Hans Blumenberg
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 103rd anniversary of the birth of Hans Blumenberg (13 July 1920–28 March 1996), who was born in Lübeck on this date in 1920.
In an early essay, “The Life-World and the Concept of Reality,” we see not only the influence of Husserl, but also that of Plato, while hinting at Blumenberg’s interest in history. In what 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 that venerable story 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 emancipate himself from explicit Husserlian formulations. David Ingram wrote of Blumenberg’s project in Kantian rather than Husserlian terms:
“In a remarkable series of books, Hans Blumenberg has persuasively argued that we can no more write history (or at least the history of ideas) without notions of progress and novelty than we can without notions of continuity. On the one hand, he maintains that successive epochs must be comparable to one another, even if historical breaks require that we relinquish a canon of enduring questions. If they were not, then there would be no possibility of experiencing them: ‘All change, all succession from the old to the new, is accessible to us only in that it can be related — instead of to the ‘substance’ of which Kant speaks — to a constant frame of reference, by whose means the requirements can be defined that have been satisfied in an identical position.’ Blumenberg is here suggesting that some minimal continuity — the functional reoccupation of identical positions by successive epochs — is a transcendental condition for the possibility of experiencing historical change in general. According to Blumenberg ‘the concept of “reoccupation” designates the minimum identity that it must be possible to discover, or at least to presuppose and to search for, in even the most agitated movement of history.’ In other words, there must be questions (that are) relatively constant in comparison to answers and a ‘constant matrix’ of expectations and needs.”
The idea of progress, after having informed much of nineteenth century European thought, came in for considerable criticism during the twentieth century, but Blumenberg took this ox by the horns and argued for the legitimacy of the idea of progress, as Ingram describes above. One is not surprised to find that Blumenberg in his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, in addition to taking on the problem of progress, also discusses secularization at length, marking off his own understanding of the idea, not rejecting it outright or affirming it as he finds it, but refashioning it to fit his needs:
“Insofar as ‘secularization’ is nothing but a spiritual anathema upon what has transpired in history since the Middle Ages, it belongs to a vocabulary wrhose 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.”
Celina María Bragagnolo wrote of Blumenberg’s attitude to the secularization thesis:
“Blumenberg’s critique of the secularization thesis focuses on a critique of historical explanations predicated on a continuity of substance. For Blumenberg, the modern age derives its radicalness from divorcing human existence from nature and the cosmos, or in Blumenberg’s anthropological term “the absoluteness of reality” (realms to which we have no natural connection) and ties it to the capacity to create a life world (as our brief description of myth shows). One could say that the rejection of absolutism, in either of its theological or political variants, is Blumenberg’s Lebensthema.”
Some have identified Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux as a pivotal moment in the advent of modernism, and Blumenberg does not neglect this. In my post on Petrarch I quoted Blumenberg to the effect that Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux was not the first moment of modernity, and Petrarch himself was not the first modern man, but rather that Petrarch was a man caught between two ages:
“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.’ Petrarch’s appeal to the ancient example of King Philip of Macedonia on Mount Haemus in Thessaly plays a role here, just as does the entirely Ciceronian justification that such a venture might be excusable for a young man who is not involved in public affairs (excusabile in iuvene privalo). Nature offers resistance to the intrusion: Sola nobis obstabat natura loci. Petrarch’s portrayal ofhis goings astray and exertions gives it the appearance of a prodigious undertaking (ingentem conatum). An old herdsman appears as a cautioner, who himself had once reached the summit under the impulse of youthful spirit but had brought away only repentance and hardship (penitenttam et laborem). One of the typical motives of curiositas-reservation and prohibition-enhances the appetite: Crescebat ex prohibitione cupiditas. All of this presents itself as a monstrous human temptation, and the experience on the sununit accords with this: Stupenti simuis steti [I stood as though amazed].”
We see, then, that in grappling with the tradition, at each stage — with Plato, with Petrarch, with Kant, with Husserl, with progress, and with secularization — Blumenberg takes on these familiar philosophers and ideas and makes them his own in his effort to understand and to justify modernity.
Further Resources
_________________________________________________________________
http://blumenberg-gesellschaft.de/
Ingram, D. (1990). Blumenberg and the Philosophical Grounds of Historiography. History and Theory, 29(1), 1. doi:10.2307/2505201
Bragagnolo, C. M. (2011). Secularization, History, and Political Theology: The Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt Debate. Journal of the Philosophy of History, 5(1), 84–104. doi:10.1163/187226311x555473
