Hans Blumenberg and the Legitimacy of the Modern Age
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Saturday 13 July 2024 is the 104th anniversary of the birth of Hans Blumenberg (13 July 1920–28 March 1996), who was born in Lübeck on this date in 1920.
One way we could classify philosophies of history would be to divide them accordingly as the philosopher who formulated them was interested in a given period of history, or in a given division of time. You’d think that philosophers of history would all be focused on the past, but that isn’t invariably the case. In my episode on Karl Jaspers I argued that Jaspers was primarily interested in the present, and there are other philosophers of history who primarily focus on bringing the insights to history to bear upon the present. I could argue that Fichte’s concern in his book Characteristics of the Present Age was an interest in placing the present within a larger historical context which is known, which therefore locates us historically within the totality of history. Isaiah Berlin characterizes this task as the central concern of Russian historicists. Ernst Bloch, by contrast, was primarily interested in the future in the form of the as-yet, and in my episode on Herman Kahn I characterized his futurism as an expansion of historical consciousness to the future.
Beyond the past-present-future division of time, philosophers may also be particularly interested in a given period of history. We saw that Isaiah Berlin was primarily interested in the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment reaction. Classicists are interested in classical antiquity, and we can easily imagine philosophers of history who primarily take their cues from classicists. For example, I’ve discussed historians like Edward Gibbon, who spent his efforts on the history of Rome, and Gibbon has been, for many, a paradigmatic historian whose historical works inspire philosophical analysis, and in my recent episode on Marc Bloch I noted that he was a medievalist, whose interest was primarily focused on the Middle Ages.
Blumenberg was primarily interested in modernity, and he belongs in a class of philosophers of history whose interest has been in understanding modernity. The meaning and significance of modernity was at the center of Blumenberg’s contribution to philosophy of history. One of the expressions of this interest in modernity was Blumenberg’s interest in the origins of modernity. There is no agreement on what constitutes modernity, so there is no agreement as to how we are to trace the origins of modernity. For example, some have argued that Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux on 26 April 1336 was a quintessentially modern moment, even if it occurred in the late Middle Ages.
In my episode on Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux, I quoted from Blumenberg, who had argued that this mountain climbing episode as a moment that oscillates between epochs. Blumenberg wrote:
“As one of the great moments that oscillate indecisively between the epochs, I would like to mark April 26, 1336, when Petrarch ascended Mont Ventoux — ‘purely out of the desire,’ as he writes, ‘to see the unusual altitude of this place.’ The comparatively modest excursion is stylized into a symbolic venture, in which desire verging on the sinful and pious timidity before what he had never set foot upon, daring and fear, presumption and self-recollection combine in an event whose attributes one could label ‘deeply medieval’ just as much as ‘early modern’.”
So, for Blumenberg, Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux wasn’t completely medieval and it wasn’t yet fully modern, but we could still call this an intimation of modernity insofar as it suggests further developments to come.
Another approach to the origins of modernity is Blumenberg’s The Genesis of the Copernican World, which explores the differences between ancient and medieval cosmology and how this translated into distinct conceptions of time. I particularly love the opening paragraph of the Introduction to this book:
“The combined circumstance that we live on Earth and are able to see stars — that the conditions necessary for life do not exclude those necessary for vision, or vice versa — is a remarkably improbable one. This is because the medium in which we live is, on the one hand, just thick enough to enable us to breath and to prevent us from being burned up by cosmic rays, while, on the other hand, it is not so opaque as to absorb entirely the light of the stars and block any view of the universe. What a fragile balance between the indispensable and the sublime.”
This isn’t obviously about the origins of modernity, but our outlook on the world, not least our outlook on the cosmos and our place within it, is part of Blumenberg’s theme, since our conception of our relationship to the heavens changes over time, and any one conception can define an epoch. Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux represented a conception of the cosmos in relation to human interests that was beginning to change. The work of Copernicus constitutes a further change in our conception of our place within the cosmos.
Blumenberg dramatizes the relationship of human beings to the universe in the story of Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux as well as in the view we have of the night sky standing upon the surface of the Earth. Further along in The Genesis of the Copernican World Blumenberg writes:
“Nietzsche saw, in this consequence of Copernicanism, the nihilistic impetus of an immense devaluation and eccentricity of man. Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ can be understood as a conclusion drawn from the failure of the Epicurean attempt at indifference, from the breakdown even of the toughest position of an uninvolved onlooker. The complaint about the indifference of the heavens to human fate was even further from falling silent in the modern age, because the hope that the world would participate in man’s happiness, a hope derived from the Stoic tradition and its adaptation by Christianity, could not be overcome by any renewal of atomism. The indissoluble kinship between hope and fear (the latter as the price we pay for the former) , which Epicurus asserted, never convinced the enthusiasts of hope, who believed themselves to be allied with the universal law either of nature or of history.”
Here the relationship between human being and cosmos takes on an emotive tinge, and perhaps more than a tinge — something closer to a crisis that wells up over historical time with the dawning human realization at the indifference of the universe not only to our well-being, but to our very existence. In his description of looking up at the night sky and seeing the stars, Blumenberg concludes that our ability to see the stars hinges on a fragile balance, implying that any number of contingencies might be different, and might yet change, in which we no longer see the stars, perhaps because humanity no longer exists to observe the stars.
Blumenberg’s interest in the relationship of humanity to the cosmos as one of observation suggests a relationship to the Husserlian conception of intentionality, that is to say, that all acts of consciousness are intentional insofar as they involve a relationship between subject and object. There is no objectless perception, no consciousness without an object of consciousness. Blumenberg gives us the human relationship to the cosmos as observer and object, differently mediated in different ages, sometimes given to us as Petrarach’s view of the world from the summit of Mount Ventoux, sometimes given to us as our view of the stars from the surface of Earth, and sometimes given us by Copernicus’ heliocentric theory. These distinct ages of the understanding of man’s place in nature can be expressed as different intentionalities of humanity and cosmos.
And we know that Blumenberg was influenced by Husserl. In an early essay, “The Life-World and the Concept of Reality,” we see not only the influence of Husserl, explicitly mentioning the intentionality of consciousness, but also that of Plato, while hinting at Blumenberg’s overriding interest in history. In the quote that follows, Blumenberg has, in the prior paragraph, imagined what the search for scientific knowledge within Plato’s cave would be like, before the philosopher ascends out of the cave, in the light of the good; anankē is the personification of fate or inevitability in Greek mythology:
“It is precisely at this point that the thought suggests itself to those versed in the phenomenology of the late Husserl that the anankē of the cave is nothing but the ‘self-evidence’ with which the given in Husserl’s ‘life-world’ is taken for granted. This life-world has a well-defined role in Husserl’s Crisis philosophy: it marks the point of departure of history as a teleologically directed process of the actualization of the intentionality of consciousness with the limiting value of phenomenology itself. This is not a process which leads out of the ‘life-world’ and flows into an ‘authentic’ reality, but one which reduces and reconditions the self-evidences of the life-world itself. To put it in the language of the Platonic model: the history of man is not realized in the ascent out of the cave but in the persevering transformation of the situation in the cave. The instrumentality of the phenomenological reduction has to begin precisely with that anankē which the Glaucon of the Platonic dialogue ascribes to the unreflected realization of the general thesis, in which the prisoners simply hold that the appearing shadows are real. The ‘life-world’ of the cave as Plato describes it and the life-world of Husserl are thereby characterized in a way that renders phenomenology as well as any knowledge of truth whatsoever impossible. But while in Plato only the violent and painful conversion and severance from the initial situation can lead to truth, Husserl’s theory of consciousness is the guiding clue for a possible history of the continuing resolution of that life-world. Phenomenology is the conclusive and now indeed infinite task of a history which must reject every way out to a pure Being as a mystical dead end and which can be experienced and endured nowhere else but in the cave itself and under its initial conditions.”
This is a surprising use to which Blumenberg has put Plato, and it helps to make the venerable allegory of the cave fresh again. The yearning of the philosopher to escape the cave is illusory; true wisdom is found within the cave, and in the neverending task of renouncing the pursuit of pure being in favor of the pursuit of knowledge where we find ourselves: in Plato’s cave. Blumenberg would ultimately emancipate himself from explicit Husserlian formulations, but these formulations have left an imprint on his thought.
Blumenberg is perhaps best known for the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate. Blumenberg shared his concern with modernity with Karl Löwith, but the two understood modernity very differently. Blumenberg and Löwith were both at a conference in Munster in 1962, at which Löwith delivered a talk that was later published as “Das Verhängnis des Fortschritts” (“The Fate of Progress”), while Blumenberg, then a young scholar, argued that the use of secularization as an illegitimate concept was itself illegitimate.
Löwith’s work was part of a critique of the idea of progress which became dominant in the twentieth century, and Blumenberg was among the few to swim against the current by defending the idea of progress, which is usually inseparable from the idea of modernity. Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) was a response to Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History of 1949, in which Lowith had argued that modernity was essentially a bastardized secularization of earlier theological concepts of history. Blumenberg defended the autonomy and legitimacy of modernity against Löwith’s arguments. Here is the opening paragraph of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age:
“What the term ‘secularization’ signifies should, it seems, be readily determinable. Whether as an observation, a reproach, or an endorsement, everyone is familiar with this designation for a long-term process by which a disappearance of religious ties, attitudes to transcendence, expectations of an afterlife, ritual performances, and firmly established turns of speech is driven onward in both private and daily public life. One need not even stick to the data (though of course they are the easiest to fix empirically and statistically) of institutional membership and influence, which are characterized by a higher degree of inertia than their motivational basis in the human life-world. It used to be one of those standing turns of speech to lament the world’s becoming ‘ever more worldly’ (rather than ever less so), while now what is asserted is that the modern age is an epoch of pure ‘worldliness,’ and its body politic is accordingly the secular state.”
The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate began as a debate over the philosophy of history. Löwith argued that philosophy of history was a secularization of Christian eschatological themes, and therefore not a real philosophy:
“…philosophy of history is… entirely dependent on theology of history, in particular on the theological concept of history as a history of fulfillment and salvation. But then philosophy of history cannot be a ‘science’; for how could one verify the belief in salvation on scientific grounds? …the following outline aims to show that philosophy of history originates with the Hebrew and Christian faith in a fulfillment and that it ends with the secularization of its eschatological pattern.”
Blumenberg’s argument that secularization itself illegitimate expanded the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate well beyond the scope of Löwith’s original critique of philosophy of history:
“Insofar as ‘secularization’ is nothing but a spiritual anathema upon what has transpired in history since the Middle Ages, it belongs to a vocabulary whose explanatory value depends on presuppositions that are not available to theory and that cannot be credited to or expected of the understanding of reality that is itself characterized as ‘worldly.’ But secularization has been accepted as a category for the interpretation of historical circumstances and connections even by people who could not be prepared to conform to the theological premises. Here the difference between the theological and the historical uses of the categories of worldliness and secularization lies neither in a change of the prescribed evaluation nor in the reinterpretation of loss as emancipation. For a positive evaluation of secularization is perfectly possible even in theology: The very people who were attempting to restore the radicalness of the original religious distance from the world and to renew theology’s declarations of transcendence ‘dialectically’ could see in the massive evidence of the manifestation of the world as ‘worldliness’ the advantage of its unmistakable character of immanence. What is foreign to the world, and appears to it as the paradoxical demand that it give itself up, was supposed to withdraw itself, in a new distinctness, from the entanglement and camouflage in which, perhaps for the sake of demonstrable success, it had become falsely familiar and acceptable.1 A theology of ‘division,’ of crisis, had to be interested in making clear the worldliness of the world rather than in overlaying it with the sacred. That is what gave the use of the term ‘secularization’ its specific theological pathos.”
Is the modern world a scam? It is all based on a lie? Löwith implied that it was, without saying so in so many words. Blumenberg went further and defended modernity as a legitimate historical category not derived from the secularization of theological models. The debate goes on. In a dramatically titled 2022 paper, “A Strange Dispute at the Deathbed of Religion: Blumenberg and Löwith Cross Swords” Paolo Costa wrote:
“…the modern champions of progress, instead of settling for the pragmatic attitude of people who have once and for all discarded the search for the absolute, often succumbed to the allure of the promises of redemption of the great universal religions and ended up demanding from human self-affirmation the same level of self-fulfilment without side effects propagated by eschatological myths.”
In some expositions the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate is presented in very broad terms as a confrontation between faith and reason, between religion and modernity, and between Heaven and Earth. The debate grew in part because it touched on so many other issues. For example, in my recent episode on Ernst Bloch I discussed how Bertrand Russell criticized Marxism as a surrogate religion and Eric Voegelin called it an ersatz religion. The problem, if it is a problem, of Marxism being illegitimate because it is a concealed eschatology is part of the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate.
What is at stake in this debate? Here’s one way to think about it. Are we even capable of formulating a concept of ourselves or of the world that is truly modern, in the sense of being distinct from the master concepts of theology brought to a high stage of development though a thousand years of medieval history? When we think our ourselves as being modern, and therefore as being historically distinct from earlier periods of history, do we in fact fail every time, without knowing that we have failed, because our presumptively modern ideas are really medieval ideas?
So the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate can become very large indeed, but we can also try to cut the debate down to size. In a 2019 paper, “Secularization between Faith and Reason: Reinvestigating the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate,” Sjoerd Griffioen argued that the debate has given rise to widespread misinterpretations:
“The debate should be seen as an unresolved dispute between incompatible philosophical positions, in which Löwith represents a ‘Stoic retreat’ from modernity and Christianity and Blumenberg a modest defense of modernity against the metaphysical burden of its Christian past.”
As we find ourselves ever-further distanced from the medieval past, and always more deeply embedded in modernity, this debate could plausibly fall away as it becomes increasingly perceived as irrelevant, or it could continue to grow as modernity remains elusive, and we can no more define its content than Löwith can define the problem with modernity. Costa further wrote about the debate:
“As is often the case with common sense statements, its apparent matter-of-factness dissolves into thin air when the spokespersons of the alleged truism are pressed to explain its truth content analytically.”
We cannot give an adequate exposition of modernity precisely because we are ourselves modern, and thus too close to see the forest for the trees. But we also can’t given an adequate exposition of the pre-modern views the preceded us, because this belongs to an inaccessible past that we can no longer understand. This is part of what makes modernity a mystery, even though modernity was supposed to be about transcending mysteries taking the world on its own terms.
