” of, the same object, gradually establishing its significance, contours, and expectations through an evolving relationship to it. Blumenberg is obviously also referring to the origins and function of language

WM, 6 / AM, 12. For Blumenberg, consciousness can exist fleetingly without an object, because, as Samuel Moyn points out, “preliminary distinctions have not yet been made” (“Metaphorically Speaking: Hans Blumenberg, Giambattista Vico, and the Problem of Origins,” Qui Parle [2000], 58). There is no prereflexive “life-world.” 70 WM, 7 / AM, 13. 71 WM, 167 / AM, 185. 69


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when, in this context, he borrows Franz Rosenzweig’s phrase: names break “into the chaos of the unnamed,” or we might say that the word crickets could “substitute” for what we experienced as noise.72 In the process, emotion expresses a potentiality for freedom, because it interiorizes the noncoincidence of the self to the self that correlates with being world-open. But it also interiorizes a sense of powerlessness, because emotion testifies to the nonnegotiable lack of control over the object—all of which is conditioned by and therefore intelligible in relation to reality’s absolutism. In Work on Myth, Blumenberg dramatizes this process of orientation or worldformation by tracking how mythical figures distance us from a lethal reality. For example, over time pure fear coalesced into the figure Medusa, who comes to stand (be a “metaphor”) for potentially uncontrolled anxiety. Her name implies a story with procedures (it sets the terms) for dealing with her. A similar process is involved in the introjection described by psychoanalysis. Alluding to The Future of an Illusion at the beginning of Work on Myth, Blumenberg claims that “Freud described the complete helplessness of the ego in the face of overwhelming danger as the core of the traumatic situation, and saw in the child’s early demand for love the compensation for such helplessness.”73 The child’s imagined loss of a seamless connection to the mother accompanies individuation and self- and other-recognition through introjection. In the Freud example, “love” individuates by particularizing an object. The individual learns to maintain a position by recognizing and attaching expectations and meanings to a cathected object. Thus, metaphor, as the vehicle that introjects also involves recognition—just as myth as institutionalized, introjected cultural meaning supports recognition. Self-preservative intentionality is therefore roundabout or “circumstantial” and pragmatic, an increased range of behaviors made possible by narrowing horizons to human proportions.74 As resistance to arbitrariness and fragmentation, this is an “accomplishment.” As for Husserl, the correlate is significance, but here it is tethered to affectively experienced limits. Significance can now be understood, as Barbara Merker argues, as a surrogate life-world under the conditions of intentionality.75 By “bracketing” all socially mediated symbolic constructs, the life-preservative function of significance, metaphor, and intentionality become visible. Sensations, perception, names, figures, and stories fill our constitutional world openness and distance us from nothingness. Obviously, intentionality may be purely subjective, purely fantasy, “the absolutism of images and wishes,”76 a price we pay for flexibility. Blumenberg needs a criterion for discriminating between pure fantasy and realistic behavior. “What the horizon is filled with can lack realism as long as this does not extend to the central matter of survival.”77 For example, as long as I realize that fantasies of jumping off cliffs and flying are not actual possibilities, the fantasy is not necessarily harmful. WM, 34 / AM, 40. WM, 5 / AM, 10. 74 Blumenberg repeatedly uses the word ‘circumstantiality’ to describe our indirect relation to reality (e.g., WM, 142 / AM, 159–60, and “AC,” 439 / “AR,” 295). 75 Merker, “Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit,” 85–86. 76 WM, 8 / AM, 14. 77 WM, 7 / AM, 13. 72 73

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Blumenberg adds that cases of failure create a zone of realistic but circumstantial “as if” behavior. For example, Odysseus’s return home is punctuated by bits of cunning designed to outwit all that threatens to prevent this return. He has an arena of “as if” behavior that, since Odysseus is pragmatic, does not include listening to the Sirens’ lethal song unless he is securely fastened to the ship’s mast. Over time, we learn which mushrooms are poisonous and which are not. This behavior is informed by “names that have been raised out of unfamiliarity by means of metaphor and made accessible, in terms of their significance, by telling stories.”78 Over the millennia, stories (myths) maintain a life-worldly position, one that acquires its own “objectivity” and necessity. This position supports human self-preservation by having stood the test of time. In offering resistance to the leveling out of spacetime contingency, this grounds further metaphorical substitution. Blumenberg broadens his already idiosyncratic understanding of metaphor even more in “An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric,” when he suggests that our constitution is itself metaphorical. Echoing Kant’s assertion of incomplete self-reflexivity, Blumenberg claims, “Man comprehends himself only by way of what he is not.” He interprets this as: “it is not only [man’s] situation that is potentially metaphorical; his constitution itself already is.”79 ‘Situation’ refers to our ongoing need to resolve our relation to the unknown; the constitution that “already is” is the dissonance of the deficiency-absolutism of reality heterogeneity. This dissonance can be resolved only indirectly in particular ways that integrate the unknown into the known. Here he has used his own analysis of metaphor to suggest metaphorically how we might comprehend human existence functionally. Based on these various extensions of the term ‘metaphor’, it follows that no wholly descriptive and rational account of who we are can be given, because every content-based account contains a metaphorical surplus that exceeds conceptuality. For example, the ideas that we are animals, machines, streams of consciousness, or genes is metaphorically saturated; the content draws on the richness (or poverty) of available life-worldly meanings. People orient themselves by acting and constituting themselves through this metaphorical surplus. The history of conceptions of human nature (e.g., the rational animal or the image of god) is a history of selfconstitution—a history of superseded metaphors or comparisons. Each metaphor sets the terms of a world-view, set of institutions, customs, and expectations that maintain a life-world. The function of metaphor itself, apart from specific content, is to create the ineliminable subjective space necessary for human self-preservation and cultural reproduction precisely by setting those terms. We can understand how metaphor accomplishes self-preservation and reproduction by examining Blumenberg’s cryptic and far-fetched sounding claim that even action can have a metaphorical structure.80 Action, by definition, is not instinctual, stimulus-response, or reactive behavior. That is, action presupposes at least some minimal prior mediation of impulse, and it presupposes a wider range of behavioral latitude, which in turn presupposes the space created by metaphor. WM, 6 / AM, 12. “AC,” 456 / “AR,” 312. 80 “AC,” 456 / “AR,” 312 78 79


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Metaphor is “an imaginative procedure, a projective principle, which expands and occupies empty space.81 More precisely, action can be “metaphorical” in the sense that one action can be substituted for another, such as animal sacrifice for human sacrifice. Or symbolic behavior can substitute for or interfere with action that tends toward reaction (stimulus-response). For example, treaties can be substituted for nuclear proliferation, environmental regulations can be substituted for environmental degradation, or rhetoric can substitute for terror. In the rhetoric essay, Blumenberg observes that “without this capacity to use substitutes for actions not much would be left of mankind.”82 This is obviously problematic in the technological era where “action [threatens to] shrink to reaction.”83 Here, Blumenberg extends the meaning of the term ‘substitution’ in order to understand action functionally.

self-assertion and the human There is one more important feature of the definition of human existence given earlier. If self-assertion is often blind because it tends to exceed limits, and if the anthropological meaning of self-assertion is protest against raw contingency, then an idea of what counts as human orientation and a concern for the ethical implications of anthropology is implicit in Blumenberg’s texts. Adaptation to circumstances requires human beings to self-assertively place limits between themselves and that which disorients—to put limits between themselves and the limits to existence that support what I will call a minimal “anthrocenteredness.” To be human means to recognize limits in a specific way, as Blumenberg explicitly affirms in an early essay on the link between ethics and the problem of self-preservation and in a later essay dedicated in part to Cassirer’s achievements. In an early essay, “Ist eine philosophische Ethik gegenwärtig möglich?” (“Is a Philosophical Ethics Possible Today?”), Blumenberg claims that Kant’s abstract idea of humanity as the power to set ends has receded into the background. However, Blumenberg still invokes Kant when he distinguishes human action from stimulusresponse or reactive behavior (Kant’s “alien causes”). In this essay, Blumenberg defines ethics as the “self-preservation of the human.” For Blumenberg, it makes no sense to discuss ethics without first having determined how to meet the orientation needs that will support value conferral. So he both holds onto a residual Kantian moment and underscores his own skepticism about the possibility of a Kantian type ethics. He cites contemporary barriers, such as the ethical deficit produced by the loss of a “cosmic ought,” the temptation to lead an aesthetic existence (let life happen rather than lead it), to allow interest in efficiency to override all interest in ends, or to allow ourselves to be subsumed and crushed by an administered society, thereby transferring the role of the subject to an anonymous collective84—not unlike Dasein superimposed on a technological grid or Foucault’s subjected self. All these threats call for an anthropological reinterpretation of the Kantian postulates, “AC,” 454 / “AR,” 309. “AC,” 440 / “AR,” 296. 83 “AC,” 446 / “AR,” 302. 84 Blumenberg, “Ist eine philosophische Ethik gegenwärtig möglich?”, in Studium Generale 6 (1953), 174, 180–81. 81 82

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which should be separated from metaphysics and viewed as part of the “rhetoric of ethics,” whose aim is to “give meaning to improving the conditions of life.” He adds: we should continue to wager “as though” we can benefit.85 When awarded the Kuno Fisher Prize in 1974, twenty years after the ethics essay, Blumenberg stated that Cassirer’s Substance and Function had been unjustly forgotten. Although Cassirer wrote this book in 1910, it contained the germ of his later theory of symbolic forms. As David Adams notes, in it Cassirer argues that “the function of symbolic forms is as important as their substance and that relations between things are as important as the things themselves.”86 Due to length considerations, I cannot go into detail about how Cassirer applied his account of the invariant requirements for apprehension and objectivity of scientific objects to all forms of experience, such as language and myth. Blumenberg put these ideas—in particular, the idea of function—to new uses when he rejected Cassirer’s formalist and essentially ahistorical treatment of symbolic forms—to which Heidegger also objected—and emphasized how symbolic form itself answers to our self-preservation needs in ways I have already discussed, i.e., to become and remain human, it is necessary to give “form” to existence. In this same speech, Blumenberg also urges us not to forget Kant and Cassirer’s guidance in another way, and he cautions against regarding the idea of humanity as a self-grounding subject by means of which we imagine escaping from contingency or as a particular conception that can be universalized such that history becomes one (oppressive) history.87 To be human is to be so in particular ways as this or that individual. Nonetheless, there are preconditions shared by all for appraising this state of affairs. The limit concepts mentioned earlier are normatively suggestive in this regard, although Blumenberg does not explicitly say so. For example, if finite existence must be a mean between the two limits of deficiency and perfection, then it is possible to ask whether at any one point in time a subject or a culture is overpowered by absolutism or has succumbed to magical thinking. Is the movement toward disorientation and anxiety or toward illusions of mastery and utopian thinking that brackets a reality principle? When Blumenberg asserts that Kant’s postulates are part of the rhetoric of ethics, I take that to mean that Kant’s aim for a world of moral self-realization, guided by a conception of the highest good, is (was) a form of rhetoric that can reflect (once reflected) a desire to act in the interests of humanity, countering the tendency to efface the human that is built into the logic of disenchantment.

limit concepts and metaphorics Ultimately Blumenberg cannot “prove” his hypothesis of limit concepts, his story of the origin of myth, or his assertion of metaphor’s primacy, as long as the model is scientific or one erroneously demanded by metaphysics.88 Limit concepts and 85 “AC,” 450 / “AR,” 306. See Müller (Sorge um die Vernunft, 361–66) for a discussion of Blumenberg and ethics. He notes that Blumenberg does not present a systematic ethics, but that an ethical concern motivates his emphasis on “caring for reason.” 86 Adams, “Metaphors for Mankind,” 154. 87 Blumenberg, “Ernst Cassirer’s gedenkend,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 85 (1974): 456–63; repr. in Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981). 88 See discussion in Leszek Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1–2.


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metaphors are justified by what they can explain and they (partially) satisfy the need for atemporal reference points. From an anthropological point of view, neither metaphysics nor scientific rationalism addresses the need for the humanly relevant world supplied by enabling vehicles such as metaphor and myth. Blumenberg observes that, “what we need from history [and cannot get] tends toward indicators having the clarity of mythical models, indicators that enable the individual subject, with his finite time, to determine how he can set himself in a relationship to the large-scale structures that reach far beyond him.”89 In terms of the referents to myth, or for that matter limit concepts, it is not a question of proof, but rather, as Leszek Kolakowski claims in The Presence of Myth, a matter of matching up needs and “areas or sources of energy active in man’s conscious relation to the world.” Kolaskowsi continues: “the proof-making ability is itself a power of the analytic mind, technologically oriented, which does not extend beyond its tasks. . . . The idea of proof, introduced into metaphysics, arises from a confusion of two different sources of energy active in man’s conscious relation to the world: the technological and the mythical.”90 Trying to convert one function into the other or to trying to prove the truths of mythical consciousness analytically results in confusion, because the two functions meet different orientation needs. Blumenberg claims that we operate on the basis of a “principle of insufficient reason,” that traditional metaphysics is therefore an excessive expectation. The desire for foundational truth is a correlate of transcendental anthropologies; it assumes an impossible congruence, the residue of an imaginary lost mythical orientation.91 This results from an “affinity for mythical thinking” untempered by a reality principle. By way of anthropology, “metaphorics”—a term that refers to Blumenberg’s methodology—deflates essentialisms or claims for traditional metaphysical certainty. This involves discovering the background, or “root,” metaphors on which claims for definitive knowledge or various self and world understandings depend. For example, nature may be understood as an organism or as a machine, and both have theoretical consequences because metaphors set the terms of our understanding. Once we see the underlying metaphors as metaphors, then the claims based on these, which we once supposed were definitive, are deflated. Blumenberg claims that metaphysics has often proved itself to be metaphorics taken literally or “substantially.”92 That is, we might believe that nature really is a machine. Metaphorics assumes that we can create distance from “absolute” or definitive claims and yet preserve the meaning installed by the metaphor. Problems arise when metaphors are taken literally. For example, genetic essentialism is reductive and may support the belief that genetic manipulation will solve problems that may have little to do with genetic makeup. At this point in time, we are also engaged in a confrontation with the artificial world produced

WM, 100 / AM, 113. Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth, 2. 91 For Blumenberg, reason constitutes a paradox. Reason is an adaptation in response to a biological shortcoming and is therefore one way in which human beings distance themselves from the absolutism of reality. It always remains a contingent achievement, prone to error and hypertrophy. On the other hand, it is the only tool we have for self-criticism and self-correction. See discussion in Müller (Sorge um die Vernunft, esp. 325–99). 92 Blumenberg, “Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie,” 140. 89 90

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by our technological inventions. The guiding metaphor is the computer, which generates research into computers that will surpass the complexity of the human mind. Understood as a metaphorical relationship, it is a comparison between ourselves and computers. Wayne Booth proposes a kind of critical metaphorics, with which Blumenberg would most likely agree, when he claims that the “quality of any culture will in part be measured both by the quality of the metaphors it induces or allows and the quality of the judges of metaphor that it educates and rewards.” He proposes that understanding metaphors allows us to decide whether to “join the metaphorist or reject him, and that is simultaneously to decide either to be shaped in the shame his metaphor requires or to resist.” For example, does it enlarge us or diminish us to use Freud’s metaphors for the soul, or B. F. Skinner’s?93 If traditional metaphysics is the correlate of transcendental anthropologies, metaphorics is the correlate of the minimal anthropology implied in Blumenberg’s texts. There is no perfect congruence between thought and its objects or between the organism and its environment. There is, however, relative congruence, which can be conceptualized by reinterpreting how human beings and the environment do or can “fit” together (Passung). The “principle of insufficient reason” implies there is no perfect fit.94 The structure of human existence indicates a gap between the “paradise” of certain knowledge we once believed we could have and what is possible. The discredited great questions and great myths persist, which indicates an anthropological need that cannot be gainsaid or deconstructed. This raises the question of whether the loss of traditional metaphysics should give way to a neo-Kantian bypassing of finitude’s pressure or a positivist reductionism that brackets out what it cannot accommodate as meaningless or anachronistic. Rather, self-evidence can be questioned by asking what it means within the limits of existence.

objectivity and rationality I want to return briefly to the issue of objectivity and rationality implied by Blumenberg’s conception of existence and its complement, the principle of insufficient reason. Somewhat counterintuitively, the great myths are the model for what counts as objectivity and rationality in institutions. Just as myths must be understood in terms of their reception history—they are tested over time and their success and our survival is measured by reality’s failure to contradict them—so are all viable institutions and habits of behavior that would shelter us from threats to viability. So, objectivity and rationality are context-dependent, with institutions providing the basis for making (rational) first-order assessments of the arrangements they embody. To understand more about what Blumenberg means by “objectivity” and “rationality,” it is necessary to take a closer look at what he means by “optimized institutions,” of which the great myths are examples. The term ‘institutions’ refers to rhetoric from the perspective of its stabilization over time, to what we take for

93 Wayne Booth, “Metaphor and Rhetoric,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 63, 66–67. 94 See discussion in Merker, “Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit,” 75–76.


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granted such that further behavioral experimentation is possible. For example, the use of knives and forks, pens and pencils has been institutionalized; so have child-rearing patterns, grammar, the use of words to refer to things and ideas. Although institutions are only relatively constant, Blumenberg claims that they constitute “burdens of proof” that we have survived and can continue to survive. It is no accident that this metaphor is drawn from logic, given that optimization implies the continuing production of “evidence” in this regard. This is not a theory of progress or a moral category; the concept is shorthand for the historical formation of any cultural or theoretical construct we may come to take for granted. For example, scientific theories remain optimal as long as they continue to account for phenomena and generate further research. Cultural constructs remain optimal as long as they continue to support value conferral, identity, communicability, and action. Blumenberg presents his theory as an analogy to Darwinian evolution; optimization may not always choose what is best, but what works, and this is “optimal” until it stops working. Optimization is the basis of a kind of objectivity. He claims: Even if the term ‘optimization’ can never claim to be applicable to a synchronic cross section as a whole, it does establish a definite distribution of burdens of proof for what gives itself out as rationality. At least arguments of the kind that assert that something can no longer be accepted because it has already been accepted for a very long time without examination do not have the rational plausibility that is granted to them at the time. What the heading “institutions” covers is, above all, a distribution of burdens of proof. Where an institution exists, the question of its rational foundation is not, of itself, urgent.95

The burden of proof metaphor suggests that institutions are plausible accounts, whose objectivity is conferred on them by their continuing anthropological relevance and correction by reality. If an institution has endured and supplies a realistic zone of “as if” behavior, it provides the resources for getting on with living. Viewed in this light, the human sciences provide evidence of how, why, and that choices of world interpretations have already been made that constitute our history. To return to the metaphor: at least in our justice system, the defendant is presumed innocent. The burden is on the prosecutor to prove the defendant’s guilt. Similarly, those who object to the optimized institution bear the burden of demonstrating its shortcomings. In practice, this is what happens. This says nothing about the inherent justice of the arrangements, but it does affirm an anthropological requirement that there be such arrangements whose plausibility is legible next to the yardstick of self-preservation. The “rationality” of institutions is coextensive with its rejection of questions in the sense that they shield us from having the question everything at once. Institutions represent elementary commitments that are necessary because we cannot start from scratch at every moment. Institutions are burdens of proof that allow us to make some accommodation with the “meager finitude of life that the thinker-for-himself has disposition over.” They free the “world observer.”96 So admitting the rationality of institutions lifts the burden of proof at the same time that it defines this burden by delineating reason’s limits. WM, 166 / AM, 183–84. WM, 26 / AM, 33.

95 96

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These limits are not just the principle of noncontradiction, but the antinomy of life and thought, partially bridged by institutions. In this context, reason would have to mean taking up burdens of proof piece-meal as they are distributed to us. That is, we move away from problems as we solve them, and the model is the one overwhelming anthropological problem constituted by the terminus a quo. Rationality and objectivity are adaptations, qualities of distance from insufficient orientations and nonviability.

anthropocentrism and “anthrocenteredness” Why is Blumenberg’s position not anthropocentric? First of all, Blumenberg would point out that a view must be a view from somewhere. I opt for the term ‘anthrocenteredness’ because it is necessary to acknowledge the place and constraints on the place from which we make our claims. The thought model discussed earlier encourages recognition of our smallness and marginality in relation to a larger natural setting at the same time that it calls into question grandiose knowledge claims. Definitive orientations and definitive evidence always exceed our capacities. This has been overlooked by the more optimistic Enlighteners and technocrats targeted by antihumanist critiques. The ever-increasing sense of the universe’s immensity further amplifies the discrepancy. In a posthumously published work, Die Vollzähligkeit, Blumenberg meditates on the immensity of time and space (innumerable galaxies) and the powerlessness of Wissen. The size of the universe is an index of the loss of our significance and also the improbability of our form of existence. But it is precisely this meditation that deflates and replaces the narcotizing and grandiose narratives associated with anthropocentrism with narratives that foster living within our means. Reinforcing a sense of life’s preciousness can become the basis for how and why we should care. Sorge is not a given any more than life is a right.97 Like Cassirer, Blumenberg thinks anxiety must be a transitional moment, but unlike Cassirer, the resolution does not measure progressive self-liberation. There is no self to liberate and no absolute point of view from which to judge the process. Awareness of biological limits is key to the philosophical endeavor itself. Anthropology counsels us to remember human beings by renouncing the nothingness at the heart of existence, on the one hand, and definitive answers, on the other hand. This anthropology of limits provides the means to realistically assess our possibilities. We may not have an overall view of the course of history, but we do have a non-negotiable limit.98

97 See discussion in Franz Josef Wetz, “Abscheid ohne Widersehen: Die Endgültigkeit des Verschwindens,” in Die Kunst des Überlebens, 42–47. Wetz tends to read these passages pessimistically, which is not surprising because the immense burden placed on human beings by modern conditions. Another way to read this is that Blumenberg is soberly appraising the challenge and the choice is ours. 98 I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions for revision.

Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger and Cassirer

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