Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg [1st ed.] 9783030430153, 9783030430160

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxv
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
I Hurt, Therefore I Am: Descartes with Blumenberg (and Job) (Agata Bielik-Robson)....Pages 3-36
Legitimacy of Nihilism: Blumenberg’s Post-Gnosticism (Elad Lapidot)....Pages 37-59
Blumenberg, Latour and the Apocalypse (Willem Styfhals)....Pages 61-79
Front Matter ....Pages 81-81
The Sovereignty of the World: Towards a Political Theology of Modernity (After Blumenberg) (Joseph Albernaz, Kirill Chepurin)....Pages 83-107
Interrogating John Locke and the Propriety of Appropriation with Blumenberg and Voegelin (Lissa McCullough)....Pages 109-128
Political Legitimacy and Founding Myths (Zeynep Talay Turner)....Pages 129-147
Front Matter ....Pages 149-149
Trial and Crisis: Blumenberg and Husserl on the Genesis and Meaning of Modern Science (Robert Buch)....Pages 151-173
Infinite Progress and the Burdens of Biography (Charles Turner)....Pages 175-192
The Ideal of Optics and the Opacity of Life: Blumenberg on Modernity and Myth (Oriane Petteni)....Pages 193-213
Front Matter ....Pages 215-215
World-Modelling and Cartesian Method: Blumenberg’s Hyperopia (Adi Efal-Lautenschläger)....Pages 217-236
Umbesetzung: Reoccupation in Blumenbergian Modernity (Sonja Feger)....Pages 237-256
Modernizing Blumenberg (Daniel Whistler)....Pages 257-274
Back Matter ....Pages 275-277

Citation preview

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC PURPOSE

Interrogating Modernity Debates with Hans Blumenberg

Edited by Agata Bielik-Robson Daniel Whistler

Political Philosophy and Public Purpose Series Editor Michael J. Thompson William Paterson University New York, NY, USA

This series offers books that seek to explore new perspectives in social and political criticism. Seeing contemporary academic political theory and ­philosophy as largely dominated by hyper-academic and overly-technical debates, the books in this series seek to connect the politically engaged traditions of philosophical thought with contemporary social and political life. The idea of philosophy emphasized here is not as an aloof enterprise, but rather a publicly-oriented activity that emphasizes rational reflection as well as informed praxis. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14542

Agata Bielik-Robson  •  Daniel Whistler Editors

Interrogating Modernity Debates with Hans Blumenberg

Editors Agata Bielik-Robson Department of Theology and Religious Studies University of Nottingham Nottingham, UK

Daniel Whistler Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, UK

ISSN 2524-714X     ISSN 2524-7158 (electronic) Political Philosophy and Public Purpose ISBN 978-3-030-43015-3    ISBN 978-3-030-43016-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Jose A. Bernat / Bacete / gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor Foreword

Modernity is again on trial. Not only in theory but in our culture, a questioning of the fundamental principles and concepts that undergird modernity has been underway. Even as technological change increases its pace and deepens its integration of society, the values and practices of traditional society maintain their grip on swaths of the population. But it is in theory and philosophy that this questioning of modernity is perhaps most palpable. Today, it is au courant to view modernity more as myth than as worthy of legitimacy. From facile indictments of progress to the deconstruction of reason no less than wholesale critiques of the Enlightenment and concepts such as universalism, the tenor of many intellectual currents is bent on dispossessing us of the idea that the modern age has legitimacy and seeking to reveal its concepts and categories as without foundation and an expression of deluded collective self-understanding. Agata Bielik-Robson’s and Daniel Whistler’s collection of chapters seeks to bring this debate back into dialogue with one of the most profound defenses of the modern age: Hans Blumenberg’s Die Legitimät der Neuzeit (1966). For Blumenberg, the “legitimacy” of the modern age consisted largely in seeing it not as a mere secularization of Christian theological concepts—as was asserted by Carl Schmitt in his Politische Theologie—but, rather, as a break with medieval and Scholastic conceptions of nature and the universe, as well as the status of science as internal to human cooperative practices no less than the view of progress as immanent to social practices and development. The transformation that takes place with the break from the all-encompassing theological Christian view of the universe and humanity is profound and, as a result, we ought not to v

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see modernity as an extension of those pre-modern structures of thought. Modernity, in other words, has its own legitimacy as a period of culture and human self-understanding. The chapters that follow explore the implications and legitimacy of this thesis in light of contemporary theory and philosophy. As such, they bring back to the fore the importance of interrogating not only Blumenberg’s profound argument, but in so doing, they also put us in the position of asking anew about the values and legitimacy of the modern age. Indeed, in an age where modernity can be seen more and more as a period of technical and instrumental reason and less as a new paradigm of humane reason, an age of increasing nihilism and ethical vacuity, these chapters probe a central and indeed essential theme in contemporary philosophy. For what is at stake is nothing less than our collective capacity to know ourselves and grapple with the eternal problem of self-determination and self-­ understanding at the heart of human existence. New York, NY, USA Winter, 2020

Michael J. Thompson

Preface

Hans Blumenberg’s monumental The Legitimacy of the Modern Age—first published in 1966 and then revised during the mid-1970s in light of the reviews, critiques and debates it had provoked—is a work formed from dialogues. It is built on an edifice of encounters with contemporaries, with an earlier generation of German thinkers and with the moderns themselves. Not only does it re-read, in sustained and often creative ways, Augustine, Bacon, Bruno, Cusa, Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, Nietzsche, Ockham, Voltaire and many others, the book is also framed as a series of responses to Arendt, Bultmann, Gadamer, Heidegger, Jonas, Löwith, Marquard, Schmitt, Taubes and Voegelin. The volume that follows aims to take the inextricably dialogical nature of Legitimacy seriously, and it aims to do so, primarily, by continuing the conversations. That is, the 12 chapters enter into dialogue with Blumenberg in the following ways: (a) By revisiting those dialogues out of which Legitimacy was conceived: the book reconstructs the conversations on political theology, Gnosticism and the value of modernity that Blumenberg was in the process of having with his contemporaries and immediate predecessors (Arendt, Freud, Horkheimer, Husserl, Jonas, Schmitt, Taubes, Voegelin, Weber, Weil, etc.). (b) By putting Legitimacy into dialogue with later visions of modernity and with political theologies that have proven influential in the wake of his work (Derrida, Latour, Levinas, etc.). vii

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(c) By interrogating those dialogues that he has with “the moderns” in Legitimacy—those dialogues, that is, out of which his idea of modernity is constituted. The chapters attend to both those modern thinkers with whom he tarries in Legitimacy (Bruno, Descartes, Locke, etc.) and also those whom he neglects (Diderot, Goethe, etc.). (d) By putting him into dialogue with himself, confronting Legitimacy with visions of modernity found elsewhere in his writings—from his early essay “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel” to his writings on technology, his essays on Freud and, most of all, his Work on Myth. In all these ways, the following chapters put Legitimacy on trial, interrogating its construction of a modernity that both challenges and exacerbates trends in postwar German conceptions of history and of historical progress. Interrogating Modernity therefore returns to Blumenberg’s work not primarily as an exercise in scholarship, but as a springboard to think again about questions of the modern, of the secular, of political theory, of historiographical method and of history itself. It does so, moreover, in a multidisciplinary manner, making use of the resources of philosophy, religious studies, theology, history of ideas, sociology, political theory and aesthetics to reframe and reconceive what it means to be modern. The chapters provide commentaries on significant aspects of Blumenberg’s multifaceted work, but they also attempt to go further—that is, they try to develop a comprehensive map of how Legitimacy remains pertinent today, in order to together offer a genuinely interdisciplinary vision of what it means to be modern after Blumenberg.

The Rise and Rise of Political Theology Schmitt, Benjamin, Taubes, Strauss, Žižek, Agamben, Goodchild, Pickstock—the increasing prominence of these names in the academy over the last two decades is a symptom of the ever-growing popularity of genealogical methods in political theology. Interrogating Modernity attempts, in part, to reinsert Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age into this list and situate it among ongoing contemporary debates over the debts contemporary life owes to past forms. We still have much to learn not only from Blumenberg’s explication, evaluation and critique of the “indirect theology” of secularization narratives, but also from the very

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contents and methods of his competing narrative of the emergence of the modern subject. Blumenberg’s book may sometimes present itself as a mere contribution “to deciphering a methodology for the application of the category of secularization in historiography” (LMA, 63), but any cursory glance through its 600-odd pages of tortured scholarly prose reveals much more. For instance, Legitimacy not only adjudicates on Carl Schmitt’s thesis— “the strongest version of the secularisation theorem” (LMA, 92)—that “all the significant concepts of the modern doctrine of the state are secularized theological concepts”1, but also—and most importantly—asks questions which Schmitt himself seems to take for granted, such as: what is it to think of an idea “that carries on or is carried on in [a] new phenomenon” (LMA, 19)? What concepts of ownership, debt and (of course) legitimacy does Schmitt’s assertion that they are primarily “theological concepts” imply? Do such claims exhibit appropriate hermeneutic sensitivity in interpreting every idea in terms of some hidden historical baggage? In fact, might the secularization thesis itself be a symptom of a “death of theology”, in which an “endangered” conceptual framework is transformed into “an intangible core content” for the sake of “self-­preservation” (LMA, 6)? Indeed, in light of the rigour, cogency and originality of Blumenberg’s own interrogation of modernity and its critics, what is most surprising is the very necessity of any belated insistence on the pertinence of Blumenberg’s work: it is to the detriment of contemporary theory that Legitimacy remains such a neglected resource. In part, what explains its neglect is also what ever-more-urgently recommends its recovery: Blumenberg’s intricate intertwining of discourses of secularization, of nihilism and of the nature and value of modernity along with reflections on historiographical method, detailed readings of intellectual history and a concern with the very possibility of the emergence of the new in history. When, for instance, Blumenberg writes in Legitimacy that “one must regard the secularization thesis as an indirectly theological exploitation of the historiographical difficulties that have arisen with regard to the philosophical attempt at a beginning of the modern age” (LMA, 75), such a claim cuts right to the heart of his programme: the eclectic bringing-together of disparate disciplines to make sense of a problem in 1  Carl Schmitt, Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. M. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 43.

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political theology. And this quotation also thereby reveals what Legitimacy has to offer theory 50 years on: an ever-more interdisciplinary approach to the genealogy of the contemporary. The year 2020 marks the centenary of Blumenberg’s birth. It provides the perfect opportunity to bring his writings more fully into the mainstream of contemporary thinking about the debts modern subjectivity owes to the past. Blumenberg should become an invaluable reference point for all those who wish to “reestablish” a “genetic reference” between the present and the past (LMA, 72). This, it must be stressed, is not to gainsay the increasing amount of invaluable Blumenberg scholarship that already exists. Any attempt to make sense of Blumenberg today stands in significant debt to Bradley Bassler, Elizabeth Brient, Bruce Krajewski and Angus Nicholls (to name but a few of the most recent Anglophone scholars), in addition to the classic interventions of Martin Jay, Richard Rorty and Robert Wallace and the translators—old and new—who have made so much of Blumenberg’s work available in English. There are, moreover, signs of an explosion of Anglophone interest in Blumenberg on the horizon: the launch of a Blumenberg Society and the publication of A Hans Blumenberg Reader2 being two obvious highlights. Notwithstanding the above, however, at stake in the present volume is the contention that to understand Blumenberg is to go beyond Blumenberg. This is precisely not an act of consigning him to obsolescence, but rather to properly recognize the self-transcending nature of Blumenberg’s own thinking, always pushing his readers outwards towards further texts, further debates, further ideas. His is a corpus that situates itself at intersections—in the midst of conversations and dialogues—that take us to all sorts of places; to use a Blumenbergian metaphor: his books—Legitimacy included—constitute a series of “exits”, launch-pads for further reading and future thinking.

Modernity, Gnosis and Self-Assertion Among all the innovative insight which populate Legitimacy, the most famous is the one on human self-assertion. According to Blumenberg, modernity begins with the Cartesian gesture of pushing away the tyrannical presence of God conceived in a nominalistic manner as deus fallax: a gesture, because the refutation of the Devious God, thinly disguised in the 2  Hannes Bajohr et  al. (eds), History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).

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Cartesian Meditations as genius malignus, cannot succeed on purely logical grounds. On Blumenberg’s reading, the Cartesian moment of cogito ergo sum is not so much a logical deduction as a moment of rebellion against the all-powerful God who cannot be trusted. Since then, the role of modern philosophy has consisted in facilitating emancipation from dependence on theology and in constantly affirming the minimum of “human certainty” necessary to protect against the threat of total dispossession that derives from the unrestricted divine potentia absoluta. In Blumenberg’s interpretation, this role can also be formulated as an “overcoming of Gnosticism”: fighting the syndrome of the crippling enslavement of the created reality by the omnipotent and devious Creator who concentrates infinite power in himself and reduces all creatures to passive puppets. Blumenberg, therefore, agrees with Erich Voegelin’s claim that modernity maintains a strong genetic relation with Gnosticism, but contests the latter’s conviction that the modern mindset is essentially Gnostic in its contempt for the existing reality of the world.3 On the contrary, the modern mindset grows out of an effort to assert the existing reality against the voluntaristic spectre of theological absolutism and thus constitutes a “second overcoming of Gnosticism”, this time more successful than the first one attempted by Christianity: The thesis that I intend to argue here begins by agreeing that there is a connection between the modern age and Gnosticism, but interprets it in the reverse sense: The modern age is the second overcoming of Gnosticism. A presupposition of this thesis is that the first overcoming of Gnosticism, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, was unsuccessful. A further implication is that the medieval period, as a meaningful structure spanning centuries, had its beginning in the conflict with late-antique and early-Christian Gnosticism and that the unity of its systematic intention can be understood as deriving from the task of subduing its Gnostic opponent. (LMA, 128)

Modern thought, therefore, “won its autonomy precisely on account of the renewal of the ‘Gnostic’ assumption that the omnipotent God and the God of salvation, the hidden God and the revealed God, and no longer 3  See Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays (Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 2012), 36, where the so-called parousiastic Gnosticism of such modern thinkers as Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger is accused of taking control over the whole of being, which “requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being – the murder of God.”

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conceivably by reason as identical, and hence can no longer be related to one another for the purposes of man’s interest in the world” (LMA, 172). The enormous pressure exerted by the presence of the omnipotent God— who no longer can be trusted as the God of salvation and who, because of that, once again evokes the image of the malignant Gnostic Archon— causes a paradoxical reaction from which modernity takes off. Instead of breaking the human will, it raises it against the oppressive deity and makes it assert itself as “the anthropological minimum under the conditions of the theological maximum”: “Because theology meant to defend God’s absolute interest, it allowed and caused man’s interest in himself and his concern for himself to become absolute” (LMA, 197). Self-assertion, therefore, emerges as a new “existential program” (138), deriving from the rebellious No thrown at the tyrannical divine will which makes no room for human self-preservation. Unlike Voegelin, who perceives modern philosophy as a continuation of the Gnostic hateful negation of being, now continued in the practical project of the radical transformation of worldly reality, Blumenberg sees this relation “in reverse”: modernity begins not as a yet another variant of Gnosticism but as an attempt to overcome the Gnostic paradigm of the monopoly of infinite power and to focus, from this time onwards, on the limited and the finite. Modern rationality, best exemplified by the development of science, is anti-metaphysical precisely in that sense: it avoids any speculation on the infinite and the absolute so as not to reawaken the Gnostic spectre of incontrollable power. Pace Voegelin, who criticizes modernity as an epoch bursting with triumphant hubris, Blumenberg notices its deeply protected secret of fragility: self-assertion, which started with the Cartesian rebellion against deus fallax, was and remains a decisionistic gesture which has nothing to do with self-deification.4 It does not 4  The crucial difference between the essentially theological programme of theosis and the new finite programme of self-assertion was very well described by Martin Jay in his classic review of Blumenberg’s magnum opus: “Because the collective project was quintessentially a human and not a divine one, immanent in history and not the product of transcendent intervention, the idea that the modern could be an illegitimate pseudomorph of the medieval is radically untenable. For what defines the modern is precisely its attempt to ground itself on the basis of human self-assertion rather than theological dispensation. A corollary of this program [of self-assertion] was the attempt to define the modern age in epochal terms as different from its predecessor; even though absolute self-grounding was in a certain sense a delusion, it nonetheless functioned to distinguish the modern from other epochs, which felt no need to legitimate themselves in this fashion”: Martin Jay, “Review of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg and Robert M. Wallace,” History and Theory, Vol. 24, No. 2 (May, 1985), 187.

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rely on the fundamentum inconcussum of indubitable absolute knowledge. It is an act of finite will against infinite voluntarism; an act in which a finite human mind, no longer capable of trusting in God, decides to trust in itself. It is precisely this fragile decisionistic core, hidden under the surface of triumphant rational rhetoric, which opens a completely new perspective on “interrogating modernity”, embraced by the chapters in this volume.

The Structure of the Volume Interrogating Modernity moves from topics central to political theology, through political theory, to a series of reflections on Blumenberg’s contribution to the historiography of modern thought. The book thus begins with questions surrounding the relation of modernity to Christianity and Judaism, of theological perspectives on historical progress and the supposedly deep-rooted Gnostic tendencies of modernity, before shifting to issues concerning the status of concepts of authority, progress and legitimacy, and concluding with historiographical concerns around the nature of the epochal threshold of modernity and of modern subjectivity. Part One takes the form of a case study in political theology: it subjects Blumenberg’s claim in Legitimacy that “modernity is the second overcoming of Gnosticism” to scrutiny in terms of its polemical context, its historical cogency and its contemporary resonances. Bielik-Robson looks to Blumenberg’s reading of Cartesian radical doubt as the moment at which Legitimacy is opened up to ongoing twentieth-century debates around suffering, existential dependence, relationality and the immanent absolute. By reading Blumenberg’s rendering of the cogito alongside Derrida’s, Marion’s and Weil’s, she shows that the cogito gives rise to a “modern metaphysics of finitude” in which existence is relational without being relative. Lapidot furthers this concern with finitude and the position of absoluteness in modernity in Chap. 2 by reading Legitimacy genetically. That is, he looks to its emergence out of Blumenberg’s debate with Hans Jonas on the Gnostic nature of modernity, for this, according to Lapidot, sheds light on the “post-Gnostic” affirmation of the modern at the heart of Blumenberg’s thinking. Finally, in Part One, Styfhals turns to the contemporary relevance of the debate over the Gnostic characteristics of the modern age by putting Legitimacy into conversation with Latour’s Gifford lectures on environmental apocalypse and the end of modernity. The chapters in Part Two interrogate Legitimacy from a similar vantage point—that of political theology—but do so with a broader remit of

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putting it into dialogue with contemporary concerns around suffering, exploitation, colonialism and oppression in modernity. Albernaz and Chepurin in Chap. 4 interrogate the presumption of worldliness at the heart of Blumenberg’s project—that is, they focus on the damage caused by the emergence of the modern world and the ways in which Blumenberg often seems blind to it. In a similar vein, McCullough attacks the violent hierarchies of the modern age, but—utilizing a footnote in Blumenberg’s Paradigms for a Metaphorology on Locke’s creation of property out of the “right kind” of labour—she is able, in part, to criticize modern oppression with, rather than against, Blumenberg. Talay Turner concludes Part Two with an interrogation of the concept of political legitimacy in Blumenberg’s works. Through a detailed commentary on his essays on Freud, Arendt and political myths, she shows the ways in which these writings can be used to supplement both Legitimacy and Work on Myth with an account of how political myths function by way of the figure of the “negative hero”. Part Three furthers this emphasis on the political stakes of Blumenberg’s project by juxtaposing Legitimacy with other competing visions of modernity. Buch, for instance, puts Blumenberg into conversation with the Husserl of The Crisis of European Sciences. He does so in order to demonstrate how Blumenberg’s constitution of the modern age—while indebted to phenomenological methodology—eschews the teleological trajectory that Husserl smuggles into his account of post-classical theorizing. In Chap. 8, Turner similarly interrogates Blumenberg on the idea of historical progress, but, in this instance, he turns to Max Weber as a key conversation partner. For Turner, a conversation between Blumenberg and Weber helps finesse a sociological account of how institutions make finitude and its attendant disappointments bearable. Petteni then places Blumenbergian modernity in a different context, interrogating his narrative of the image of light in modernity from the perspective of optics and modernist aesthetics. In so doing, she shows how Blumenberg’s work on myth can stand in tension with the temptation in Legitimacy to affirm a transcendental subject imposing itself on the world. Behind the above lurk questions of methodology—in particular, of Blumenberg’s methodological choices in narrating the modern age. And it is to these questions that the chapters in the final part of the volume turn: they put Blumenberg’s historiography in conversation with alternative conceptions of historical cognition. Thus, Efal-Lautenschläger returns once more to Blumenberg’s Descartes as an instance of a refusal to take the reforming nature of modern method seriously. The Blumenberg who

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downplays the significance of the Reformation in particular and of the emendatory aspects of modern thinking in general is one who, according to Efal-Lautenschläger, is blind to the full potency of the methodologies of early modern philosophies. In Chap. 11, Feger then turns to the development of Blumenberg’s own methodology, particularly the way in which he frames the modern age as exceptional to the extent that its own methodological assumptions and prejudices become transparent to it. Moreover, Feger argues, this impacts on the very concept of “reoccupation” that structures Legitimacy and its exceptional trans-historical status. And in the final chapter this trans-historical status accorded to reoccupation becomes the central theme: Whistler reflects on whether such a concept is an appropriate tool for accurately and properly making sense of modernity. That is, he asks which modernities are excluded from Legitimacy as a result of the hegemony of reoccupation. Interrogating Modernity ends therefore where it began—with questions concerning the nature and value of the modern in Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, in his writings more generally and also in respect to a wider horizon of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought. Nottingham, UK Egham, UK

Agata Bielik-Robson Daniel Whistler

Bibliography Bajohr, Hannes et al. (eds). History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [LMA]. Translated by Robert Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Jay, Martin. “Review of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg and Robert M.  Wallace.” History and Theory, Vol. 24, No. 2 (May, 1985), 183–196. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. M. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Voegelin, Eric. Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays. Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 2012.

Praise for Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg “Hans Blumenberg’s profound analysis of the origins and meaning of modernity continues to inspire new insights and provoke fresh controversies. The trenchant responses to his legacy assembled by Bielik-Robson and Whistler set his ideas in motion, sparking illumination as they collide with those of other thinkers, including Descartes, Locke, Husserl, Weber, and Latour.” —Martin Jay, Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, USA “In this immensely significant and highly original collection, Blumenberg’s monumental work provides the perfect foil for a set of fresh, searching and powerful interrogations of the character of philosophical modernity. Learned and deeply penetrating, these essays set the standard for contemporary discussions about the origins of modernity.” —Philip Goodchild, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, UK

Contents

Part I Overcoming Gnosticism   1 1 I Hurt, Therefore I Am: Descartes with Blumenberg (and Job)  3 Agata Bielik-Robson 2 Legitimacy of Nihilism: Blumenberg’s Post-Gnosticism 37 Elad Lapidot 3 Blumenberg, Latour and the Apocalypse 61 Willem Styfhals Part II Political Theologies of Modernity  81 4 The Sovereignty of the World: Towards a Political Theology of Modernity (After Blumenberg) 83 Joseph Albernaz and Kirill Chepurin 5 Interrogating John Locke and the Propriety of Appropriation with Blumenberg and Voegelin109 Lissa McCullough

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6 Political Legitimacy and Founding Myths129 Zeynep Talay Turner Part III Competing Visions of Modernity 149 7 Trial and Crisis: Blumenberg and Husserl on the Genesis and Meaning of Modern Science151 Robert Buch 8 Infinite Progress and the Burdens of Biography175 Charles Turner 9 The Ideal of Optics and the Opacity of Life: Blumenberg on Modernity and Myth193 Oriane Petteni Part IV Modernity and Method 215 10 World-Modelling and Cartesian Method: Blumenberg’s Hyperopia217 Adi Efal-Lautenschläger 11 Umbesetzung: Reoccupation in Blumenbergian Modernity237 Sonja Feger 12 Modernizing Blumenberg257 Daniel Whistler Index275

Note on Contributors

Joseph  Albernaz is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His research interests include Romantic literature and philosophy, the environmental humanities, critical theory and political theology. He is at work on a book about community and the common in Romanticism, while other recent work includes essays on William Wordsworth, Friedrich Hölderlin and Mary Shelley. Agata Bielik-Robson  is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Her publications include The Saving Lie. Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (in English, 2011), Judaism in Contemporary Thought. Traces and Influence (coedited with Adam Lipszyc, 2014), Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (2014) and Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (2019). Robert Buch  is Senior Lecturer in German and European Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. In 2010, he had his book The Pathos of the Real: On the Aesthetics of Violence in the Twentieth Century published and in 2014 he co-edited Blumenberg lesen. Other publications on Blumenberg include “Umbuchung. Säkularisierung als Schuld und als Hypothek bei Hans Blumenberg”, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, 4, 2012, as well “Untröstlich. Hans Blumenbergs Arbeit an der Passionsgeschichte”, in Das Buch in den Büchern, Andrea Polaschegg, Daniel Weidner, eds. (2012).

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NOTE ON CONTRIBUTORS

Kirill Chepurin  is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He has also held visiting positions at Humboldt University, Berlin, and the University of California, Berkeley. He has published extensively in English on German Idealism, Romanticism, and political theology, including a forthcoming collection with Fordham University Press, German Idealism and the Future of Political Theology. Adi  Efal-Lautenschläger is a teaching and research fellow at the University of Tel Aviv, as well as a researcher at the University of Strasbourg. Her areas of research include art historiography, artistic theory, the French philosophical tradition and Cartesianism. Sonja Feger  is a researcher working on Blumenberg’s conception of reality and his account of a phenomenological anthropology at the University of Koblenz-Landau, before which she has held positions at the University of Freiburg, Paris-IV, Basel University and DePaul University. Since 2019, she has been scientific assistant to the editors of Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie. Elad Lapidot  is Lecturer in Philosophy and the Talmud at the University of Bern as well as at Freie Universität, Humboldt Universität, the Universität der Künste and the Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin. He is a co-editor of the new critical edition of Hans Jonas’ Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. His recent publications include Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (SUNY Press, forthcoming in 2020); Heidegger and Jewish Thought (ed.) (2018) and the first Hebrew translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Resling, forthcoming in 2020). Lissa McCullough  works at the California State University, Los Angeles and has taught philosophy and religious studies at Muhlenberg College, Hanover College and New York University. She is author of The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction (2013) and editor of The Call to Radical Theology and Thinking through the Death of God (with Brian Schroeder) as well as Conversations with Paolo Soleri. Oriane Petteni  completed her PhD at Liège University in 2019 on the crisis of representation in classical German philosophy. She works with concepts of light, vision and visibility in German Idealism and poststructuralism and has published extensively on related issues in numerous

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i­nternational journals. She has also been a visiting researcher at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Willem  Styfhals  is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. He is the author of No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy (2019). Zeynep  Talay  Turner  teaches philosophy at Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul. Her research interests lie in ethics, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury European philosophy, philosophies of the self, and philosophy and literature. She is the author of Philosophy, Literature and the Dissolution of the Subject (2014) and numerous articles on related subjects. Charles Turner  is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Modernity and Politics in the Work of Max Weber (1992), Investigating Sociological Theory (2010) and Secularization (2019). Daniel  Whistler  is Reader in Modern European Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. His publications include The Schelling-­ Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801: Nature and Identity (2020), The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Theology (2017) and After the Postmodern and the Postsecular: News Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (2010).

Abbreviations

The following frequently cited works by Hans Blumenberg are abbreviated throughout this volume as follows: LMA Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, translated by Robert Wallace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. LN Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2017. WM Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, translated by Robert Wallace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.

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PART I

Overcoming Gnosticism

CHAPTER 1

I Hurt, Therefore I Am: Descartes with Blumenberg (and Job) Agata Bielik-Robson

To begin, I want to explain the complex triple reference in the title. What I want to do in this chapter is to read Descartes as a modern Job, that is, to see the Cartesian process of methodical doubt as a case of what Jewish theology calls “lamentation” (kinah): an existential outburst of doubt, an anxiety, which inevitably leads to the crisis in the relation between Creator and his creature. Just as Job loses everything and in the end clings desperately to his reduced bare life, so too does Descartes lose everything and, in the midst of loss, clings to the naked fact of his existence. And just as Job, when he has nothing more to lose, faces his God, who, since the moment of this confrontation, will never be the same again—so too does Descartes, at the lowest ebb of the hyperbolic doubt, face his devious God, who, after the crisis, will no longer be able to haunt the living the way he used to. Of course, there is the difference of style: Job’s kinah is a classical lamentation, full of explicit disorientation and pain—while Descartes’ treatise, conceptually impeccable, is only implicitly lined with existential anxiety.

A. Bielik-Robson (*) Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_1

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But just as there is a grain of the philosophical accusation of the arrangement of being in Job—so is there a grain of painful kinah in Descartes. Although it does not mention Job explicitly, Hans Blumenberg’s reading of Descartes suggests this affinity very strongly. In the crucial chapter of Legitimacy, “Theological Absolutism and Human Self-Assertion”, which culminates in the nominalist interpretation of Cartesian hyperbolic doubt, Blumenberg portrays Descartes as the first modern man in search of self-assertion—with or without God. The nominalist moment of this portrayal is absolutely crucial here: according to Blumenberg, the genius malignus, the Malicious Demon who appears in the darkest night of Cartesian doubt, is a philosophical avatar of deus fallax, the Devious God of the nominalist theologians (William Ockham, Duns Scotus and Nicolas of Autrecourt). The experience of encountering such God is a metaphysical horror, vertigo, and disorientation, akin to the Joban condition of a human subject finding himself thrown into the terrifying Real: even if masked by a religious piety or a seemingly neutral philosophical idiom of a “metaphysical fable”, its content is traumatic. According to Blumenberg, the fictitious and semi-neutralizing effect of the way in which Descartes tells his genius malignus hypothesis does not derive from the lightness of a thought experiment, but rather from the fact that it offers an innovative philosophical translation of the theological “historical situation”, which also announces a moment when, for the first time, modern philosophy liberates itself from theology: The deus absconditus and deus mutabilissimus who is not committed to kindness and dependability except under the conditions of salvation as defined by revelation could only be taken into account philosophically as if he could be the genius malignus in relation to man’s certainty of the world. By transforming the theological absolutism of omnipotence into the philosophical hypothesis of the deceptive world spirit, Descartes denies the historical situation to which his initial undertaking is bound and turns it into the methodical freedom of arbitrarily chosen conditions. (LMA, 184)

Although presented in the form of “methodical freedom”, the content of the hyperbolic doubt which leads to the confrontation with deus fallax is the sheer negativity which is looked in the eye by the first modern philosophy, but not yet, as in Hegel, squarely “in the face”.1 Though no longer 1  In the famously sublime passage from the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, which defines philosophical courage, Hegel says: “Spirit wins its truth only when, in utter dismem-

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blurred by the appeasing films of piety, which bows down in the face of the almighty God and, in fear and trembling, hopes for his kindness and self-­ limitation in regard to human beings, the Cartesian form of a “metaphysical fable” and its freely chosen arbitrary conditions of “as if” is also a manner of dealing with the trauma. Yet, as Blumenberg shows, this dealing is not simply repressive, as in the case of the pious nominalist formula; rather, thanks to its new philosophical translation, the trauma can also be, for the first time, confronted and worked through. By reaching, in Derrida’s words, a “zero point of madness”, the philosopher must make a decision after which (if there ever comes an “after”) nothing stays the same: either the mad abyss of the extremely voluntaristic God engulfs all, or a new order emerges, which no longer pictures God in its centre. It is precisely this modern decentred order of things arising out of the philosophical crisis of theological absolutism which will concern me here.2 berment, it finds itself […] Spirit is the power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it”: G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 19. 2  In fact, a fourth name should be added to the title: Derrida. His reading of Descartes, which he unfolds in “Cogito and the History of Madness” in reference to Michel Foucault’s Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, is a paradigmatic case of refusal to neutralize the moment of what he calls “hyperbolic doubt” in Descartes’ reasoning, or rather an attempt to maintain the validity of reason on the edge of abyss. Pace Foucault, who claims that Descartes is the founder of the classical rationalism which excluded madness from its midst, Derrida, very much in the Blumenbergian vein, argues to the contrary. The whole point of cogito’s “mad audacity” is that it includes and even feeds on the vertiginous moment of madness, creating an indeterminate zone of decision which is neither mad nor rational, nor both simultaneously: “The hyperbolical audacity of the Cartesian Cogito, its mad audacity, which we perhaps no longer perceive as such because, unlike Descartes’s contemporary, we are too well assured of ourselves and too well accustomed to the framework of the Cogito, rather than to the critical experience of it—its mad audacity would consist in the return to an original point which no longer belongs to either a determined reason or a determined unreason, no longer belongs to them as opposition or alternative. Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum. Madness is therefore, in every sense of the word, only one case of thought (within thought). It is therefore a question of drawing back toward a point at which all determined contradictions, in the form of given, factual historical structures, can appear, and appear as relative to this zero point at which determined meaning and nonmeaning come together in their common origin”: Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 67–68. Derrida also confirms indirectly Blumenberg’s hypothesis about deus fallax as the nominalist prototype of genius malignus, by noticing that on “the onset of the well-known movement leading to the fiction of the evil genius” (ibid., 63), Descartes not only talks about “an all-powerful God by whom I have been created such as I am” but also imagines Him as a grand deceiver:

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Thus, although the juxtaposition itself—of Descartes and Job—is not Blumenberg’s idea, it is inspired by the latter’s interpretation of the Cartesian condition of distress, very much resembling the one Job experienced in front of a transcendent, omnipotent and voluntaristic God. Blumenberg never mentions Job in his analysis of Descartes, which may be caused by his reluctance to see modernity enmeshed in the theological imbroglio, but a bridging point was offered by Hans Jauss, also a member of the Poetik und Hermeneutik group, who in his essay “Job’s Questions and Their Distant Reply: Goethe, Nietzsche, Heidegger” presents Job as the first hero of self-assertion—a theological variant of the working-­ through of the trauma of the terrifying Real—and although he, as if symmetrically, does not mention Descartes in his analysis of Job, he nonetheless prepares the ground for their comparison, which will be my theme here.3 “But how do I know that Hell [i.e. the deceiving God, before the recourse to the evil genius – J.D.] has not brought it to pass that … I am not deceived every time that I add two and three, or count the sides of a square …?” (ibid., 64). 3  For Jauss, who resorts to the Blumenbergian distinction between theodicy and theology, the Book of Job is the brilliant instance of the latter: its main role is not to explain away “a seemingly painful reality”, but, on the contrary, to introduce a new concept of right and justice based directly on pain: “Jehovah seems to prefer Job’s unorthodox questions to the orthodox answers of Job’s friends whom He reprimands after He has distinguished Job, his servant, with a face-to-face appearance […] The ambiguity of this ending poses the question whether the Book of Job can justifiably be considered an early theodicy. Blumenberg suggested in an earlier discussion, which I should like to take up again here, that a distinction be made between theodicy and theology with respect to the canonizing or decanonizing function of question and answer. In the face of the misfortune and human suffering in the world, a theodicy attempts to reveal the higher justice of God within an impenetrable order which is merely masked by a seemingly painful reality; a theology, on the other hand, rejects the justification of God by mankind, dismisses the canon of just compensation as anthropomorphic, and asserts that God’s will is rationally incomprehensible. With regard to the interaction of religion and literature, ‘a theodicy narrows the scope of aesthetic phenomena by its tendency to canonize the permissible, whereas a theology frees these phenomena and grants license for the expansion of what is relevant and representable.’ If we consider Job’s questioning protest, the Book of Job – customarily interpreted as a theodicy in the sense that it is a justification of God’s actions answering the question of the meaning of suffering  – is, rather, a ‘theology’ that ventures to broach in literary form a reality hitherto excluded by the dogma and canon of the representable”: Hans Jauss, “Job’s Questions and their Distant Reply: Goethe, Nietzsche, Heidegger,” Comparative Literature, vol. 34, no. 3, Summer 1982, p. 194; Hans Blumenberg, in Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. 3, Munich, Fink 1968, p. 536. In the same text quoted by Jauss, devoted to the Book of Job, Blumenberg calls it a “provocation”, which can suggest an affinity with Descartes’ manoeuvre, also consisting in provoking God’s omnipotence for the sake of the assertion of the finite human will: “God as a spectator of the theater of the world, for whom all creatures are, in Luther’s formulation,

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In my reading of Descartes with Blumenberg (and Job), I want to focus on the critical moment of reversal in which lament suddenly breaks into a self-assertive performance, by first provoking and then destroying the order about which it laments. Just as Job changes the rules of the theological game, so does “Descartes appear not so much as the founding figure of the epoch as rather the thinker who clarified the medieval concept of reality all the way to its absurd consequences and thus made it ripe for destruction” (LMA, 187). The moment of the destruction of the old sense of reality is also a beginning of a new one: an epochal break establishing a new set of affects, the most important of which would be, in the formulation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, le sentiment de l’existence, the “sense of existence”.4 While the Joban lament derives its accusatory power from enumerating all negative aspects of finite existence—transience, passive dependence, suffering, vulnerability to fate, and finally death—self-­ assertion converts them into a powerful modern sense of the Real. The possibility of this conversion can be seen already in Job’s “insubordinate and unorthodox questions” which challenge the absolutist God: “Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his Maker?” (Job 4.17). This questioning series could and should be continued in the more and more provocative cadence: Shall mortal man also exist in a more true way? Shall he possess a treasure—his suffering and pain—holding the key to the kingdom of being? This new anchorage in the Real, centred around the “painful reality”, which Adorno calls the Archimedean point of modern philosophising—my pain/suffering/distress/trauma is the most real and certain thing in the universe, which nothing, even the most powerful God, can invalidate—gives the subject a completely new intuition of being, which has a power to revolutionize masks [Larven] and mummery  – that is not a theodicy but its provocation” (ibid., 547). Jauss comments: “Jehovah’s speech [demonstrates] ex negativo the cynical literal-mindedness of a treacherous God. Thus, Blumenberg’s thesis proves to be true: the Book of Job is not a theodicy but its provocation, in the dual sense that the prevailing theology’s framework of answers is shaken less by Job’s insubordinate questions than by God’s behavior which mocks all justice” (ibid., 197; my emphasis). The self-assertive attitude of Job manifests itself in asking “insubordinate questions” for which God does not deliver any answers, and, just as Descartes determined to proceed with or without God, “Job is seeking his right before, and, if need be, also against, God; he is not seeking an act of mercy, still less redemption” (ibid., 199; my emphasis). 4  On the paradigmatic use of this phrase, see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Rêveries du Promeneur solitaire, Paris: Gallimard, Ed. de la Pléiade 1972, “Cinquième Promenade,” pp. 1045–1047.

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metaphysics, that is, transform in turn the traditional most existing, eternal and immutable Absolute into a Cartesian “metaphysical fable”, or an ontological fiction: for, according to the modern sense which I want to explore here, what cannot suffer, cannot exist either. In modernity, the subject gets redefined as the subject-to-traumatization; suffering becomes a new condition of all truth.5 If, theologically speaking, modernity begins with Duns Scotus’ democratic thesis on the univocity of being, it really gathers momentum only in this affective turning of the tables, in which the Scottian abstract claim truly becomes flesh. So, just as Job eventually discovers that he, precisely because of his extreme deprivation, exists at least as strongly as God and this gives him a new vantage point in his negotiations—Descartes, undergoing a similar reduction, discovers the “indivisible kernel of his being”, which leads him to the self-assertive exclamation: “Even if He deceives me, I am, I exist!” This self-assertive reversal constitutes the gist of the modern revenge against God conceived—in Derrida’s terms—as “the unscathed Absolute”.6 When the negative moment of pathein (passivity and suffering) becomes the new criterion of existence, the Absolute, which cannot say I hurt, therefore I am, gets wiped out of existence.

Self-Assertion, or the Reversal There are few readings of Descartes’ Meditations which do not treat them as an exercise in pure thought, but pay attention to their anxious affective aura: “the other light, a black and hardly natural light, the vigil of the ‘powers of unreason’ around the Cogito.”7 Although Descartes himself called his essay in methodical scepticism a “mental experiment”, this rhetorical manoeuvre should not mislead us: the true content of Meditations is the most extreme anxiety which touches the very core of the “sense of existence”. In those existentially vigilant interpretations of Descartes— given by Hans Blumenberg, Simone Weil, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel 5  “The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression, is objectively conveyed”: Theodor W.  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.  B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1973, pp. 17–18. 6  Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge. The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Acts of Religion, trans. Gil Anidjar, New  York & London: Routledge, 2002, p. 87. 7  Derrida, “Cogito,” 75.

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Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion—there comes to the fore one common motif: the Cartesian cogito emerges as the product of working through the absolute dependence on the powerful Other, which can never be shaken off completely, but only transformed from within. This dependence is experienced either as an extremely traumatic relation, leading to madness, despair, vertigo, the loss of substance and, finally, death (so Derrida, and to some extent Blumenberg)—or, on the contrary, as a positive foundation which gives life and lets be, although always within the perimeters defined by, in Kierkegaard’s words, the omnipotent “He who has made me” (so Weil, Marion and, to some extent, Levinas).8 The first line of Descartes’ existential interpretation focuses on his attempt to rebel: to oppose the non-transparent bonds of dependence, which he refuses to trustfully rely upon (as the Hölderlinian “bonds of love”9) and thus projects as Stricke, oppressive confines, imposed by the omnipotent genius malignus, which may be a “fiction” (as Descartes calls it), but still derives from quite real existential anxieties of being merely a plaything in the hands of a capricious and not necessarily loving God. The second line accentuates Descartes’ moment of abdication, in which he recognizes the futility of his struggles for ontological autonomy and the necessity to embrace and gratefully accept dependence as the only way to be. Curiously enough, this division among Cartesian interpreters seems to mirror pretty exactly the traditional conflict among the readers of the Book of Job: the split between those who concentrate on Job the Rebel and see his mutiny against the all-powerful God as at least partly victorious—and those who see only Job the Pious, full of contrition, who in the end admits that, according to Kafka’s aphorism, Sein heisst Ihm zugehören (“to be means to belong to Him”).10 As I have already suggested, this 8  Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, trans. Walter Laurie, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952, p. 187n. 9  See Friedrich Hölderlin, Der Rhein: Wer war es, der zuerst/ Die Liebesbande verderbt/ Und Stricken von ihnen gemacht hat? 10  The Jewish tradition, unlike the Christian, has plenty of room for the attitude which it calls “arguing with God” and which it derives from Job’s statement: “God may well slay me; I may have no hope/ Yet I will argue my case before God” (Job 13:15). The agon with the omnipotent power which “may slay me”, but can nonetheless be defeated by a finite human being, constitutes a narrative thread that starts with Jacob, continues with Job and often resurfaces in Talmud (e.g. the famous folio Bava Metzia 59b). In his God: A Biography, a story of the Hebrew Bible told from the Jewish perspective, Jack Miles claims that Job’s rebellion was totally successful and that his success transformed the nature of the Judaic

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analogy can, in fact, be deepened. Job’s lament is not just a “sigh of the oppressed creature”, as Marx described it11—it is also a cognitive attempt to test the limits of knowledge and self-reliance within the relation of ontological dependence and finitude, a first Kantian critique of finite reason. And accordingly, Descartes meditations are not just a “mental experiment” in establishing minimal certainty—they are also lamentations which articulate the pain of anguish and derealization in the face of the omnipotent Other. Although Blumenberg never states it explicitly, there is thus something which gives both Job and Descartes a kind of “elective affinity”: the pursuit of self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung). In his reading of Descartes, Blumenberg focuses on the critical moment in his reasoning: the hypothesis of the Malicious Demon from the second Meditation: But [as to myself, what can I now say that I am], since I suppose there exists an extremely powerful, and, if I may so speak, malignant being, whose whole endeavors are directed toward deceiving me? […] I suppose, accordingly, that all the things which I see are false (fictitious); I believe that none of those objects which my fallacious memory represents ever existed; I suppose that I possess no senses; I believe that body, figure, extension, motion, and place are merely fictions of my mind. What is there, then, that can be esteemed true? Perhaps this only, that there is absolutely nothing certain.12

The rhetoric of this fragment is defensively appeasing, backed by an explanation that this is just a supposition, a kind of a “metaphysical fable” which Descartes is going to employ in order to test his hyperbolic doubt. But divinity: “Job has won. The Lord has lost”: Jack Miles, God: A Biography New York: Knopf, 1995, p. 325. In his essay devoted to the motif of wrestling with God, David Frank quotes Miles and comments: “God recognizes that Job was just and in the end restores Job’s health and family, giving him twice what he had at the beginning of the story. With this defeat, God falls silent; this is God’s last argument in the Hebrew Bible. This loss, though, is paradoxical, as ‘Job may, therefore, have saved the Lord from himself’ by insisting on the pairing of justice and power, God’s silence after Job has profound theological implications […] By besting God in argument, Job demonstrates that humans can remain true to justice in the face of power”: David Frank, “Arguing with God, Talmudic Discourse, and the Jewish Countermodel: Implications for the Study of Argumentation,” Argumentation and Advocacy, vol. 41 (Fall 2004), pp. 81–2. We shall return to those “profound theological implications” later on. 11  Karl Marx, “Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Collected Works, vol. 3, New York, 1976, p. 175. 12  René Descartes, Meditations on the First Philosophy, trans. John Veitch, in The Rationalists, Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1974, p. 119.

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Blumenberg is not to be deterred; the lament is true and the “malignant being” is nothing else but the most extreme version of the voluntarist deity whom the nominalist theologians, well known to Descartes, called deus fallax, the “devious God”. And to be in the hands of the devious God means to be unable to constitute oneself as an even minimally autonomous being: absolute dependence on the capricious and unpredictable highest power makes it impossible to take any step on one’s own, assert oneself in existence, breathe or simply live. This is precisely Job’s situation and Job’s cry of despair and disorientation, which Descartes almost exactly repeats: “But where can wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?” (Job 28:12). Also the earlier kinah (Job 3), in which Job laments the fact of being born, is implied in the Cartesian fear of the omnipotent and possibly devious being which malignantly “hedges in” the dependent creature: Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden,    whom God has hedged in? For my sighing comes instead of my bread,    and my groanings are poured out like water. For the thing that I fear comes upon me,    and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet;    I have no rest, but trouble comes.

But soon there comes the twist: the lament hardens into a new kind of certitude; the watery abysses of anxiety suddenly turn into a tiny spot of dry land. Just as Job discovers at the very bottom of his loss his naked “creaturely life” as a piece of resistance which will allow him to stand up and summon his Maker,13 so too does Descartes discover the twist in the midst of deception: I had the persuasion that there was absolutely nothing in the world, that there was no sky and no earth, neither minds nor bodies; was I not, therefore, at the same time, persuaded that I did not exist? Far from it; I assuredly 13  On the antagonistic use of the concept of “creaturely life”, see Eric Santner, Creaturely Life. Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. xix, where “‘creatureliness’ signifies less a dimension that traverses the boundaries of human and nonhuman forms of life than a specifically human way of finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonisms in and of the political field” (my emphasis).

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existed, since I was persuaded. But there is I know not what being, who is possessed at once of the highest power and the deepest cunning, who is constantly employing all his ingenuity in deceiving me. Doubtless, then, I exist, since I am deceived; and, let him deceive me as he may, he can never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I shall be conscious that I am something. So that it must, in fine, be maintained, all things being maturely and carefully considered, that this proposition [pronunciatum] I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.14

Ego sum, ego existo! The more I am deceived, the more I can be sure that I exist. Thus, the more the Malicious Demon (or deus fallax) wants to deprive me of anything certain, the more certain I grow of one thing: that I am! The more I am dependent on the devious God who haunts me, possesses me, hedges me in and makes me suffer an endless anxiety of derealization, the more I grow sure of my pained existence. Dolor, ergo sum. The confidence of self-assertion grows directly from the awareness of painful dependence: not as its negation or refutation, but as its existential reverse. This is how the greatest disaster suddenly flips to the other side, and the liquid element of lamentation hardens into a dry land of self-assertion which becomes the new imperative of modern philosophy: “after the theological absolutism of the Middle Ages, self-assertion had to be the implication of any philosophical system” (LMA, 152). Descartes does not discover anything new; he only manages to achieve the self-assertive reverse of the former lament: the same condition/affliction of ontological dependence and negativity converts into a positive condition/sine qua non of bold separation. The “latent language”15 of the Cartesian symptom does not stop pronouncing: “Even if dependent, I am, I exist! Even if in your hands, I am as much as you are! I hurt – because of you – and therefore I am. Do whatever you want – deceive me, deprive me – it does not matter: I am.”16 Here, Klage und Anklage, the usual ritual of lament and  Descartes, Meditations, p. 119; my emphasis.  Derrida, “Cogito,” p. 38. 16  On Derrida’s account, this constant “talkative” self-persuasion is a necessary defensive manoeuvre to keep the abyss at bay, an incessant active “work” of the subject protecting itself against falling into a slumber of passivity: “Thereby, through his own language, he reassures himself against any actual madness – which may sometimes appear quite talkative, another problem – and can keep his distance, the distance indispensable for continuing to speak and to live” (“Cogito,” 66; my emphasis)—not only in Descartes’ own thought, but in the whole of modern philosophy: “The expression ‘to say madness itself’ is self-contradictory […] madness is what by essence cannot be said: it is the ‘absence of the work,’ as Foucault pro14 15

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accusation, undergoes a sudden reversal in which the very passivity of dependence transforms into a new and irrefutable intuition of being, a new metaphysical absolute. But with this unexpected turning of the tables, the premodern vision of ontological plenitude represented by the eternal divine being no longer delivers the paradigmatic sense of existence: a new Real is born, and, what is most important, directly out of all those negative attributes which the traditional metaphysics assigned to the lower and finite, ontologically dependent and deprived, realms of reality. Once it was the divine Absolute which possessed all the subsistent being and dwarfed in comparison the merely existing, privative and fragile creatures by turning their life into “illusion”—now, after Descartes, it is the other way round: the Real moves to the realm of precarity, while the divine Absolute fades into a non-existent “metaphysical fable”. This great reversal is the sole theme of Blumenberg’s analysis of Descartes, whom he sees as the first thinker to emancipate himself from “theological absolutism”: the scholastic form of theism which followed theocentric logic to the end and created a “theological monster”, who, instead of securing the existence of the world as its reliable creator, turned against his own creation and threatened to annihilate it: The God Who places no constraints on Himself, Who cannot be committed to any consequence following from His manifestations, makes time into a dimension of utter uncertainty. This affects not only the identity of the subject, the presence of which at any given moment does not guarantee it any future, but also the persistence of the world, whose radical contingency can transform it, from one moment to the next, from existence into mere appearance, from reality into nothingness. (LMA, 161–2; my emphasis)

The Cartesian moment of cogito ergo sum is thus a moment of rebellion against this metaphysical monstrosity, as well as the first act of human self-­ assertion in the world reduced to the Joban “dust and ashes”.17 From this foundly says […] In any event, the Cogito is a work as soon as it is assured of what it says. But before it is a work, it is madness. If the madman could rebuff the evil genius, he could not tell himself so. He therefore cannot say so […] And philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness” (ibid., 51; 72; my emphasis). 17  It well may be that the locus in the Book of Job where Job experiences the theophany in the face-to-face encounter and seemingly humbly says—“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee: Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (42.4–6)—should be interpreted as yet another sign of irony on Job’s part, alerting

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time on, it is the role of modern philosophy—as emancipated from service to theology—to affirm the minimum of “human certainty” against the threat of total dispossession deriving from the unrestricted potentia absoluta: Philosophy won its autonomy precisely on account of the renewal of the “Gnostic” assumption that the omnipotent God and the God of salvation, the hidden God and the revealed God, and no longer conceivably by reason as identical, and hence can no longer be related to one another for the purposes of man’s interest in the world. The role of the philosopher is defined by the reduction of human certainty under the pressure of the assumption that divine omnipotence cannot have placed any restrictions on itself for man’s benefit. (LMA, 172)

The paradox of self-assertion consists in the reaction to the pressure: instead of breaking, dissolving, dissipating in a quietist self-less trance (although, theologically speaking, this is the preferred dis/solution), the subject hardens into an unbreakable, indivisible atom of selfhood, which, from the Cartesian beginning of modernity, becomes the new centre of philosophy. Theology and philosophy part ways, and, according to Blumenberg, they do so for good. While the former fosters theological absolutism and reduces the human side to quietist semi-nothing deprived of its own will and being, the latter picks up the indivisible kernel of the human self from the “dust and ashes” of reduction and builds a defensive fence around it: Under the enormous pressure of the demands made upon it by theology, the human subject begins to consolidate itself, to take on a new overall condition, which possesses, in relation to ambushes set by the hidden absolute will, something like the elementary attribute of the atom, that it cannot be split up or altered. Absolutism reduces whatever is exposed to it, but in the process it brings to light the constants, the no longer touchable kernels […] The ius primarium, the primeval right to self-assertion, becomes comprehensible long before Descartes and Hobbes as the essence of modern age’s understanding of itself – that is, as the anthropological minimum under the conditions of the theological maximum […] Because theology meant to defend God’s absolute interest, it allowed and caused man’s interest in himself and his concern for himself to become absolute […] [In Descartes] the us to a regressive danger of facing God as the sublime power which is supposed to leave us speechless in awe.

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provocation of the transcendent absolute passes over at the point of its most extreme radicalisation into the uncovering of the immanent absolute (LMA, 196–7; 178; my emphasis).

“Long before Descartes and Hobbes” could indeed refer cryptically to the Book of Job (so claims Jauss), in which the anthropological minimum asserted itself for the first time against the conditions of the theological maximum and, thanks to the obstinacy of the Man from Uz, human being’s concern for his life as significant and non-negligible in the grand scheme of things became absolute.18 In such a surreptitious fusing of Descartes with Job, the first rebel against the Gnostic-Absolutist-­ Monstrous God, Blumenberg could be seen as offering an alternative theological reading of the former, which focuses mostly on the existential features of Cartesian thought, implicitly present in his seemingly self-­ confident logic: his ever-recurring anxiety and fear of this all-powerful alterity he encounters in the deepest night of hyperbolic doubt. He does 18  “That such an idea of the absolute and its transcendence could achieve such a sustained influence on Scholasticism can only be understood as the repression of the humanistic element of the Christian tradition by its theological ‘rigor.’ Only when the indifference of divinity towards man had been thought through to the end was theology’s immanent logic satisfied […] The world as the pure performance of reified omnipotence, as a demonstration of the unlimited sovereignty of a will to which no question can be addressed – this eradication even of the right to perceive a problem mean that, at least for man, the world no longer possessed an accessible order” (LMA, 171). Pace Blumenberg, who stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the rebellious aspects of the Book of Job—“Is this game between the ‘lofty Lords’ with humanity at stake really fully justified by its results? I still maintain that this is an example of dualism translated into a voluntaristic idiom in which only those questions may be asked which have already been answered” (Blumenberg, Poetik, p. 547)—such a situation of extreme cognitive distress “to which no question can be addressed” is precisely the one described in the story of the Man of Uz. While indeed the questions raised by Job’s pious “friends” are those “which have already been answered”, the new questions raised by Job are truly, as Jauss maintains, “unorthodox” and “insubordinate” and thus have a lasting gamechanging effect. On this game-changing incompatibility of Job and God, see also Ernst Bloch: “Job puts morality where Yahweh puts nature […] Yahweh is replying to moral questions with physical ones, beating down the blinkered insight of an underling with blows of wisdom formed in the impenetrable darkness of his cosmos. The nature-pictures are undoubtedly powerful, but there is also a strange, unmistakable whiff of almost demonic pantheism. Nature is no longer the mere arena or show-place (Schauplatz) of human action, as it is in Genesis 1; it is the clothing, or at least the cipher concealing the majesty of God. Yahweh’s works have ceased to be anthropocentric; human teleology breaks down; firmament and colossus tower over it”; Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity. The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. J. T. Swann, London: Verso, 2009, p. 97.

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not deny, therefore, that Descartes discovers the fundamental primordial dependence on alterity—the fact that, before ego becomes res cogitans, it is first and foremost a res cogitata, a thing merely passively thought by a powerful other—but he denies the affirmative mode in which some commentators render this relationship (I will deal with it in detail in the next section). Rather, we are confronted here with a deeply traumatized subject who tries to defend himself against the abyssal dimension of this dependence, yet, at the same time, is incapable to break with it for good. The hypothesis of the Malicious Demon may thus be logically irrefutable, yet it can, nonetheless, be neutralized affectively—played down, ignored, repressed, even foreclosed—according to the rule “enough is enough!”, which, as Jonathan Lear suggests, is always the most effective line of therapy. According to Lear, the patient reaches the point of relative health when she is able to exclaim: “Oh, this is crap!”—which very nicely corresponds with Blumenberg’s take on Descartes, who may be said to have reacted in a similar way, by simply deciding to cut himself off emotionally from the theological morass and call deus fallax a “metaphysical fable”— basically, a very crappy story.19 If, therefore, Selbstbehauptung becomes the ultimate agenda of Cartesian thought, it is only because, in the worldview bequeathed to early modernity by nominalist theology, self-assertion became so blatantly impossible: “The senselessness of self-assertion was the heritage of the Gnosticism which was not overcome but only ‘translated’” (LMA, 136), says Blumenberg in reference to Abelard and Ockham and their nominalist concept of deus fallax.20 What unites Descartes and Hobbes, the two 19  See Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 117, where Lear calls it also a “lucky break” and an “existential sabbath”. 20  Blumenberg’s position on Gnosticism goes somewhat against his officially declared method of radical historicism, which emphasizes the epochal break in the formation of Western modernity and allows only for “reoccupations” of former premodern models of thought, but rarely, if ever, for their “translations”. Gnosticism, therefore, constitutes an important exception: “The thesis that I intend to argue here begins by agreeing that there is a connection between the modern age and Gnosticism, but interprets it in the reverse sense: The modern age is the second overcoming of Gnosticism. A presupposition of this thesis is that the first overcoming of Gnosticism, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, was unsuccessful. A further implication is that the medieval period, as a meaningful structure spanning centuries, had its beginning in the conflict with late-antique and early-Christian Gnosticism and that the unity of its systematic intention can be understood as deriving from the task of subduing its Gnostic opponent” (LMA, 128). In his book on the return of Gnostic patterns

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founding fathers of modernity, is their focus on the precarity and exposure of the creaturely finite life, which—despite, but also because of that— requires extra-protection: a deliberate self-assertive effort which elaborates on the natural data of self-preservation. Again, what the waning Middle Ages would still see as the sign of creaturely unworthiness, nothingness and its ontological irrelevance, early modernity turns into a new object of interest and care, a new gold raised out of “dust and ashes”: precisely because fragile and exposed, reduced by the omnipotent deity “from reality to nothingness” (LMA, 162), human life must be asserted, against all odds—and with or without God.21 When God and Nature can no longer be trusted, biological self-preservation becomes a conscious “theme” (LMA, 138), while the new “intuition of existence” leads towards a self-assertive thought of survival, no longer just spontaneously practised but now also reflected upon. Blumenberg comments: The “self-assertion” does not mean the naked biological and economic preservation of the human organism by the means naturally available to it. It means an existential program, according to which man posits his existence in a historical situation and indicates to himself how he is going to deal with the reality surrounding him and what he will make of the possibilities that are open to him (LMA, 138; my emphasis).

For Blumenberg, self-assertion is an “existential programme”, a “provisional” and practical pursuit of human well-being originating in the therapeutic need to appease the metaphysical horror of irrefutable Gnostic danger—and not a new metaphysics of finitude. Blumenberg sees the in modernity, also polemically devoted to Blumenberg, Cyril O’Regan states: “Against the backdrop of his own softening of his embargo against thematic repetition, Blumenberg suggests the possibility that Gnostic modes of discourse broadly conceived have a measure of genealogical potential. Although Blumenberg suggests continuities between Romanticism and Idealism and Gnosticism, not surprising given his historicist-functionalist leanings, he leaves this genealogical potential relatively underdetermined. In addition, Gnosticism is thought to include both Valentinianism and Marcionism. Surprisingly, Marcionism is the banner Gnostic discourse and thus quintessential metaleptic Christian discourse”: Cyril O’Regan, The Gnostic Return in Modernity, Buffalo, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2001, p. 64. Indeed, Blumenberg seems mostly interested in the critical relation between creature and Creator, which eventually leads to its radical re-evaluation—a distinctive feature of Marcionite rather than Valentinian Gnosis. 21  This conversion—of dust into gold, of “nothing into something”—is also a thema regium of Hegel’s Phenomenology, stated explicitly in the preface (p. 19).

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uniqueness of the modern epoch in the apotropaic gesture which turns away from the Gnostic threat—and because of that finally refutes it: not by logical means, which, as he insists, cannot be done, but only by therapeutico-­pragmatic means, which orient human interests onto new paths of both practical and theoretical curiosity. But do we have to stop at that? Perhaps, Descartes’ manoeuvre is actually far more ambitious and, going beyond a simple defence mechanism, it has a potential power to revolutionize modern metaphysics—the way the Book of Job revolutionized religious belief—even if modern metaphysics, let alone religion, has not yet become fully aware of all the consequences of this revolution. For, let us repeat it again, it is only with Descartes-Job that the famous thesis on the univocity of being, which founded modernity, becomes flesh and acquires an affective significance. Finite creatures, so far crushed by a principle of analogy which refused them a decent share of true being, raise their voices and claim their right to be, by asking their “insubordinate questions” together with Shakespearian Shylock: “If you prick us, don’t we bleed?” And, perhaps even more importantly: “If you wrong us, shouldn’t we have revenge?”

Towards a New Metaphysics of Finitude The intuition that this Cartesian wrestling with absolute dependence on “the highest power that made me” has serious theological and metaphysical implications emerges very strongly in Derrida’s “Cogito and the History of Madness”, the crux of which is his reading of the hyperbolic doubt. Pace Foucault, who accuses Descartes of a simple “internment of madness”, and similarly to Blumenberg (of whose reading of the Meditations he does not seem to be aware), Derrida too considers the “fiction” of the genius malignus as a symptom whose light hypothetical form of a “tale” (fabula) covers up a serious existential anxiety referring to the Real of “absolute dependence”, paradigmatically experienced by Job: Now, the recourse to the fiction of the evil genius will evoke, conjure up, the possibility of a total madness, a total derangement over which I could have no control because it is inflicted upon me – hypothetically – leaving me no responsibility for it… This time madness, insanity, will spare nothing, neither bodily nor purely intellectual perceptions.22  Derrida, “Cogito,” pp. 63–64; my emphasis.

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Very much in the Blumenbergian vein, Derrida is also attentive to the special moment of reversal, announced by ego sum, ego existo, which inverts despair into paradoxical certitude, not safely outside, but inside the abyss of madness: “The certainty thus attained need not be sheltered from an emprisoned madness, for it is attained and ascertained within madness itself. It is valid even if I am mad – a supreme self-confidence that seems to require neither the exclusion nor the circumventing of madness.”23 In both, Blumenberg and Derrida, the hyperbolic moment is the vertiginous clash of absolute dependence and self-assertion, from which the subject emerges through decision: while the crisis cannot be “resolved”,24 it must be decided upon by an act of “mad audacity”. Also, both agree that Descartes knows that “he has no right to exclude madness” on his own and must therefore evoke the argument from divine veracity, however weak and unconvincing, to proceed at all: to come back to the world, let history happen, make things work again: The theme of divine veracity and the difference between God and the evil genius are thus illuminated by a light which is only apparently indirect. In short, Descartes knew that, without God, finite thought never had the right to exclude madness, etc. Which amounts to saying that madness is never excluded, except in fact, violently, in history; or rather that this exclusion, this difference between the fact and the principle is historicity, the possibility of history itself.25

Yet, they begin to differ precisely on the point of the theological implications. Blumenberg considers Cartesian “mad audacity” to be a self-­ sufficient strategy: self-assertion of the finite subject is to work with or without God, that is, regardless of any infinitist metaphysics. Foucault’s statement that “work is the absence of madness”26 is taken here literally to its furthest pragmatic extreme: whatever works within the confines of instrumental reason puts the spectre of madness away—and that, for Blumenberg, is more than enough. For Derrida, however, the pragmatic progress of reason with its “working” hypotheses and reductive positivist procedures is not sufficiently strong to ward off the spectre of madness, collapse and dissolution—of God, man and the world—which always  Ibid., 67; my emphasis.  Ibid. 25  Ibid., 395, n28. 26  Ibid., 51. 23 24

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escapes self-assured discourse. For Derrida, the daimonias hyperboles—a cry uttered by Glaucos at the Socratic vision of epekeina tes ousias in Plato’s Republic27—signifies a place of transcendence and excess where all meaning is born out of a meaningless matrix, a “point zero of sense”. The Cartesian cogito is precisely such a “demonic hyperbole” where meaning springs out of meaninglessness and independence out of dependence. It is a “point zero” of a new beginning, inaugurating a new metaphysical mutation: a new sense of existence which cannot leave the former Absolute intact. This is the reason why a traditional metaphysician, when faced with the Cartesian discovery, immediately wants to diminish its significance. Such is precisely the purpose of Jean-Luc Marion’s reading of Descartes’ Meditations: to counteract their uncanny, innovative—perhaps even, as Derrida says, “demonic”—theological implications. By focusing on the sense of ontological dependence, Marion wishes to restore the Neoplatonic hierarchy of beings, where only the Absolute can enjoy a pleroma of existence, while all dependent creatures are granted merely relative ontological status, never a full and univocal kind of being. According to Marion, therefore, Cartesian argumentation inscribes itself in the space of an original dialogue where the ego discovers itself as overtaken even before it can state its own existence, overtaken by the Other of whom it can only know that he invades it and therefore addresses it (qui l’aggresse et donc adresse).28

Since autrui me pense avant que je ne me pense moi-meme (“the other thinks me before I think myself”29), the Cartesian ego is not so much solipsistic as originally intersubjective, being a part of l’intrigue originairement dialogique.30 And while Marion is right in pointing to the heterogenic moment of the encounter with primordial alterity within the self (with which both Blumenberg and Derrida would agree), his traditionalist agenda consists in pushing away a spectre of anxiety—a terrifying sense of possession leading to madness of self-loss (être pri et aggressé)—and in emphasizing only the positive context of the original interpellation. In Marion’s reading, the dialogic trust, always present in Descartes’ e­ ssentially  Ibid., 69.  Jean-Luc Marion, Questions cartesiennes II. Sur l’ego and sur Dieu, Paris: PUF, 1996, p. 46 (my translation). 29  Ibid. 30  Ibid., 45. 27 28

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pious thought, survives intact through the “fiction” of the malicious demon only in order to return triumphantly in the Third Meditation, where it is finally restored to a full faith: The originally dialogic situation of ego sum, ego existo finally disengages itself from the fiction of the God imagined as a Grand Deceptor, and only now, enters in full light into a relation between the infinity, the first thinker and interlocutor, and the finite: the first existent, also a thinker, but most of all something only originally thought, originally interpellated.31

But isn’t the trusting “bond of love” restored here a little too quickly, glossing over the “bond” and exposing “love”? Even if loving, nexus amoris is still a bondage which gives rise to a real anxiety of dependence on the unintelligible deity, which cannot be explained away as nothing but a mere didactic “fable”. Yet, read that way, Cartesian novelty becomes neutralized: the “demonic hyperbole” is closed off, with the cogito reduced back to a traditional form of piety, characteristic of “theological absolutism”.32 No one has expressed better the essence of this traditional piety, which makes human rebellion against divine dependence a priori futile and

 Ibid., 47.  Marion’s reasoning, which finds comfort in dependence, is an integral part and parcel of his theology of analogy, drawing from the premodern Thomistic sources, but it may also be said to follow Schleiermacher’s definition of faith as “absolute dependence”, which expresses the ontological status of human subject—as, literally, subject to God: “The feeling of absolute dependence, accordingly, is not to be explained as an awareness of the world’s existence, but only as an awareness of the existence of God, as the absolute undivided unity”: Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart, London: T & T Clark, 1999, p. 132. Marion also follows Emmanuel Levinas’ precursorial comments on Descartes’ modification of the Anselmian proof of God’s existence from God’s idea, according to which only the Infinite could insert into our finite minds the idea of itself: “Is the idea of God (understood as signifying the uncontained par excellence) the very absolution of the absolute here? This idea of God surpasses every capacity […] The idea of God is God in me, but it is already God breaking up the consciousness that aims at ideas, already differing from all content […] in the idea of the Infinite is described a passivity more passive than any passivity appropriate to a consciousness: it is the surprise or susception of the unassumable, more open than any opening  – an awakening  – but suggesting the passivity of the created one”: Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 63–64: my emphasis. Marion’s original contribution consists in shifting this relation of creaturely passivity and dependence to the earlier stage of hyperbolic doubt. 31 32

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hopeless, than Simone Weil in the Cartesian allusions made in her The Intimations of Christianity Among the Greeks: One must realise that no one in this world is a real centre, because the real centre is beyond this world and no one has right to say “I.” One must renounce  – for God and in the name of love and truth  – this illusion of power which He granted to us, allowing us to think in the first person. But he gave us this privilege only in order for us to give up on it. Only God has right to say “I am.” “I am” is for ever and only God’s unique name.33

Descartes’ emphatic and exclamatory ego sum, ego existo! would thus be twice blasphemous: as an unrightful appropriation of being, which can belong only to the One, now gathered in the atom/kernel/centre of another “I”, which understands its finitude, but is not ready to “give up” its right to be. For Blumenberg, Weil’s wisdom would be a perfect summary of the Gnostic position: “The Gnostic pleroma draws all the predicates of existence to itself and allows the world to be degraded to a mere appearance of nothing, to the demiurge’s deception” (LMA, 148). This pious renouncement is precisely what the Cartesian discovery puts into question—and it cannot be so easily glossed over. As Leszek Kołakowski states in Metaphysical Horror, an essay which also deals with Descartes’ existential terrors concerning his slipping sense of self-reality: I cannot say with conviction “I am a part of a linguistic game,” “my reality is relative to historically established patterns of perception,” “that I exist means that it is useful to believe I do,” “I do not exist,” etc. That I am is indeed irrefutable and to this extent the “existence” in a metaphysical, non-­ relative sense becomes intelligible to me.34

33  Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity Among the Greeks, trans. Elisabeth Chas Geissbuhler, London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1957, p. 140. Kołakowski explains this religious intuition in philosophical terms: “It [the Absolute] is infinite (qualitatively, as the Germans like to say). That is to say, it cannot be limited, let alone destroyed, and thus cannot be affected by anything that is not itself. To enjoy logically necessary, self-supporting existence amounts, indeed, to being utterly impassible; an entity which is subject to changes or alterations caused by anything else would be corruptible and destructible, which is obviously incompatible with being ‘infinite’ (i.e. perfectly autonomous) and uncaused. Consequently there is only one. This at least is self-evident in Platonic thinking, as if there were more than one Absolute, they would limit each other and none would meet the requirement of infinity”: Leszek Kołakowski, Metaphysical Horror, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988, p. 34; my emphasis. 34  Kołakowski, Metaphysical Horror, p. 26; my emphasis.

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Yes, precisely: metaphysical, that is—non-relative. The palpable joy and relief of this exclamation—Ego sum! Ego existo!—comes from the fact that modern reason, instead of being just an all-negating skepsis, actually touches the very base of being: my own, most-own existence. What has been lost in the previous stage of Cartesian Meditations—the sense of reality dissolving into perceptive errors, nightmarish dreams, demonic deception and madness of dispossession—is now found again. This bit of reality regained may not be a grand vision of the Great Chain of Being as we know it from premodern metaphysics, but at least we know that it is not a fiction. We have a bit of the Real which can become a new ground for a new metaphysical theory, a new metaphysics of finitude, which sticks to the “irrefutable reality” of ego sum that even the most malicious demon or devious God cannot take away. For, as Descartes triumphantly announces: “Even if he deceives me, I am, I exist!” Thus, although dependent, deficient and negative, this “intuition of existence” does not allow any relativization—and, because of that simple fact, it has the potential to revolutionize traditional Neoplatonic metaphysics in which ontological dependence became a synonym for merely relative non-subsistence or quasi-being. The Cartesian existential moment announces something unheard of: despite the dependence, its “intuition of existence” is absolute! It is only now that Scottian univocity of being can finally become operative and inaugurate the development of philosophical modernity. In this perspective, Heidegger’s scathing view of Descartes, in Being and Time, reveals its serious limitations: not only do we not deal here with a paradigmatic case of Seinsvergessenheit and the metaphysical deracination of the subject as a “view from nowhere”, but we witness the birth of a new modern metaphysics of finitude based on simultaneously heteronomous and absolute “intuition of being”. Marion is thus right when he emphasizes the dependent status of the Cartesian ego sum, ego existo! and yet wrong when he gives Descartes’ argument a regressive Thomistic twist and pushes it back into the traditional fold of Neoplatonic metaphysics, grounded in the contrast between the absolute causa sui and the relative “being caused”. While suffering and passivity—dolor, pathein— constitute paradigmatic existential heteronomy, they do not preclude the subjective moment of absolute self-assertion which grows precisely out of dependence: the self-asserted ego sum is not sovereign, but it also leaves the traditional opposition of sovereignty and subjection behind. Now, the subject—as subject to higher powers which may indeed deceive us— becomes also a modern subject in terms of the assertive “intuition of

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being” which is no weaker than the divine “I am that I am”. “I may be weak in my thinking, but I am as strongly as God who weakens me”—says the modern subject, demanding its equal share in the univocal right to be.35 But this revolutionary demand truly announces a revolutio: a radical reversal-inversion of the traditional criteria of existence. Thus, although anti-theistic in the traditional sense of the Neoplatonic hierarchy of being with the eternal Absolute on top, this new post-Cartesian “intuition of existence” does not have to be automatically anti-theological, as Blumenberg seems to imply by describing the firm division of labour between theology and philosophy. On the contrary, it appears to have produced its own, in Hegel’s words, “modern religious sentiment” and its new sense of the Real, which now demands that also God undergoes the “ordeal of negativity”, that is, suffers and dies—and thus is no longer the Absolute traditionally conceived.36 At least, no longer the Absolute in the traditional sense of the word, but a “tragic Absolute” in which the order of imitation is reversed: no longer a Lord over creation, God is now a tselem of the Man from Uz, a “suffering servant” himself.37 And if there exists, in Blumenberg’s words, a truly modern myth, it is definitely the one 35  But Kołakowski—more inclined to follow Weil and Marion in the end—does not take this path. Having granted to Descartes that he indeed gained an “immediate intuition of existence”, he nonetheless claims that “nothing else can be deduced from the Cogito” and that this intuition cannot be assumed as “paradigmatic”, that is, as grounding any universal metaphysical understanding of being. The precious Cartesian moment, therefore, turns into a triumph without consequence: “And why does it matter at all that we have the intuition of existence? It does not matter – or so it seems – for any practical purposes” (ibid., 26), says Kołakowski—and this is precisely where I would beg to differ. It means a lot. It means everything to a modern man who at least knows that he will never let go his strong “intuition of existence”, achievable here and now, in worldly immanence and hand it over to any kind of myth of the Absolute that could be nothing but a “metaphysical fable” (and it doesn’t matter if this fable tells bad news about something malignant or good news about a benign absolute being). Once Descartes gets hold of his particular sense de l’existence, wrenched from wrestling with the devious demon, he will stick to it no matter what: with or without God— which, as Pascal immediately noticed, made him the greatest danger to traditional theism: “I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God”: Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, Letters, and Minor Works, trans. W. F. Trotter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1910, Thought no. 37, p.  34. Pascal, similarly to Kołakowski, also finds his discovery of the cogito deep down meaningless: “Descartes useless and uncertain” (Thought no. 38, ibid.). 36  G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977, p. 134. 37  See David Farrell Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

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of the “tragic Absolute”, which deconstructs the very notion of ontological sovereignty, thus allowing for a departure from theological absolutism—not only into the realm of “theoretical curiosity” sported by finite human minds, but also into modern experiments with the new “deipassionistic” metaphysics of divine deprivation, scathedness, depletion—all summed up in the Hegelian term of Verletzung—which makes even God finally declare: “I hurt, therefore I am.”38

If You Wrong Us, Shouldn’t We Have Revenge? Killing off the Absolute In his interpretation of the Book of Job, Ernst Bloch focuses intensely on the motif of revenge: Job’s prophecy of the advent of a Messiah-Avenger (goel had-dam) who will dethrone the “pharaonic” King of the Universe and announce a new religion, no longer grounded in “fear of the Lord”, awe and anxious piety.39 For Bloch, the Book of Job anticipates the Christian development of both theosis (man becoming God) and anthroposis (God becoming man), culminating in the bold idea of incarnation. Dormant for ages, suppressed in its boldness by the Neoplatonist metaphysics which prepared the rise of “theological absolutism”, this new idea awakens at the onset of modernity in the agonistic form of the Lutheran Anfechtung Gottes, which once again evokes the Joban “vengeful” rivalry 38  On the Gnostic/Valentinian genealogy of the motif of “God in pain”, see also Cyril O’Regan: “Thus Gnostic return has to do with the repetition in modern Christian discourses of a narrative focused on the vicissitudes of (divine) reality’s fall from perfection, its agonic middle, and its recollection into perfection […] It is also to install deipassionism as essential to a vision of the divine” (The Gnostic Return, pp. 29; 33; my emphasis). According to O’Regan, the Romantic and German Idealists theological stories, based on the Valentinian narratives, are essentially theogonic: they stake on the divinity’s “dynamic developmental pattern”, the goal of which is “rethinking the relation between pathos and the divine” (ibid., 87). Although formed on the basis of the returning Gnostic narratives, those modern stories also strongly “deform” the original Valentinian lore, which did not make much of this relation. When summarizing the Valentinian tractates composed by Ptolemy, O’Regan writes: “As loudly as any Platonist in the second century, Ptolemy is involved in affirming the apathetic axiom that what is divine cannot suffer, that is, that the divine transcends suffering, as it transcends mutability” (ibid., 106). 39  While rejecting the usual translation of goel had-dam as “Redeemer”, and opting for “Avenger of blood”, Bloch accentuates the motif of revenge: “All interpretations point, then, to the figure of an Avenger, the avenger of the downtrodden Job whose blood is crying out to heaven, the unnamed, unknown one who pursues with justice and redresses the murder of the innocent”: Bloch, Atheism, p. 101.

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between creatures and the Creator. And although Luther does all in his might to conjure it away, the modern metaphysical mutation, opened up by a new daimonios hyperbole, does not allow for its suppression as effectively as the old “theological absolutism”: It is just this [the rivalry] that Luther […] translated into monotheistic terms: He who wanted to be God and it was naturally self-evident for him that man had to want this could only want to be it in place of the one God. Where no equivalence is possible, thinking has to take the form of the desire to annihilate; the potential murder of God can only be gotten rid of by the annihilation of the nature that has to desire it by the replacement of that nature, through an act of grace. (WM, 545; my emphasis)

In these new metaphysical conditions, there are only a few options which could resolve the rivalry: (1) once again, a recourse to simple piety, finding comfort in “absolute dependence”, yet not by the reestablishment of Neoplatonic metaphysics, but by the replacement of natura pura in man through an act of personal grace (Luther, Schleiermacher); (2) an a-­theistic empowerment of the human subject seeking its own theosis (Bloch); and (3) a new theological vision which shifts Anfechtung Gottes into divinity itself, renders it susceptible to “tragedy”—pain, suffering, ordeal (Hegel, Schelling)—and, in consequence, kills off the very idea of the Absolute as such. Although Blumenberg explicitly protests against the third option, seeing in it, in a quite Löwithian manner, an “illegitimate” anthropological projection,40 it has nonetheless developed into a strong modern myth, feeding on the hybridization of modern theology and philosophy. For Blumenberg, myth is always and foremost an anti-absolutist instrument. Mankind, says Blumenberg in Work on Myth, has devised myths in order to escape the “absolutism of reality”, that is, a situation in which the human being becomes radically disempowered and disoriented; myth has always served the purpose of turning the universe into a liveable world, Lebenswelt, in which power is diffused and distributed in such a way that man should no longer feel a passive victim of fate. Man, therefore, cannot 40  See Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957, especially the Introduction, p. v. In Work on Myth, published in 1979 (i.e. 13 years after the first version of Legitimität der Neuzeit, containing the chapter on Descartes), Blumenberg vehemently rejects a non-absolutist evolution of monotheism along the lines of the God against God formula as “an intradivine dissension, a division at the foundation of the divinity such as is described by Jakob Böhme” (WM, 526). I will come back to this shortly.

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live either in the world of positivist absolutism, in which brute facts do not add to any meaningful totality, or in the world of theological absolutism, in which God, the metaphysical Absolute, reduces everything besides himself to nothing: 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… (WM, 110; my emphasis)

For Blumenberg, therefore, myth does not question the reality in which we live, does not wish to make it merely relative or epiphenomenal; whenever it leads to such relativization, it means that it gives in to the Gnosticizing metaphysical temptation, which once again reopens the abysses that myth had wished to close. Such paradigmatic closure is the Cartesian gesture of the cogito: formulated on the verge of self-­dissolution— in fact, from the midst of “mad hyperbole” itself—it “deprives itself of an immediate relation to its abysses” the very moment it faces them. Yet, in Legitimacy, Descartes is not regarded as the founder of a modern myth, but as the founder of modern a-theistic instrumental reason which is satisfied with its cognitive results as long as they work. But what if we shifted Blumenberg’s treatment of Descartes into the later universe of Work on Myth? What if—following Derrida’s intuition—his cogito is precisely the originating moment of a new metaphysical mutation: a new “sentiment of existence” coupled with a “modern religious sentiment”?41 The most significant turning point in the creation of the modern myth is Hegel, who associates “modern religious sentiment” with infinite mourning: sadness, melancholy and guilt, all caused by the “death of God”, the demise of the Absolute—if Gott selbst is tott, dying a real death on the cross, then he cannot be the indemnified metaphysical divinity of “theological absolutism”.42 The only element of the infinite in the finite is precisely the guilty memory of God’s having died on the cross; and although Hegel claims—still quite piously, at least on the surface—that 41  This hypothesis follows closely Cyril O’Regan’s suggestion that “Work on Myth represents a development of Legitimacy in that it is more acutely aware of the inextricably hermeneutic nature of Gnostic myth”: The Gnostic Return, p. 61. 42  “The feeling that God himself is dead is the sentiment on which the religion of modern times rests”: Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, p. 134.

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the guilt fuelling the modern sense of Trauer derives from the fact that God had died for us, hopeless sinners, and since then we have been constantly failing to repay the debt (Schuld)—Nietzsche reveals the cards of this “vengeful” game and grafts onto Hegel his own “death of God” narrative, which already sounds like Freud in Totem and Taboo: God did not simply choose to die for us; we have actually killed him out of revenge for stealing all being (or women) for himself. But this is also very true of Hegel and his own highly heterodox version of Christianity, which in order to let God die for us—suffer, experience pain and then die for real— must have killed God as the divine Absolute in the first place. But, just as Pascal never forgave Descartes his wish to “dispense with God”, so too did Christian orthodoxy never forgive Hegel, and German Idealism in general, this unheard-of scandal of killing off the Absolute: of turning the untouchable and fateless actus purus of Aquinas’ infinite Substance into a changing, willing and suffering Subject who goes through the risky motions of complex Trinitarian life, that is, of submitting the eternal being to the way of all things finite and establishing the latter as the true criterion of existence. Despite Hegel’s own declarations, especially in the late period of the Lectures in the Philosophy of Religion, that he is nothing but a good Lutheran, the so-called heterodox Hegel43 proved to be a stumbling block to Christian theology which, until today—and only with scant exceptions deriving from the Moltmannian school—maintains firm belief in the eternal, thoroughly unscathed, divinity. For, as Jean-Luc Marion apodictically claims (partly in critical reference to Hegel), the Absolute cannot suffer the slightest lack or change, let alone die—or otherwise it would not be God by definition.44 Christian orthodoxy has good reason to rage against Hegel, because there is no denying that this killing off the Absolute contains a Joban element of vengeance which adds an antithetical flavour of guilt to the process of mourning. Before, when faced with the Absolute, the finite being could only lament its privatio essendi, its verging on the abyss of nothingness; now however, after the sudden switch of perspectives allowed by the process of self-assertion, the finite takes revenge on the source of all being  See Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel, Buffalo, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994.  “[T]he ‘death of God’ sets forth a contradiction: that which dies has no any right to claim, even when it is alive, to be ‘God’”: Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance. Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, New York: Fordham University Press, 2001, p. 1. This is a good example of what Cyril O’Regan calls the “apathetic axiom” (The Gnostic Return, p. 106). 43 44

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which “jealously” had guarded all existence only for itself. As if in the Freudian “anthropological phantasy” of original monotheism, where all sons kill the totemic father and eat his flesh, here finite beings kill the Absolute in order to partake in its share of being, thus depriving it of its ontological monopoly. The Orphic-Gnostic motif of the vengeful killing of God always lurks in the background, even in the seemingly most pious of thinkers: so, even in Martin Luther himself, who, in the midst of his Anfechtung Gottes—rivalry with God—suddenly exclaims: “How can I live, if God lives?” No wonder that Blumenberg quotes this line immediately after his interpretation of Descartes: it is exactly the same sense of existential competition into which the self-assertive finite being enters against the potentially all-consuming Infinite. Either the Absolute, or me— no third option given.45 Thus, while Blumenberg is reluctant to consider non-absolutist developments of modern monotheism (he hardly ever mentions Hegel, and even more rarely approvingly), his “work on myth” nonetheless inscribes itself well into the programme of de-absolutization which kills off the infinite Absolute as the default model of perfect being. Hence also his reading of Descartes in Legitimacy goes against the possible absolutization of the cogito which, instead of destroying the very idea of the Absolute, would reinstate it within human subjectivity. The question, however, remains: why does Blumenberg reject any de-absolutization within modern theology and allows only modern philosophy (and science) to walk the path free of untouchable absolutes?

The Immanent (Non)Absolute Although the whole of Work on Myth is devoted to the transformations of the story of Prometheus, from its ancient Greek inception to its late-­ modern end in Kafka’s poem, one can easily detect here an echo of the earlier antagonism which occupied Blumenberg already in Legitimacy. While the figure of Prometheus is often interpreted as Christological and 45  “The provocation of the transcendent absolute passes over at the point of its most extreme radicalisation into the uncovering of the immanent absolute […] The God Who had never owed man anything and still owed him nothing, […] was no longer the highest and the necessary, nor even the possible point of reference of the human will. On the contrary, He left to man only the alternative of his natural and rational self-assertion, the essence of which Luther formulated as the ‘program’ of anti-divine self-deification” (LMA, 178; my emphasis).

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understood in terms of a rivalry of “God against god”,46 it is also “human, all-too-human”, reverberating with Job’s suspicion that man may indeed be “better than his gods”, as well as with the Cartesian drive towards self-­ assertion. After all, the Cartesian tearing of the realm of cogito away from the sole power of God can indeed be regarded as a modern execution of the Promethean stealing of fire (being) from unique divine possession. Self-assertion as defiance against “absolute dependence”—whether in monotheistic Job, polytheistic Prometheus or philosophical Descartes—is thus Blumenberg’s favourite thema regium, which he plays out as his anti-­ absolutist subversion, summoning to the rescue all possible strategies— mythic, dualistic, Trinitarian—against the Gnostic danger of the monopolization of power. Sympathetic to late Schelling’s Catholic confession, Blumenberg quotes his Philosophy of Mythology, which implicates Prometheus into a Trinitarian intrigue, passing through the “Marcionite” agon between Father and Son, where the status of the mythic rebel moves fluidly between humanity and divinity. Schelling writes: Consequently spirit, as that in man which is, in its origin, divine, is, on account of its autonomy, potentially what impels man “to rebel against the gods.” I am speaking of Prometheus, who on the one hand is only the principle of Zeus himself and, in contrast to man, is something divine, a divine element that becomes the origin of man’s intelligence, that confers on him something that had not been granted to him by the previous world order […] But over against the divine, Prometheus is will, which is indomitable and indestructible, and which is therefore able to withstand the god. (WM, 554)47

In Promethean disguise, Job the Rebel is present here as the divine tselem [likeness] potentially impelled to oppose God’s rule in the name of moral, rational and existential autonomy—and, on top of that, both Prometheus and Job don the features of the Cartesian cogito which is “the origin of man’s intelligence” and has at its disposal an infinite will that, as we know from Descartes’ account, is not just responsible for making errors, but also 46  While evoking this formula, Blumenberg has in mind both Luther’s Anfechtung Gottes, a “rivalry with God”, which Luther ascribes to human nature deprived of grace, and Goethe’s “extraordinary saying”, which he put in Dichtung und Wahrheit, according to which: Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse (translated via Blumenberg as: “Only a god can prevail against a god”). 47  F.W.J.  Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie (1856), Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1957, vol. 1, p. 481.

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aids finite cogito in its agon with the deus fallax; if it weren’t for the former’s infinite will to stay in being and reasoning, the hyperbolic doubt would have disarmed the rational subject and plunged it into madness. But this human aspect becomes once again a springboard for a new theological projection: since now conflict, pain, the threat of dispossession and existential vertigo constitute the very core of the Real, God—no longer an indemnified Absolute—must undergo the same process and assert itself in the midst of confusion. Schelling’s drafts of the Weltalter are the best illustration of such attempt to translate the modern theosophical intuition of “God against God”—the self-conflicted deity—into a philosophical theory of divine self-therapy, but, according to Blumenberg, it is only his Philosophy of Mythology which succeeds in telling the full story of the divine split and its ultimate reconciliation, because it avoids a language of “an intradivine dissension, a division at the foundation of the divinity such as is described by Jakob Böhme” (WM, 526) and chooses instead a complex Trinitarian formula where the elements of dualistic Marcionism are ultimately reconciled: “the talk is not of the one God and his possible self-­ estrangement, but rather of two gods, of the dualism prevented only with difficulty in the history of Christian dogma of the Creator and the Redeemer, the demiurge and the man-god, the constraining Father and the liberating Son” (WM, 535): Schelling drew the ultimate consequence from the tendency that was implicit in the collateral tradition according to which Prometheus was Zeus’s son. For myth, what is also divine can only develop into something antidivine; under Idealism’s postulate of autonomy, being a son inevitably turns into being an enemy … From the perspective of the end of his story and of history as such, Prometheus, after all, becomes one of the hypostases of Zeus, the implication of his desire for a world. “So there was after all something in Zeus in conformity with which he could not simply not like what Prometheus had done.” […] The disclosure of his filiation is the completion of the sense of history in favor of man, the integration of the demiurgic species into a reconciled universe. Polytheism is not obliterated or even just corrected by Trinitarian monotheism, but is decoded by it. (WM, 554–55)

Prometheus the Rebel—just like Job the Rebel—would thus represent a hidden aspect of divinity itself. What Bloch calls a discontent with the “demiurgic principle” of an indifferent Absolute, first projected onto the rebellious human mind, is now incorporated back into a new theological vision, also containing pain, conflict, self-alienation and the experience of

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finitude, either in Joban/Promethean suffering or in Christ’s real death. The divine Absolute, first appearing as a Gnostic deus fallax, gets dragged into the Promethean tragedy, the goal of which is ultimate reconciliation, yet “in favour of man”. Blumenberg, however, rejects this modern theological development: all he finds convincing in Schelling’s narrative is an oblique reference to Marcionite dualism as the remnant of polytheism within monotheistic lore. Led by his overruling principle, which is the protection of the human finite mind against infinitist absolutism, he naturally sympathizes with the separation of powers elaborated within the polytheistic solution. Whereas monotheism, for him, is and always will be an absolutist religion; even if it produces discourses of self-limiting power—which, in Legitimacy, he criticizes in reference to Nominalist weak attempts to defend potentia ordinata—he rather sides with Goethe, who pronounced the idea of divine self-limitation as “absurd” (WM, 526): “in monotheism there can be no such a thing as a relaxation from absoluteness” (WM, 547). No Christian kenosis, therefore, and no kabbalistic tsimtsum (contraction, also very strongly present in Schelling) can “relax” theological absolutism, and if they attempt to do so, they only engender an inner contradiction within Neoplatonic metaphysics, which must introduce a war into the One in order to account for the production of the manifold of beings. If he, therefore, accepts the Trinitarian scheme in Schelling’s interpretation, it is only because it retains and decodes the polytheistic wisdom of the “separation of powers”: It is not God’s dissension with himself that is conceived as the limiting case of the absolute (and thus at the same time as the negation of every other possibility of opposing a god who alone is able to oppose himself), but rather the original schema of man’s liberation from anxiety in the face of all the powers that he cannot comprehend, insofar as these seem to stand only against man, and must consequently be thought of as being turned aside by opposition to one another. Gods, when there are many of them, have their respective competencies, among themselves the system of their strengths and weaknesses. Since they are originally forces and powers, they are, like forces and powers, in their nature unrestricted, unless other forces and powers restrict them. Because – and that is a reason for the dominant god’s jealousy – a god is never curbed except by another god. (WM, 550; my emphasis)

Only polytheism, therefore allows for a separation of powers and the diffusion of the absolutist monopole. But what about the monotheistic defiance of Jacob, Job, even Christ himself? According to Blumenberg, it can

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sustain itself as such only because it is inherently dualistic; that is, it abandons the humanity of the rebelling agent and forces his secret divinization according to the above rule that a god is never curbed except by another god. And indeed, in the Jewish tradition, Jacob is called yeshurun, a God-like theomorphic hero; Job is regarded as the righteous one who defeated God himself and opened a path towards incarnation as the theosis of the “son of man” (Bloch), and Christ himself, within the Marcionite Gnosis, becomes an anti-God of redemption set against the God of creation. The “relaxation” of absolute power, therefore, can only come from the outside, represented by an anti-divine agent. But, perhaps, there is a flaw in this all-too-easy opposition of monopolistic monotheism and power-diffusing polytheism. Blumenberg does not seem to notice an aporia in his conception of the former as always and only a theological absolutism of potentia absoluta. Since there is no God who, by claiming all the power, would not engender another god by the spirit of rivalry, revenge and the “fascination of the absolute” (WM, 547), then every monotheism, which contains in itself the Gnostic danger of the demiurgic monopoly, must necessarily imply a further development, also typical of most Gnosticisms: an antagonistic tension bordering on—or directly issuing in—metaphysical dualism. There would, therefore, be no such thing as a chemically pure monotheism—or an “ideal type” in Weberian terms: there would always be some other ready to challenge, confront and thus limit divine omnipotence. So, does not Blumenberg contradict himself when he, on the one hand, opposes the polytheistic diffusion of powers to the monotheistic seemingly secure power-monopoly and, on the other, agrees with Goethe that the whole point of having “a god” is to defy him? Goethe expressed this on another occasion as follows: “People do not regard anyone as a god except when they want to act in a way that is contrary to his laws, because they hope to deceive him; or because he puts up with things; or because he relaxes his absoluteness enough to let them be absolute too.” That is a retrospect, already almost contemptuous, on the former Prometheus, who had, as it were, fallen into the trap of becoming a god. The point of the myth is the inevitability, for the god, of engendering other gods, defiant demiurges, by the fascination of the absolute […] The formulas that Goethe uses can only be understood polytheistically, because neither in Spinozism nor in monotheism can there be such a thing as a relaxation from absoluteness […] The god who cannot tolerate any foreign gods beside himself procures them for himself only by virtue of the fact that he wants to be a god. It is only

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against a god that there are gods at all; this is what pantheism wanted to rid the world of. (WM, 547; my emphasis)

In the above fragment, the phrase “neither in Spinozism nor in monotheism” is particularly confusing in its suggestion of equivalence: for, while it makes no sense whatsoever to either lament or rebel against the impersonal necessitarian God of Spinoza, that is, the ultimate Deus philosophi (who/which might indeed come close to the “ideal type” of Blumenberg’s monotheism), it makes all the sense to rebel against a personal dispenser of power who controls fate—and then, precisely in the way Goethe described it, demand that he relaxes his absolute grip on things. If Blumenberg seems to side with Goethe, it is rather on the issue of rebellion as such, which he now sees, together with the aging Weimar sage who left his Promethean Sturm und Drang behind, as overrated and merely perpetuating the cycle of domination, whereas pantheism properly understood, that is, the one where there is no divine position at all, could be a way out of the absolutist structures of power. If monotheism is not a good solution, it is not because it never challenges God’s power (because it does so constantly, at least since the time of Job), but because it carries on the vengeful vicious circle of absolutization: of “engendering other gods, defiant demiurges, by the fascination of the absolute”—among which there is also, perhaps, the Cartesian cogito, now, after it rebelled against its God, thinking of itself as an “immanent absolute” (LMA, 178): immanent, finite, yet still absolute.

Conclusion Is our reading of the cogito as the founding moment of a new metaphysics of finitude such a new anti-divine absolute—and, in that sense, nihil novi sub sole? Yes and no. Yes, because it is absolute in Kołakowski’s sense of “non-relative”—and no, because “non-relative” does not translate here into “non-relational”. The Cartesian “immanent absolute” is indeed always in danger of a wrong “insular” absolutization, where it begins to think of itself as self-sufficient and causa sui, but it does so only when it forgets its origin in the “demonic hyperbole” where it announced its independence in the midst of the most abyssal dependence.48 But if 48  On this danger, see Derrida’s remark in The Beast and the Sovereign, where he compares Descartes to Robinson Crusoe: “Not like Descartes, who also, as you know, obsessively asked

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Blumenberg’s reading of Descartes comes close to both Derrida’s and Marion’s, it is because they all accentuate the relational—not insular— character of the Cartesian cogito. Where they differ is in the description of this relationality: in Blumenberg and Derrida, apotropaic; in Marion, piously dependent. What, however, ultimately counts in all these readings is that the cogito is not ab-solutus, that is, absolved from any relation, perfectly separate and ontologically self-caused. Finite, dying, having its beginning and its end beside itself—the cogito is nonetheless self-assured in its precarious existence. Relational—yet not relative; not relative—yet relational. This seems to be the game-changing formula which created the modern metaphysics of finitude: the new sentiment de l’existence of beings which do not have to be infinite in order to be.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge, 1973. Bloch, Ernst. Atheism in Christianity. The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. Translated by J. T. Swann, London: Verso, 2009. Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [LMA]. Translated by Robert Wallace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth [WM]. Translated by Robert Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Translated by Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, 2 vols. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Descartes, René. Meditations on the First Philosophy. Translated by John Veitch. In The Rationalists. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974.

himself the question of path as method and resembled, in his own way, a first Robinson of philosophy who intended to rely only on his own strength, reconstruct everything himself after having radically doubted every presupposition, as Woolf said of Robinson Crusoe: the cogito ergo sum is a hyperbolic Robinsonade, particularly at the moment of hyperbolic doubt that absolutely insularizes the self-relation of the cogito sum, and we could go a long way analysing this affinity or this analogy between the Philosopher-voyager Descartes and Robinson Crusoe”: Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, p. 33; (my emphasis).

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Frank, David. “Arguing with God, Talmudic Discourse, and the Jewish Countermodel: Implications for the Study of Argumentation.” Argumentation and Advocacy 41 (Fall 2004): 71–86. Marx, Karl. “Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” In Collected Works, vol. 3. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Hegel, G.  W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.  V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Hegel, G.W.F. Faith and Knowledge. Translated by W.  Cerf and H.  S. Harris. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977. Jauss, Hans (ed.). Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. 3, Munich: Fink, 1968. Jauss, Hans. “Job’s Questions and their Distant Reply: Goethe, Nietzsche, Heidegger.” Comparative Literature 34.3 (Summer 1982): 193–207. Kierkegaard, Søren. Christian Discourses. Translated by Walter Laurie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952. Kołakowski, Leszek. Metaphysical Horror. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Krell, David Farrell. The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Lear, Jonathan. Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Levinas, Emmanuel. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Marion, Jean-Luc. Questions cartesiennes II.  Sur l’ego and sur Dieu. Paris: PUF, 1996. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Idol and Distance. Five Studies. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001. Miles, Jack. God: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. O’Regan, Cyril. The Heterodox Hegel. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994. O’Regan, Cyril. The Gnostic Return in Modernity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001. Pascal, Blaise. Thoughts, Letters, and Minor Works. Translated by W.  F. Trotter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1910. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Rêveries du Promeneur solitaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Santner, Eric. Creaturely Life. Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Schelling, F.W.J. Philosophie der Mythologie, 3 vols. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1957. Schleiermacher, Friedrich D.E. The Christian Faith. Edited and translated by H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart. London: T & T Clark, 1999. Weil, Simone. Intimations of Christianity Among the Greeks. Translated by Elisabeth Chas Geissbuhler. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1957.

CHAPTER 2

Legitimacy of Nihilism: Blumenberg’s Post-Gnosticism Elad Lapidot

Both Hans Jonas and Hans Blumenberg presented, as a central and defining project in their intellectual work, reflections on the nature and meaning of modernity, which attempt to interpret modernity, modern man and modern mind, in reference to Gnosticism. Gnosticism is the designation that has become prevalent in a certain intellectual historiography—much due to Hans Jonas’ work—for an intellectual movement that emerged in late antiquity, around the beginning of the Common Era.1 Understanding

1  For a good historical account of the context, rise and development of this intellectual historiography in the twentieth century, see Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted. Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008). See also Yotam Hotam, “Gnosis and Modernity  – A Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 3–4 (2007):591–608. For a historiographical critique of the category of “Gnosticism”, see Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

E. Lapidot (*) University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_2

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modernity in relation to Gnosticism thus constitutes a specific form of situating the modern times within the great narrative of the Common Era itself, that is, based on a reading of Gnosticism as a crucial, even defining element in this narrative. In other words, these interpretations posit Gnosticism as a central element for the intellectual history of the West. This chapter reflects on the meaning of this contemporary gesture, of which Jonas and Blumenberg are two central representatives, but which extends well beyond them, through the identification and contemplation of a basic difference between their respective accounts. Indeed, as noted and analysed by Benjamin Lazier,2 notwithstanding the similarities as well as mutual esteem and influences between these two thinkers of modernity and Gnosticism, they disagree on one point, arguably the most crucial one, namely the exact nature of the relation between modernity and Gnosticism. Whereas it was Blumenberg’s central thesis that modernity is the overcoming of Gnosticism, Jonas’ famous claim was that not only do central aspects in the constitution of the modern mind reproduce Gnosticism, but these modern elements radicalize the fundamental “nihilistic” tendency of Gnostic thought. In other words, if for Blumenberg modernity is no longer Gnostic, for Jonas modernity is hyperGnostic. This diagnostic difference has clear axiological consequences: since both consider Gnosticism basically as negative, namely a tendency that requires “overcoming”, Jonas’ diagnosis of modernity as hyper-Gnostic implies fundamental critique or condemnation of the modern world, as “nihilistic”, whereas Blumenberg is the famous proponent of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Where does this disagreement arise from? Does it follow from a different understanding of Gnosticism, or from a different perception and interpretation or perhaps a different evaluation of the essence of modernity? What element, component or characteristic of modernity is viewed differently by these two thinkers? How does this divergence between Jonas and Blumenberg open a conceptual space for reflecting on the meaning of thinking, side by side, modernity and Gnosticism? My method for answering these questions is to stress my own disagreement when it comes to the understanding of the disagreement between Jonas and Blumenberg, a disagreement on a disagreement. The position I wish to disagree with—and this does not mean here to refute or to invalidate, but to set out from, as 2  Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted; idem, “Overcoming Gnosticism: Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy of the Natural World”, Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 4 (2003):619–637.

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a ground, and to further investigate and complicate—is the account offered by Benjamin Lazier of the Jonas/Blumenberg difference. On Lazier’s reading, both Jonas’ and Blumenberg’s work should be basically read as anti-Gnostic, that is, as criticizing Gnostic elements in modernity. Whereas, however, Blumenberg identified the resurgence— “return”—of ancient Gnosticism only in theological critique of modernity as “secularism” (“crisis theology”; see below), for Jonas, so Lazier, “[p]reoccpuation with the return of gnosticism in the form of crisis theology only deflected attention from its more pervasive and dangerous incarnation. Scientific thought replicated gnostic dualism.”3 In other words, if Blumenberg identifies Gnosticism only in anti-modernity, Jonas diagnoses as Gnostic a constitutive component of the modern world, namely modern science. The bone of contention would thus be, in Lazier’s interpretation, the meaning of modern science. If modern, technological science manifests for Blumenberg the emancipation of human reason, which accordingly legitimizes modernity and overcomes Gnosticism, for Jonas, “[f]ar from the overcoming of Gnosticism, Baconian science was its coconspirator” (ibid., 57). For Jonas, modern science is not the overcoming but the reincarnation—and radicalization—of ancient Gnosticism, and therefore, it is precisely modern science and technology that contemporary thought needs to overcome, which would be the task undertaken by Jonas himself (ibid., 10). In what follows I would like to call this interpretation into question. Basically, in agreement with Lazier on deeming modern science and technology a central object of Jonas’ and Blumenberg’s contradicting appreciation of modernity and its relation to Gnosticism, I wish to argue that this disagreement goes deeper into—and thus renders visible—the diverging conceptual, ontological foundations of these two thinkers. In a nutshell, it seems to me that the difference in appreciating the meaning of modern science, technological science, arises from a fundamental difference in the ontological interpretation of the nature of nothingness, non-­ being and the New. Whereas Jonas—a certain Jonas—contemplates non-being as the source of nihilism, Blumenberg contemplates it as the source of legitimacy and creation. These two different conceptions are not necessarily contradictory; in fact to a certain extent, on a certain level, they are complementary. With respect to Gnosticism, my claim in this chapter is that they represent not two different applications of the basically same 3

 Lazier, God Interrupted, 56.

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anti-Gnostic agenda, but rather arise from two different positions of rejecting Gnosticism: anti-Gnosticism (Jonas) and post-Gnosticism (Blumenberg). This claim is both surprising with respect to Blumenberg and inaccurate with respect to Jonas. Indeed, it focuses on a certain position formulated by—or, at least, that may be and has commonly been drawn from—Jonas, that is, anti-Gnosticism, in order to call into question the anti-Gnostic reading of Blumenberg. The anti-Gnostic reading of Jonas has already been called into question, for instance, by Jonathan Cahana and by myself.4 This chapter focuses on dislocating the anti-Gnostic reading of Blumenberg. It will begin with a rather brief discussion of Jonas, a founder of the Gnosticism category in the intellectual historiography in which Blumenberg intervenes, and this for the sole reason of establishing what Gnosticism and anti-Gnosticism mean in this specific discourse, in order to then proceed to examine in more detail the applicability of these categories to Blumenberg’s project.

Hans Jonas and the Gnostics: Against the World The most basic characterization of Gnosticism according to Jonas’ analysis, which remained unchanged from his earlier works in the late 1920s to his later book of 1958, is Entweltlichungstendenz, “tendency of turning away from the world”.5 Gnosticism, from its mythological to its philosophical expressions, is anti-cosmism; that is, it is a kind of knowledge that locates truth—and the Good—beyond this world and so aims, both epistemically and practically, “away” from this world, to another world. Anti-­ cosmism is nonetheless an inaccurate term, insofar as Gnosticism does not reject the world as mere cosmos, “order”; that is, it is not promoting chaos or anarchy as such, but rather this world order, in view of another. It is perhaps for this reason that Leo Strauss, in a letter to Hans Jonas, proposed a more specific formulation, defining Gnosticism, based on

4  Jonathan Cahana, “A Gnostic Critic of Modernity: Hans Jonas from Existentialism to Science, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 86, no. 1 (2018):158–180; Elad Lapidot, “Hans Jonas’ Work on Gnosticism as Counterhistory”, Philosophical Readings 9 (2017):61–66. 5  Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. 1. Die mythologische Gnosis: mit einer Einleitung zur Geschichte und Methodologie der Forschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1934) [GSG I], 5.

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Jonas’ descriptions, as “the most radical rebellion against physis”.6 Gnosticism does not reject all order, but proposes a different order or cosmos, which diverges from the order of this world, the order of physis. Physis, I suggest, is the order of “growth”, namely of organic change within the totality of life. Gnosticism breaks with physis. It may be called meta-physics insofar as it proposes—as Jonas understood it—a world beyond this world: a world of truth beyond this world of non-truth, a good world beyond this evil cosmos. This position could be described and was in fact designated by Jonas as “dualism”, insofar as it breaks with the wholeness of our world order and suggests the existence of another order, irreconcilable with this one.7 Nonetheless, I would suggest that insofar as Gnosticism is anti-cosmic, such that the two different worlds or orders invoked by Gnostic thought are related to each other by opposition (true/false, good/bad), they remain connected by a broader, comprehensive system of evaluation, within which they perform interconnected roles in one and the same conceptual or narrative constellation, “system” or “story”. In fact, notwithstanding his definition of the basic Gnostic principle as “dualistic”, the actual historical intellectual models that Jonas presents as incorporating most purely Gnosticism—both as myth and as philosophy—are monistic: Valentinian myth and Plotinus’ system. In these models, the different orders, true and false, good and bad, do not stand in a dualistic relation, or rather non-­ relation to each other, but in a dialectical relation; that is, they are different aspects or manifestations of the same order. It is precisely as a shift from dialectics to dualism that the radicalization of Gnosticism in modernity may be characterized in Jonas’ reading. Indeed, in Jonas’ most famous identification of Gnostic elements in modernity, “Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism” of 1958,8 he points to central tendencies in the modern human condition which turn from the world in a more radical way than ancient Gnostic Entweltlichungstendenz. The two modern intellectual phenomena that Jonas discusses in this essay are existentialism, exemplified by Heidegger, and—the arguably much more central phenomenon of—modern science. According to Jonas, what 6  Strauss to Jonas, 19 November 1958 (HJA 7-13b), quoted in Lazier, “Overcoming Gnosticism”, 632. 7  Jonas describes the basic Gnostic tendency as “anti-cosmic, eschatological dualism”; see GSG I, 5. 8  An earlier version of this essay appeared already in 1952; see Hans Jonas, “Gnosticism and modern Nihilism”, Social Research 19, no. 4 (1952):430–452.

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characterizes both is that they do not turn from the world as evil, which eo ipso means a turn against and so also towards the world, but they turn from the world as utterly indifferent: modern Entweltlichung is not anti-­ cosmic, but a-cosmic. This also means that the modern mind—as it is manifested in these phenomena—does not go beyond the order of physis in view of and towards another order, a metaphysis; rather it is the pure negation of the world by a purely worldless self: existentialism absolutely disconnects the human from physis, and technological science accordingly absolutely delivers the physical world to man’s will. Modernity thus does not reproduce ancient Gnosticism’s metaphysical rejection of this world, it rather goes beyond Gnosticism to perform a much worse and fatal nihilistic rejection of all established order. As Lazier claims, Jonas’ later work, from the Phenomenon of Life to The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age,9 may be read as a counter-operation of returning to the world order and restoring human belonging to physis.

Blumenberg and the Critique of Modernity: Against Time Benjamin Lazier’s claim was that Blumenberg, albeit sharing Jonas’ basic anti-Gnostic position, identified as his sole contemporary Gnostic-like opponent—crisis theology. He thereby deflected attention from what Jonas acknowledged as the “more pervasive and dangerous incarnation” of Gnosticism in modernity, modern science. I wish to claim that the difference is deeper, and that Blumenberg’s polemics are broader: they aim beyond “crisis theology” at nothing less than the critique of modernity, ultimately also the kind of anti-Gnostic critique formulated by Jonas. In other words, I wish to present the difference between Jonas and Blumenberg not just as two diverging anti-Gnostic interpretations of modernity, but—at least to a certain extent—as two properly conflicting positions on the meaning of the modern age, and of Gnosticism. In order to do so, in what follows I will reflect on the meaning of some basic elements in Blumenberg’s project, as it was formulated and carried out in The 9  Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York, Harper & Row, 1966); idem, Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), translated by David Herr as The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

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Legitimacy of the Modern Age. All I can offer here is an outline for a more detailed and comprehensive reading of this book, which nonetheless, I think, may also guide a further reading of Blumenberg’s broader work. I begin with the basic nature of Blumenberg’s initial polemical gesture, as it was formulated in the first part of Legitimacy, with the title “Secularization – Critique of a Category of Historical Wrong (geschichtliches Unrecht)”. Under this title, Blumenberg opens his vast project with a negative, critical act, namely of identifying opponents, that is, a basic position against which his project takes shape, namely a basic position that defines his project negatively. Disregarding for a moment “secularization”, Blumenberg’s basic opponents are not the moderns, but critics of modernity. More precisely, his project—a critique of critique, a certain anti-­ anti—is conceived as a response to the critique of the modern age as a “historical wrong”. It is for this type of critique that the problematization of modernity as “secularization” would be a paradigmatic case. What does it mean to criticize the modern age as a “historical wrong”? Arguably, it means to identify and condemn a certain illegitimacy in the very historical event of the modern age, namely in the modern age as such, to the effect that the modern would seem to arise by definition as—to use André Gide’s words quoted by Blumenberg as epigraph—“the fruit of crime”, for instance, the crime of nihilism. This kind of critique delegitimizes the very order—cosmos—of the modern world and in this sense performs an anti-­ cosmic gesture that could be described, applying Jonas’ terminology, as Gnostic. The fruit of the crime, the illegitimate child, is in his very being in conflict with the order of the world, is not at home in the world, entweltet. Indeed, the paradigm is the category of “secularization”, and this part of Blumenberg’s polemics may very well be read—as Lazier does—in perfect harmony with Jonas. On this reading, Blumenberg exposes the critique of modernity as secularization, the “secularization theorem”,10 as contemporary Gnosticism. In fact, he indicates how the claim whereby the modern age has arisen from a process or event of secularization, namely of becoming secular, basically means identifying modernity as worldliness, or more precisely as the process of becoming worldly, Verweltlichung, which in German functions as a synonym for secularization. According to Blumenberg, this description of the modern age as the “worldly age” structurally portrays modernity and the world itself as a derivation and 10  Of which the “strongest form” would be Carl Schmitt’s “political theology”; see LN, 102.

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thus a fall from an unworldly origin, a position that calls to mind Gnostic anti-cosmism. Blumenberg more specifically identifies the secularization theorem as theological, namely as “a last theologumenon, which charges the heirs of theology with the consciousness of guilt for the occurrence of the original fall” (LN, 133). To consider—and eo ipso to delegitimize— modernity as Verweltlichung is to reproduce a theological dualism—“crisis theology” (see Lazier)—between worldly and unworldly, secular and sacred, world and God. The secularization theorem would arise from an Entweltlichungstendenz, a turn away from the world, that is, the very Gnostic principle that Jonas described. One prominent example of this kind of theology discussed by Blumenberg is the theologian Robert Bultmann’s project of Entmythologisierung, “de-mythologizing” the Christian message so as to extricate from the narrative, the worldly figure, an “original grain” that is not of the world, weltlos. This project, Blumenberg points out, echoes the classical heresies of early Christianity and reproduces “Gnostic myth” (LN, 49). Interestingly, Bultmann’s Entmythologisierung was explicitly inspired by Jonas’ own project of Entmythologisierung, not of the New Testament, but of the Gnostic mythologies, that is, of the Gnostic Dasein from its inscription in the world through various forms—myths, philosophies—of representations that Jonas called “objectivations”.11 It is often forgotten that this very anti-cosmic, anti-historicist methodology of existential hermeneutics, this hermeneutical Entweltlichung, was precisely what fascinated Jonas originally both in Heidegger and in the Gnostic texts—and not just as an interesting parallel, as he later portrayed it, but as the guiding principle for his own project.12 However, and this is a crucial point that I wish to make now, in contrast to Bultmann and the “crisis theology”, both for Jonas and arguably—pace Jonas’ own critique—for Heidegger too, the extraction of Dasein, of the human subject, from its “fall” into the world, paradigmatically the modern world, was not done for the sake of unworldliness, on the contrary. It would be rather modernity, modern man, or being-in-the-modern-world that is too disconnected from things, too turned away from physis. In other words, there is a—Jonasian, 11  Rudolf Bultmann, “Neues Testament und Mythologie”, in Kerygma und Mythos. Ein theologisches Gespräch, ed. H.W. Bartsch (Hamburg-Volksdorf: Herbert Reich Evangelischer Verlag, 1951), 15–48, 26; Jonas, GSG I, 85. 12  Elad Lapidot, “Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist II. Hans Jonas’ The Lost Book”, in Hans Jonas Handbook, eds. Michael Bongardt, Holger Burckhart, John-Stewart Gordon and Jürgen Nielsen-Sikora (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, forthcoming).

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Heideggerian—critique of modernity, delegitimization of modernity, not on the charge of Verweltlichung, a fall into the world, but on the charge of Entweltlichung, a fall out of the world. My claim is that Blumenberg’s polemics apply to both. Blumenberg not only rejects the theological critique of modernity as too worldly, but so too Voegelin’s—and therefore also Jonas’—critique of modernity as “the return of Gnosticism” (LN, 150), namely as not worldly enough. I would say that if he opposes any return of Gnostic anti-cosmism in theological critiques of modernity as secularization, at the same time he also opposes anti-Gnostic cosmism in the philosophical critiques of modernity as world-negating. The basic target of Blumenberg’s critique is in fact more fundamental than both: it is the claim underlying both critiques of modernity, namely the claim of geschichtliches Unrecht, the historical wrong or illegitimacy of modernity, that is, an illegitimacy that arises from the very historical process. Indeed, both the critique of modernity as a fall into the world and its critique as a fall out of the world are based on a critique of modernity as a fall: modernity is criticized not just for being godless or wordless, but for breaking with the old God or for breaking with the old world, namely for being a break, which means for being modern. What is at stake here is the fundamental ontology of history. Blumenberg’s most fundamental opponent thus seems to be Heidegger. What Blumenberg criticizes in Heidegger, however, is not what Jonas’ criticized in “Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism”, that is, the a-cosmic tendency. The exact opposite. The basic target of Blumenberg’s critique of Heidegger is the conception of history as Geschichtlichkeit, sometimes translated “historicality”. The problem with Geschichtlichkeit, as Blumenberg sees it, is not that it is too detached from cosmic world order, but that it is too attached to a fixed order of things, to some substance. What Blumenberg criticizes most fundamentally is the “substantialist ontology of history” (LN, 125). In this understanding, notwithstanding change, history always relates to a basic “constant” (LN, 37–8), some original substance, which perseveres in its existence throughout history, and only undergoes Umsetzung, that is, transformation or conversion. This original constant substance is the basic assumption of all critiques against any historical age as constituting Selbstentfremdung, self-alienation, namely of the original, ahistorical substance (LN, 26), be that through “transformation of authentic theological content into secular self-alienation” (LN, 75), that is, Verweltlichung, or through Entweltlichung. “Substantialist ontology of history” underlies all claims of geschichtliches Unrecht, of historical illegitimacy.

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It should be noted, however, that the delegitimization of history, for instance, of the modern age as a historical wrong, does not necessarily entail a critique of the modern world, of the modern cosmos. Substantialist history can also manifest itself in narratives of progress, whereby modernity is not a fall from the pre-modern origin, but a positive development of this original substance. “Progress as Fate” is what Blumenberg criticizes in the context of his discussions of—and to a certain extent his agreement with— Karl Löwith (LN, 35).13 In other words, the basic object of Blumenberg’s polemics, the critique of modernity as historically illegitimate, is not the condemnation of the modern order, the modern cosmos, for being too worldly or too unworldly, nor does it mean any critique of the modern world. The claim of geschichtliches Unrecht delegitimizes modernity not as a world, not as cosmos, that is, not as any this or other order of existence, but, on the exact contrary, as modern, namely as constituting or claiming to constitute a radical change, a break within the substantial order of things, a cosmic break. What bothers Blumenberg in the secularization theorem as well as in any critique of modernity is therefore not the Gnostic-like condemnation of cosmos or physis, but, on the exact contrary, the delegitimization of history itself as change, as time. This delegitimization of modernity, as historically illegitimate, is done in the name of the substance, the constant order or cosmos. Accordingly, rather than being anti-Gnostic, Blumenberg’s position could be more precisely described as anti-anti-Gnostic, inasmuch as it opposes the cosmic suppression of cosmic break. His discourse is Gnostic inasmuch as in its fundamental ontology the world is essentially not cosmos, order, but eon, “age” or “epoch”. Blumenberg’s polemics are thus turned against the delegitimization of time, Zeit, and the paradigmatic time, for him, is the time that breaks, that ends and begins anew, namely the new time, modernity as Neuzeit. Blumenberg’s project is accordingly to overcome the critique of modernity as delegitimization of the New.

The Legitimacy of the New as Post A basic question for interrogating Blumenberg’s positive project, that is, in response to his opponents, thus concerns the conceptual interrelations between newness and legitimacy, or more abstractly between Zeit and 13  On the question of progress in Blumenberg and Löwith, see Robert M. Wallace in his “Translator’s Introduction” to his translation of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, xi–xxx.

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Recht, time and justice. I have already noted in what sense I identify Blumenberg’s discourse—which could be perhaps designated as eonic—as a- or anti-cosmic, and thus, in contrast to Jonas’ anti-Gnosticism, as rather Gnosticist-ish.14 In order to sharpen this observation, that is, to better determine the relation of Blumenberg’s anti-anti-modern position to Gnosticism, I now wish to offer two possible interpretations for the relation between the New and the Legitimate in Blumenberg’s text, two possible answers to the question: how is the new legitimate? I suggest that each one of these two answers matches one of the two different—ancient or modern—Gnostic approaches that were described by Jonas in “Existentialism, Gnosticism and Nihilism”. The first reading arises from a fundamental problematization of the relation between newness and legitimacy. If legitimacy means having a claim that is consistent with some objective, external and general criterion or norm, for example, a law, a principle, an established state of affairs, then one can more generally say that legitimacy arises from complying and being consistent with a certain established order. Legitimate is being “in order”, “all right”, belonging to the cosmos. The New, however, breaks with the established order. As Blumenberg describes the novelty introduced by Descartes, it is “absolute beginning, founded on itself only” (LN, 159). Accordingly, it seems that the New by definition has no source of legitimacy; its newness consists precisely in breaking with the order— physis, law, origin, history—that could have justified its claim. The “legitimacy of the modern age”, of the “new time”, would therefore signify not a specific source of legitimacy, but a specific form of legitimacy, the specific—and somewhat paradoxical—kind of legitimacy that the New, lacking any external order to justify its claim, may nonetheless assert. In fact, Blumenberg may be read as asserting precisely this, namely that modernity brought with itself also a new form of legitimacy: “absolute beginning, founded on itself only”. The new has no other foundation but itself, and so its specific form of legitimacy is self-legitimization (LN, 81)— whence Blumenberg’s famous thesis that modernity bases its claim on Selbstbehauptung, self-assertion, or the assertion of the Self. The modern self has no superior order to justify it: its raison d’être and essence is to turn away from all such transcendence. In this sense, it constitutes a-cosmism 14  I thus concur with Robert Buch that Blumenberg’s relation to Gnosticism is “ambivalent”; see Buch, “Gnosis”, in Blumenberg lessen. Ein Glossar, ed. Robert Buch and Daniel Weidner (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), 87–100, 83.

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without metaphysics and could be described, in Jonas’ terms, as nihilist. Nonetheless, self-asserting modern newness is not portrayed by Blumenberg as a-cosmic. Rather, it creates its own cosmos. To stay with Descartes, the modern knows through method, which means that modern knowledge generates itself (LN, 84; and with respect to Newton, 197–209). Modern science is not contemplative, but creative; it is technology. The New Time, modernity, accordingly finds its justification in the new world that it creates for itself. It is indeed nihilist, but it asserts nothingness as the condition for newness, the condition for creatio ex nihilo (LN, 252). There is, however, a second possible reading of Blumenberg, which insists in a harder manner on the meaning of newness and legitimacy, and thus calls into question the nihilist or a-metaphysical interpretation that affiliates Blumenberg with modern super-Gnosticism, as Jonas portrayed it. Indeed, if the New Time is really “absolute”, in the sense of breaking all relations to and dependencies on an established world and order, a cosmos, then arguably it would, properly speaking, no longer belong to time, to the succession of before and after. The Absolute is in this sense timeless and therefore is neither “new” nor does it require any “legitimacy”. As Blumenberg notes in the context of his discussion of Descartes, “reason as last instance needs no legitimacy for giving effect to itself” (LN, 159). To put it the other way around: what does it mean to say that modernity, Neuzeit, is not just absolute, but “new”? The New seems to be in fact a paradigmatic temporal category, inasmuch as it designates absolute beginning, namely simultaneously absolute existence, independence and self-­ sufficiency, and the condition of the absolute as “beginning”, that is, as an event, which implies change of and break with something. The absolute is ab-solute, and the New is a predicate of the Old. More precisely, the New, albeit absolute beginning, nevertheless, as “new”, is the claim of being development and improvement of the Old. The new is a better version of the same, is essentially progress. In fact, in Blumenberg’s account, the absolute Self that modernity asserts in its self-legitimization is not just itself, the pure identity of its singular and particular being, of its contingent and unjustifiable existence. Modernity consists not in pure self-assertion, but in “the self-assertion of reason” (LN, 72; my emphasis). The New Time would be the new form, deployment or dispensation of an old principle, the very principle of principle, of order and cosmos: reason, ratio, logos. Understood this way, not only does the New not preclude the

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need for and the category of Legitimacy, but the New itself is a category of entitlement and legitimization. Blumenberg in fact notes the structural link between newness and legitimacy: “To assert and establish the legitimacy of its ideas is the elementary endeavor of what is new [das Neue], or claims to be new, in history; to dispute such legitimacy, or to prevent or at least shake the self-­consciousness that goes with it, is the technique of defending the existing state of affairs [das Bestehende]” (LN, 81). In other words, not only is the New a category of legitimacy, but Legitimacy itself—both asserted and disputed, both the legitimate and the illegitimate—would be a category of the New, namely a category that belongs not to the realm of cosmos as physis, but to the dimension of historical time. Blumenberg acknowledges the inherent historical structure of legitimacy in his recurring intimation, which could serve as a motto for The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, whereby “legitimacy is always only discussed when disputed” (LN, 107).15 In other words, the discourse of legitimacy is always historical, it always presupposes and reacts or responds to, is always already—to speak with Blumenberg’s theory of history (see below)—in dialogue with a previous discourse, a negative discourse of delegitimization. Legitimacy enters the world through negation, through illegitimacy. It is by the negation of delegitimization, namely by the negation of negation, a double negation, that legitimacy is positively asserted. Accordingly, the legitimacy of modernity, of the new time, albeit self-­ assertion, is nonetheless not absolutely detached from any prior or superior order, from all norm and history—it does not arise from a-cosmic nihilism. Rather, the legitimacy of the new, its self-assertion, arises from and is based on a previous delegitimization. The positive right of the New World, modernity, in this sense, arises from the negation of the Old World. Accordingly, modernity, as both new and legitimate, is nothing but the accomplishment or completion of a historical process setting out from an original tendency of turning away from the world, an original Entweltlichungstendenz, or as Jonas called it, “Gnosticism”. Blumenberg’s discourse of “legitimacy of the modern age”, thus arises not from super-­ Gnostic a-cosmism: the new age is legitimate not because it completely breaks with all rational order, with all cosmos; on the contrary, modernity 15  Cf. “the problem of legitimacy is articulated only in the disputed and defended right” (LN, 129); “The talk of ‘legitimacy’ of the modern age is only comprehensible insofar as it is in dispute” (LN, 72).

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is legitimate because it is the successful completion of a process in which none other than Reason itself re-emerged from its negation. If this narrative is not exactly Gnostic, since its basic operation is not to negate the world, but to affirm its legitimacy, it is not for the reason that it is anti-­ Gnostic, namely that it rejects the eonic discourse of plurality of worlds, good and bad, positive and negative, the eschatology of fall, oblivion, reawakening and redemption. Rather, if Blumenberg’s project is not Gnostic, it is because it is what I would like to call post-Gnostic. It does not perform a critique or a polemic against Gnosticism—it performs the completion of Gnosticism, it performs the Gnostic redemption. This is the main thesis of this chapter: Blumenberg’s is a post-Gnostic discourse. The succinct formulation of its accomplished Gnosis, that is, the core of its redeeming and redeemed knowledge: “modernity is the [second] overcoming of Gnosticism” (LN, 138).

Blumenberg’s Gnosis Blumenberg rejects Eric Voegelin’s claim that modernity is “the Gnostic age” (LN), portraying it instead as “the [second] overcoming of Gnosticism”. The word “second” appeared in the first version of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age of 1966 and was deleted in the second, revised version of 1973. My claim is that this short description may be read as a succinct formulation of Blumenberg’s suggested legitimization of the modern age, the basis for its legitimacy as the New Time. On my reading, in response to Voegelin’s—and Jonas’—delegitimizing claim that modernity is Gnostic, Blumenberg does not just say it is not. He does not just dismiss the understanding of the modern age in reference to ancient Gnosticism and so, in some way, as arising from Gnosticism, as being a certain effect of or response to Gnosticism. There would be a certain order, or better a certain process or history, the unity of which is articulated by—at least—the two crucial points of Gnosticism and modernity. What is the precise relation between these two moments? What is the nature of the movement that runs between them, what is the nature of the history that they define? Blumenberg calls it Überwindung, “overcoming”. From Gnosticism to the modern age runs the history of the overcoming of Gnosticism. In other words, a history that began with Gnosticism reached its end with modernity. What this means—and this is my claim—is that not only is modernity simply not Gnostic, but it is not anti-Gnostic either: the “overcoming” of Gnosticism does not just mean

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the annihilation, destruction, abolition or eradication of Gnosticism; rather, it means the completion of Gnosticism, in the sense of the history that began with and by the emergence of Gnosticism, a history that Jonas identified with the Common Era. This is why the previous section described Blumenberg’s position as post-Gnostic. This last section will now contemplate the meaning of this position, by asking what it means to legitimize modernity by portraying it as the completion of Gnosticism. Noteworthy, first, is the very form of legitimization through historiography, which is the basic form of Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age, or more generally the form of narrative, in which the modern age is justified, or more precisely justifies and asserts itself, as arising from its history. Indeed, self-narration could be deemed as the project with which Blumenberg himself engages in the self-assertion that he considers as the essence of modernity. Certainly, there are many ways in which this kind of narrative self-assertion constitutes the very principle of modern historiography. In this sense, modern technology and modern historiography may indeed be said to cooperate in the project of modernity, as suggested by Heidegger.16 Be that as it may, self-legitimizing narrative is precisely how Hans Jonas described the nature of the Gnostic myth: “its descriptive communication becomes a predestined act within its mythical horizon, or better it becomes a turning point (Peripetie) of the entire happening that makes out its content, which with this event of itself shifts into the new mode of revelation, of knowledge, namely of self-consciousness. To the extent that this revelation is also included as a scene in its narrative, the Gnostic myth appears to itself and is characteristically referred back to itself, re-absorbed in itself. Instead of simply, like other myths, speaking about its objects, the Gnostic myth itself rather belongs, under the title of

16  See Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII−XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39) (= GA, Bd. 95), ed. Peter Trawny, (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann 2014), translated by Richard Rojcewicz as Ponderings VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2017). History and technology, Heidegger wrote in one place, are “basically the same” (100–1): “technology is the history of nature” (116); history is the “technology of Geschichte” (351). One of the constant conceptual distinctions in Heidegger’s work is between Historie, designating history as a modern science and discourse, in the sense of a contemporary engagement on the past, and Geschichte, which designates the phenomenal field to which we refer among others and not in the most proper way through the historical science, namely historical events, in the sense of what has happened (Geschichte as coming from geschehen, to happen).

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‘Gnosis’, to its prominent objects.”17 In other words, Gnosis is knowledge that asserts itself inasmuch as its content is the narrative—myth, history— of its becoming known, such that the very act of knowing it or having it known eo ipso constitutes an event in the story it tells and so confirms it by becoming it. Jean-Luc Nancy described this kind of self-narrating myth as myth par excellence.18 It is indeed my observation that Blumenberg’s historiographical legitimization of modernity—“modernity is the [second] overcoming of Gnosticism”—functions similarly, inasmuch as it completes the history of reason’s self-assertion by an act of communicating, of writing this history, of making it known to itself. More specifically, Blumenberg’s narrative is not just a turning point in the history of self-assertion. In properly Gnostic myth, as Jonas described it, the telling of the myth inaugurates a turning point in the history of the Gnostic self’s fall into the world by awakening this self from its cosmic absorption. Divulging to the self its outer-worldly origin introduces the initial alienation of the Gnostic self from the world, the famous Entweltlichungstendenz. In this sense, the Gnostic myth begins the Gnostic history of self-assertion. In contrast, my claim is that Blumenberg’s historiography does not function only as a turning point in the history that it tells, but as the completion of this history; or better: it functions as the completion of the completion, as the performance of Gnostic history as already complete, the performance of the self-asserting self as already absolute. In other words, rather than a Gnostic myth, Blumenberg formulates, so it seems to me, what may be called a post-­ Gnostic narrative, namely what the self, having broken with the old world and having successfully redeemed itself into the new world, retrospectively tells itself of its own genesis. I am unable to offer here a sufficient examination of this hermeneutical thesis in Blumenberg’s text, namely to show to what extent it may support a detailed reading of Blumenberg’s historiography or even of his different historiographical projects. I can only offer two preliminary indications: 17  Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. 2. Von der Mythologie zur mystischen Philosophie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1954) [GSG II], 14. 18  See Jean Luc Nancy, “Le mythe interrompu (1984)”, in Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1986, 1990), referring, among others, to Schelling’s concept of tautegory—“self-saying”: the myth “says nothing but itself, and that it is produced in the consciousness by the same process that, in nature, produces the forces that the myth stages” (ibid., 124); the myth narrates itself as “nature communicating itself to man”; “cosmos structuring itself in logos” (ibid., 125).

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one concerning Blumenberg’s conception of history and historiography; the other, related to the first, concerning the specific history told by Blumenberg himself. First, with respect to Blumenberg’s conception of history, one of his formulations which best expresses the historiographical manifestation of modernity’s constitutive self-assertion reads: “modernity was the first to understand itself as an epoch and therewith created the other epochs” (LN, 129). Modern self-assertion is performed here as self-knowledge, which concerns the historical essence or ontology of the modern age—and thus of all history. The modern age is the first age to understand itself as an age, an epoch, what the Gnostics called eon. As already argued above, the eon, a category of time, designates discontinuity, an interruption and break with a previously existing order, a break with cosmos. The epoch is different than what preceded it, it is new. “Modernity was the first to understand itself as an epoch”—this means that the Neuzeit was the first Zeit to understand itself as new, which means that the Neuzeit has full legitimacy in calling itself that; that is, it is justified in its claim to be new, or, since this claim precisely constitutes the Neuzeit, it is simply justified, legitimate. In other words, the legitimacy of the modern age implies a certain ontology of history, in which historical entities are conceived as epochs. It is precisely this eonic ontology that Blumenberg’s conception of history articulates. The fundamental principle of Blumenberg’s eonic ontology of history is indeed discontinuity. He characterizes historical being as change (Wandel) and break (Bruch) of epochs. These descriptions may of course be inscribed—and questioned—in a broader context of post-World War II (WWII) reconfigurations of historiography, by authors such as Michel Foucault (discontinuity)19 and later Jean-Luc Nancy (interruption), who engaged in post-modern contestation of the nineteenth-century’s great narratives of modernity as telos of history. Arguably, this discourse can also be extended back to pre-WWII, to anti-historicist conceptions of history by authors such as Jonas and Heidegger, precisely in the context of their critique of modernity. Nonetheless, Blumenberg’s operation can only be designated as post-modern in the same sense that it may be called post-­ Gnostic, that is, not as critique, but as completion of the modern event. Its explicit intention is to contest the—what Blumenberg understands as 19   Cf. Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, “Umbesetzung” in Buch and Weidner (eds), Blumenberg lesen, 335.

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the Heideggerian—“substantialist ontology of history”, of history as Geschichtlichkeit, which arises from the transformations of a permanent substance. Thus, instead of transformation, Umsetzung, Blumenberg proposes Umbesetzung, “reoccupation”, as the category for the fundamental event of history. If history is dis-continuation and break between epochs, then, Blumenberg explains, “[t]he concept of ‘reoccupation’ implicitly designates the minimum of identity, which must still be found or at least may be presupposed and searched for in the most unstable movement of history” (LN, 541). Reoccupation means that historical epochs do not organically grow and develop from one another, but replace each other, come in each other’s place. This implies that a historical age can vacate its place, become an “empty position”, that can then be “reoccupied”. In contrast to the “substantialist ontology”, Blumenberg’s reoccupation theory thus supposes the possible and necessary “disappearance” of substance or cosmos (Ordnungsschwund) and the creation of what Blumenberg’s historiography identifies as the original Gnostic idea in Democritian and Epicurian atomism, namely “empty space” (LN, 162). It is the empty space, the vacant position, that would constitute the “minimum of identity” in history, hence a negative identity, an identity of void or nothingness. It is noteworthy that, notwithstanding ancient atomism, Blumenberg does not situate his historical ontology in the realm of physis, but in the realm of logos. History, that is, the dis-continuation of epochs, each reoccupying the empty place left by the disappearance of its predecessor, has a “dialogical structure” (LN, 220), which, as Blumenberg notes, is the structure of “all logic, historical as well as systematic” (LN, 442). By “dialogue” he means a form of logos, of discourse, which would not be the “monologue of the absolute subject” (i.e. the permutation of the permanently identical substance), but an exchange of questions and answers. Logos, as dialogue of questions and answers, would constitute the concrete domain where history takes place through “reoccupation”, whose fundamental dynamic is in fact portrayed by Blumenberg as dialogical: “reoccupation of emptied positions of answers […], whose relative questions could not be eliminated” (LN, 75). More specifically, what constitutes the different epochs in human history, or what constitutes human existence as history of different epochs, is that “different statements are understood as answers to identical questions” (LN, 541). The different epochs are different answers, or assertions. What they share, their “minimum of identity”, is the same empty space of negative logos, the same “not” that they try to fill.

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Lazier already indicated how this process of reoccupation, as described by Blumenberg, resembles the process of “pseudomorphose”, by which Hans Jonas, following Oswald Spengler’s geological metaphor, accounted for the emergence of new ideas that crystallize within the emptied terminological shells of vanished systems of thought, for example, Gnosticism in the terminology of classic Greek philosophy.20 For describing the process in which, within the realm of discourse, empty form is filled with contingent content, Blumenberg himself does not turn to the geological metaphor, but most centrally I think, in view of his later work, to the event of the metaphor proper (LN, 104ff.). Umbesetzung (reoccupation) would mean Übertragung (transfer, translation, metaphor). Be that as it may, the underlying ontological condition for this structure is the disappearance of substance, the emergence of non-being. The epochal answers, as assertions, are predicated on the discursive void that they attempt to fill, that is, on the inaugural and identical question as radical negation, as a fundamental calling into question of the world order, of the existing cosmos. History, as dialogue, arises from Entweltlichung. And modernity is the epoch in which eonic world history comes to know itself, to write itself as such, and so to constitute the self-consciousness of the new world.21 This already leads me to the second preliminary indication that seems to warrant a reading of Blumenberg’s historiographical discourse as a post-­ Gnostic narrative, namely the specific history that it tells. It is only possible to offer here a very quick sketch, which does not do justice to Blumenberg’s nuanced analyses and will need to be further developed and refined, or refuted, in closer and more patient readings. In fact, the historical ontology of “reoccupation of emptied positions of answers […], whose relative questions could not be eliminated” is the abstracted and generalized formulation of a specific history, the summary storyline of which reads: “modernity is the [second] overcoming of Gnosticism.”22 The inaugural event of this narrative is the emergence—within the antique cosmos of  Hans Jonas, GSG I, 43; Lazier, “Jonas and Blumenberg”, 625ff.  Cf. the “Proto-Hegelian” character identified in Blumenberg’s narrative by Robert Pippin, “Blumenberg and the Modernity Problem”, The Review of Metaphysics 40 no. 3 (1987):535–557, 547. 22  Cf. Daniel Weidner, “Säkularisierung”, in Buch and Weidner (eds), Blumenberg lesen: “The talk of reoccupation seems not to be free from mythical traits, since it implies (topically) a limited number of places, which are to be ‘asserted’, and (economically) a limited quantity of energy, on which one ‘struggles’. And Blumenberg’s alternative presentation of the rejection of Gnosticism pushes something like the story of secularization all the way back 20 21

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physis, a world order without breaks, without nothingness, newness and historical time, an order that was not called into question and so requires no legitimacy—the emergence of its radical delegitimization. Gnosticism introduces question and negation of the world, Entweltlichungstendenez. It declares the world evil and thus eo ipso points at its eschatological end and at the potential coming of another, good, new world. The first, still repressed, but already awaken, self-conscious presence of the new world in the old, is the Gnostic Self itself, the Gnosis as an a-cosmic subject, a reason or logos that is detached from the world. The Middle Ages feature in Blumenberg’s narrative as a complex response or answer to Gnosticism, in which, to preserve the old world, radical, cosmic negation, that is, evil or sin, is not denied, but identified with Gnosis itself, declared illegitimate knowledge of the new, curiositas or, in German, Neugierde, “greed for the new”. The delegitimization of cosmic knowledge, however, entailed—in phenomena such as voluntarism and nominalism—the decline and disappearance of the known cosmic order (Ordnungsschwund; ibid., 150), which is precisely the Gnostic apocalypse. The disappearance of the old world makes place for the emergence of the new world, of the new as a world, as the principle of a self-aware epoch, modernity. The Gnostic self, which initially emerged as an anti-cosmic reason, now asserts itself as the new sovereign of the new cosmos that it creates for itself with its modern science and technology, a cosmos beyond physis. Gnostic anti-cosmism is finally overcome with the creation of the Gnostic cosmos, the self-­knowing epoch, whose ultimate act of self-legitimization is the rewriting of history after its own eonic image, namely as the story of Epochenwandel.

Conclusion The guiding question of this chapter was how to understand the diverging interpretations by Hans Jonas and Hans Blumenberg of the relations between modernity and Gnosticism. For Jonas, modernity is radicalized Gnosticism. For Blumenberg, modernity is the overcoming of Gnosticism. Lazier understood this difference as an opposition between two anti-­ Gnostic approaches, which mainly arises from Blumenberg’s failure to identify the a-cosmic nature of modern science and technology. In contrast, this chapter developed the claim whereby, basically, Jonas and to antiquity, in order to explain the emergence of modernity and ultimately also the modern discontent with modernity” (238).

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Blumenberg agree that modernity detached the human from the world like never before, and in this sense they both agree that the modern age is a radicalized Gnosticism. However, whereas Jonas takes a genuinely anti-­ Gnostic approach, reads man’s detachment from the world as a-cosmic nihilism and advocates a return to physis, Blumenberg embraces modern negation of the old physis, reads it as the self-assertion of reason and the creation of a new, technological world, and, in this sense, provides what this chapter proposes to call a post-Gnostic affirmation of modernity, which he performs through historiography. In conclusion, I would like to formulate one brief critical observation. It concerns the basic nature of Blumenberg’s project. As post-Gnostic, this project opposes any contemporary Gnostic positions, that is, radical critiques of the modern world, not because it is basically against Gnosticism, but because it considers the historical Gnostic project as completed: the old world is gone, the new world is self-asserted. It is noteworthy how this radical embrace of the Gnostic project, through acknowledgement of its self-assertion and the performance of its completion, indeed successfully neutralizes—“overcomes”—what is arguably the most fundamental Gnostic trait that has made it so interesting for twentieth-century intellectual history, namely, as Strauss formulated it, its “rebellious” nature. The Gnostics rebel against the established order. Declaring the revolution successful is declaring it over. Indeed, it seems that Blumenberg’s narrative successfully de-revolutionizes the Gnostic world-negation. The eonic, once-apocalyptic message about the end of the world becomes historical ontology. In this ontology, the dramatic nature of historical time—evil, destruction, the new—is crystallized (to re-invoke mineralogy) in the metaphoric structure, a sort of negative Platonic idea (i.e. it is not the form of things, but the form of the void that informs—impresses—them). One symptom of this shift, for instance, is the marginality, in Blumenberg’s epochal theory and story, of the event. His contemplation of the rupture and break, that is, the downfall and rise, of the ages, is focused not on events, but on the Schwelle, the threshold. Blumenberg thus delivers a powerful deployment of what could perhaps be deemed as the fundamental operation of the “post-”, exemplary the post-modern, which consummates modernity by disengaging from its event. Ultimately, this historiographical logic may be said to generate a much stronger effect of “substantialization” of the historical process than both modernist progress histories (Hegel) and anti-modernist histories of downfall (secularization

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thesis, Heidegger), namely by ending history in the substance of the present.

Bibliography Blumenberg, Hans. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit [LN]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2017. Buch, Robert. “Gnosis”. In Blumenberg lessen. Ein Glossar, edited by Robert Buch and Daniel Weidner. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. 87–100. Bultmann, Rudolf. “Neues Testament und Mythologie.” In Kerygma und Mythos. Ein theologisches Gespräch, edited by H.W.  Bartsch. Hamburg-Volksdorf: Herbert Reich Evangelischer Verlag, 1951. 15–48. Cahana, Jonathan. “A Gnostic Critic of Modernity: Hans Jonas from Existentialism to Science.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 86.1 (2018): 158–180. Heidegger, Martin. Überlegungen VII−XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39) (= GA, Bd. 95), edited by Peter Trawny. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2014; translated by Richard Rojcewicz as Ponderings VII–XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2017. Hotam, Yotam. “Gnosis and Modernity – A Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past”. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8.3–4 (2007): 591–608. Jonas, Hans. Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979; translated by David Herr. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York, Harper & Row, 1966. Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1958. Jonas, Hans. Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. 2. Von der Mythologie zur mystischen Philosophie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1954. Jonas, Hans. “Gnosticism and modern Nihilism”. Social Research 19.4 (1952): 430–452. Jonas, Hans. Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. 1. Die mythologische Gnosis: mit einer Einleitung zur Geschichte und Methodologie der Forschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1934. Kopp-Oberstebrink, Herbert. “Umbesetzung”. In Blumenberg lessen. Ein Glossar, edited by Robert Buch and Daniel Weidner. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. 350–362. Lapidot, Elad. “Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist II. Hans Jonas’ The Lost Book.” In Hans Jonas Handbook, edited by Michael Bongardt, Holger Burckhart, John-­ Stewart Gordon and Jürgen Nielsen-Sikora. Stuttgart: J.B.  Metzler Verlag, forthcoming.

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Lapidot, Elad. “Hans Jonas’ Work on Gnosticism as Counterhistory”. Philosophical Readings 9 (2017):61–66. Lazier, Benjamin. God Interrupted. Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Lazier, Benjamin. “Overcoming Gnosticism: Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy of the Natural World”. Journal of the History of Ideas 64.4 (2003): 619–637. Nancy, Jean Luc. La communauté désoeuvrée. Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1986. Pippin, Robert. “Blumenberg and the Modernity Problem”. The Review of Metaphysics 40.3 (1987): 535–557. Wallace, Robert M. “Translator’s Introduction”. In Hans Blumenberg. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, translated by Robert M.  Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Weidner, Daniel. “Säkularisierung”. In Blumenberg lessen. Ein Glossar, edited by Robert Buch and Daniel Weidner. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. 245–259. Williams, Michael Allen. Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

CHAPTER 3

Blumenberg, Latour and the Apocalypse Willem Styfhals

Faced with the effects of climate change, it is often believed that we are living in the end times. The end of humanity and of the world as we know it is near. When discussing climate change, the topic of the apocalypse seems inescapable: some believe the catastrophe has already taken place, others want to push it as far as possible into the future; some think it is inevitable, others believe that we still have our fate in our own hands; some argue that civilization is about to collapse, others dismiss such doomsday visions as too alarmist and pessimistic. Whether we think the end is imminent, in a distant future or already behind us, we are all apocalyptics. The apocalypse indeed returns as an important category to make sense of our own times and even of modernity in general. While mostly used today in political contexts, the apocalypse is ultimately a theological concept. In order to make sense of our current vision of the future, we could ask ourselves to what extent this theological framework still determines our modern concept of the end of time. To answer this question, we should develop a political theology of the environmental apocalypse. In an attempt to explore what such a political theology could look like, I will

W. Styfhals (*) KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_3

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confront Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical understanding of apocalypticism with the contemporary French thinker Bruno Latour’s reflections on the end of time and climate change.

A Political Theology of Environmental Apocalypse Developing a political theology of the environmental apocalypse could seem surprisingly easy, as many political theologies of apocalypticism already exist. Indeed, the concept of the end of time played a crucial role in the German debates on political theology and secularization. These debates that took place in the 1950s and 1960s actually centred around a discussion about the “secularization of eschatology” in modern times. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, eschatology is the theological discipline concerned with the end of time, but many postwar German philosophers, such as Karl Löwith, Jacob Taubes, Rudolf Bultmann, Eric Voegelin and Carl Schmitt, believed that this theological view of time tacitly survived in secular modernity. In other words, the connection between modernity and the theological concept of end of time has been explored extensively, albeit not in the context of climate change: Löwith, on the one hand, sought to unmask the secular faith in progress as a transformation of Christian eschatology1; Voegelin, on the other hand, recognized apocalyptic, eschatological and millenarian features in totalitarian politics that promised an earthy salvation and a secular Kingdom of God.2 Voegelin had Marx’ classless society or the German Third Reich in mind. As such, Löwith and Voegelin conceived of the end of time—both in its theological and in its secular guise—as a redemptive event. Their conception of the end of time was hardly concerned with doomsday visions or apocalyptic prophecies. The end of time, in Löwith’s and Voegelin’s view, is something modern human beings hope for, pursue or even realize; it is not something they fear or want to keep at bay, as we do today. Löwith’s and Voegelin’s analyses of eschatology simply do not apply to the environmental apocalypse. In this regard, our contemporary apocalyptic mindset has a different genealogy and a different political theology. In an attempt to develop these, one could turn to the work of Hans Blumenberg, the main critic of the secularization theses put forward by Löwith and Voegelin. In The  Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).  Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). 1 2

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Legitimacy of the Modern Age, he not only criticizes the very concept of secularization but also attempts to develop a non-eschatological, non-­ apocalyptic account of modernity. He wanted to safeguard modernity from the end of time. For him, this concretely meant giving up the absolutist pretensions of the philosophy of history, modern science and totalitarian politics, but maintaining a modest version of progress and science. Blumenberg did not give up modernity itself, as Löwith and Voegelin did. The modern age has legitimacy as historical epoch but neither because it presents itself as the end of history nor because it believes it progressively brings about an immanent redemption. Thus dismissing the idea that eschatology is secularized in modernity, Blumenberg develops a substantial reinterpretation of the history of eschatology in the book’s fourth chapter as an alternative to the story his contemporaries told. Perhaps his interpretation can be a starting point for making sense of the theological roots of our current apocalypticism. Blumenberg emphasizes that the end of time has been predicted innumerable times but always fails to take place. In early Christianity, he adds, apocalyptic hopes were quickly disappointed, and, as a result of this non-­ occurrence of the end, eschatology was increasingly abandoned by the church from the early Middle Ages onwards, thus giving rise to the institutionalization of the church in the world. If the world does not come to an end, it is necessary to settle in this world and reinvest it with meaning. While the end of time devalued the world in view of a transcendence about to break into history, the deferment of the end revalues the world. In the early Middle Ages, eschatology itself secularizes rather than being secularized in modernity. Blumenberg’s chapter on eschatology is titled tellingly “Instead of Secularization of Eschatology, Secularization by Eschatology” (LMA, 37). This is Blumenberg’s interpretation of eschatology in a nutshell. What is important to our concern with climate apocalypse is that the historical modification of eschatology, which Blumenberg describes, explains why the apocalypse can appear today as deeply terrifying rather than as redemptive. In early apocalyptic speculations, the end of time brings salvation. In this context, one hopes for the end of time because it will save us from an evil world. But as soon as we have settled in the world and attribute value to it, its end can only induce fear. This is the situation in which we find ourselves today, although Blumenberg himself restricts his discussion to the Christian Middle Ages. He argues that “the basic eschatological attitude of the Christian epoch could no longer be one of hope for the final events but rather one of fear of judgment and the

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destruction of the world” (LMA, 44). The point of Blumenberg’s claim is that the parallel between Christian eschatology and the modern faith in progress or in the possibility of an earthly paradise does not hold up. In the medieval Christian view, the end of time is the doom of the world; while in the modern view, it is the goal of our historical striving. Since these are two radically different things, the latter cannot be the secularization of the former, as Löwith and Voegelin maintained. This is of course a very pertinent criticism of the classic secularization thesis, especially because Blumenberg also develops a convincing alternative genealogy of the modern faith in progress. However, his position tends to obscure the existence of modern apocalyptic visions that do present the end of the world as catastrophic and deeply frightening. The apocalyptic rhetoric of climate activists is but one example. In Blumenberg’s days, the nuclear apocalypse and the idea of a mutual assured destruction were just as pertinent. How then to fit such modern forms of apocalypticism into Blumenberg’s picture? Are these perhaps secularizations of the Christian fear of the end of time? Löwith might have been wrong to associate progress with the secularization of eschatology, but perhaps eschatology was rather secularized in modernity’s doomsday visions and catastrophic prophecies. Blumenberg would certainly reject this inference, but he does not really discuss the issue in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Interestingly, he writes about apocalyptic thinking elsewhere—in Lebenszeit und Weltzeit. Here, he discusses ancient and modern doomsday visions alongside each other, without explicitly distinguishing between religious apocalyptic convictions and modern political ones. Blumenberg, however, does not develop a political theology of the apocalypse here. Rather, he explains how apocalyptic thinking is bound up with the specificity of human consciousness itself. Whether we hope for it or fear it, whether it brings redemption or catastrophe, whether it is religious or political, the apocalypse has an eternal attractiveness to human beings. Blumenberg tries to explain why this is the case.3 3  For more detailed analyses of Blumenberg’s concept of the end of time, see Daniel Weidner, “Ende,” in Blumenberg Lesen, ed. Robert Buch and Daniel Weidner (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), 57–71; Martin Zerrath, Vollendung und Neuzeit: Transformation der Eschatologie bei Blumenberg und Hirsch (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2011); Bruno Godefroy, “Hans Blumenberg: l’eschatologie désarmorcée,” Éthique, politique, religions 2 (2013), 99–118. Blumenberg first developed his interpretation of eschatology in a review of

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Blumenberg on the World and Its End In Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, Blumenberg argues that the apocalyptic imagination confuses lifetime (Lebenszeit) with worldtime (Weltzeit). It is an evident truth that the lifetime of an individual human being does not coincide with time as such—with worldtime. We all know that time existed before we were born and will continue after we die. While lifetime and worldtime can never be the same, apocalypticism fails to differentiate between these two forms of time. The apocalyptic, in Blumenberg’s view, refuses to conceive of the continuation of time beyond his own consciousness of it. He cannot seem to deal with the fact that the world will continue after he dies. Therefore, he posits the end of time within his own lifetime—if I have to die, the world has to perish with me. For Blumenberg, this apocalyptic confusion between lifetime and worldtime is neither a conceptual mistake nor just a pathological delusion. Rather, the apocalyptic convergence of these divergent experiences of time is an attempt to overcome the indifference of the world to human existence: “What is at stake is the inability to bear the indifference of the world in its ‘prior and continued existence’ (Vorbestand und Fortbestand).”4 Indifference consists here primarily in the fact that the world existed before we were born and will still be there long after we have passed away. However obvious the realization might be that time is indifferent to one’s individual life, the contrast between the short duration of one’s lifetime and the infinitely long duration of time itself can make one’s existence seem utterly futile. To reduce this indifference and counter this potential futility, apocalyptic prophecies invest indifferent time with human meaning by telling stories about its imminent end. They typically project social or personal experiences of crisis on time itself, claiming that time is in decline or that it is “out of joint”. Moreover, if the world and time itself are supposed to perish with one’s own death, the age one is living in is elevated above all others. If we are indeed living in the end times, our existence gains world historical significance. This could be experienced as an indication that time ultimately does care about one’s individual human life, which, for this very reason, becomes meaningful. Interestingly, the concept of the Anthropocene fulfils a similar function today. The age that we are living in Rudolf Bultmann’s History and Eschatology: Hans Blumenberg, “Geschichte und Eschatologie,” Gnomon 31 (1958), 163–166. 4  Hans Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 79. (Translations are mine.)

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is incomparable to other epochs because humanity leaves an imprint on the geological classification of time itself. If our geological age is defined by our human presence on earth, humanity and our current generation, in particular, gain a world historical significance, however negative this significance is. If our own human time now determines geological time, our lifetime runs parallel to worldtime, to put it in Blumenberg’s words. In this sense, time is no longer indifferent to our existence but is, on the contrary, overloaded with human meaning. The Anthropocene and the apocalypse go hand in hand, as both attempt to invest time itself with absolute human meaning. Blumenberg’s discussion of apocalypticism is obviously not concerned with climate change or the Anthropocene. The example he develops in Lebenszeit und Weltzeit is more political. In his attempt to understand apocalyptic thinking, Blumenberg wrote specifically about Hitler’s apocalyptic delusions at the end of the Second World War. His analysis centres on a claim Hitler allegedly made in his Berlin bunker a few days before his death: “Wir Kapitulieren nicht, niemals. Wir können untergehen. Aber wir werden eine Welt mitnehmen” (“We will not capitulate, never. We can go down. But we will take a world with us.”).5 Hitler was facing certain defeat, but with this defeat, he would make the world itself perish. In Hitler’s vision, the end of the Third Reich and his own death would have to mean the end of the world itself. By presenting his own fate as cosmic fate, his death gained absolute meaning. Because he could not deal with the fact that the world would remain indifferent to his downfall, he created an apocalyptic delusion in which reality itself would go down with him. This delusion goes one step further than most apocalyptic visions. For Hitler believed that he himself would be the one bringing the world to an end. The expectation of the end of time now turns into a political programme that sets itself the goal of bringing about the apocalypse. Instead of just overcoming the indifference of time by giving an absolute meaning to one’s own lifetime, Hitler now claims that time as such depends on his own lifetime. His own death will be the world’s doom. Hitler’s pathology is actually a reversal of the famous Messiah complex. In this redeemer fantasy, one is also convinced that the end of the world is imminent, and that this world catastrophe is bound up with one’s personal fate. However, someone who imagines himself to be the Messiah believes that he can still avert disaster and that he is the only one alive who can. 5

 Quoted in ibid., 80.

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The fate of the world depends on him. Hitler’s delusion is the opposite of such a redeemer fantasy. He no longer believes that the world can be saved but is rather convinced that he is the one who will bring about its doom. Both delusions, however, fulfil the same function of actively and violently reducing worldtime to lifetime. In both cases, one’s life has absolute and world historical significance. A toned-down version of such a redeemer fantasy also returns in current debates about climate change. The naïve view that we can still avert environmental disaster by means of technological innovation contends that the fate of the world is in the hands of our generation. Catastrophe seems inevitable, but we are the ones who can supposedly still save humanity. In this view, we are even in a much better position than previous generations because of our unprecedented scientific and technological abilities. Again, the central idea behind this reasoning is that the fate of the world depends on us. Our own lifetime has an extraordinary significance in the history of the world. The narcissistic overtones of such apocalyptic reasoning are unmistakable.6 Blumenberg would indeed diagnose these apocalyptic pathologies as cases of “absolute narcissism”.7 However, more is at stake for Blumenberg than mere psychopathology. He is not so much interested in Hitler’s mental condition at the end of the war but in the philosophical implications of his apocalypticism. The more fundamental philosophical issue is that Hitler failed to accept that time and the world itself are indifferent to his existence. Hitler’s case is therefore not “that of a mental confusion but rather that of a relation to the world (Weltverhältnisses)”.8 He even claimed somewhat dramatically that “Hitler had no world”.9 Indeed, having a world means recognizing something outside of the self that is radically different from it and that the self can only influence to a certain extent. Hitler’s radical unworldliness epitomizes Blumenberg’s critical stance towards any kind of apocalyptic thinking. The apocalypse distorts our relation to the world, he argues. In its most extreme forms, eschatology entails a complete devaluation or rejection of the world. In view of its imminent

6  Sigmund Freud studied this in his famous case study of Judge Schreber: Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XII (1911–1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on technique, and Other Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958). 7  Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, 80. 8  Ibid., 82. 9  Ibid., 84.

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end, the apocalyptic ultimately has no interest in the world. He could not care less about its meaning. Although these critical insights remain implicit in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, it is crystal clear that the book wants to resist any eschatological reading of modernity and makes modernity’s worldliness of central importance. For Blumenberg, the modern relation to the world is not only diametrically opposed to eschatology’s unworldliness, but it also arose as a response to the eschatological devaluation of the world. This unworldliness is most tangible in the eschatological worldview of ancient Gnosticism, which considered the world to be an intrinsically bad place created by an evil demiurge. The only meaning of such a Gnostic world consists in the possibility of its imminent end. Blumenberg argued that this early Christian heresy of Gnosticism returned in the late Middle Ages, and he presented the genesis of the modern age as a response to this return. He famously claims that “the modern age is the overcoming of Gnosticism” (LMA, 126).10 Blumenberg’s point is that modernity’s concept of the world is radically new. For it first arose in an attempt to overcome the unworldliness of eschatology and Gnosticism. Strictly speaking, he adds, the world itself only becomes noticeable and conceivable after it has first been rejected in view of another reality beyond. In other words, there was no this world below before there was that world beyond. For this reason, Blumenberg argues that the modern worldview does not simply entail a return to an ancient cosmos that has been obscured by Christianity, eschatology and Gnosticism: “the worldliness of the modern age cannot be described as the recovery of a consciousness of reality that existed before the Christian epoch of our history” (LMA, 8). The modern investment in the world is not a mere rediscovery of a reality that has been forgotten but a legitimate and original discovery of something unseen: There was no “worldliness” before there was the opposite of “unworldliness”. It was the world released to itself from the grip of its negation, abandoned to its self-assertion and to the means necessary to that self-assertion, not responsible for man’s true salvation but still competing with that salvation with its own offer of stability and reliability. This true creation of the world (Weltwerdung) is not a secularization (Verweltlichung) in the sense of

10  For Blumenberg’s interpretation of Gnosticism, see Part One of this book. Also see Chapters 5 and 6 of my own book, No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

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the transformation of something preexisting but rather, as it were, the primary crystallization of a hitherto unknown reality. (LMA, 47)

Modernity proves eschatology wrong. Eschatology’s unworldliness necessarily has to give rise to a new conception of worldliness because the end of the world simply does not take place. In modernity, the world becomes worldly because it continues to exist. Eschatology and Gnosticism have voided the world of meaning, but the world’s persistence guarantees a certain stability of reality in which human beings can now assert their own existence. It is certainly not the case that the world suddenly receives an absolute justification or redemptive meaning, but at least it is possible to continue living in it. This modest worldliness sufficed for the early moderns, in Blumenberg’s view. This is also the challenge that we are facing today in a new climatic regime. We urgently need to rethink our conception of the world in order to make a more sustainable relation to it possible. This world has to be one in which it is at least possible to continue living. Perhaps we need to discover once again a hitherto unknown reality, as the early moderns did in Blumenberg’s account. In our own times, however, the modern worldview that Blumenberg still defended proves incapable of guaranteeing the world’s stability and reliability against eschatology. The world that we believed to have mastered through technology now produces an apocalypse once again. The world that we believed to have been made stable and reliable through science is becoming again an evil Gnostic reality that will soon fall apart. Blumenberg already hinted at such a possible outcome of modernity in Legitimacy: The evil of the world appears less and less clearly as a physical defect of nature and more and more (and with less ambiguity, on account of the technical means by which we amplify these things) as the result of human actions. That would have to produce a new variety of Gnosticism and, no less necessarily, a new conception of revolt against it. (LMA, 57)

To counter this return of Gnosticism, we do not need to re-establish nature as an intrinsically meaningful being that we should care for and value for its own sake. There is no need to revive ancient cosmologies and ontologies to counter our technological exploitation of nature and its apocalyptic consequences. Not unlike the early moderns, we simply need a world that we can live in. This world does not need to be deeply

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meaningful, let alone redemptive; stability and reliability suffice. In Blumenberg’s view, establishing such a new worldliness is incompatible with apocalyptic thinking that is characterized by its unworldliness. If we want to rethink our world, we cannot at the same time uphold an apocalyptic vision of the future in which the world crumbles. Even if the apocalypse is exactly what we want to avoid, apocalyptic narratives prevent by their very nature a genuine investment in the world. Blumenberg certainly provides us more relevant tools to think the theological and anthropological origins of apocalyptic thinking than Löwith and Voegelin, but he is shy of developing a political theology of the apocalypse. On the contrary, his thinking implies a radical critique of apocalyptic thought and its theological history. In order to further explore the possibility of a political theology of the environmental apocalypse, I will turn to the recent work of the French thinker Bruno Latour and confront it with Blumenberg’s thinking. Latour is not only one of the leading philosophers of climate change and the Anthropocene, he is also an important voice in debates about modernity. For this reason alone, a confrontation between Latour and Blumenberg is worthwhile. Latour’s earlier reflections on modernity mainly fit within a specifically French context and can be read as responses to postmodernism—but his more recent book, Facing Gaia, relies on the German tradition of political theology in an attempt to answer philosophical questions triggered by our “new climatic regime”.11 Interestingly, Latour does not side with Blumenberg here, but with one of his adversaries, Eric Voegelin.

Bruno Latour on “Not Putting an End to the End of Times” In Facing Gaia, Latour takes a position that is radically opposed to Blumenberg’s critique of apocalypticism. Unlike Blumenberg, who considered apocalyptic thinking to be incompatible with an investment in the world, Latour maintains that the end of time allows us to rethink our relation to the earth. Faced with climate change, we should not become less apocalyptic to be rational and worldly but rather more apocalyptic: “The 11  Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). For a different angle on Latour’s relevance to secularization and political theology, see Massimiliano Simons, “Bruno Latour and the Secularization of Science,” Perspectives on Science 28 (2020).

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fusion of eschatology and ecology is not a plunge into irrationality, a loss of composure, or some sort of mystical adherence to an outdated religious myth … The apocalypse is a call to be rational at last, to have one’s feet on the ground.”12 What he has in mind is a fully secular version of the apocalypse that has nothing to do with religion and even less so with modernity. Only by truly thinking apocalyptically can we conceive a new concept of nature that we need in our new climatic regime and that he will call “Gaia”. In order to understand what Latour has in mind, we need to reconstruct his complex political theology of modernity that he bases on Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics, one of the books Blumenberg targets in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.13 Endorsing Voegelin’s (and Löwith’s) secularization thesis in its crudest and most explicit sense, Latour argues that modernity is nothing but the immanent continuation of religion. The modern age has fundamentally misunderstood itself; it brings nothing truly new or original but just continues what already existed. For Latour, this entails that we have never been modern—repeating a claim he had earlier made in the famous book with the same title.14 He criticizes modernity in a way that would have certainly upset Blumenberg. Latour even holds modernity’s religious nature responsible for the current crisis, claiming that “the religious origin of the ecological crisis is indisputable”,15 or even: “If modernity were not so deeply religious, the call to adjust oneself to the Earth would be easily heard.”16 The key to Latour’s critique of modernity is the concept of immanentization that he borrows from Voegelin. What happens in modern times, according to Latour and Voegelin, is the complete immanentization of religious transcendence. For both of them, modern secularization does not designate the increasing rejection of the supernatural world but, on the contrary, the increasing attempt to draw transcendence into this world, to gain immanent control over it: “The attempt at immanentizing the meaning of existence is fundamentally an attempt at bringing our knowledge of transcendence into a firmer grip”, says Voegelin.17 Through immanentization the moderns want to hold in a firm grasp something that by  Ibid., 218 (Latour’s emphasis).  See Voegelin, The New Science of Politics. 14  Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 15  Latour, Facing Gaia, 210. 16  Ibid., 207. 17  Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 124. 12 13

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definition resists our control. This is the dangerous illusion of modern thought that would lead to totalitarian politics, in Voegelin’s view, and to the current environmental crisis, in Latour’s. Paradoxically, Latour adds, immanentization cuts us off from true immanence. Because the moderns can only understand immanence as the realization of the absolute, they can no longer see this world for what it really is—an earth, which has its own agency and which responds to our actions. The moderns claim to be absolutely invested in the material world and at the same time show a complete indifference towards materiality that they consider to be void of meaning, death and without agency. The world is nothing more to them than a passive substratum in which they can realize their own redemption. Latour follows Voegelin again by associating this modern view of the world as indifferent and meaningless with the Gnostic worldview. For Voegelin, Gnosticism rejects the immanent world as evil or indifferent and at the same time tries to gain an absolute control over the transcendent world from within immanence through the mystical knowledge of Gnosis. Voegelin even went so far as to claim that “Gnosticism” is “the nature of modernity”.18 The modern Gnostic loss of immanence and contempt for the earth eventually produced the environmental crisis that we know today, Latour argues. He rightly remarks that it would be ridiculous to talk about ecology to a Gnostic who from the outset dismisses nature. While this connection between the environmental crisis and Gnosticism sounds far-fetched, the implications of Latour’s weird association are very pertinent: Latour is indeed suggesting that it would be just as ridiculous to discuss ecology with a modern scientist who views nature an indifferent materiality of which he considers himself to be “master and possessor” and in which he can realize some kind of technological salvation. What is specifically immanentized in modern times is redemption. Reiterating the topic of secularized eschatology, Latour claims that “modernity has inherited the Apocalypse”.19 Modernity has immanentized (or secularized) the end of time by positing it within history itself: “History begins to bear, in its very movement, the transcendence that puts an end to it! This means, then, that we are going to be able to transform immanence into what is able to bear eternity for good.”20 When transcendence is completely immanentized, eternity is here and now. Consequently,  Ibid., 107.  Latour, Facing Gaia, 206. 20  Ibid., 197. 18 19

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redemption has taken place and our salvation is fully in our own hands. This absolute certainty about salvation is what the Gnostic also achieves through mystical knowledge, according to Voegelin. In paraphrasing Voegelin, Latour is actually radicalizing his position. By claiming that modernity immanentizes the end of time, Latour ends up saying that modernity presents itself as the apocalypse. The Christian concept of redemption is not simply secularized in specific modern phenomena, as Löwith and Voegelin maintained, but modernity as such believes to have realized this very redemption, says Latour. In this view, modernity marks an absolute point in time, an end of history, an immanent redemption, an apocalypse. We, moderns, are all apocalyptics, in Latour’s view, to the extent that we think the end of time is already behind us. For him, the story of modernity is a post-apocalyptic fiction. The problem of modernity’s strange apocalyptic conviction is that real apocalyptic rhetoric or threats like climate change cannot affect us anymore. If we have already reached the end of time and if we master reality in an absolute sense, there is nothing to be afraid of anymore: A certain number of peoples tell themselves henceforth that they are absolutely certain that they have reached the end of time, have arrived in another world, and are separated from the old times by an absolute break. To these peoples, obviously, nothing serious can happen any longer, since they believe they have always been within the “end of history.” It is thus completely useless to speak to them in apocalyptic terms announcing to them the end of their world! They will reply condescendingly that they have already crossed over to the other side, that they are already no longer of this world, that nothing more can happen to them, that they are resolutely, definitively, completely, and forever modernized!21

For Latour, this is not only the root of climate change denial but also of common reactions of apathy or, on the contrary, naïve optimism. Most of us fail to understand the gravity of the environmental threat, either because we simply deny that there is a problem at all or because we think we are in a better position than ever to solve it. Living after the end of time and having achieved redemption, we have completely mastered our existence and we can solve any possible problem. For Latour, this underestimation of the apocalyptic threat that climate change poses can be explained by modernity’s post-apocalyptic condition:  Ibid., 195 (Latour’s emphasis).

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If you were to ask why the so-called ecological questions don’t interest very many people, in spite of their scale, their urgency, and their insistence, the answer might not be too hard to find if you were to take their religious origin into account. Telling Westerners … that the time has come, that their world has ended, that they have to change their way of life, can only produce a feeling of total incomprehension, because, for them, the Apocalypse has already taken place.22

Latour is definitely overstating his point. No secular, modern Westerner literally believes that redemption has already taken place, and even Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim that Western society has reached the end of history is almost universally rejected today. Nonetheless, Latour’s underlying claim is correct: our society has an almost religious confidence in the redemptive potentials of modern science and capitalism that prevents us from taking climate change seriously. But Latour is right in a more literal sense too. Discussing modernity’s post-apocalyptic condition is perhaps not as idiosyncratic as one might think. The idea that redemption has already taken place is neither new nor unusual. It is not specifically modern, not even Gnostic, but it is what every Christian actually believes. For, according to Christian orthodoxy, redemption has already taken place in Christ’s incarnation. As such, one could argue that mainstream Christianity is a post-apocalyptic religion that posits redemption in the past and does not expect any redemptive events to take place in the course of time. This is why the end of time is of no great importance in traditional Christian doctrine and why the Book of Revelation takes up such an awkward position in the New Testament. In line with Latour’s claims about the moderns, one could argue that the apocalypse produces a feeling of total incomprehension for most Christians. Blumenberg also emphasizes this in his interpretation of Christian eschatology: “The events that are decisive for salvation have already occurred” (LMA, 43). As the apocalypse failed to take place, early Christianity did not defer the end of time into a distant future but strangely pushed it back into the past, Blumenberg argues: Thus the tendency in dealing with eschatological disappointment was not to explain away the delay, to reintroduce indefiniteness, but rather to relocate the events that were decisive for salvation in the past and to emphasize (what  Ibid., 206.

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was now only) an “inner” possession of certainty deriving from that past. The future no longer brings something radically new, the triumphantly intervening victory over evil. (LMA, 43–4)

If any salvation is still to take place, it can no longer be on the level of history but only on the level of the individual. Christianity interiorizes eschatology. This is why, in Blumenberg’s view, it could not be secularized in modernity into the historical idea of progress. The result of this relocation of redemption is that the Christian church has a much more stable basis and justification of its creed. If redemption has already taken place and if the church represents this redemption in history, its legitimacy is absolute. However, against the spirit of Blumenberg’s argument and in line with Latour’s position, one could argue that precisely this post-apocalyptic tendency of Christianity is continued, even secularized in modernity. It is not that the apocalyptic or eschatological expectations are immanentized, as Voegelin maintained, but rather the church’s position as the representative of the absolute is secularized. Just like the Christian church, modernity lives after the apocalypse. Latour develops his political theology of modernity in an attempt to finally overcome both religion and secularization. His goal is to be become immanent by leaving modernity and religion behind once and for all. Thus, it also becomes possible to become truly apocalyptic and to develop a concept of the end of time that is no longer religious. The dangers of religious and modern forms of apocalypticism are as obvious for Latour as they are for Blumenberg and Voegelin. However, Latour is convinced that a truly immanent and rational apocalypse beyond religion is conceivable. In order to develop such an apocalyptic vision, we have to realize that the apocalypse lies neither behind us nor in front of us but is currently taking place. Unlike moderns, Christians or Gnostics, we live during the apocalypse: “Remaining in the end of time: this is all that matters.”23 The environmental catastrophe is currently happening. Apocalyptic rhetoric should not warn us for disasters that will take place in the near future but should point to the apocalypse that we live in. This is the reason why we need to become genuinely apocalyptic, in Latour’s view, and why it is rational to do so. This is the only way we can come to terms with the earth that we inhabit. Indeed, the environmental apocalypse makes it possible to ­radically  Latour, Facing Gaia, 217.

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rethink our concepts of nature and immanence. Unlike the moderns, we can finally see that the earth is not indifferent and materiality is not death but a precarious reality that has as much agency as we have. Recognizing the earth for what it really is means becoming genuinely immanent and leaving religion and modernity behind. This enables us to see immanence as immanence and not as an immanentization of transcendence: If we could manage this, we could finally dispense with the religious, but not in the sense of secularizing existence. … The terrestrial is neither profane nor archaic nor pagan nor material nor secular; it is just what is still out ahead of us, like an Earth that is in effect new. But not in the sense that it would be a geographical space to discover and measure – in the sense, rather, of a renewal of the same old Earth, once again unknown, to be composed.24

In Facing Gaia, Latour associates this view of the earth with James Lovelock’s notion of Gaia, concluding his chapter on the end of times as follows: “This is why it is so important, in my view, to try to face up to Gaia, which is no more a religious figure than a secular one. Gaia is an injunction to rematerialize our belonging to the world, by obliging us to re-examine the parasitic relations of Gnosticism to the counter-religions.”25 In short, Latour wants to overcome Gnosticism and eschatology in order to revalue earthly existence and to think the world in a radically new way. Quite surprisingly, this sounds a lot like Blumenberg’s project.

World, Apocalypse, Madness In spite of their radical conceptual differences, both Blumenberg and Latour attempt to develop a philosophical worldview for our age grounded in a reflection on the end of time. Blumenberg explicitly wants to make sense of the early modern conception of worldliness and justify its radical novelty; Latour develops an interpretation of the earth as Gaia that presents itself as overcoming the modern worldview. For both, this reality is only conceivable beyond religion and secularization. They proclaim a return to the world or the earth not by retrieving something that has been lost or obscured but by opening up an unknown reality. Nonetheless, the way in which Blumenberg and Latour describe this world could not be  Ibid., 212.  Ibid., 219.

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further apart. Blumenberg endorses a modern reality from which all meaning and agency is removed. What Blumenberg termed Ordnungsschwund (disappearance of order) is exactly what Latour criticized the moderns for (LMA, 137). For Latour, the modern worldview that conceives nature as death, meaningless and passive materiality is untenable if one takes climate change seriously. Latour and Blumenberg thus fundamentally disagree about the legitimacy of modernity: Latour is a fierce critic of all things modern, however general his concept of modernity is; Blumenberg is an apologist of the modern age, however modest his remaining version of modernity is. This is hardly surprising, as Latour explicitly sides with Blumenberg’s adversaries, Voegelin, Löwith and even Schmitt. Latour envisions a new paradigm beyond modernity—one that has nothing to do with postmodernism, to be sure, but rather with our new climatic regime. Climate change not only confronts us with the limits of modern thought but also shows us that we have never been modern. To return to the central issue of this chapter, it is clear that this different appreciation of modernity and its conception of the world coincides with a radically different commitment to the apocalypse and its political-­ theological implications. Blumenberg wants to ban every remnant of theology from modernity and modern politics, thus radically dismissing eschatology and apocalypticism. Latour also fears modernity’s apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic tendencies, but develops a new immanent concept of the apocalypse beyond religion and modernity. Apocalypticism is the only reasonable response to the crisis of our times. Despite the nuances and idiosyncrasies of Latour’s interpretation of the apocalypse, this is an extreme position. The question remains whether it is possible at all to live and continue living in the apocalypse. The apocalypse is an unstable, unbearable position that might be conceptually appealing but not practically endurable. This is what Blumenberg made crystal clear in Lebenszeit und Weltzeit as well as in Legitimacy. The apocalypse is so attractive because it allows us to see the world in a radically different perspective, thus liberating us from the old world for a moment. But this moment does not give rise to a stable and durable position in the world. The apocalypse always has to be pushed further into the future or indeed back into the past to make it compatible with the continuation of the world. The eschatological worldlessness as such is incompatible with a continued existence in this world. Therefore, it cannot give rise to a worldly political

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programme. For Blumenberg, there is no such thing as an apocalyptic political theology. Apocalyptic theology and politics are literally worlds apart. Because of its instable relation to the world, the position of the apocalyptic is ultimately pathological for Blumenberg. He not only touches upon apocalypticism’s narcissistic nature but also diagnoses it in passing as a case of paranoia and as delusion. Apocalypticism implies a pathological distortion of our normal relation to the world. Blumenberg does not really develop or argue for this diagnosis, but his use of these pathological metaphors is striking, not in the least because Latour uses a very similar rhetoric of psychopathology when speaking about climate change. This means that Latour is aware of the instability of an apocalyptic existence too. There is something unbearable and deeply pathological about living in an apocalyptic catastrophe. Latour, however, suggests that this instability is part of our new climatic condition itself. In the first chapter of Facing Gaia, he argues that our relation to the world itself has become unstable. Our new climatic regime is characterized by “a profound mutation in our relation to the world”.26 Not unlike Blumenberg, Latour associates this mutation of our world with madness: “‘An alteration of the relation to the world’: this is the scholarly term for madness. We understand nothing about ecological mutations if we don’t measure the extent to which they throw everyone into a panic. Even if they have several different ways of driving us crazy!”27 In hilarious ways, Latour then sets out to diagnose the different reactions to climate change. He calls the optimists who think they can still avert disaster through technological innovation bipolar in a manic phase; the pessimists are simply depressed. Interestingly, Blumenberg’s and Latour’s uses of psychopathological metaphors imply that a solution in the form of a cure is possible for the problems they associate with the (environmental) apocalypse. For both of them, the treatment does not consist in isolating the patient from the outside world but in reintegrating him immediately in earthy existence. For Blumenberg, the apocalypse and its continued failure triggers a new, modern worldliness; for Latour, the apocalypse itself calls us to face Gaia.

 Latour, Facing Gaia, 8 (Latour’s emphasis).  Ibid., 11.

26 27

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Bibliography Blumenberg, Hans. “Geschichte und Eschatologie.” Gnomon 31, no 2 (1958): 163–166. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [LMA]. Translated by Robert Wallace. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983. Blumenberg, Hans. Lebenszeit und Weltzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Buch, Robert, and Weidner, Daniel (eds). Blumenberg Lesen. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XII (1911–1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique, and Other Works. Edited and translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1958. Godefroy, Bruno. “Hans Blumenberg: l’eschatologie désarmorcée.” Éthique, politique, religions 2 (2013): 99–118. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Simons, Massimiliano. “Bruno Latour and the Secularization of Science.” Perspectives on Science 28 (2020). Styfhals, Willem. No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952. Zerrath, Martin. Vollendung und Neuzeit: Transformation der Eschatologie bei Blumenberg und Hirsch. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2011.

PART II

Political Theologies of Modernity

CHAPTER 4

The Sovereignty of the World: Towards a Political Theology of Modernity (After Blumenberg) Joseph Albernaz and Kirill Chepurin

“Acute eschatology is the equivalent of the obsessional neurosis whose universal effect Freud described with the phrase, ‘at last the whole world lies under an embargo of impossibility,’” writes Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (LMA, 67–8). To place the (modern) world under an embargo of impossibility is, for Blumenberg, to question its legitimacy and the very logic of possibility inherent to it. That is, however, exactly the trajectory that our chapter seeks to open up from within Blumenberg’s text. As critical theory across disparate subfields seeks to challenge anew the modern Kirill Chepurin’s work on this chapter was supported by the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. J. Albernaz Columbia University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. Chepurin (*) National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_4

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world’s underlying logics as, constitutively, a world of domination and exclusion, genealogical investigations of modernity—confined earlier to Ideengeschichte—gain a new urgency. Many of these logics, as contemporary political theology shows, also mark modernity as co-imbricated with Christianity and its theopolitical apparatus.1 To trace the genesis of these logics is to trace the genesis of the modern world—of how it has been structured and how it continues to structure its subjects. We see the ongoing resurgence of interest in Blumenberg as tied to this tendency. However, despite this resurgence, Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age still remains to be re-read and re-configured through the lens of contemporary theoretical problematics. This chapter is, for us, a first step towards such a re-configuration. There is much to be learned from Blumenberg about the underlying logics of domination in modernity, often despite his own interest in legitimating the modern world. This goes, among other things, for Blumenberg’s analysis of the entanglement of modernity with Christianity and the ideas of immanence, transcendence and sovereignty that emerge out of that entanglement—or out of the modern world’s (and Blumenberg’s own) attempt to break away from it. From the political-theological perspective, turning to Blumenberg is important, insofar as it can help us think the co-imbrication of Christian and modern logics while still attending to key differences between them— a point that sometimes gets lost in all-too-quick identifications of modernity with Christianity or in postulating too smooth a continuity between them, as in standard theories of immanentization or secularization. At the same time, the point is not to mount a secularist defence of modernity, but to think, with and against Blumenberg, both what is shared between Christianity and modernity and, in a more nuanced way, what changes in the transition between the two. In particular, as we shall see, modernity’s form of investment in the world—its identification of the world with the totality of what is possible and producible—at once inherits and transforms the Christian form of worldly investment, generating new logics of futurity, immanence and transcendence, as well as a new world: a world of endless productivity, alienation, work, globalization, exploitation and racialization, a world recognizable as characteristically modern. For Blumenberg, while in late-medieval nominalism the inexhaustible totality of possibility was identified with God, the move of modernity is to identify this totality with the world, in relation to which the modern 1  For a general mapping of this problematic, see Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet, “Immanence, Genealogy, Delegitimation: German Idealism and Political Theology,” in Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology, ed. Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021).

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subject asserts itself. We will argue that Blumenberg’s logic of the self-­ assertion of the subject involves the actualization of possibilities inherent in the world, a framework in which the world itself (re)occupies a position that is constitutively transcendent, even though Blumenberg frames modernity as an overcoming of transcendence via the immanence of “human self-assertion”. Modernity, we contend, reoccupies the sovereignty of God with that of the world. The logic of possibility and actualization that makes the modern world possible functions, furthermore, as the logic of legitimation, in which the subject, the world and the modern age itself find their new justification, and through which they overcome the perceived Gnostic threat: the threat of the illegitimacy, even the downfall, of the world. Blumenbergian sovereignty thus converges with the Schmittian, so that the two may be seen as working jointly to establish and uphold a (transcendent) order—the order of the world.

Overcoming Gnosticism, Investing in the World The Legitimacy of the Modern Age makes a powerful case for the autonomy of modernity with regard to the preceding Christian epoch—but it also emphasizes at least one continuity between the two, which can be framed via what Blumenberg casts as their common enemy: Gnosticism. Indeed, for such a painstaking work, Blumenberg’s most succinct and programmatic definition of modernity in the book is rather idiosyncratic, even cryptic: “The modern age is the second overcoming of Gnosticism” (LMA, 126). The Christian age is the first (and ultimately failed) attempt at such an overcoming. Far from being external, this opposition to Gnosticism structurally defines both epochs as these epochs’ shared task, thereby creating an antagonistic continuity between Christianity and modernity. What is at stake in this shared opposition? It is, to put it simply, the Gnostic refusal of investment in the world that both  Christianity and modernity oppose. This refusal is, in fact, what “Gnosticism” for Blumenberg indexes—coupled with the idea of God (and, accordingly, salvation) as absolutely alien to the world and irreconcilable with it. In this sense, Gnosticism operates as a generic and transhistorical term beyond its initial function as an umbrella concept for early Christian-adjacent heresies that variously conceive the creator of the world (known as the demiurge) as malevolent and, by extension, the world as illegitimate. Instead, Gnosticism names an operation of the refusal of the world, in which all guarantee and purposefulness of this world’s reality,

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and all sense of this world as worthy of being upheld and invested in, disappears.2 This operation is at work already in the Jewish apocalypticism that early Christianity sought to overcome. The apocalyptic demands the immediate end of the world, refusing investment in the world’s continued existence. This end is immediate in the sense of not being mediated by the world and not going through it; there is no work of or in the world—no work of history—to be done before this end can arrive. The end is, instead, imminent, demanded right now. This means, however, that the world as such is stripped of all investment and legitimacy—as is worldly power. But as Christianity found itself needing to explain the world’s continued existence, it was also establishing itself just as such a power. As a result, it needed to justify not the end of the world, but its prolongation. Therefore, already in its early eschatological overcoming of Jewish apocalypticism, and then in its opposition to Gnosticism, as Blumenberg shows in a chapter with the telling title “Instead of Secularization of Eschatology, Secularization by Eschatology”, Christianity makes the move of postponing the end of the world and salvation—making room for and justifying the world in its not-yetness, between creation and redemption.3 The very concept of “world” names this continued justification of the state of things, the structural not-yet: “What the term ‘world’ signifies itself originated in that process of ‘reoccupying’ the position of acute expectation of the end” (LMA, 47). The world becomes the work of redemption in a constitutively deferred eschatological horizon. In this, a kind of “secularization” occurs—an investment in and stabilization of the world, allowing for a separate age to emerge and to hold its ground (even if its theological status remains merely preliminary or transitive), and thus, among other things, for the establishment of the Christian Church as the institution of the not-yet that is the world—as the institution “stabilizing” this not-yet (LMA, 44). As it continues to oppose Gnosticism in its various guises, Christianity goes on to further strengthen its investment in the world. The first overcoming of Gnosticism consists precisely in this: in the suppression of the Gnostic heresy and the establishment both of the worldly authority of the Church and its ontological,  For the Gnostic, “the world deserved destruction” (LMA, 131).  It is not coincidental that Gnosticism “disputed the [Christian] combination of creation and redemption” (LMA, 129), since Christianity justified the world precisely as what takes place between the two. 2 3

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theological and cosmological paradigms. This overcoming, however, comes at a fateful cost. There emerges a constitutive tension or “ambivalence” (LMA, 484) at the heart of Christianity, owing to which medieval Christianity, culminating in nominalism, will ultimately fall apart: a tension between investment in the world and investment in salvation, or the end of the world. Despite the tendency towards investment in the world, the work of redemption still remains, in the Christian epoch, fundamentally not the work of the human subject. As Blumenberg points out, within the medieval Augustinian framework of original sin, the human was considered to be responsible for (the condition of) the world. This responsibility was, however, defined in a way that resulted in a “renunciation of any attempt to change” the world, still less to master it (LMA, 136). The evil of the world was due to the original, free human sin, so that, now, the human could not by her efforts escape this fallen condition, and only the transcendent grace of God could bring about salvation. Augustine’s ultimate motivation was that of justifying the world, contra Gnosticism: he wanted to secure the justice and justification of God by introducing human freedom in the form of original sin, thus absolving God from the Gnostic accusation that he was responsible for evil in creating this wretched cosmos (LMA, 133). This Augustinian freedom at once exacerbated the tension between divine grace and the current state of the world, and tied the human to this (fallen) state even further. There was no real work on the world that the fallen human could do, no real possibility available. Directed towards a future that was fundamentally not-yet, humanity must only accept the world and the divine work of redemption. In Blumenberg’s account, this (first) overcoming of Gnosticism was neither permanent nor fully successful. Christianity, one could say, did not invest in the world fully enough—precisely because the balance still had to remain theologically tipped in favour of divine transcendence and salvation. It is through this gap that Gnosticism persisted as a threat, and the tension already present in early Christianity between worldly investment and the (more Gnostic) apocalyptic demand continued to exist. With the intellectual developments of medieval nominalism, the tension comes to the fore and ultimately snaps. For Blumenberg, nominalism—exemplified by thinkers like William of Ockham, Nicholas of Autrecourt and Peter d’Ailly—indexes a kind of implicit recrudescence of the Gnostic attitude, the refusal of investment in or relation to a world that is utterly

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unfathomable. It is not until the Gnostic tendencies in nominalism are overcome that modernity will arrive in the fullness of its legitimacy. Blumenberg’s treatment of various nominalist thinkers is complex, but the fundamental reason for nominalism’s fall into Gnosticism is simple. For the nominalist theologians, God’s sovereign power was radically absolute (potentia absoluta) and his will unable to be constrained by any relation to order, regularity, or law. This “late medieval theological absolutism”, with its hypertrophy of “the theological predicates of absolute power and freedom”, was therefore “not concerned with the reality of the world and its significance for human consciousness but [solely] with preserving the full range of God’s possibilities” (LMA, 159). God’s absolute and “unlimited sovereignty” was here identified with the totality of possibility, infinite and inexhaustible (potentia is not only power but possibility4). This late-­ medieval God was, in fact, so omnipotent as to become completely alien to consciousness. There was no glimpsing into the unfathomable will of the divine, no analogy with the human, so transcendent God had become. God now had all the possibility to himself, which the human could not access. All that remained for the human was to exist in a world that this alien God had created, without the prospect, not just of changing it, but even of knowing how it worked, as it were, “in itself”. This led ultimately, for Blumenberg, to the waning of the importance of divine transcendence, which came to be radically separated from the life of the subject in the world. As we will see, despite (or rather because of) this separation, the contradictions of nominalism’s Gnostic tendencies ultimately generated a newly legitimated and autonomous investment in  or “attention to the world” (LMA, 505). In insisting on the absoluteness of divine sovereignty, nominalism paradoxically paved the way for the sovereignty of the world.

The Counterworld, or the Birth of Modernity out of Nominalism Where the previous theological architecture of orthodox Christianity had tried to find a balance between the transcendence (and thus sovereignty) of God and his purposes for the world, late-medieval nominalism destroyed any analogy or even relation between Creator and creation. Consequently, 4  “The concept of potentia absoluta implies that there is no limit to what is possible … [T]o the potentia absoluta [of God] there corresponded an infinity of possible worlds” (LMA, 153, 160).

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human knowledge of reality was radically put in question. Since God could do whatever he willed, and this will was unfathomable to the human mind, God’s will—and thus the world—became absolutely contingent.5 There was, in this framework, no sufficient reason to be established for the world’s workings, and no certainty about them. Since God’s will was absolutely alien and contingent, and thus God’s reasons for creating the world and the way the world functioned in itself, reality too was perceived as contingent and as alienated from the human mind and its existential concerns. The nominalist “intensification of transcendence” was accompanied by a “resignation with respect to immanence”, i.e., in Blumenberg’s terms, to the world (LMA, 486). The situation out of which modernity originated is marked for Blumenberg by a fundamental uncertainty about reality and an “intense consciousness of insecurity” (LMA, 163). The guarantee of reality was disappearing from view and from under one’s feet: as created by the alien God, the world itself became alien, contingent, “groundless” (LMA, 163). This absolute alienation of God from the world resulted in a general “Telosschwund”, a disappearance of any identifiable purpose inherent in the world (LMA, 206), and a concomitant loss of what Blumenberg calls the “human relevance” of the credibility of transcendence and salvation (LMA, 137). According to Blumenberg’s story, as we have seen, this hypertrophy of the transcendence of the nominalist God, even to the point of “hiddenness”, harboured a return of the Gnostic tendency: “The Gnosticism that had not been overcome but only transposed returns [in nominalism] in the form of the ‘hidden God’ and His inconceivable absolute sovereignty” (LMA, 135). There was thus here a convergence of sovereignty, transcendence and possibility, all located in the will of the hidden God. At the same time, on the other side of this divide or from the point of view of human finitude, there was another convergence: that of alienation and contingency, also bound to the absolute divine will—but transposed onto the world. As a result, to the hidden God, there corresponded the hidden world, appearing as alienated and absolutely contingent. Accordingly, the second overcoming of Gnosticism had to overcome this alien God and the alienation from the world-in-itself that it entailed. To that purpose, nominalist thinkers gradually set the stage, in opposition to the fundamentally unknowable divine reality, for what Blumenberg 5  As Blumenberg claims, only after nominalism could “the world’s form [be conceived] as contingent” (LMA, 156).

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terms the counterworld—the world as it appears to the human and as the human can navigate and deal with it: “Deprived by God’s hiddenness of metaphysical guarantees for the world, man constructs for himself a counterworld of elementary rationality and manipulability” (LMA, 173). Contingency is, after all, a kind of possibility, too. What is contingent— what could be otherwise—can also be seen as manipulable, as long as this contingency can be understood as subject to some sort of “elementary rationality”. This rationality may not correspond to God’s real (unfathomable) will and the world’s real (unfathomable) workings, but as long as some sort of rationality to the world’s contingency can be established, the human should be able to get by in this world. This shift towards altering the world (by transforming it into a manipulable counterworld) initially appears for Blumenberg not as a drive to mastery, but simply as a minimal “self-defense”, essentially the last resort against the disorder of existential and metaphysical insecurity (LMA, 191)—a crucial motif in Blumenbergian anthropology, which he tends to transpose onto the logic of the history of ideas: desire for order and control, for rationality and manipulability, as springing from the more minimal need for security and defence. This mechanism is generally, for Blumenberg, characteristic of human self-assertion, and the construction of the counterworld in nominalism serves precisely the purpose of defending the human against the alienness of God and of reality. A reality that is absolutely alien is perceived as threatening, provoking the fundamental need for safety vis-à-vis an “indifferent and ruthless” world (LMA, 182). As a result, theoretical and practical interest turns, in nominalism, towards what is “humanly relevant”—towards an interest not in how God-created reality works in itself, but in what the human mind could make of its workings. The human may not possess any real possibility (which belongs to God)—but as long as there can be discovered a mechanism of dealing with the world’s contingency in a consistent, rational manner, the human will possess a guarantee of reality, however limited or phenomenal, that the hidden God is incapable of providing. Indeed, modernity will come to realize that “a hidden God is pragmatically as good as dead”, with the result that the human is released to engage in a “restless taking stock of the world” and the possibilities it provides (LMA, 346; translation modified). The counterworld is being constructed, crucially, in a de facto opposition to the divine: as a human world divorced from the transcendent divine possibility and from transcendent salvation.

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The elementary rationality in which the human mind could place its trust despite the metaphysical contingency of reality was, for the nominalists, mathematical. Underlying the new view of the world as manipulable are a complex set of philosophical developments that formulate the quantification and measuring of nature. In opposition to the divine totality of possibility, the human seeks another kind of possibility, which the counterworld could claim for itself: possibility qua manipulability, the possibility of dealing with and mastering reality. Seeing as the world “no longer possessed an accessible order” (LMA, 171), effort gets redirected towards dealing with what is humanly accessible, manipulable and ultimately producible—and mathematics, in contrast to the qualitative Aristotelian physics, provides the perfect instrument.6 Mathematical quantification is best able to deal with contingency because it is, in principle, “useable in any possible world” (LMA, 164). Once again, then, we see how the contingency that was a source of alienation becomes a spur, even an instrument, of human self-assertion. This counterworld is not only subject to rationality and manipulability, but also, crucially, mastery: “The more indifferent and ruthless nature seemed to be with respect to man, the less it could be a matter of indifference to him, and the more ruthlessly he had to materialize, for his mastering grasp, even what was pregiven to him as nature, that is, to make it ‘available’ and to subordinate it to himself as the field of his existential prospects” (LMA, 182). The “mastering grasp” of the human is presented here as a necessary response to the alienated world and an alien God—a need to provide the world with some kind of order. Counterintuitively, then, mastery arises out of the evacuation of truth or knowledge about God’s infinitely sovereign will, his intentions or laws for creation. One example here is the way Blumenberg understands the principle of Ockham’s razor: instead of “reconstruct[ing] an order given in nature”, it “reduce[s] nature forcibly to an order imputed to it by man” (LMA, 154). The forcible and ruthless character of man’s production and domination of reality’s order is crucial here, and will become fundamental to modernity. The contingency of reality and its concomitant indifference to the human, its radical absence of care, is perceived as a threat and so has to be countered with violence, aimed at subduing and regularizing the substrate of the world. 6  “The ontological replacement of the category of substance by the category of quantity had indeed established the ideal of handling all possible problems by calculation” (LMA, 348).

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The materialization of nature is a part of the same development. “Reduction of the world to pure materiality”, Blumenberg writes, is “not primarily a theoretical proposition … but rather a postulate of reason assuring itself of its possibilities in the world – a postulate of self-assertion” (LMA, 209, emphasis added; cf. 151). In this, we see the (humanly relevant) idea of possibility gradually migrating from God to the (counter) world that the human is constructing—the world that is now coming to be seen as producible, as “open to man’s rational disposition” and to change (LMA, 151). This is the key component of the transition to modernity. Blumenberg frames this development essentially as a binary choice: the human could produce a counterworld of immanent self-­ assertion to compensate for the “groundlessness of Creation”, or else face the Gnostic resignation of an alienated transcendence (LMA, 154)—an option that would have been, per Blumenberg, outright unbearable for the human. In this way, the sovereign possibility of God begins to give way to the possibilities inherent in the world, which the human can take stock of, manipulate and master: an increasing investment in the world over and against divine transcendence, an investment that Blumenberg legitimates as existentially inevitable, thereby legitimating the modern world that it produces. We can thus see a nexus taking shape in nominalism that will become autonomous in and as modernity: the nexus of alienation—possibility/ producibility—mastery, associated with the counterworld that the nominalists construct. According to Blumenberg’s logic, alienation from the world and from God leads to the need to re-establish security, order and regularity through mastery and self-assertion, with possibility as the central crucial node. That is to say, insofar as the world is now grasped, altered, mastered and produced, it is done so as a world of possibility, as a “field of existential prospects” that the human must both “subordinate” and work to actualize. As Blumenberg summarily puts it: “what is no longer found ready as reality benefitting man can be interpreted as a possibility open to him” (LMA, 211). Possibility relates to and mediates the other terms in the nexus by holding out the promise of overcoming alienation through the mastery of the contingent reality. Nominalism, then, sets the stage for modernity, in which the counterworld, the manipulable field of “this-worldly possibilities”, becomes the central focus of human activity (LMA, 151). In this way, the conjunction of possibility and self-assertion is formed within nominalism—as is the opposition to divine sovereignty, “to which … man was no longer to

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submit with humble resignation, but which he would rather oppose with a new epistemological conception of the possibilities left open to him even with this reservation” (LMA, 385). This opposition is, however, still limited by this reservation. For Blumenberg there is a limit to nominalism, marking it as not-yet modern: the primacy of divine transcendence. The secret of creation is still removed from the human—as are salvation and fulfilment. Nominalism still maintains “the theological decision in favor of the transcendent status of such fulfillment”, precluding its “general human accessibility” (LMA, 173). In addition, while nominalism denies “that the created world could be the equivalent of the creative power actualized in it”, it still does not grant this power to the human subject (LMA, 160), nor does it identify the world itself with the sovereign totality of possibility. Possibility still lies fundamentally with God, and the counterworld that the human produces is not yet the true reality. In other words, the theoretical nexus that will become fundamental to modernity may be, in nominalism, in the process of formation, but it is still secondary, not yet autonomous (or, in Blumenberg’s terms, legitimate), still existing in the quasi-Gnostic shadow of the omnipotent divine sovereign. But with the turn to the modern age, transcendence loses credibility as a “possibility that is held out to man” and a renewed investment in the world occurs. A new possibility is now held out to man: possibility itself.

The Sovereign Position of the World With the emergence of modernity, all possible positions become positions in the world (identified with the humanly manipulable counterworld constructed under nominalism) and the world itself (and not God) becomes the totality of possibility. In our reading of Blumenberg, this move—this reoccupation—does not simply happen in modernity, it is modernity, fully legitimated. The counterworld becomes the true world: a reality that is at once contingent (not defined by a pre-given divine order) and immanently producible (by the subject). In his contrast of nominalism and modernity, Blumenberg sets up an opposition between, so to speak, alien transcendence and human immanence. For him, this binary is self-evident; there is no other option available. The choice between the two is for him clear, as well. Faced with the “transcendent uncertainties” of an indecipherable God and an alienated reality that precludes all access to fulfilment or to existential security, the human invests in what is manipulable and

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masterable—in the world of and as possibility (LMA, 468). This mediated relation of subject and world—the subject-world dyad—itself becomes the guarantee of reality: the only reality that is guaranteed to provide the subject with perfect certainty and security is the one that has been produced immanently by the subject. “The world must be regarded as producible if it is not certain that man can get by with what is given”—and if what is given is itself, at its core, uncertain and unreliable (LMA, 209). Fulfilment thereby also becomes a matter of production: the world in which the modern subject finds itself may be originally alien and contingent, but since this contingency is also grasped as possibility, it must be possible to produce a reality that would be the subject’s own—rational, known, familiar, controlled. This means seeing the world as a “potential for human production” (LMA, 199), as “a reality to be altered and produced in accordance with human purposes” (LMA, 209), a “worldly” reality now fully and self-evidently identified with possibility (LMA, 561). To produce is to actualize—to move from the current set of positions and possibilities to a new, future one: to produce the world is to produce the future. Blumenberg’s key concept of the self-assertion of the subject, which defines the modern epoch, is premised on the subject-world dyad thus understood. Modern self-assertion, says Blumenberg, “means an existential program, according to which man posits his existence in a historical situation and indicates to himself how he is going to deal with the reality surrounding him and what use he will make of the possibilities that are open to him” (LMA, 138). The “historical situation” is contingent—and thereby other to the subject, alienated, in the sense of not being originally of the subject’s own making. This reality is the situation in which the subject finds itself; these possibilities are simply out there and the subject has no access to their origin, only to making use of them. Alienation from reality crucially persists in modernity from nominalism, becoming a constitutive characteristic of the modern age—an alienation from the modern world’s own Christian origin, upon the break with which it constitutively founds its legitimacy, thereby inscribing this gap into its structure of reality. However, this reality is now also understood as “open”, as ripe with possibility that the human must discern and make use of. In other words, the starting point of modernity is the promise that the human can “deal with reality” all on her own. It is the new “horizon”, that “of the immanent self-assertion of reason through the mastery and alteration of reality” (LMA, 137). Modernity begins with reality as “a potentiality open to

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man’s rational disposition” (LMA, 151), to mastery and to change. Accordingly, the paradigmatic modern subject (“man”, or perhaps Man) is, in this framework, one who can discern and grasp—make use of, actualize, master—possibility. In this, the alienation-possibility-mastery nexus that began in nominalism becomes, in our reading of  Blumenberg’s account, fully decoupled from divine transcendence. Modernity names for him self-assertion’s becoming immanent and autonomous for the first time, its liberation from any tie to a transcendence that would delegitimate or restrict the autonomy of self-assertion by placing possibility outside of human production and actualization. But what is the nature of this worldly immanence that Blumenberg posits? In producing a counterworld of possibility, the human takes on a creative power akin to that of the Gnostic demiurge, that figure considered by the Gnostics to be the variously bungling or malevolent creator of the false material world. Indeed, Blumenberg makes this connection himself, writing, for example, of the “demiurgic activity exercised by man upon the world”, and the human’s “demiurgic production” (LMA, 205, 209; cf. 216, 474). However, Blumenberg does not fully explore the conceptual ramifications of his strange recapitulation of the Gnostic framework. For under this framework, the demiurge is not the true sovereign; the real sovereign is the alien God, dwelling beyond in transcendence. That is, of course, exactly what Blumenberg seeks to avoid: modernity, for him, overcomes Gnosticism by collapsing the distinction between the true, otherworldly sovereign and the one who produces the world (here: the human as the demiurge), by identifying this world with the true reality. Yet if we tarry with this Gnostic framework, retaining Blumenberg’s suggestion that the human takes on a demiurgic role in modernity, who or what assumes the role of the true, transcendent sovereign? We claim it is the world. The world reoccupies God’s transcendent position as the totality of possibility, so that, consequently, the immanent-transcendent apparatus that was a source of alienation does not disappear, but is instead transposed onto and ultimately as the world itself. The following passage, while particularly thorny even by Blumenberg’s standards, provides an important view into this framework: From melancholy over the unreachability of what was reserved transcendently for the Deity, there will emerge the determined competition of the immanent idea of science, to which the infinity of nature discloses itself as the inexhaustible field of theoretical devotion [Zuwendung] and raises itself

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to the equivalent of the transcendent infinity of the Deity Himself, which, as the idea of salvation, has lost its certainty. (LMA, 336; translation modified)

This passage contains in nuce the transition to modernity and the appearance of self-assertion as we see it, beginning with the alienation from transcendence and ending with the human seeking fulfilment (“salvation”) through dealing (scientifically) with a supposedly immanent world—“a restless taking stock of the world, which can be designated as the motive power of the age of science” (LMA, 346). Despite Blumenberg’s mention of a “theoretical devotion”, modern theory needs to be understood for him as subordinated to the practice of mastering and producing reality (e.g. LMA, 208–9). The world as the “field of theoretical devotion” coincides, in “the immanent idea of science”, with the field of the production and mastery of reality. The world as the totality of possibility is inexhaustible, as is the subject’s devotion to it—and it is now from the infinite possibilities inherent in the world that the subject awaits fulfilment.  As Blumenberg puts it in his discussion of Giordano Bruno, this foundational figure of the new epoch, modernity “reoccupies the position of the sovereignty of the divine will with the necessity of the self-transfer of the divine into the worldly—and thus with the necessity of the identification of possibility and reality” (LMA, 561). Like other thinkers, such as Charles Taylor, who see modernity as a turn towards immanence, Blumenberg’s modernity thus takes up the new scientific engagement with the “immanent” world after being detached from an unreachable transcendence. The transition out of the Middle Ages is framed by Blumenberg as a competition between resigned (“melancholy”) alien transcendence, where possibility is reserved for God, and a newly self-authorized human immanence that takes up the infinite possibility for itself. Yet, contra Blumenberg’s insistence on immanence winning this existential competition, transcendence does not disappear when the position of the transcendent Deity is reoccupied in modernity, because it is the position itself that is transcendent: the sovereign position of the transcendent totality of possibility. The world retains the structure of transcendence “equivalent” to that of the transcendent God, and with it, the alienation that transcendence produces. In defending his notion of self-­ assertion as immanent, Blumenberg might respond that the fact that the position of the world is transcendent, reoccupying what used to be the position of God, does not necessarily entail the transcendence of self-­ assertion itself, for the subject can never have access to possibility in its

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entirety, finding itself instead, in its self-assertion, immanently “dealing with” possibilities in a contingent, limited situation. This is, however, precisely what needs to be problematized: Blumenberg’s normative idea that the modern subject “merely” orients itself in a particular situation, without recourse to a position or structure of transcendence—an idea inherent in Blumenberg’s frequent characterization of self-assertion as “minimal” or “modest”. In fact, transcendence is inscribed into the logic of modern self-assertion as its condition and is produced as its result. This structural transcendence, and its concomitant alienation, has several interrelated aspects. First, it is precisely because the position of the totality of possibility is transcendent that the subject is alienated from the contingent reality-as-possibility in the midst of which the subject finds itself at the onset of modernity—never possessing this totality as such, but merely orienting itself within it, in a constitutive separation from this totality and its (hidden) origin. The immanence of self-assertion is premised on an original gap between the subject, as capable of discerning and making use of possibilities, and the world as the field of these possibilities, which the subject perceives as something contingent and other than itself. The subject discovers itself in a contingent reality that is not of the subject’s own making, proceeding from which the subject strives to produce a reality that would be mastered and under control. Furthermore, until the future comes in which the subject will have produced a reality that is fully its own, this gap will persist. This structures the subject’s immanent self-assertion as a striving and a gap, directing it towards a future that is producible but also, fundamentally, not here yet. This future—the end goal of overcoming alienation and producing a fully mastered reality by actualizing possibilities to the fullest, which reoccupies the telos of salvation—is what modern self-assertion orients itself towards. As long as reality remains alienated, and not fully produced and controllable by the human, this telos persists as transcendent and alienated from the subject: the work of actualizing the possibilities inherent in the world is constitutively endless. Possibility is by definition something that is yet to become actual, or to be discarded in favour of actualizing an alternative possibility. Either way, possibility is inherently not-yet actualized. This is overwhelmingly so in the case of the process of actualization that is supposed to produce the world in its entirety—to exhaust the possibility whose inexhaustibility is inscribed into the very character of reality as contingent, and thus as always containing within itself a further set of possibilities. In this way, the full exhaustion of possibility cannot but transcend

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(the very logic of) possibility. Blumenberg speaks, in this regard, of “self-­ assertion’s unending task” (LMA, 215). Even though “the mastery and alteration of reality” is the goal towards which self-assertion is directed, self-assertion remains immanent for Blumenberg insofar as it remains modest—that is, insofar as it does not make the leap to the transcendent future of a fully mastered reality, but deals rather, progressively and in small measurable steps, with the possibilities that serve immediate human needs in a given historical situation at a given moment. In this, such a future remains merely a regulative ideal, without falling into what Blumenberg criticizes as “overextensions” of self-assertion’s “authentic” immanent and modest character (LMA, 49; cf. 89). Such an ideal, however, remains constitutively transcendent, so that a double gap emerges: the original separation of the subject from the reality alienated from it, coupled with the subject’s constitutive separation from the goal of overcoming this alienation. One may observe that at both ends of this gap, we find precisely the world as the totality of possibility—as the transcendent position from which the subject is alienated and which it strives to actualize—so that the subject and its striving exist as this gap between past and future, this tear in the world, through which the world does not merely remain static but reproduces its not-yet—or rather, through which the world remains at once in place (in its unreachable transcendent position) and constitutively not-yet. The not-yet is thereby perpetuated and transcendence redoubled. Traditional salvation of the soul may have, towards the end of the Middle Ages, become uncertain, but in modernity it has been replaced by a desire for actualization in a deferred future that is always “not yet”—a horizontal and temporal transcendence that constitutes self-assertion’s efforts. It is as and through this immanent-transcendent apparatus that the transcendent position of the world reproduces itself. This work on the world constitutively transcends any individual subject, too, ultimately creating alienation from the process of self-assertion itself, precisely as (in Blumenbergian terms) modest, that is, as one that is endless and is not supposed to reach the fully actualized future. The problem with the alien, transcendent divine sovereign of nominalism was that he did not care for the subject—but does the modern world care? If the prospect of divine salvation ultimately lost relevance for consciousness because it became too alien, then why would the endless not-yet of the world fare

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better?7 After all, it takes unending, infinite time to actualize the possibilities inherent in reality, across subjects and across generations (LMA, 155; cf. 571). It takes immense energy and never-ending work to actualize it, too. All that for the sake of a future that is always possible but never now, so that the subject must continue to strive for it, doing “work in his particular situation for a future whose enjoyment he cannot inherit” (LMA, 35)—ultimately, for the sake of the (re-)production of the world. The modern subject may strive for fulfilment, but all it gets is more work, the immanence of self-assertion leading to the imperative of this work (of the world) as self-legitimating, self-perpetuating and order-upholding. Both Christianity and modernity thus, in Blumenberg’s account, overcome Gnosticism by investing in the (not-yet of the) world8—but only in modernity does this investment become total, so that there is nowhere to escape from the world: the position of transcendence, too, is occupied by it, as is the position of the end goal of all striving. This produces the necessity (the desire) that the world, this world, keep going—at any cost. Thereby, the modern world becomes what Blumenberg calls “the workplace of human exertion”—the “price”, as he puts it, of modern freedom (LMA, 200). It is this imperative of work and production that lies for Blumenberg at the basis of the modern process of technicization, in turn leading to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century industrialization (LMA, 225), and to the divisions and dominations that industrialization produced or strengthened. The regulative ideal (of the immanent and modest character of self-assertion) that alone was supposed for Blumenberg to “make history humanly bearable” by “mak[ing] every absolute claim untenable” (LMA, 35) itself lays absolute claim to the subject, binding it to the imperative of the production of reality and the movement of

7  Bringing this logic up to the present, Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011) registers an estrangement from the very process of self-assertion under contemporary capitalism, as structured by the promise or the possibility of producing a non-alienated existence: “the attrition of a fantasy, a collectively invested form of life, the good life”. “[A]s the blueprint has faded”, Berlant writes, this fantasy “has become more fantasmatic, with less and less relation to how people can live” (ibid., 11), increasingly losing, as Blumenberg would say, relevance for consciousness. 8  The point is not to say that the modern not-yet is a mere “secularization” of the Christian not-yet—but to see at once the origin of the former in and its specificity vis-à-vis the latter— and to see in both a (genealogically connected) apparatus of transcendent futurity and indefinite deferral.

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actualization, the fulfilment of which is always deferred into a transcendent future. Again, it is precisely the activity of self-assertion that defines modern subjectivity in the first place. If we think of the world as the regime of reality that endlessly reproduces and justifies itself through a distribution of possibility and actuality, and where the subject is the locus it reproduces itself through, then we could say that it is the world, and not the subject, that in modernity becomes sovereign. Modern subjectivity reveals subjection as its flip side: defined in its supposed self-assertion via the work on the totality of possibility that is the world, the modern subject becomes subject to the world. And if one is not subject to the world, then one is not a subject at all. Crucially, this modern logic of subjectivation also produces, and legitimates, various specific (transcendent) forms of subjection, domination, exploitation and exclusion. If, in modernity, possibility becomes identified with the world, that means that possibility gets distributed, too, across different situations (and sites) in which subjects find themselves—geographically or across the globe, too. The idea of the distribution of and access to possibility remains unthought by Blumenberg, and yet the stakes here are considerable. Such an analytic provides a perspective on how the “workplace” that is the modern capitalist world becomes an overarching structure of domination—as well as on the logic of racialization. After all, where possibility is both telos and resource, to be competed for and over, access to it becomes unequal. Some get (or start) ahead in the race to accumulate and actualize it, others get left behind; still others do not have access to possibility at all. To master possibility, to get ahead in this race, is to occupy a position of power—over the external world, over other subjects and over those who, within this framework, are not considered subjects, as in the case of the enslaved. As Sylvia Wynter observes, employing Blumenberg’s concept of reoccupation: in the modern world, Blackness was “made to reoccupy the signifying place of medieval/Latin-Christian Europe’s fallen, degraded, and thereby nonmoving Earth” (emphasis added).9 Blackness here is, one could say, that which does not take part in modernity’s movement of actualizing possibility—that which has no (and can have no)

9  Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3 (3), 2003, 319.

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possibility.10 This exclusion of Blackness is thus constitutive of how the very categories of “impossibility and possibility in the form of a historial limit [are] produced as existence”, as Nahum Chandler writes.11 Such is, for example, the (non-)place of Africa in Hegel’s philosophy of history, as what precedes the movement of actualization (of freedom) and cannot participate in it. Another German Idealist thinker, Schelling, explicitly configures racialization as the consequence of regarding the world as the totality of possibility and world-history as the process of actualizing it—so that those remaining at the lower stage (Stufe) of this movement are supposed to serve as mere possibility for the higher. The lower is, in fact, destined for Schelling to die out naturally upon coming into contact with the higher (as in the case of “the American natives”)—or to be put to use by the higher, as in the transportation of enslaved Africans to the New World, thereby saving the lower from world-historical abandonment and giving it the possibility to become part of something higher12—to become part of the movement of possibility itself. Death and slavery index the zero degree of the logic of possibility, and division through possibility, by way of which the modern world functions. The earth itself cannot escape the world either. The modern conception of the world as a totality of possibility that must be worked on sets the stage for engaging nature as an exploitable, transformable resource, with self-assertion taking a “restless inventory” of the world’s possibilities (Weltinventor) and setting a programme for the “domination of nature” that Blumenberg sees as uniquely modern (LMA, 346; 182). With devastating ecological consequences, the nonhuman world comes to be seen as an “inexhaustible source of material”, full of possibilities that must be explored, expanded and exploited by self-assertion, from the depths of the earth up into the starry sky, and even the realm of the invisible (LMA, 474; 369).13 This development is particularly connected with the natural philosophy of Francis Bacon, who considered his thought historically 10  On Blackness as a “void of historical temporality”, see Frank B.  Wilderson III, Red, White & Black (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 38. 11  Nahum Chandler, X – The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 153. 12  F.W.J.  Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, Bd. II/1 (Stuttgart-Augsburg: Cotta, 1856), 509, 513–5. 13  Cf. LMA, 363: “the space in which the epoch pursues its curiosity about the world has its dimensions, its expanding width, height, and depth.” In other words, the totality of possibility identified with the world gets distributed along all three dimensions.

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“due”, given that it coincided with what Blumenberg calls “the opening of the world by seafaring and trade” (LMA, 388).14 In a sense, Bacon was correct, as long as one recognizes that Blumenberg’s “opening of the world” implies the opening up of the possibility of discovery and conquest, meaning the brutal European colonization of the New World, and as long as one understands the truth of “trade” as a nascent global capitalism propelled by the slave trade. The historical convergence of this view of nature as a field of possibility—“the inexhaustible field of theoretical devotion”—and the fact of Western global capitalist domination, extraction, colonization, racialization and enslavement that forms and is formed (and justified) by a conceptuality like Bacon’s is far from a coincidence. That is to say, the view of nature or the earth as a resource of possibilities to actualize occurs intimately alongside the conversion of other groups of humans into a resource, humans who, while closed to possibility or constitutively lagging behind, become themselves a resource for work and actualization.15 The modern world is, one could say, the earth converted to possibility. The world as the totality of possibility thus reveals itself to be a distribution of power and hierarchical order. This is also where the sovereignty of the world, and the logic of modern “immanent” self-assertion, converges—despite Blumenberg’s explicit opposition to Schmitt—with the Schmittian-Hobbesian (transcendent) sovereignty. Precisely because Blumenberg tends to avoid thematizing self-assertion in relation to sovereignty, the rare instance where he does is all the more telling. The subject’s transfer of right to the absolute sovereign ruler in the Hobbesian contract is, for Blumenberg, not a secularization of God’s sovereignty (as in Schmitt), but an exemplary instance of the self-assertion of reason (LMA, 219). In Hobbes, we might recall, the state of nature is configured as absolutely contingent and lawless, an alien, dysfunctional chaos, in which every subject is an absolute sovereign unto itself, and therefore no sovereignty and no rule actually exist; hence the necessity of transitioning to a civil state—of instituting, and upholding, the political world. In 14  Cf. LMA, 389: “The image of the contemporary voyages of discovery dominates Bacon’s thought.” 15  On enslavement as geo-racial “resource” in and of modernity, see Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). On the colonized and women’s bodies and labour becoming “natural resources” beginning in early-modern capitalism, see Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).

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Blumenberg, this is analogized to the general “demiurgic” creation, in early modernity, of the world as the site of rational self-assertion. Just as early scientific modernity emerged through self-assertion seizing the alienated cosmos of nominalism as a field of possibilities, in the political realm it is the alienated “chaos of absolute rights [in the posited state of nature]… that enables [reason] to grasp the opportunity of self-assertion … by transferring the many absolute rights to one absolute right – that of the ruler” (LMA, 219). In each case, this gesture indexes self-assertion’s need for order and justification, no matter “the doubtfulness of the achieved and justified order and of the resulting concept of order”, for “‘any order at all’ [is better than none]” (LMA, 219). This existential need for order is put forth and produced over against the chaos, disorder and alienation of the pre-political state of nature, likened by Hobbes to the chaos of matter, with its “constructive potentiality” (LMA, 220). Thereby, the political world becomes producible in a way comparable to the material world. If the Hobbesian state of nature maps, per Blumenberg, onto the late-­ nominalist state of alienation (LMA, 218), then the overcoming of that state coincides structurally with the overcoming of nominalism and Gnosticism, and thus with the condition of modern self-assertion as such. In other words, this logic of sovereignty—which for Blumenberg extends beyond Hobbes to other regimes of modern governance like liberalism (LMA, 220)—exemplifies, in the political sphere, the general modern logic of subjection and world-investment. Political order needs to be instituted as part of the overall world-order, its producibility and its regularity, so as to make possible the work on and of the world. Self-­ assertion structurally needs a sovereign because it needs order, or the guarantee of reality. If the subject were really to assert itself, without limit, in this contingent, alienated world in which the subject finds itself at the outset of modernity, this would lead, as in the Hobbesian state of nature, to “the unlimitedness and unlimitability of [the subject’s] claim to everything at all” and to “perfect chaos” (LMA, 218–9). This serves to show, yet again, that Blumenbergian self-assertion carries with it the requirement of a transcendent order, political and ontological, so it can function as an investment in (and justification of) the world and is not directed against it. The limited, “modest” character of modern self-assertion on which Blumenberg so emphatically insists thereby reveals subjection and (transcendent) order as its necessary conditions. The claim to power—“to everything at all that [the subject] finds within his reach”—of course remains within this order, too, but channelled into the work of

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maintaining the world instead of disrupting it. In this way, it becomes the modern claim to the possibility of mastery and domination of reality. Subjective self-assertion and political sovereignty, Blumenberg and Schmitt, function together to uphold the stability of this order and this position.16

Conclusion: Life Against the World The fear of the absence, refusal or unjustifiability of the world is shared by Blumenberg and Schmitt. The imperative that the world must be is, of course, just as central for the Christian overcoming of apocalypticism and Gnosticism as it is for modern investment in the world (Gnosticism’s second overcoming). For if there is no world, or if it has no legitimacy, then the entire logic of self-assertion falls apart, and the ground and telos of the subject’s striving dissolve into air. If, however, this world that Christianity and modernity have jointly produced—this world that is violent, contingent, exhausting—is to be delegitimated, then it might be worthwhile to dwell on the transitory moment of alienation and disorder, grasped by Hobbes and Blumenberg alike as the condition that they seek to foreclose. Thinking alienation and disorder as decoupled from the supposed necessity of the (Christian-modern) world elicits what would need to be affirmed against the logics of transcendence that set the subject endlessly to work and to reproduce the world—and what needs to be refused so as not to fall back into these logics. What needs to be refused in the first place is the all-too-often implied inevitability of the modern world and the modern structure of reality, even in those accounts that are otherwise critical of the Christian-modern. Despite his sense for historical contingency, Blumenberg, too, is keen to affirm the necessity of the modern world bordering on the teleological— no wonder that modernity is considered by him to be the decisive overcoming of Gnosticism, inevitably finishing the task that remained unfinished in Christianity. Modern self-assertion, for Blumenberg, was the “only possibility left to man”, the only alternative in the face of the alienation that the Gnostic tendency represents (LMA, 191; cf. 468)—the alternative of what Blumenberg sees as immanence against the alienation 16  On how Schmittian sovereignty serves to uphold the order of the world, see Daniel Colucciello Barber, “This, Now-Here, No-Where,” in Chepurin and Dubilet, Nothing Absolute.

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of transcendence. In the choice set up between alienated transcendence and the immanence of self-assertion, it is only the latter that could, for Blumenberg, provide the guarantee of reality, the order and security of world-production and world-investment. The Gnostic imperative of “the downfall of the world”, inhabiting what is absolutely alien vis-à-vis the world, appears unbearable or “intolerable” to Blumenberg (LMA, 131)— an “obsessional neurosis” that places the world “under the embargo of impossibility” (LMA, 67–8), in response to which the human must take up the demiurgic role and invest in the world.17 However, is it not the modern world itself that becomes unbearable, exclusionary and precarious—an endless workplace, whose burdens we are never done bearing? What if, therefore, the binary that Blumenberg advances at the origin of modernity is a false one? In the binary between the impossible and the possible, the threatening and the secure, the choice for order, which Blumenberg absolutizes, was, after all, the choice for a specific kind of order produced by, in and as modernity—an order born out of the exclusion and exploitation of forms of being deemed too disorderly or too different. What if one could rather think an affirmation or inhabitation of the disorderly and the impossible, or that which, vis-à-vis the modern world, has no possibility? What if the alien could function not as an alien transcendence, but what Fred Moten has termed an “alien immanence”18? This would involve, to reclaim Blumenberg’s dismissive phrase, a life against the world,19 a choice to inhabit immanently the downfall of the world against its order and its apparatus of exclusion and subjection. Hobbes and Blumenberg think of disorder and chaos as a hyper-individualistic, brutal state (a conception that is itself part of modernity’s narrative), so as to pit the perceived evils of such a state theodically against the good of the world-order.20 However, could the choice for 17  Fourteen years before Blumenberg’s Legitimacy, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]) employed the same Freudian concept of “obsessional neurosis” to describe the (non)position of Blackness in the world (42). This common Gnostic refusal of the world-order seen as neurosis must be thought alongside Fanon’s later call, in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1961]), for “an agenda for total disorder” (2). We acknowledge here Anthony Paul Smith’s ongoing work around this question in Fanon.  18  Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 63. 19  “The world … demanded a decision between trust and mistrust, an arrangement of life with the world rather than against it” (LMA, 131). 20  On Blumenberg’s project as a theodicy, see Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

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disorder be instead a choice made from within the (under)commons of afflicted life, a choice already made by the multitudes of those disproportionately subjected and alienated so as to produce the order of the modern world? To think the unbearability of the world that sets subjects endlessly to work—though always differentially and unequally—is to refuse the transcendence instituted by and as the modern world, to refuse to convert alienation into possibility and mastery, and to dwell with an immanence that is alien to the world of possibility, that precisely does embargo the world in the name of the impossible and demands its downfall.

Bibliography Barber, Daniel Colucciello. “This, Now-Here, No-Where,” in Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology, ed. Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [LMA]. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985. Blumenberg, Hans. Die Legitimät der Neuzeit [LN]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2017. Chandler, Nahum Dimitri. X – The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Chepurin, Kirill, and Alex Dubilet, “Immanence, Genealogy, Delegitimation: German Idealism and Political Theology,” in Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology, ed. Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2004. Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Schelling, F.W.J. Sämmtliche Werke, Bd. II/1. Ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling. Stuttgart-Augsburg: Cotta, 1856. Styfhals, Willem. No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

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Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 3. No. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

CHAPTER 5

Interrogating John Locke and the Propriety of Appropriation with Blumenberg and Voegelin Lissa McCullough

Hans Blumenberg was in the deepest sense a death-of-God thinker. His concern was to assess how human existence in the Western world can recover—has recovered—its bearings in face of the sheer annihilating absoluteness of the claims of God after the death of God; how humans can and do venture to create their own basis relatively in the aftermath of an omnipotent Creator who has ceased and desisted from creating absolutely. Hence Blumenberg’s frequent invocation of terminology such as reoccupation, rehabilitation, self-assertion, exertion and the like. As part of this overarching project, Blumenberg’s metaphorological analysis of truth in the modern age traces the radical shift from the passively received truth of the pre-modern conception to the voluntarist activity of methodical-­ technical elicitation of truth in the modern. Truth imaged as a light with its own irrepressible power to shine and penetrate the darkness gives way to an Enlightenment spirit that illuminates the obscurities of nature with its own light.

L. McCullough (*) California State University Dominguez Hills, Los Angeles, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_5

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In the modern era, truth is wrested from nature by homo faber through valiant battles and victories of solicitation: “The more ‘artificial’ the object, the more ‘truth’ it has for mankind .… Take nothing for granted, produce everything and relate it to other products!” From early modernity forward (Francis Bacon, Descartes, Montesquieu), knowledge assumes the character of labour: all truth is earned, no longer freely poured down by divine grace or wilfully fended off by the reprobate. Now, in face of Nature’s resistance, her secrets are prised by man; the pursuit of knowledge becomes an “expeditionary campaign”. Per the instaurationist creed of Bacon, “the existing state of nature no longer enjoys metaphysical sanction”, and this marks a historically new deficiency of nature; in face of this deficiency, methods are needed to produce truths.1 Methods are tools for extracting the desiderata from an uncooperative, passive, silent and “dumb” nature. As Heidegger famously articulated it, a distinctly modern technological unconcealment (aletheia) is produced when things are challenged (suffered, coerced) to bring themselves forth (vom herausfordernden Entbergen betroffen wird).2 Crucial for the present interrogation of John Locke’s political philosophy is an extended footnote in Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960) that proves a vein of gold when mined for its immense implications. This footnote expands on the notion of truth as a product of labour. In it, Blumenberg remarks that this sort of produced truth is truth that is legitimately one’s own.3 The possession to be taken—staking the claim to one’s propriety—is foundational to modern truth. The author then offers an essential observation concerning the modern transfiguration of truth into property: “Property’s foundation in labor is … implicit in the modern age’s conception of truth before it gains the ascendancy in legal theory.” Blumenberg is asserting that the wresting of truth from nature is the initial labour that in turn powers and conditions the wresting of a legally specifiable, exigible material value from nature. Propriety presupposes the rectitude of this appropriation to be indisputable—propriety first of all in truth as the product of one’s invested labour, then propriety in the material fruits of one’s truth-eliciting labour. 1  Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 23–25, 21. 2  Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans., and with an introduction by William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 16. 3  Blumenberg, Paradigms, 32 n. 1. The successive quotations are all from this seminal footnote.

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In the pre-modern context, the crucial footnote continues, if providence or nature looks after the basic needs of all human beings, then property is only possible through occupatio, and a layer of positive statutes is illegitimately superimposed onto the state of nature. Within this classical outlook, “the principle of universal anthropocentric teleology makes a metaphysical foundation of private property impossible”. Here Blumenberg briefly invokes the Stoic idea of privata nulla natura. Though he does not spell this out further, we can take for an example the Roman lyric poet Horace’s asseveration: “Nor he, nor I, nor any man, is made/by Nature private owner of the soil.”4 In other words, if Nature or God provides for one and all, the quest to appropriate is unnatural or, in a Christian context, sin. The footnote comments further: “In both ancient [Stoic] and medieval [Christian] metaphysics, God’s exclusive right to property in the absolute sense [my emphasis] is grounded in the fact that man, strictly speaking, cannot ‘produce’ anything at all. He is an agent mandated by nature or by God with the task of realizing what already lies before him.” As soon as modern thought dismantles this teleological (theological) conception, however, there arises “man” who produces—in effect, creates—truth from out of the unknown, ex abysso. Implicitly correlated with this, the footnote continues, is the idea that “nature is originally, constitutively, and chronically deficient with respect to human needs”, and “labor now becomes the authentic property-founding act”. At this very moment Blumenberg invokes Locke, the sole engagement with Locke in the book. Interpreting this in my own words, property is the new sacred substance faut de mieux that is elicited—created—by the exercise of human will and natural right. Not God, not nature, but my labour produced this value. “Nature and the Earth furnished only the almost worthless Materials, as in themselves”, writes Locke in the Second Treatise of Government (1689).5 By investing myself, proprium meum, this value is mine, not a gift of God to all, but my rightful proprietas to take hold of, to steward, to accumulate and/or to dispose according to my wishes. The footnote then observes: 4  Horace, Satires, 2.2.129–30, quoted in Benjamin Straumann, Roman Law in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 152. 5  John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed., with an introduction and notes by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 298 (§43).

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The property analogy quite obviously plays a fundamental motivating role in the modern foundational order of labor and truth. Late medieval nominalism, with its extreme theological idea of sovereignty, bequeathed the modern spirit a strong aversion to ideas of “grace” and “gift.” The origin of the modern age’s acute methodological reflection thus essentially lies in the need not to have to accept and passively receive the truth, but to ground it funditus denuo (totally anew)—“ground” understood not just in the sense of coming up with grounds for a thesis, but of producing the thesis itself from its grounds.

Labour becomes the property-founding act. The crux on which this novel assertion of ownership is based—the axiom sine qua non—is Locke’s notion of the person as proprietas of oneself asserted in the Second Treatise (§27).6 Without this axiom, products of my labour would ultimately also belong to God. To appropriate justifiably, with rectitude, I must belong to myself, not to God. Blumenberg asserts that Locke was the first to deploy this idea against neo-Stoic theories of the origin of property, and Rousseau became its most effective disseminator. He notes that its “potentially revolutionary characteristic” lies in its ever-present potential for critical application in a vast array of new contexts. Here we finish the footnote. Having lifted up the vital contents of this note to open the territory, let us shift to a perspective on Locke divulged privately by the political thinker Eric Voegelin, who can perhaps be regarded as Blumenberg’s truest friend—if, and only if, Blake’s proposition that “opposition is true friendship” holds true. In April 1953 Voegelin composed two letters to his fellow political theorist Leo Strauss in which he addressed Locke as political philosopher. Or rather, it turns out, as a pretender to the claim of being a philosopher, since in Voegelin’s eyes Locke is “a nonphilosopher, a political ideologue” who “hides his nihilism not only from others but from himself through the rich use of a conventional vocabulary” of nature, reason, right and law. These feigned notions are employed as camouflage for “something quite different” that is drastically less legitimate. In a long letter apparently never mailed, Voegelin openly emotes: “When it comes to Locke, my heart runs over. He is for me one of the most repugnant, dirty, morally corrupt appearances in the history of humanity” and “one of the first very great cases of spiritual pathology”. Voegelin regards the essential Lockean idea of man as proprietor of his own person—property 6

 Locke, Two Treatises, 287–288 (§27).

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of himself—with particularly acute vehemence as “one of the most terrible atrocities in the so-called history of philosophy—and one perhaps not yet sufficiently noticed”.7 Have we yet sufficiently noticed? What are we meant to be noticing? Voegelin’s antipathy is provoked by a spiritual nihilism—in his words, the “deliberate destruction of spiritual substance”—that he espied uniquely concentrated in Locke—not in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Malthus or anyone else, let us note—as a philosophical impostor buttressing the political-­ economic status quo of the English upper class with a pathological ideology: that is, the substitution of “spiritual substance” by a spirit of unfettered acquisitiveness that Locke lends divine sanction and legitimacy, enshrining it so effectively that it comes to ascendance, as we now witness, in modern financial capitalism’s post-colonial domination and exploitation of the greater part of the world today. Voegelin’s analysis posits that Locke’s status quo claim-staking rests on a changed meaning of ratio: “The Lockean ratio is in fact opinion, no longer participation in the ratio divina. With that, the question arises, essentially for the whole Age of Reason, whether a ratio that, unlike the classical and Christian, does not derive its authority from its share in divine being is still in any sense a ratio? For Locke, it is clear … that it is no longer that. In the concrete realization he must drop the swindle of ratio, and in the last instance refer to desire.” Locke’s constitutional theory is not truly based on natural law, in Voegelin’s view, but on a psychology of desire. He questions: “Is Locke still a philosopher of natural right? Is he still a philosopher at all?” Voegelin continues that, in the Second Treatise, Locke makes three attempts to establish a properly constructed political order: It is a brutal ideological construction to support the position of the English upper class, to which Locke belonged through his social relations. The construction is consistent, insofar as the concupiscentia is maintained from the beginning as the driving motive; it is inconsistent, insofar as the introduction of the vocabulary of natural right forces a repeated redefinition of the concept of nature …. Is an ideological constructor, who brutally destroys every philosophical problem area in order to justify the political status quo, a philosopher? 7  Eric Voegelin to Leo Strauss, Letter 41 (April 20, 1953) and Letter 42 (April 15, 1953, never sent), in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964, ed. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 93, 96, 95.

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Voegelin answers no; Locke is a nonphilosopher; he is at core an ideologue, a swindler, a servant-courtier to the ruling class, who embodies the “bad conscience of modern man” in that he hides his nihilism even from himself through the deceptive use of conventional political and legal vocabulary. Locke effects a “systematic destruction of symbols”, yet the symbols are still used with new meanings substituted.8 Leo Strauss, in his response to the Voegelin letter that was sent, does consider Locke a legitimate theorist of natural right but concedes that modern natural right is “untenable, narrow, and crude”. He agrees with Voegelin concerning the subjective focus of right in modern political theory and proposes that the German idealistic concept of freedom in Kant, Hegel and others is “a synthesis of the premodern concept of virtue with the Hobbesian-Lockean concept of subjective right as the morally fundamental fact”.9 Building on this exchange, we might infer that subjective opinion concerning right and the psychology of desire in Locke displace ratio divina much as Descartes’ cogito—doubting God but not itself—replaces ratio divina with the lumen naturale. Both early-modern thinkers carve out a space of freedom from God, from the demands of a divine morality, and equally from the natural givens of communal connectedness, responsibility and obligation. Locke’s theory converts this private space into a domain of unlimited right of accumulation, which may be—and has been—coordinated with his natural-right rationales and justifications in ways that deprive others of life, land, liberty, property and presumably happiness. As Samuel Johnson remarked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”10 And as noted by Teresa Richardson: “Western social, political, and economic institutions are argued to have … universalized fundamental principles applicable to all civil societies. The  Ibid., 95–96, 93.  Leo Strauss to Eric Voegelin, Letter 43 (April 29, 1953), in Faith and Political Philosophy, 97–8. The spur of this exchange is that Voegelin is awaiting publication of Strauss’ book on natural right, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), based on his Walgreen Foundation lectures delivered at the University of Chicago in October 1949. Years later, in a 1971 preface to the same book, he refers readers to his updated views on modern natural right in “On the Basis of Hobbes’ Political Philosophy” and “Locke’s Doctrine of Natural Right,” in What Is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe, 1959). 10  Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (1775); excerpts are republished on “Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page”: https://www.samueljohnson.com/tnt.html 8 9

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paradox is that these very prescriptions were not argued to apply to all of humanity. In fact, the belief in liberal principles co-exists with their exclusive application.”11 Much as Hegel’s philosophy gave birth to myriad Hegelianisms in the nineteenth century, so Locke’s theories gave birth to scores of imitators who popularized and propagated his political ideas in early-modern England and especially colonial America, where his foundational influence on legal-political practice has been second to none. In Capitalism and Religion (2002), the contemporary philosopher of religion Philip Goodchild poses the succinct question that we would do well to ponder: “How did this ancient god, Mammon, a perennial enemy throughout biblical history, finally gain the upper hand?” In formulating his own response Goodchild points to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748), proposing that “the murder of God was effected by the emergence of the self-regulating market as the organizing principle of the social order”.12 But I would sooner point decades earlier to John Locke and would suggest that Voegelin, thinking in exactly this vein, is revolted by Locke as the first really brutal and powerful God-killer in his “deliberate destruction of spiritual substance” and his elevation of the sanctity of private property—grounded in a revolutionary notion of self-possession—over the sacred ties that formerly obliged one to love one’s neighbour and God above all. Even as Locke continues to be widely held in high esteem today, his political philosophy has been re-evaluated in recent years as obscuring a truly dark aspect that can no longer be harboured in silence or shrouded in ignorance. The most influential proponent of early-modern liberalism, celebrated as the principal architect of modern political freedoms and influential advocate of religious toleration, Locke was a “man of affairs” who directly benefitted financially from colonialism and slavery in the new world. As secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and a major colonial proprietor, Locke assisted in drafting the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, in which slavery was in force. He was secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations (1673–1674) and a member of the Board of Trade (1696–1700) with responsibility for the 11  Theresa Richardson, “John Locke and the Myth of Race in America: Demythologizing the Paradoxes of the Enlightenment as Visited in the Present,” Philosophical Studies in Education 42 (2011), 110. 12  Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002), 28, 29.

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American colonies. He was an investor in the English slave trade through the Royal African Company and the Bahama Adventurers company.13 True, the recent revisionist research of Holly Brewer mitigates the damage somewhat, making the case that Locke authentically opposed slavery when it was politically feasible to do so, and in some instances his arguments about value-producing labour were used to break up large plantations in the hands of absentee owners in favour of smaller-scale yeoman farmers.14 But there remains a world of damage insusceptible to mitigation. Locke’s fundamental propositions concerning freedom, rights and natural law are being decoded as part and parcel of a colonial and hegemonic project undergirding mass dispossession, land expropriation, oppression, exploitation and genocide.15 The aggressive application of Locke’s political-­economic ideology was and is felt around the world as enclosing colonial lands for commercial cultivation, or profitable sale became the defining feature of the passage from a “state of nature” to a state of civilization.16 In the perspective of Locke’s philosophy, Bhikhu Parekh writes, 13  Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 90–91, 110–111, 115; Edmund S.  Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988), 129; John Quiggin, “John Locke Against Freedom,” Jacobin magazine, June 28, 2015: https://www.jacobinmag. com/2015/06/locke-treatise-slavery-private-property/; Goodchild, Religion and Capitalism, 33–34. 14  Holly Brewer, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery,” American Historical Review (October 2017): 1038–78. 15  Brad Hinshelwood, “The Carolinian Context of John Locke’s Theory of Slavery,” Political Theory 41, no. 4 (August 2013): 562–90; David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Two Treatises of Government,’” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (October 2004): 602–27; Judith Whitehead, “John Locke, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Governance of Colonial India,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 42, no. 1 (February 2012): 1–21; Vicki Hsueh, “Unsettling Colonies: Locke, ‘Atlantis’ and New World Knowledges,” History of Political Thought 29, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 259–319; Robbie Shilliam, “Forget English Freedom, Remember Atlantic Slavery: Common Law, Commercial Law and the Significance of Slavery for Classical Political Economy,” New Political Economy 17 (2012): 591–609. 16  Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Mitja Durnik, “Property Rights as a ‘Consequence’ of Economic System: The Case of John Locke and Canadian Aboriginals,” Innovative Issues and Approaches in Social Sciences 1, no. 1 (January 2008): 53–90; Judith Whitehead, “John Locke and the Governance of India’s Landscape: The Category of Wasteland in Colonial Revenue and Forest Legislation,” Economic & Political Weekly, December 11, 2010; Onur Ulas Ince, “Enclosing in God’s Name, Accumulation for Mankind: Money, Morality, and Accumulation in John Locke’s Theory of Property,” The Review of Politics 73, no. 1 (Winter

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“Indians [Native Americans] had no property in land, and the English were fully entitled to … acquire the ‘surplus’ land.” Unlike the natural-­ right-­trampling Spanish colonialism of the sword, natural-right-respecting English commercial colonialism “used force only when [the natives] did not voluntarily part with their vacant and wasted lands”. Indeed, even when the natives enclosed lands, as was sometime the practice, Locke argued that lands could be appropriated if the best possible, most productive use was not being made of them: in that case it “was to be looked on as Waste, and might be the possession of any other” (Second Treatise §38). In Locke’s view, enclosure and settlement by English settlers conferred on the natives such economic, moral, cultural and political benefit that obstinate resisters might justly be condemned as irrational and destroyed as wild savage beasts.17 Anthropologist Judith Whitehead argues that in British-controlled India, Locke’s distinction between settled agriculture on enclosed land and nonsettled forms of livelihood framed basic differences in the ways the colonial administration treated agricultural fields and forests.18 Locke’s dichotomy between value- and nonvalue-producing labour, his definition of waste and wastelands, was enshrined in early political economy, a discipline that exerted direct influence on Indian governance, particularly its land settlements. His distinctions between value-producing labour and waste figured in the development of the Forest Acts in the late nineteenth century, which were a major means to establish colonial hegemony based on the commodification of land, agriculture and forest produce, and have provided the legal framework for Adivasi (native aboriginals of India) dispossession for the past century and a quarter. Locke provided a definition of waste and wastelands that was formative in the evolution of British political economy: “The labor theory of property”, Whitehead summarizes, “simultaneously validated the expansionary tendencies of capitalist accumulation, upheld private ownership as a natural right even under conditions of accumulation, and provided a racialised component to practices

2011): 29–54; Jimmy Casas Klausen, “Room Enough: America, Natural Liberty, and Consent in Locke’s Second Treatise,” The Journal of Politics 69, no. 3 (August 2007): 760–69. 17  Bhikhu Parekh, “Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill,” in Decolonization of the Imagination: Culture, Knowledge, and Power, ed. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (London: Zed, 1995), 88. 18  Judith Whitehead, “John Locke, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Governance of Colonial India,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 42, no. 1 (February 2012): 1–21.

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of colonial dispossession.”19 Quite pertinently, then, Vicki Hsueh challenges the Lockean conception of common sense (“reasonableness”) and common right to property by examining the current indigenous perspectives delegitimized by the Second Treatise and offering contemporary indigenous conceptions of common sense as a challenge to those claims.20 Political scientist Jimmy Casas Klausen argues that the Second Treatise grants to adult English non-express consenters the full political mandate to leave their natal polities and start new ones wherever there is “room enough”, meaning wherever there are nonenclosed “undeveloped” lands. Thus Lockean liberalism not only justified settler-initiated colonialism but ideologically mandated it insofar as natural liberty requires the availability of open space for its actualization.21 Umut Özsu stresses the importance of Marx’s term “primitive accumulation” to capture the specificity of expulsion and expropriation, marking it off from the routine economic coercion that characterizes established processes of capital accumulation. Wherever the capitalist mode of production is fully established, he writes, social relations are structured by a set of market constraints that get expressed in the ideology of “free labour”, “contractual freedom” and “individual liberty.” But in an environment that is not yet integrated into the capitalist mode of production, such as the colonial environment, the use of direct, unconcealed violence to compel dispossession and subjugate labour power is the modus operandi.22 Here I would submit that a better term for this—the mot juste—would be privative accumulation. The further darkness in this story is the persistent insusceptibility of Lockean property law to critique and scrutiny: David J. Seipp makes the case that as critical as property law is and remains for lawyers, virtually none of them are interested in investigating the origin and foundation of 19  Whitehead, “John Locke and the Governance of India’s Landscape,” 2. Here she cites Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). 20  Vicki Hsueh, “Cultivating and Challenging the Common: Lockean Property, Indigenous Traditionalisms, and the Problem of Exclusion,” Contemporary Political Theory 5 (2006): 193–214. 21  Klausen, “Room Enough.” 22   Umut Özsu, “Grabbing Land Legally: A Marxist Analysis,” Leiden Journal of International Law (2019), 5. This article addresses how land and resource grabbing (including coercion of human resources) is the real core of capital accumulation, and how it has been ongoing from Locke’s era to our own, continuing apace internationally today. See also Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

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that right, and here Seipp quotes the eighteenth-century words of William Blackstone: “Pleased as we are with the possession, we seem afraid to look back to the means by which it was acquired, as if fearful of some defect in our title” (Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1776). Blackstone defines the right of property as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”—the spit and image of Locke’s invention. Seipp observes that legal scholars addressing the foundational origins of property rights typically begin with the writings of John Locke and give little consideration to the meaning, scope or importance of property in the centuries of common-law development prior to Locke’s time.23 Those would be the centuries in which religious ethics and traditions of communal usage play a predominant role. The Lockean legacy, once its measure is taken globally, from the most to the least developed countries of the world, is mindboggling. The global-historical ironies and—let us acknowledge them—criminalities with respect to the most rudimentary humanitarian rights (not to speak of animal or ecosystem rights) persist on a tragic scale.24 How is it that Locke’s definition (invention) of property rights, including the root notion of possession of one’s own person, proprietas in oneself, spearheaded the dispossession and subjection of peoples around the globe? How did it happen that exercise of Lockean freedom as a birth right in effect mandated profiting from land expropriations, expulsions and indeed genocides of natives of other lands in practice? How is it that the present-­ day possessive world-order created on the basis of these powerfully disseminated and liturgically reiterated Lockean ideas so successfully resists and evades any scrutinizing examination of its ideational foundations—in brief, of its legitimacy? Locke’s axioms are enshrined in a quasi-sacred, unquestioned and unquestionable metaphysical-legal supremacy. Indeed, what need is there of divine sanction after the death of God, we must wonder dumbfounded, when a set of legal-political mores reigns with such hieratic inviolability?

23  David J. Seipp, “The Concept of Property in the Early Common Law,” Law and History Review 12, no. 1 (Spring 1994), 30, 29. 24  Vincenzo Ruggiero models for us how not to mince words in The Crimes of the Economy: A Criminological Analysis of Economic Thought (London: Routledge, 2013). Chapter 2 of this book centres on Locke, “Humans and Venison,” 7–22.

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The modern age began, Blumenberg affirms, “not as the epoch of the death of God but as the epoch of the hidden God, the deus absconditus— and a hidden God is pragmatically as good as dead” (LMA, 346–7).25 When William of Ockham raised theology to its maximal pretension over against reason, it had the unintended result of reducing theology’s role in explaining the world to a minimum—and now as a consequence, “man had to behave as though God were dead”. This entails the deepest implications for the social structure. A social-political order established on the basis of transcendent divine sanction makes an absolutely grandiose claim—one comprehending every dimension of reality—and precisely therein it carries within itself an absolute vulnerability. Should the absolute claim falter, nothing whatsoever that it once supported can remain standing—as Nietzsche prophesied two centuries after Locke—no authority, no truth, no morality, no meaning. Such a deflation of divine authority became visible in the foundering of late-medieval Christendom, the wars of the Reformation, the weakening of monarchic divine right, the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the English Revolution, leading as it did to an unfathomable lèse-majesté— the regicide of Charles I in 1649, an event that never ceases to shock anyone sensitive to its historical-metaphysical implications.26 One marvels to realize how crucially Locke was positioned within the world’s architecture precisely as the political impact of God’s recession into unknowability became patent. Catholic regimes were failing and Britain’s imperial power began its rise towards apogee. When the Whig moment arrived with the Glorious Revolution (1688), Locke was there with his programme to fill the theological-political vacuum with what Voegelin calls euphemistically “something quite different”. Goodchild well encapsulates the ways in which Locke was crucial for articulating and  See also LMA, 171: “That such an idea of the absolute and its transcendence could achieve such a sustained influence on Scholasticism can only be understood as the repression of the humanistic element of the Christian tradition by its theological ‘rigor.’ Only when the indifference of divinity toward man had been thought through to the end was theology’s immanent logic satisfied.” 26  It merits noting that J.N. Figgis attributes the rise of contract theory to the self-assertion (to borrow Blumenberg’s term) of the Teutonic element, keenly interested in security and freedom, as against the Latin and civilian element, loyal to the view that all political power comes from above, as in the divine-right patriarchal theory of Robert Filmer. Figgis goes so far as to declare the monarchomachian treatise Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1576) a document of the Whig revolution avant la lettre: “It is no anachronism to say that this treatise is very Whig, if by Whig be understood that body of opinion that is expressed in Locke and reflected in the Revolution settlement” (John Neville Figgis, Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius: 1414–1625, with introduction by Garrett Mattingly [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960], 182–183, 178). 25

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propagating the values of his class: they were, he writes, “enshrined in political concepts of the right to own property, the liberty to form contracts, and the separation of social and economic life from religious control”. Per Goodchild, Locke’s epistemology established empiricism as the basis for the pursuit of a purely technical reason; his political philosophy provided the theological legitimation for the modern capitalist state; his work on toleration separated the commonwealth and the sphere of political economy from the influence of the church; his study of money contributed to the emergence of economics and he was a founding subscriber in the Bank of England. The conceptual framework he established for the notions of knowledge, right, liberty and money “has remained dominant precisely because it has successfully lent itself to the making of money”.27 With this ideological, institutional and financial infrastructure in place, the doors were opened to colonial land grabs, imperial profiteering, capital accumulation and a new for-profit piety: a Protestant-rationalist rereading of Christianity and natural law that did not interpose any objection to the infinite quest of lucre. God helps those who help themselves. The social historian Richard Henry Tawney, in his classic reply to Max Weber’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922), declared that the Lockean revolution was nothing less than a redefinition of the very basis and nature of society: Society is not a community of classes with varying functions, united to each other by mutual obligations arising from their relation to a common end. It is a joint-stock company rather than an organism, and the liabilities of the shareholders are strictly limited. They enter it in order to insure the rights already vested in them by the immutable laws of nature. The State, a matter of convenience, not of supernatural sanctions, exists for the protection of those rights, and fulfills its object in so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom, it secures full scope for their unfettered exercise. The most important of such rights are property rights, and property rights attach mainly, though not exclusively, to the higher orders of men, who hold the tangible, material “stock” of society .…The Church [of England]… reproduced the temper of an aristocratic society, as it reproduced its class organization and economic inequalities, and was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position which … is still the characteristic and odious vice of Englishmen.28  Philip Goodchild, The Theology of Money (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 19.  Richard Henry Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922; New York: Penguin, 1980), 192–3. Disclaimer: It is not my intention to insult or offend any English man or woman in citing this quotation; the overstated opinion expressed is Tawney’s, not mine. 27 28

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For Locke, society—a nonnatural contractual artefact of voluntary consent or refusal of consent—is nonexistent in the state of nature. Where did all those social relations and obligations go? They were simply abstracted away by a myth. In the Lockean mythology, as Lewis Mumford affirms, “the individual was abstracted by the political philosopher of the new order from the bosom of human society. This individual [ceased] to maintain his omnipresent relations with city, family, household, club, college, guild, and office: he became the new unit of political society.”29 Locke’s reinvention (re-mythologization) of the Hobbesian “state of nature” once again abolishes society with the stroke of a pen—but this time with a different prevenient motive: in order to create society ex nihilo strictly limited by conditions that revere a new sacred, a new sacrosanct: proprietas. In Locke’s myth, the individual’s labour has sempiternally created property preveniently—mythically always before the formation of society—such that the individual’s currently held property always trumps belongingness to society; the individual’s only incentive to consent to “join” society is to protect the property he has in himself and the investments of “his” labour—which includes the labour of his servants and slaves, his financial assets gained from profiteering, his economic exploitation of foreign lands that were neglected by the native denizens who merely lived on them and failed to produce value from them. From his opportune location in the English social order, Locke seized the moment to enshrine what he held sacred, defending it from the post-­ Christian, post-monarchic, democratic age already militantly arrived, and did so by redefining a few terms for a rising elite with power to institute and enforce them—the efficacity of the “work of myth” confirmed.30 Locke founded a new religion focused around the sacrality of proprietas in The Second Treatise on Government, while retaining in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) as much as was reasonably salvageable of the ­trappings of Christian faith to give the new religion a respectable pedigree, hitching it to a long history, and thereby the authority of an apparent continuity with Jewish-Christian tradition—meanwhile making the radical, revolutionary inversions necessary to enshrine the new divinity securely, pouring old deadly sins and vices into new wineskins of virtue and 29  Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (1926; Boston: Beacon, 1957), 10. 30  Here I allude to Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, ironically but not facetiously; far rather, I intend to affirm that Blumenberg’s scrutiny of myth and metaphor is on the money.

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s­ anctimony. This is what Voegelin intends when he charges Locke, as we have seen, with the “systematic destruction of symbols” yet with still using the symbols, now with new meanings substituted. From a retrospective vantage point, it is arguable that the Lockean religion, which has granted unfettered licence to the pursuit of illimitable possession, is the single most successful and thriving mainstream Western faith since the demise of the Christian God in early modernity. Viral possessiveness and the passion to accumulate, precisely in its illimitability, is a metaphysical disease that plays itself out on a physical playing field in terms of material “cash value”. It longs beyond the limits of the earth, the world is not enough, as Hannah Arendt warned in her study of imperialism: a relentless accumulation of property must be based on a relentless accumulation of power because the process of limitless capital accumulation needs the political structure of an unlimited power to protect growing property by constantly growing more powerful.31 Thinking in the same vein, Simone Weil held illimitable desire to be the root of all evil and injustice: “There is always some illimitability in desire. To conquer only the terrestrial globe? To live only a hundred years? To make only 40% profit on the money one has invested?”32 If every religion has its specific pathologies, the religion of proprietas has the notable pathology that it desires to possess without accepting any ends as limits, nor can it imagine sharing what it acquires except to support further acquisition. It converts everything into a means to further means, to the point that it cannot imagine an end, 31  Hannah Arendt, “Imperialism,” part 2 of The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian, 1958), 143, 149. Her extended analysis of the unlimited drive to capital accumulation, especially 142–157, is acutely pertinent to the present chapter: “Wealth became a never-ending process of getting wealthier”, and anyone could belong to this class “who conceived of life as a process of perpetually becoming wealthier, and considered money as something sacrosanct which under no circumstances should be a mere commodity for consumption” (145). Arendt’s intensive focus falls not on Locke but on Hobbes, reminding us that both figures need to be rethought together in a less sanitizing perspective. For even though Hobbes is widely regarded as an “ugly fellow”, he too has been sanitized by the view that he embraced the absolutism of the sovereign out of a dread of social-political chaos, rather than that he sought the right to deny loyalty to any commonwealth, as Arendt argues, retaining the freedom to dissolve it by declaring (in his perception) a “state of war”. The very conception of his commonwealth includes its dissolution, as Hobbes does “not even want to succeed in incorporating [the individual] definitely into a political community” but rather seeks to lose the bonds of and obligations to any community (140). 32  Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 2 vols., trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 1:88.

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that is to say, an end in itself. The universe is for it a kingdom of means to no end—what Weil considered the precise recipe for hell. The logical consequence of this “power-accumulating machine”, Arendt observes, is “the destruction of all living communities, those of the conquered peoples as well as of the people at home”.33 So it is that interrogating Locke as political philosopher—was he a philosopher or a class-interest schemer, a shyster, a fraud?—ushers us immediately onto the ongoing realities of post-colonial land and resource dispossession, forced and involuntary dislocation, economic subjection and enslavement, unfettered profiteering and accumulation, and aggressive development and manipulation of the natural world that we refer to as environmental destruction and ecosystem degradation, or more colloquially as “killing the planet”. This is to propose that the aggressivity of Locke’s ideological programme in history—a history still unfolding— should be brought into mainstream scrutiny as least as patently as the Nazism of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt has, and for the same reasons. “Truth”, Blumenberg writes, “insofar as it is divorced from the salvational necessity of old and subordinated to a new ideal of human determination, still appears [in the post-Copernican era] to bear the stamp of the seductive, the deviant, and the taboo.”34 In writing this, he seems to have in mind the “wickedness” of Faustian man, perhaps also the brutish realism of Hobbesian man, but not the “good” reasonable Lockean man. What is deviant here? Lockean man steps into the natural light free and tolerant, cool and benign, fair in attitude, noncombative, on a theoretically level-playing field with all others, unfettered by social ties and obligations, unclouded by theological-ethical traditions, ready and eager to make the most of a nature that has no quality, virtue, or value until it is taken possession of, grabbed, enclosed, enframed, challenged forth and turned to profit by industrious investment of my (i.e. my servant’s, my slave’s, my employee’s, my horse’s) labour. When my horse bites the grass, when my servant cuts the turf, the labour that is mine (i.e. my horse’s, my servant’s, my slave’s, my employee’s), by “removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixt my Property in them”, and let us note, they “become my Property … without the assignation or consent of any body”. “I have a right to them” (Second Treatise, §28).  Arendt, “Imperialism,” 146, 137.  Blumenberg, Paradigms, 20.

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Blumenberg invokes the “arrogated sovereignty” of the Baconian creed: the rights exercised by it are sovereign rights.35 Surely, if any person has been consequential for the all the creatures of the earth, achieving a sovereign self-assertion of his legacy after the death of God, that person is John Locke. Without speculating on Locke’s psychology but simply sticking with the historical evidence, I dare say one can surmise that he sincerely believed in the good he was doing as his influence transvaluated the traditional mortal sins of avarice, gluttony, lust, theft, hubris and sloth into the signature virtues of a new world order, the gospel according to John Locke, bearing the blessings of a Whiggish God. Had Locke not existed, no doubt it would have been necessary to invent him. Fortunately for the powers that he represented in an epochal hour—unfortunately for the conquered and expropriated, the enslaved and indentured, the untimely dispatched—Locke was there to fix in natural law, with divine sanction, the property claims, interests and imperial-colonial sovereignty of his ruling class. Truly a myth-maker par excellence, Locke may have grasped better than any other modern man the Blumenbergian creed that the truth of metaphor is a verité a faire.36

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: Meridian, 1958. Armitage, David. “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Two Treatises of Government.’” Political Theory 32.5 (October 2004): 602–27. Arneil, Barbara. John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Becker, Ronald. “The Ideological Commitment of Locke: Freemen and Servants in the Two Treatises of Government.” History of Political Thought 13 (1992): 631–56. Bell, Stephanie A., John F. Henry, and L. Randall Wray. “A Chartalist Critique of John Locke’s Theory of Property, Accumulation, and Money: or, Is It Moral to Trade Your Nuts for Gold?” Review of Social Economy 62.1 (March 2004): 51–65. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [LMA]. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge: MIT, 1983. Blumenberg, Hans. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Translated by Robert Savage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.  Blumenberg, Paradigms, 21–22.  Ibid., 15.

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Breen, Timothy. The Lockean Moment: The Language of Rights on the Eve of the American Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Brewer, Holly. “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery.” American Historical Review (October 2017): 1038–78. Donoghue, John. “Transatlantic Discourses of Freedom and Slavery during the English Revolution.” Storicamente: Laboratorio di Storia 10 (2014): 1–24. Durnik, Mitja. “Property Rights as a ‘Consequence’ of Economic System: The Case of John Locke and Canadian Aboriginals.” Innovative Issues and Approaches in Social Sciences 1.1 (January 2008): 53–90. Emberley, Peter, and Barry Cooper, eds. Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Farr, J. “‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate”: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political Thought.” Political Theory 14.2 (1986): 260–68. Figgis, John Neville. Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius: 1414–1625. Introduction by Garrett Mattingly. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960. Fitzmaurice, Andrew. Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Goodchild, Philip. Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety. London: Routledge, 2002. Goodchild, Philip. The Theology of Money. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Harris, Cole. Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance and Reserves in British Columbia. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and with an introduction by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Hinshelwood, Brad. “The Carolinian Context of John Locke’s Theory of Slavery.” Political Theory 41.4 (August 2013): 562–90. Hsueh, Vicki. “Cultivating and Challenging the Common: Lockean Property, Indigenous Traditionalisms, and the Problem of Exclusion.” Contemporary Political Theory 5 (2006): 193–214. Hsueh, Vicki. “Unsettling Colonies: Locke, ‘Atlantis’ and New World Knowledges.” History of Political Thought 29.2 (Summer 2008): 259–319. Ince, Onur Ulas. “Enclosing in God’s Name, Accumulation for Mankind: Money, Morality, and Accumulation in John Locke’s Theory of Property.” The Review of Politics 73.1 (winter 2011): 29–54. Klausen, Jimmy Casas. “Room Enough: America, Natural Liberty, and Consent in Locke’s Second Treatise.” The Journal of Politics 69.3 (August 2007): 760–69. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

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Morgan, Edmund S. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: Norton, 1988. Özsu, Umut. “Grabbing Land Legally: A Marxist Analysis.” Leiden Journal of International Law (2019): 1–19. Parekh, Bhikhu. “Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill.” In Decolonization of the Imagination: Culture, Knowledge, and Power. Edited by Jan Nederveen Pieterse and B. Parekh. London: Zed, 1995. 81–98. Perelman, Michael. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Quiggin, John. “John Locke Against Freedom.” Jacobin magazine. June 28, 2015. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/locke-treatise-slavery-privateproperty/ Richardson, Theresa. “John Locke and the Myth of Race in America: Demythologizing the Paradoxes of the Enlightenment as Visited in the Present.” Philosophical Studies in Education 42 (2011): 101–112. Ruggiero, Vincenzo. The Crimes of the Economy: A Criminological Analysis of Economic Thought. London: Routledge, 2013. Screpanti, Ernesto. The Fundamental Institutions of Capitalism. London: Routledge, 2001. Seipp, David J. “The Concept of Property in the Early Common Law,” Law and History Review 12.1 (Spring 1994): 29–91. Shilliam, Robbie. “Colonial Architecture or Relatable Hinterlands? Locke, Nandy, Fanon, and the Bandung Spirit,” Constellations 23.3 (2016): 425–35. Shilliam, Robbie. “Forget English Freedom, Remember Atlantic Slavery: Common Law, Commercial Law and the Significance of Slavery for Classical Political Economy.” New Political Economy 17 (2012): 591–609. Straumann, Benjamin. Roman Law in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Strauss, Leo. What Is Political Philosophy? Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe, 1959. Tawney, Richard Henry. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. New  York: Penguin, 1980. Tully, James. “Aboriginal Property and Western Theory.” In Theories of Empire 1450–1800. Edited by David Armitage. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998. 345–72. Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Foreword by Dante Germino. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952. Waswo, Richard. “The Formation of Natural Law to Justify Colonialism, 1539–1689.” New Literary History 27.4 (Autumn 1996): 743–59. Weil, Simone. First and Last Notebooks. Translated by Richard Rees. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1970.

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Whitehead, Judith. “John Locke, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Governance of Colonial India.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 42.1 (February 2012): 1–21. Whitehead, Judith. “John Locke and the Governance of India’s Landscape: The Category of Wasteland in Colonial Revenue and Forest Legislation.” Economic & Political Weekly. December 11, 2010. Wood, Ellen Meiksins, and Neal Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688. New  York: New  York University Press, 1997. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. “God in Locke’s Philosophy.” In The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought. Edited by Chris L. Firestone and Nathan A. Jacobs. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.112–48. Villalobos-Ruminott, Sergio. “Notes on Accumulation and Violence.” ACLA presentation. Georgetown University. March 2019.

CHAPTER 6

Political Legitimacy and Founding Myths Zeynep Talay Turner

“Moses the Egyptian” puts Blumenberg in dialogue with Sigmund Freud and Hannah Arendt. The essay is a review of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, but begins with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and quite early on draws our attention not only to the “deep-rooted” similarities between the two texts, but also to the “equivalence of the effects”: “As Freud took Moses the man from his people, so Hannah Arendt took Adolf Eichmann from the State of Israel.” Blumenberg does not hide his “indignation” towards this “stealing”. Why does he think that both Freud and Arendt took something away from the Jewish people? More importantly, what is it that he thinks they took away? Simply the founder of their state, albeit, not a national hero to be commemorated with exuberant celebrations every year and with statutes erected in squares, but on the contrary, a negative hero. A negative hero is one who created the very conditions of the possibility of their nationhood despite the fact that he belongs to and/ or represents those who had almost destroyed those conditions. Blumenberg claims that Arendt, in thinking she was accused of a lack of piety towards the victims, failed to see the public and political function of the trial, which was to provide the Israeli state with a founding myth and a source of legitimacy. Z. T. Turner (*) Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_6

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We can understand what Blumenberg means by this last statement against the background of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and Work on Myth. Though Blumenberg does not discuss political myths particularly in Work on Myth, some of his concepts may provide part of the theoretical framework for thinking about them. For instance, his idea that “myths create not only meanings but also significance” has become an important insight to understand one of the social functions of political myths. The discussion of significance is also related to that of legitimacy. The legitimacy of the modern age for Blumenberg is grounded in the idea of human self-assertion, which needs to be distinguished from the impulse towards what he calls human self-empowerment. The latter gives rise to thinking in absolutist terms and to the gnostic adoration, or even, deification of humankind. Human self-assertion, on the other hand, is a result of a new quality of consciousness that started to emerge by the end of the Middle Ages: the world is something that we can have an effect on. Self-assertion means we do not have to legitimate science in terms of the absolutist agenda of the Christian tradition. It is an existential programme according to which human beings cannot avoid having to make their own history. The interesting question is, then, whether a state that seeks legitimacy by “political myths” is trying to answer such an absolutist question (self-empowerment) or whether it is simply seeking its place in the world alongside other states (self-assertion). Whether or not Blumenberg’s own answers to this question are convincing, the terminology itself may open up interesting discussions.

Mythos Versus Logos In Work on Myth, Blumenberg asks why, with the so-called achievements of the Enlightenment project—that is, rational and scientific thought— myths have not disappeared. His answer goes like this: “No one”, says Blumenberg, “will want to maintain that myth has better arguments than science; no one will want to maintain that myth has martyrs, as dogma and ideology do, or that it has the intensity of experience of which mysticism speaks” (WM, 67)—but it has something to offer: significance. If we understand the function of myth in creating such significance, we will be less perturbed by the question of “why myths have not disappeared” and less willing to assert an antithesis between mythos and logos, mythos and reason, and the presupposed transition from mythos (irrational thinking) to logos (rational thinking). As Angus Nicholls points out, though they

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have differences, various treatments of myth from the pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle through the New Testament, to the Enlightenment make one central argument: “myth is a stage in human cultural development that is primitive, misleading and often fallacious, and should therefore be left behind if one is to achieve philosophical rationality, to acquire the correct (usually monotheistic) religious beliefs, or to attain the practical advantages of scientific modernity.”1 In order to overcome both the Enlightenment idea that once we enter into rational thinking (logos), myths are old-fashioned, and as such belong to a distant past,2 and the Romantic idea that myths are more fundamental to human nature than rational and scientific thinking, Blumenberg proposes that rather than evaluating myth from the perspective of the terminus ad quem (the point at which the process terminates) as the Enlightenment did, we should focus on its terminus a quo (its point of departure) (WM, 19). Both Cassirer and Vico “have approached myth from the point of view of scientific rationality as the terminus ad quem, and they have thus, at least partially, failed in their attempts to theorise myth in its autonomy”.3 Blumenberg writes, “What Cassirer and others have overlooked while demanding a theory of the origin of the myth is the circumstance that the entire stock of mythical materials and models that has been handed down to us has passed through the agency of reception, has been optimised by its mechanism of selection” (WM, 168). To give, or even give back, autonomy to myth, we should focus on its function. For Blumenberg the primary function of myth is to act as a barrier to what he calls “the absolutism of reality”. He uses this phrase right from the beginning to signal that “man came close to not having control of the conditions of his existence and, what is more important, believed that he simply lacked control of them” (LMA, 3–4). Human beings are limited 1  Angus Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (New York: Routledge, 2015), 2. 2  By drawing our attention to the original meaning of myth that is “word, speech” and the secondary meanings, “public speech” and also “dialogue, conversation” or “tale, narration”, Bottici points out that no dichotomy of mythos versus logos existed in the ancient Greek sources, and that such a dichotomy is a “later interpretation of the modern rationality in search of its origins”. She writes, “By the time of the composition of the Homeric poems – a time that most interpreters place around the eight century BC, the semantic area of the Homeric mythos corresponded to the area that would later be covered by the term logos” (Chiara Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 21. 3  Bottici, Political Myth, 116.

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creatures with limited resources, and in order for this vulnerable being to survive, it needs to put some distance between itself and the external world, “the archaic unfamiliarity of the world” (WM, 48), which otherwise may overwhelm it.4 As a means of self-preservation for a vulnerable creature, myth may be doing what many other forms of human cognition do—stories of all sorts, metaphors, religion, philosophy, science and technology. Indeed, “[m]yth itself is a piece of high-carat ‘work of logos’” (WM, 12). As the Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst says, it is a misconstrual to see “myth as something threatened by and threatening to science, or as a kind of misinformation for which science is the cure”; it “is actually, however, an alternative kind of science; that is, an alternative kind of investigation”.5 This “alternative kind of science” is conducted via Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology in Work on Myth. Like Freud, who, in order to be able to talk about the relationship between law and culture, gives us a narrative about the origin of law and religion, Blumenberg feels the urge to give us an “imaginative reconstruction”6 of this primordial situation of our ancestors, because only then could we understand what we human beings are, or at least come close to an understanding of what we are. His account of the way we have worked on myth begins with an account of the work of myth. “Stories are told”, he says, “in order to kill something. In the most harmless, but not the least important case: to kill time. In another and more serious case: to kill fear” (WM, 34). Mythic thought functions as a compensation to reduce the anxiety of the helpless ego and transform it into a more bearable fear (WM, 4–5). For Blumenberg anxiety must be rationalized into fear, “not through experience and knowledge, but rather through devices like that of the substitution of the familiar for the unfamiliar, of explanations for the inexplicable, of names for the unnameable” (WM, 5). “Panic and paralysis”, says Blumenberg, “as the two extremes of anxiety behaviour, are dissolved by the appearance of calculable magnitudes to deal with and regulate ways of dealing with them” (WM, 6). We 4  Here Blumenberg was probably influenced by Arnold Gehlen’s idea of human being as a deficient being (Mängelwesen): “human beings are not naturally assigned to a specific environment and are, therefore, incomplete beings in comparison with other animals. Due to their incomplete nature, they must undergo a process of disciplining” (Bottici, Political Myth, 120–121). 5  Robert Bringhurst, Everywhere Being is Dancing (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), 64. 6  Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 129.

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cannot know the origins of myths, and “however certain it is that myths were made up”, Blumenberg says, “we know no one who did it and no moment at which it was done” (WM, 266). But myth gives names, and naming the unknown also means dominating it. Blumenberg draws our attention to the biblical story of the beginning, with the giving of names in Paradise: in the beginning the earth was formless and void, but God said: “Let there be light; and there was light” (WM, 35). By naming things God created them. But the idea that “all trust in the world begins with names” is characteristic of science too: “the faith that the suitable naming of things will suspend the enmity between them and man, turning it into a relationship of pure serviceability. The fright that has found the way back to language has already been endured” (WM, 35). One way in which the difference between modern science and myth is merely a matter of degree is that “the modern age has become the epoch that finally found a name for everything” (WM, 38). By naming the unknown, myth also provides a means for orientation; that is to say, the arbitrariness of reality is eliminated. And thanks to the significance (Bedeutsamkeit) that myth produces, this means of orientation is achieved. Referring to Erich Rothacker’s “principle of significance”, Blumenberg argues that the purport of significance is that “in man’s historical world of culture, things have ‘valences’ for attention and for vital distance different from those they have in the objective world of things that is studied by the exact sciences”, and he further states that “‘[s]ignificance’ is related to finitude” (WM, 67)—that is, it responds to, if not answers, the question of what it means to be a creature with a limited time on earth.7 Blumenberg also defines significance as the following: “Significance also arises as a result of the representation of the relationship between the resistance that reality opposes to life and the summoning up of energy that enables one to measure up to it” (WM, 75). Odysseus, for instance, has a mythical quality or significance for two reasons: (1) his return home symbolizes the restoration of meaning in which the order of world and life is guaranteed against accident and arbitrariness; (2) his homecoming is accomplished against not only external 7  Blumenberg also refers to Simmel while examining the idea of significance. He quotes a passage from Simmel’s Die Philosophie des Geldes: “Objects are not difficult to acquire because they are valuable, but we call those objects valuable that resist our desire to possess then. Since the desire encounters resistance and frustration, the objects gain a significance that would never have been attributed to them by an unchecked will” (WM, 67).

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adversaries but also against internal diversion (WM, 76). Or Prometheus’ deeds are significant “on account of his powers of self-assertion and cunning in his dealings with the absolutism of Zeus, and because of his daring procurement of fire for human beings”.8 “Thus”, Nicholls claims, “wherever the interests of human beings appear to be threatened by external reality, there is potential for significance.”9 For Blumenberg, “the Prometheus story is just one paradigmatic instance of human beings forced to deal with ‘the absolutism of reality,’ which in this instance was epitomised and demonstrated by Zeus”.10 Thus, compared to the absolute power of the God of monotheism, that is, the supreme, omnipresent God, myth has a polytheistic structure and gives rise to a division of powers. It should also be noted that there is no single myth, whether it be that of Odysseus or Prometheus. Myth can survive as long as it can be adapted to different times and cultures. In other words, those myths that can survive over time are those that change according to the different needs of cultures. This is why, he argues, that as long as there is a need for it, you can never bring a myth to an end. And this is why we still have Prometheus and Oedipus and so on, and not only Hesiod’s Prometheus or Sophocles’ Oedipus, but also Goethe’s Prometheus and Freud’s Oedipus. I have already remarked that myth, as a means of self-preservation, may be doing what many other forms of human cognition do (stories of all sorts, metaphors, religion, philosophy, science and technology); yet, it can also be suggested that the constant presence of these myths through cultural selection is consistent with human self-assertion. I will return to this. It is worth noting at this point that Blumenberg’s treatment of myth— in particular his claim that myth is rooted in a primordial fear—sounds similar to Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Yet, when they say that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology”,11 or “humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown … enlightenment is mythical fear radicalised”,12 they are finding a different sort of commonality between myth and science. Blumenberg finds similarities between myth and science because they are partners in a joint enterprise, not because they make the  Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 20.  Ibid., 20. 10  Ibid., 139. 11  Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford; California: Stanford University Press, 2002), xviii. 12  Ibid., 11. 8 9

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same mistakes and certainly not because one mutates into the other. For Adorno and Horkheimer, modern instrumental reason is driven by a logic of domination that is partly self-preservation, partly self-empowerment: “enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can make them: their ‘in-itself’ becomes ‘for him’. In their transformation, the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination.”13 For Blumenberg, both myth and science may be seen as devices of self-­ assertion. What does that mean?

Self-assertion and Legitimacy When in the mid-1960s Blumenberg defended the legitimacy of the modern age, he was responding to those who had claimed that some apparently modern ideas and concepts—notably progress—are in fact a secularized version of Christian ideas, and that therefore the claims of the modern age to have achieved something distinctive were spurious. His response was to defend unfettered scientific enquiry and curiosity as precisely such achievements. Karl Löwith, for instance, in his Meaning in History, claims that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophies of history, including Voltaire, Condorcet, Hegel, Marx and Proudhon, in which we encounter the idea of inevitable progress, are nothing other than a “secularization” of eschatological patterns that we see in Christianity and Judaism, to which Blumenberg counters by pointing out that those modern ideas of progress that “promise” something do not promise “redemption” or “salvation”, but something that results from an immanent process of development. As Robert Wallace says in his Introduction to Legitimacy, there is no “transcendent intervention comparable to the coming of the Messiah, the end of the world, the Last Judgment, and so forth”.14 The idea of “immanent process of development”, claims Blumenberg, is consistent not with theological absolutism or its equivalent, but with human self-assertion, which he defines as “an existential program, according to which man posits his existence in a historical situation and indicates to himself how he is going to deal with the reality surrounding him and what use he will make of the possibilities that are open to him” (LMA, 138). There are indeed modern equivalents of absolutism, but they arise not  Ibid., 6.  Robert Wallace, Introduction to LMA, xvii.

13 14

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because a theological substance turns into its modern equivalent, but because some modern thinkers “reoccupy a vacant – absolutist – answer position”. However, what is crucial is that others did not, and saw the world as something that we can have an effect on. In other words, as Nicholls claims, against the “absolutism of reality” which manifests itself in the new disguise of the theological absolutism of the late medieval period—a contingent world with a “completely unrestricted God who had created the world and who could therefore also destroy the world at any given moment for no apparent reason”—human beings had a choice: “Either to continue praying to an apparently hidden and arbitrary God in the hope of salvation, or to undertake what Blumenberg calls ‘immanent self-assertion’”—and the modern age chose the second option.15 Löwith himself thought he had found a remedy for the Hebrew and Christian view of history (which manifests itself in the modern idea of progress, where the past is related to future as promise) in Greek and Roman cyclical time. Blumenberg, by contrast, thought that what was, if one will, worth inheriting from the ancients was the polytheistic separation of powers that prevents a supreme, omnipresent god from causing these anxieties that led to human self-empowerment in the first place. As Albano writes, “Human self-assertion opens up to a natural world less as an order, teleologically comprehensible, always already there to be discovered, than an order, constitutively human, that one may place there. It is, moreover, not thinking natural world in its materiality as negative, but as positive in the valuation of its possibilities for human development.”16 However, it should be noted that Löwith was responding to the same modern idea of self-empowerment which Blumenberg himself criticizes: the Enlightenment’s identification of science with the idea of inevitable progress changed the notion of theoretical curiosity, and the moderate goals of scientific enquiry and self-assertion were replaced by the will to absolute knowledge, or “will to truth”, which resulted in the disenchantment of the world.17 It is this will to truth, and the idea of an absolutism  Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 17.  Peter J. Albano, “The cogito, human self-assertion, and the modern world,” Philosophy Today 44, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 187. 17  Laurence Dickey, “Blumenberg and Secularization: ‘Self-Assertion’ and the Problem of Self-Realizing Teleology in History,” New German Critique, No. 41 (Spring  - Summer, 1987): 153. 15 16

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of truth, that animates Blumenberg’s engagement with Freud’s Moses and Arendt’s Eichmann.

Freud, Arendt, “Will to Truth” When Freud published Moses and Monotheism in 1939 and Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, they did so, Blumenberg argues, out of a will to truth, out of a belief that no matter what the consequences, truth is to be revealed—a truth which can be neither changed nor prevented.18 For Blumenberg, Freud “was one of those people who trust that the truth can achieve anything, even freedom, and thus from their love of truth feel entitled to expect everything of themselves and of others”.19 The “truth” that Freud “reveals” in Moses and Monotheism is that Moses was actually born as an Egyptian with pharaonic blood, rather than merely raised as one, and that he was a follower of the monotheist Akhenaten. Thus, when he “chose” Jews as the followers of Akhenaten’s monotheism, he did so as a stranger: “only a stranger could exercise this measure of violence, this terrible weaning from gods and idols, from the comfortable anticipation of the next day, in order to compel renunciation in favour of the unknown.”20 Freud further claims that Moses was murdered by the Jews themselves and this was the origin of religious rituals. Freud, Blumenberg claims, saw little that was political about his book— for instance, that those who want to attain power for themselves rely on the potential of the despised, whom they cannot love but whom they promise themselves to love once the despised are worthy of power and beneficence. Yet, precisely because of this, an ideology of liberation includes both “contempt for the present as a result of the past and affection for the future as the result of the present”, and thus, when the liberated people realized that they were merely a means for “an abstract revolt”,21 they murdered Moses. They then had to forget this particular act so that they would feel no shame for their past. And this is the origin of their “complicated rituals of guilt relief”.22 18  Hans Blumenberg, Rigorism of Truth: ‘Moses the Egyptian’ and Other Writings on Freud and Arendt, trans. Joe Paul Kroll (Ithaca: London: Cornell University Press, 2018), 5. 19  Ibid., 2. 20  Ibid., 2. 21  Ibid., 3. 22  Ibid., 3.

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Several people read the book before it was published and were shocked with the content. When Freud arrived in London in 1938, he was still working on it and determined to publish it. The Jewish scholar Abraham Yahuda was one of the first to visit Freud in London when he arrived, and when he was given the manuscript and read it, he beseeched Freud not to publish. In vain. The book was published. In 1939. Blumenberg says that thanks to Freud’s will to truth, “the year 1939 did not seem to him to be the absolutely wrong moment to take from the beaten and humiliated [Jews] the man who, in the beginning, had founded their trust in history”.23 The problem is, Blumenberg writes in his notes, that rather than bringing freedom to Jewish people, this bare truth placed upon them “the burden of the truth about themselves” and made them “gaze into their abysses in countless hours of analysis across the world”.24 But Blumenberg’s more provocative claim is that, thanks to her desire for truth, it did not seem inappropriate to Hannah Arendt in 1963 to publish her report on the Eichmann trial, and thereby to rob the Jews of Adolf Eichmann as a negative founder of the modern state of Israel. Arendt had argued, before it began, that the trial belonged before a tribunal of all human beings, not before a particular nation, and, after she had been to the trial, she claimed that the witnesses in the court even accused Eichmann of the things that he was not responsible for, for things that he did not commit directly but could have. As such, Arendt thinks, Eichmann stands as a scapegoat for the real criminals, the Germans. In fact, according to Arendt, Eichmann should have been put on trial for the facts, for the real deeds he committed because only then would the real criminals, the Germans, not be able to get away with their past. For Blumenberg, however, such moral rigourism and universal moralism ends up failing “to touch what is necessary only in a mythical sense”.25 Here what is mythical is also political for Blumenberg, and, for example, the compensation that Germany accepted to pay was an act of state, rather than a moral compensation (which could not be measured and evaluated anyway). Blumenberg writes: “Some states are founded by their enemies. Nobody else could have managed to confront the improbability of their existence … But then: there they are, because nobody wanted them except those who had

 Ibid., 1.  Ibid., 40. 25  Ibid., 8. 23 24

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finally destroyed the conditions of their possibility.”26 Perhaps Blumenberg exaggerates when he says this; however, his point is that Arendt could not see that Eichmann had a mythical function, that is, significance, as a negative hero whose death provided a retrospective act of foundation for a state that had come into being territorially via an international agreement, but whose Jewish character needed to be established in other ways. In other words, in her so-called juridical approach and in her moral rigourism, she was blinded to “the public and political status of the trial as staking a claim to national legitimacy”.27 Though Blumenberg does not say much about what he means by “national legitimacy”, we may recall how he uses the term in Legitimacy: the legitimacy of the modern age is grounded in human self-assertion, which needs to be distinguished from the impulse towards human self-­ empowerment that gives rise to thinking in absolutist terms. Self-assertion is an existential programme according to which human beings cannot avoid having to make their own history, and when it is replaced with the will to absolute knowledge, or “will to truth”, the disenchantment of the world is inevitable. In his discussion of Arendt, Blumenberg refers to something like this again, claiming that, thanks to her own will to truth, she had been blind to the mythical and political aspects of the trial, specifically the legitimacy claim it supported. What kind of truth was Arendt mistakenly seeking? Arendt herself had written “Truth and Politics” (1967) partly in order to respond to the question of “whether it is always legitimate to tell the truth  – did I believe without the qualification in ‘Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus’?” [“Let justice be done though the world may perish”].28 She goes back to the old clash between truth and opinion: in Plato’s cave allegory, upon his return from the journey, the truth-seeker tries to communicate what he has found to the people within the cave, yet fails because the truth immediately evaporates among the diversity of opinions. And Plato knew very well that whenever the philosophical truth-seeker wishes to be involved in the affairs of the world, she is always in danger. However, today, the seeker of the factual truth is even more endangered, especially

 Ibid., 45.  Ibid., 10. 28  Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 1977), 227. 26 27

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if a factual truth opposes the interests of a group. What does Arendt mean by factual truths? What truths can be regarded as factual? The facts I have in mind are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not-namely, secrets. That their assertion then should prove as dangerous as, for instance, preaching atheism or some other heresy proved in former times seems a curious phenomenon, and its significance is enhanced when we find it also in countries that are ruled tyrannically by an ideological government.29

What Arendt finds even more dangerous is that various factual truths can easily turn into a matter of opinions: “as though the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record but a matter of opinion”.30 In her “factual account of the trial”, which Arendt says, “seemed to me so glaringly borne out by the facts of the case that I felt it needed no further explanation”,31 she gives us a factual description, as she sees it, of a specific kind of evil. People who committed atrocities during the Third Reich did not have evil intentions, but simply followed the rules without thinking, without having a Socratic dialogue with themselves, and they were more dangerous than those who had evil intentions. In other words, the apparatus of Nazi rule did not choose “the great demons” but “the little family men”. However, if this is a factual truth, then according to Blumenberg’s astonishing claim, she should have been silent about it, because she has missed the whole point of the trial, which is this: just like Moses, Eichmann, who was judged in the heart of the state that would not have arisen without him, could stand before this court only as the phenotype of nondescriptness. He became the self-desubstantiating phantom of a figure that was able to “make” history only once he had been captured and killed. This is why it was never to be said that this man had been a clown. . . To have captured and

 Ibid., 236.  Ibid., 236. 31  Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship” in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Shocken Books, 2003), 18. 29 30

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e­ xecuted a pathetic straw man discredits the act of state that was and had to be made of it.32

Let us recall what Nicholls says: “wherever the interests of human beings appear to be threatened by external reality, there is potential for significance.”33 Thus, “a pathetic straw man’s” execution would not create any kind of significance; in other words, “a pathetic straw man” could not have been the negative founder of the state, of any state indeed.

Political Myths, National Heroes When Blumenberg published Work on Myth, he was criticized on the basis that, though he is directly or indirectly in dialogue with those who have written on the twentieth century’s political myths, he himself does not talk about political myth at all, let alone offer a theory of it. It might be true that the Blumenberg of Work on Myth may not be regarded as a theorist of political myth, but it is partly because Blumenberg’s analysis of myth dramatically departs from Cassirer’s (The Myth of the State, 1946) and others’ analyses of political myths. For Blumenberg, political myths are not just a subspecies of myths. In the Myth of the State, Cassirer argues that even though the mythical mind, which is a primitive form of human consciousness, has been and should be overcome by scientific rationality, whenever human beings face an unusual and dangerous situation, it can easily reappear (regression): “In desperate situations man will always have recourse to desperate means – and our present-day political myths have been such desperate means. If reason has failed us, there remains always the ultima ratio, the power of the miraculous and mysterious.”34 He further argues that a National Socialist myth could then easily emerge at a time when inflation and unemployment in Germany reached its peak point, and when all rational means and resources were exhausted: “This was the natural soil upon which the political myths could grow up and in which they found ample nourishment.”35 This is exactly what Blumenberg rejects: National Socialism could never have created a new myth. For Blumenberg, Cassirer  Blumenberg, Rigorism of Truth, 11. My emphasis.  Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 20. 34  Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 279. 35  Ibid., 278. 32 33

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mistakenly comes up with this analysis because he evaluates myth from the perspective of the terminus ad quem (the point at which the process terminates), rather than from the perspective of its terminus a quo (its point of departure) (WM, 19). Blumenberg writes, “myth does not need to answer questions; it makes something up, before the question becomes acute and so that it does not become acute” (WM, 197). The myth that Blumenberg occupies himself with is about self-preservation of a vulnerable creature— it does not attempt to give answers to some political, theoretical or social questions; indeed, it might be called pre-theoretical. Blumenberg did write about political myths in some texts in his Nachlass. One such text is “Kein Mythos des XX. Jahrhunderts” from the 1980s or 1990s, and another is “Präfiguration: Napoleon und Hitler/ Napoleon und Alexander” (published in Präfiguration: Arbeit am politischen Mythos in 2014). Finally, there is his controversial review of Arendt, “Moses the Egyptian”. Blumenberg begins “Kein Mythos des XX.  Jahrhunderts” with the questions of whether myth can be brought to an end—a topic that he already discussed in Work on Myth—and whether there could be a myth of the twentieth century, and, if so, what forms it would take. He concludes that while we seem to have some mythical models (mytische Muster) in the twentieth century, we may not have “genuine” myths that will survive across the epochs as those myths Blumenberg himself focuses on have done. As we have seen, for Blumenberg, those myths that are successful produce significance, and this “significance” is “produced” through a process of cultural selection, through the needs of a particular culture. In other words, myth has its own historical existence. How are “mythical models” produced then? The answer, he says, is through prefigurations. What are they? As Erich Auerbach shows—originally, for instance, as it appears in the Roman playwright Terence’s Eunuchus—figura, which is a Latin translation of the Greek term for shape, meant “plastic form”.36 However, figura gains a new, theological meaning in the Christian world: for instance, Tertullian uses figura as “something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical”; in other words, “the relation between the two events is revealed by an accord or similarity.”37 The 36  Erich Auerbach, “Figura” in Scenes from the drama of European Literature (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–78. 37  Ibid., 29.

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aim of this kind of interpretation “was to show that the persons and events of the Old Testament were prefigurations of the New Testament and its history of salvation”.38 For example, Tertullian writes: “For if Adam provided a figura of Christ, the sleep of Adam was the death of Christ who was to sleep in death, that precisely by the wound in his side should be figured the Church, the mother of all living.”39 Blumenberg uses this idea in “Prefigurations”.40 He claims that especially in times of crisis, prefiguration has a function: repeating a prefigurate is undertaken in a way that this repetition will produce the identical effect.41 Prefiguration used in this way functions as a decision-making aid: if the conditions are the same, then it may be assumed that the result of the repeated act itself will be the same. Blumenberg gives us the example of the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973: the Egyptian and Syrian armies decided to invade Israel on October 6, that is, on the tenth day of Ramadan, and this decision was “prefigured” by the Prophet Muhammed’s beginning the preparations for the Battle of Badr in 623 on the same day.42 Blumenberg further argues that prefiguration confers legitimacy on a decision that may be highly contingent, that is to say, unjustifiable. In other words, the repeated act becomes part of a mythical programme only through the act of repetition. In fact, it is not genuinely an act of repetition—there is no such thing outside the strictest rituals—but a search for a model that will convey legitimacy on a current contingent act by making it appear to be a repetition, and part of that repetition is the suppression of what is contingent. And even if the decision turns out to be a mistake, the accusation of not using the right moment for the act cannot be  Ibid., 30.  Ibid., 30. 40  Nicholls draws our attention to Blumenberg’s response to Götz Müller’s review of Work on Myth in which he accuses Blumenberg of neglecting political myths. Blumenberg, in his response, claims that indeed there is a missing chapter in the published book, which was present in the manuscript and which he decided not to publish. He further says: “It was called: Stalingrad as mythical consequence. It cost me more work than most of the other things in the book. This is how the conclusion came to be left in the air” (quoted in Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 203). Nicholls says that there is no such text as “Stalingrad as mythical consequence” in Blumenberg’s Nachlass, but there is a text which elaborately discusses the mythical dimensions of Hitler’s decision to invade Stalingrad, and the title of this text is “Präfiguration: Napoleon und Hitler/Napoleon und Alexander”. 41  Hans Blumenberg, Präfiguration: Arbeit am politischen Mythos (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), 9. 42  Ibid., 10. 38 39

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levelled.43 For example, Napoleon’s Russian campaign (or, as it is known in Russia, the Patriotic War of 1812) functions as a prefigurate for Hitler to invade Moscow in 1941–1942 and also for the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942–1943. And Napoleon himself is said to have referred to Alexander the Great’s success in Egypt to legitimate his own decision to invade Egypt.44 With this, we come to the other component of the title: “Napoleon und Alexander”; that is, via Napoleon, Alexander also functions as a prefigurate for Hitler. Thus, Blumenberg emphasizes the social and political function of prefiguration—that is, it being a source of legitimacy. Prefigurations differ fundamentally from myths in that while prefigurations are not rational—indeed, even make one lose contact with reality— myths help us “face” reality without being overwhelmed by it. They help the subject to handle reality by putting a barrier between her and reality. The idea of losing contact with reality is examined via Hitler’s decision and rhetoric. Blumenberg quotes a passage from Goebbels’ diary entry from 28 February 1945 where, referring to his conversation with Hitler in Berlin, he notes: We must be as Frederick the Great was, and also such a Stoic philosophical attitude to people and events that the Führer is adopting today reminds us strongly of Frederick the Great … Who knows when a meteorite will once again strike the earth and will dissolve it in fire and ashes. In these matters the Führer is a Stoic too and wholly a son of Frederick the Great.45

Blumenberg’s point is that both Hitler’s and Goebbels’ rhetoric is based on prefiguration: this is how they make decisions and justify them to people around them in times of crisis. A political myth has thereby been established. Though we may not conclude that prefigurations are merely political myths, we can still argue that they are tools and devices to provide the relevant rhetoric to produce political myths. And here there is none of the cultural selection we saw in the production of myth; rather, it is a strategic selection of a particular language and rhetoric by those who hold power—a rhetoric which enables them to elevate themselves to the level of god-like figures (human self-empowerment).

 Ibid., 10.  Ibid., 23–24. 45  Ibid., 38. 43 44

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What about Eichmann? Blumenberg adopts a similar approach in “Moses the Egyptian”: what Arendt failed to see is the mythical function of Eichmann (significance) for the state of Israel—namely, Eichmann’s being a source of legitimacy. Though, at first glance, there is no repetition in the sense that we see in prefigurations, a similar outcome is achieved: the legitimacy is created not by rational ideas or by some universal values and principles, as Arendt herself advocates, but by a founding political myth, albeit a negative one. In his notes, Blumenberg writes: “He was the secret founding figure of this state, on whom must be performed the cleansing act that was both a great revenge and a mythical perpetuation, in order to deal with the past or to save, to win the past for itself.”46 What is legitimacy? If we take the simple definition of it, it is the right and acceptance of an authority—and here there is always a reference to shared values and needs of a culture. It is a contested term and concept, but, at bottom, we can argue that the legitimacy of a state, of any state, can be conducted by many different ways: in a democracy, the legitimacy can derive from the popular perception or belief that the government rules in accordance with democratic principles and values; or the legitimacy of the foundation of the Turkish Republic derived from having won the Independence War and vanquish its enemies in order to then emphasize the ideas of progress and development. In the case of the state of Israel, the legitimacy discourse has always been part of an existential programme: one faces a constant threat from one’s enemies, which is why the state of emergency has not been lifted. There is of course a paradox here in that this does not refer to any shared values at all, or any substantive aim like progress or economic development. And a state of emergency implies a lack of security. But Blumenberg implies that Eichmann was necessary in that he added something that was missing, in that he embodied the whole danger that Israel faced and did so in the form of one person. Eichmann as a negative hero, the man who would have destroyed Jewish people, needed to be killed. Is Moses then a prefiguration of Eichmann? What is amazing about Blumenberg’s review is that he seems to give a positive answer to this question. In fact, Blumenberg claims that Freud could have written the Eichmann book, but his version would be better precisely because he could have seen what was missed by Arendt: the mythical function of the trial. Thus, even though at the beginning of the review Blumenberg says that Freud’s and Arendt’s texts have the equivalence of effects, the reasons  Blumenberg, Rigorism of Truth, 46.

46

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for the equivalence does not lie in the content. The reason was poor timing. Blumenberg seems to suggest that should Freud have lived long enough to witness the trial, perhaps this time it may finally have been a good moment for him to pursue his will to truth and make sense of Moses as a prefiguration of Eichmann. Freud died in 1939, so Blumenberg is speaking on his behalf. Of equal interest is the idea that without Freud’s account of Moses, Blumenberg himself might not have been able to see the Eichmann trial in these mythical terms.

Conclusion We began with the question of whether a state that seeks legitimacy through a “political myth” is trying to answer an absolutist question (self-­ empowerment) or simply seeking its place in the world alongside other states (self-assertion). In this connection we asked what function the Eichmann trial performed for the already existing state of Israel, whose place in the world was, nevertheless, precarious. Blumenberg’s answer— that Eichmann might be seen as a negative political hero in the way that Moses was a negative cultural hero—is controversial, to say the least. And it might be said that the author of a massive book on the breakdown of the medieval worldview (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age) and of a massive book on myth (Work on Myth) that barely mentions politics was entering into a debate beyond his area of specialization—the highly charged question of what a Jewish state should do with someone who had sought to destroy the Jews. By linking the trial with the question of Israel’s legitimacy, Blumenberg might have been accused of overinterpretation, of imposing a terminology he had used in a completely different context and for very different purposes. It is, however, worth recalling the definition of self-assertion used in Legitimacy: “an existential program, according to which man posits his existence in a historical situation and indicates to himself how he is going to deal with the reality surrounding him and what use he will make of the possibilities that are open to him” (LMA, 138).

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Albano, Peter J. “The cogito, human self-assertion, and the modern world,” Philosophy Today 44.2 (Summer 2000): 184–189.

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Arendt, Hannah. Responsibility and Judgment. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Shocken Books, 2003. Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. London: Penguin, 1977. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Middlesex: Penguin, 1964. Auerbach, Erich. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Blumenberg, Hans. Präfiguration: Arbeit am politischen Mythos. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. Blumenberg, Hans. Rigorism of Truth: ‘Moses the Egyptian’ and Other Writings on Freud and Arendt. Translated by Joe Paul Kroll. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [LMA]. Translated by Robert Wallace. Cambridge; MA: MIT Press, 1983. Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth [WM]. Translated by Robert Wallace. Cambridge; London: MIT Press, 1985. Bringhurst, Robert. Everywhere Being is Dancing. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. Bottici, Chiara. A Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Cassirer, Ernst. The Myth of the State. New Haven: Stanford University Press, 1946. Dickey, Laurence. “Blumenberg and Secularization: ‘Self-Assertion’ and the Problem of Self-Realizing Teleology in History,” New German Critique 41 (Spring-Summer, 1987): 151–165. Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History: Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Nicholls, Angus. Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth. New York: Routledge, 2015. Simmel, George. Die Philosophie des Geldes. Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1920.

PART III

Competing Visions of Modernity

CHAPTER 7

Trial and Crisis: Blumenberg and Husserl on the Genesis and Meaning of Modern Science Robert Buch

The main thrust of Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age is twofold. First and foremost, the book takes issue with the notion that the modern age lacks legitimacy. In other words, what it disputes is the thesis that modernity’s alleged legitimacy is owed to, and derived from, the very legacy, the great theological tradition of Western Europe, that it sought to overcome. As is well known, Blumenberg imputes this view, the so-called secularization thesis, to a number of contemporary philosophers and intellectual historians among which Karl Löwith is the most prominent. But the dismantlement of the secularization thesis is complemented by another argument. For Blumenberg also disputes, less vehemently perhaps, but time and again, the self-image of the modern age, according to which it founded itself, in another kind of creatio ex nihilo or self-birth: heir and descendent to no one but itself. The recourse to the trope of creation out of nothingness is highly ironic of course and is a good example of the tension Blumenberg is after. Picturing modernity as self-conceived is an

R. Buch (*) University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_7

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emphatic way of claiming its independence and originality, its being without progenitor and without precedents, and not in need of any custodians. But in this very act, modernity draws on the legacy it denies, the tradition it disavows so eagerly, at least rhetorically. Legitimacy spells out its critique of these two misconceptions in dizzyingly detailed discussions of the different lineages of modernity. Blumenberg’s complex and often complicated argument revolves around two points. Against the suggestion that some of the distinctive characteristics and achievements of modernity, the notion of progress, for instance, are nothing but “secularized” theological ideas, Blumenberg argues that there is indeed a break or rather a shift—he calls it an Umbesetzung, a reoccupation—in the way different epochs conceive of the creator and his creation, the world and the human subject, how they figure man’s debts and liabilities vis-à-vis God, what they make of human wonder and anxiety, but also how they conceive of our needs, desires and, eventually, human self-­ assertion vis-à-vis creation and its author. At the same time, Blumenberg insists that this shift—this reoccupation of positions—can only be accounted for if the previously available options are properly understood. The painstaking reconstructions he undertakes in his book are largely attempts to delineate the predicaments and impasses which certain theological developments entailed. In this regard, the modern responses are indebted to questions that could no longer be answered in a satisfactory manner by the available intellectual resources. The modern subject’s “self-­ assertion”, one of the book’s key terms, is not a triumphalist gesture overriding and erasing obsolete positions. Rather, such self-assertion is imposed upon the modern subject as a result of inconsistencies within the given system of positions. The process of transformation Blumenberg seeks to explain is neither one of hostile takeover and elimination nor of secret, unavowed continuity, in which secular ideas are nothing but theologoumena in disguise, but one of giving way, of displacement. The disintegration of one set of responses and the ensuing embarrassment act as a catalyst for a new set of attitudes. The modern outlook that asserts itself, moving into positions formerly occupied by theology, must not be reduced to being nothing but a placeholder for the predecessor whose hidden force is undiminished; yet, at the same time, it cannot be understood without the predecessor either. I want to flesh out these abstract claims by looking at the book’s third part, titled “The Trial of Theoretical Curiosity”. Even though it is the longest part of the book, discussions of Blumenberg’s first major work

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tend to neglect it. Generally, the first two parts have received the most attention. While the first features various exponents of the secularization thesis whose shortcomings Blumenberg then seeks to expose, the second presents the work’s key thesis according to which the advent of the modern age is best understood as the “second overcoming of Gnosticism”. The reasons for the relative neglect of the third part undoubtedly have to do with its length and more specifically its detail and apparent digressiveness, but above all its sheer material abundance, ranging, as it does, from the Socratic dismissal of natural philosophy (in particular astronomy and cosmology), Aristotle’s emphatic characterization of man’s desire to know as a natural and indeed essential part of his constitution, the views of the different Hellenistic schools, their later Roman and Greek successors, Cicero and Plotinus, the Church Fathers, the Scholastics and their late medieval counterparts, to the natural philosophy of the early modern period and the protagonists of the Scientific Revolution as well as their Enlightenment heirs, from Voltaire to Kant, and ending in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with Feuerbach and Freud. The following discussion has two aims. The first is to offer a synoptic reading of the labyrinthine third part of Legitimacy. It will trace the vicissitudes of curiositas in Blumenberg’s sweeping panorama. The gist of this reading is that modern self-assertion is far less antagonistic than one might think, a compromise based on renunciation and transformation rather than rejection and radical upheaval of the received traditions. The second aim is to juxtapose Blumenberg’s account of the genesis of early modern science with Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences. If Blumenberg reconstructs the case “for” theoretical curiosity, Husserl believes that the “theoretical attitude” has yet to fulfil its original purpose. For all the differences between the two works, Blumenberg was a lifelong critical reader and admirer of Husserl’s and thus the Crisis provides an interesting foil for Blumenberg’s “Trial”.

The Vicissitudes of curiositas The legitimacy of the modern age is the legitimacy of theoretical curiosity. That is how one could sum up the third part of the book and also, in a sense, the book as a whole. Blumenberg recounts the story in the form of a trial: it is the trial that gives the third part its title. To deny the legitimacy of the modern age and to charge it with illegitimacy is to suggest that it is based on some kind of transgression. Blumenberg sets out to demonstrate

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that the alleged transgression was inevitable, imposed rather than chosen. One of the original names of this transgression was curiosity. The trial Blumenberg reconstructs in painstaking detail is that of curiosity’s discrimination and its subsequent rehabilitation. The court files, the materials that constitute this trial, are voluminous and by no means straightforward. As indicated above, a dizzying array of witnesses are summoned to make their depositions. Even though the curiosity on trial is at times differentiated by degree, into lesser and more harmful forms, it is above all intellectual or “theoretical curiosity” that is at stake—theoretische Neugierde, Wißbegierde and Wissenstrieb are the German terms used most frequently, the desire or urge to know. Such libido sciendi is what would drive but also be overtaken and surpassed by the modern sciences. As much as Blumenberg’s account of the epochal trial—a trial, to be more precise, that spans and divides the epochs—is one of the vindication of theoretical or scientific curiosity, it is also one in which the recalcitrant urge is, to put it in Foucauldian terms, channelled and disciplined—in other words, rationalized. While in some sense a familiar plot of the overcoming of obstacles, a closer look reveals a far more dialectical process, alternating between contestation and affirmation. The grand narrative arc of the account culminates in the rationale of scientific enquiry, a justification for investigations no longer in violation of any boundaries but set on their way, triggered and necessitated, by the very strategies designed to limit and check the restless urge to know. The third part spells out the legitimacy of the modern age by juxtaposing the countless cases aiming to prove the illegitimacy of human knowledge with the opposite cases that advocate its legitimacy. Modern science is undoubtedly the terminus ad quem of these debates. Its terminus a quo, however, is a far more capacious notion of knowledge. The gist of Blumenberg’s long discussion, at once detailed and wide-ranging, is how this capacity is wrested from its detractors but also that its irrevocable success as science comes at a significant price, that of renunciation and resignation. The disavowal of knowledge assumes many forms. One way of organizing the bustling field is to ask in the name of what curiosity, the desire for knowledge, is rejected and whether any alternatives on behalf of which it is rejected are offered; another is to distinguish between outright dismissal and more qualified reservations, in which certain areas are off limits, barred from investigation, while it is imperative to know, indeed, to make every possible effort to investigate others. One of the dichotomies operative in many controversies over legitimate and illegitimate knowledge is

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that between the necessary and unnecessary, the kind of knowledge that is gratuitous and superfluous, and the kind that is essential, indeed indispensable. This dichotomy is also played out along the topological lines of that which is close at hand, of immediate, that is, readily apparent relevancy, and that which is far away and of no concern to one’s given circumstances, abstruse and inconsequential matters. A related issue, moreover, is the question of motivation: is the desire to know a natural disposition or is it, rather, a symptom of waywardness, a deviance from, and challenge to, the natural order of things which is all there is to see, with no need to look further or beyond the obvious. The question of motivation, in turn, raises that of the expected rewards: sophistication, elevation, self-realization and fulfilment are some of the potential benefits; detraction from what is truly important, mindless searching without end, futility and disappointment, self-aggrandizement and self-deception are some of the risks against which the detractors warn. These antithetical positions are present from the beginning of the history of Western thought. On the one hand, we find in the pre-Socratics and Aristotle the notion that the human intellect is geared towards nature, the natural world appears before it to be grasped, there is a mutual affinity and appropriateness between the two. Furthermore, the desire for knowledge is, according to the first sentence of Aristotle’s “Metaphysics”, natural to man. Indeed, man’s share in the divine is this pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. It is not a means to an end but an end in itself. This non-­ instrumental character of man’s desire to know is precisely what sets it apart and what makes knowledge the highest goal and ultimate fulfilment of human aspiration. Importantly, “man’s life is”, in Aristotle’s view, “in principle capable of fulfillment in its essential pretension to knowledge, and the objectivity to which he has access exceeds neither his powers nor his finitude” (LMA, 256; LN, 294–5). On the other hand, there is a distancing from this lofty ideal. Nowhere as prominent as in Socrates turning philosophy away from the heavens and back to the villages and cities of man, as Cicero would put it, in order to investigate good and evil, questions of ethics and logic over against those of astronomy and physics.1 It is true, the later Plato would re-integrate cosmology and knowledge of the world with the Socratic concern for the soul through the concept of anamnesis and the myth of the demiurge, making knowledge of the self dependent on situating it in, and grasping the origin of, the natural and 1

 See LMA, 240, 247; LN, 276, 283.

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cosmic order, the world soul and its little relative, the human soul.2 The subsequent Hellenistic Schools, however, would take a far more detached view, born out of “the disappointment of the great pretensions to truth that philosophy had introduced into the world” (LMA, 269; LN, 309). Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, in different ways, all seek to reduce and moderate the epistemological ambitions of their predecessors. At odds with one another, to be sure, there is nonetheless a shared effort to repudiate the idea that the supreme form of self-realization and of happiness, eudaimonia, is through knowledge. On the contrary, knowledge no longer affords peace and composure. Rather, the urge to know is indicative of the fact that the unknown is a source of disquiet. In a sense, what unites the Hellenistic Schools, irrespective of their differences, is the will to counter and quell this disquiet. Happiness is precisely not to be disturbed by the noise of the world, its attractions and distractions. It is divorced from science or natural philosophy as it was known then. The Stoa sought reassurance from the admiration of the order of nature, an order the Stoics regarded as evidence of an anthropocentric teleology that essentially made any worries obsolete—as it did tarrying with matters obscure and elusive. The sole purpose of Epicurean science, both physics and theology, was to immunize man against these concerns, to prove their innocuousness and insignificance, allowing him to adopt the happy equanimity of the gods that live in the space between different worlds. The separation of happiness and knowledge is pushed further still by the Sceptics. Scepticism dissolves the “constitutive relation between theory and eudaimonia” (LN, 310; LMA, 270; translation modified). It stages what Blumenberg calls an exodus from philosophy, declaring knowledge either unattainable or at least not attainable by conceptual means. While happiness would continue to be the goal, reaching it is predicated on abandoning philosophy. The subsequent developments can be seen as a series of reconfigurations of theoretical curiosity and its defaults, the misguided aspirations of the desire to know and the higher obligations and rewards it misses. The Christian Fathers would adopt the Hellenistic separation of knowledge and happiness, but would project such happiness into the beyond; salvation of the soul was to have absolute priority over any other preoccupation. If Cicero had denounced curiositas for taking precedence over engagement in public affairs and displacing cura, the care for the common good, the Christian thinkers of Late Antiquity would follow this pattern,  See LMA, 250–255; LN, 286–292.

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except that the object of their concern, their cura, would be the redemption or damnation of the soul rather than the res publica.3 Their stance against the desire for knowledge faced two challengers: pagan philosophy and gnosticism. They took issue with the former by rejecting ancient astronomy’s pretension to take the measure of the cosmic order and predict the future, but they also fervently opposed the equation of knowledge and salvation championed by their gnostic competitors. It was precisely against the latter’s exalted view of knowledge as the very means of salvation that they pitted their faith. At the same time, this faith also countered the sceptical acceptance of incertitude—for faith was, in essence, absolute, imperturbable conviction, the opposite, precisely, of incertitude. Faith’s claim to definitive reassurance effectively aimed at cancelling out both sceptical resignation, advocated by Pagan philosophy, and unending, hypertrophic gnostic speculation. Two further restrictions were crucial for completing the discrimination of curiosity, sealing the delegitimation without which it would, in turn, not have played the decisive role in the drama of modern self-assertion. The first was to undo the purported harmony between the human ability to grasp and appreciate the cosmic order. The world was not simply there to be contemplated and admired but was created and owned by its author, who showed and withheld, veiled and revealed the miracle of his creation as he wished. The second was this idea of ownership based on authorship, copyright, to use a modern term, that branded human efforts to grasp the rationality presumably underlying the natural order with the irredeemable stigma of illegitimacy. Rather than prying into the secrets of creation, humans should acknowledge the conditions and limitations set by the creator and concentrate on the possibility of salvation, for which only a turn inwards, away from the lures of the world, could prepare them. It is this rationale that makes Augustine pit memoria against curiositas, the fateful dispersion into the world. As much as such elevation of memory, turning inside, echoes the gnostic recall of the soul’s forgotten provenance, the thrust of Augustine’s polemic against curiositas was profoundly anti-gnostic.4 Against the gnostic dualism of an absent saviour god and an evil demiurge who produced a lesser copy from the divine original—a plot unmistakably reminiscent of the Platonic theory of ideas—Augustine insisted that creation was not derived from a preconceived plan that could 3 4

 See LMA, 479–308; LN, 318–357.  See LMA, 311–315; LN, 360–366.

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be purloined and copied, but was based on God’s will alone, creation out of nothingness, by fiat, foreclosing the possibility of becoming known or providing a model for other creations. Blumenberg sees these determinations as providing the template or blueprint for the verdict in the trial of theoretical curiosity, “Urteilsmuster für den Prozeß”. Among the most significant steps setting the stage for the trial are the disparity between the human mind and the world, the abandonment of the Aristotelian notion of their natural match. The world is no longer that which is available to the senses, above all to seeing, contemplation being the exemplary mode of apprehending the natural order. It is more than what is there and it is precisely its merely partial availability that raises the distinction of what is important and what is not, the economic question, for a finite being, of necessary and superfluous pursuits. The cancellation of the natural fit between the cognitive apparatus and the field to which it would apply itself extends that field ad infinitum, an extension that would act as a spur, setting off curiosity on its restless searches that would, in turn, gain it the negative reputation of futility. While Blumenberg cites Aristotelian Scholasticism as the last attempt to conceive of mind and world as organized according to the same rational principles and hence not incommensurable, late Medieval theology would expend its intellectual energy to prove the opposite by developing a notion of divine omnipotence designed to rein in the recalcitrant and seemingly unstoppable desire to know.5 The stigma of this desire was precisely its inability to check itself, its urge, or itch, to push on, without end. Succumbing to this infinite drive was missing the true infinity of divine transcendence. Rather than bringing about a surrender to this magnified power, though, by heightening it to such an extreme degree, late Medieval nominalist theology would inadvertently, as Blumenberg has it, pave the way for human self-assertion and the rehabilitation of theoretical curiosity. On the one hand, by removing the matter of salvation from any intelligible rationale that could reassure man in this most pressing question. The nominalist God is inscrutable and so are his acts of grace. Salvation and damnation are not tied to a logic of reciprocity. On the other hand, human efforts to discern the laws of creation, which would invariably raise the suspicion of usurpation and copyright theft, were countered with the insistence, most prominently in the famous condemnation of 219 Scholastic-­ Aristotelian theses in 1277 by the bishop of Paris, that God’s creation of 5

 See LMA, 331–337; LN, 384–392.

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the world we know was one out of an infinite number of possibilities, chosen not for its rationality or suitability for human existence but based solely on his will and therefore also subject to be revoked by its creator, if he so wished.6 In other words, it was a creation to which he was by no means obliged. According to Blumenberg, these rather unforgiving stipulations ironically had a liberating effect. One, “the radical displacement of the preconditions of salvation into transcendence could plunge man into uncertainty and fear, but it could no longer determine his action or the direction of his essential interests” (LMA, 345; LN, 403). What used to be the preoccupation par excellence had become a matter taken entirely out of man’s hands. The worry about one’s salvation, Heilssorge, Blumenberg contends, ceased being an essential interest because there was no way of affecting it.7 At the same time, a new essential interest was forced upon man: the necessity to assert himself over against a world, a reality, not created for his sake, by a power no longer thought of as looking after it. This pivotal shift from divine omnipotence (or “theological absolutism”) to human self-assertion is in fact the central argument of Blumenberg’s book, developed in great detail in its second part that bears this very title. Given the weight it carries in the overall structure of the work, it comes as no surprise that it has met with significant criticism, above all concerning the crucial role Blumenberg assigns to Nominalist theology and William of Ockham in particular.8 The argument also undergirds the fourth part. However, the strategies of the defence, if I can put it like that, in the trial of theoretical curiosity cannot simply be subsumed under this narrative. Indeed, Blumenberg himself examines so many different authors in what he calls the “no-man’s-land between the epochs” (LMA, 371; LN, 434), the sixteenth century, that it is difficult to identify moments of transition, of indisputable reversal of the erstwhile verdict  See LMA, 346–347; LN, 404–405.  I note in passing the remarkable parallel with, and difference to, Max Weber’s account of the Protestant Ethic. Both Blumenberg and Weber single out uncertainty and anxiety in the face of the inscrutability of divine grace—though one associates it with Late Medieval Nominalism, the other Calvinism—as the crucial factor in the advent of the secular modern age. While for Blumenberg it will inadvertently allow “theoretical curiosity” to evolve into modern science, for Weber it will constitute the secret motivation for a new mode of economic activity, capitalism. 8   See Jürgen Goldstein, Nominalismus und Moderne. Zur Konstitution neuzeitlicher Subjektivität bei Hans Blumenberg und Wilhelm von Ockham (Munich: Alber, 1998), 190–198; Kurt Flasch, Hans Blumenberg. Philosoph in Deutschland 1945–1966 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2017), 496–524. 6 7

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against curiosity. Even though the overarching “story”, from theological absolutism to human self-assertion, is undoubtedly part of the trial files studied in the fourth part of the book, the particular cases that either foreshadow or instantiate the rehabilitation of theoretical curiosity are often remarkably guarded, concerned above all to mediate between conflicting pretensions. As difficult and risky as it may seem to summarize the complex positions Blumenberg reviews, two moments stand out. The first is predicated on a technological development, the telescope, and is treated in a chapter titled “Interest in Invisible Things Within the World” (“Das Interesse am innerweltlich Unsichtbaren” [LMA, 361ff; LN, 422ff]); the second is the kind of Umbesetzung or reoccupation of given positions – though Blumenberg himself, in this instance, doesn’t use the term –, with far-reaching consequences. Galileo’s use of the telescope not only confirmed the Copernican challenge to the Ptolemaic model. Rendering the invisible visible—Sichtbarmachung des Unsichtbaren (LN, 428; LMA, 366) is the formulation in German—it led to a new understanding of the physiological limitations of human perception. However, this was a boundary whose successful transgression legitimated “theoretical curiosity”, rewarding its illicit prying into obscure and remote areas whose inaccessibility had hitherto placed them off limits, no less for practical as for metaphysical reasons, with insights concerning nothing less than the structure of the universe. Copernicus’ achievement consisted in offering a more cogent model of the movement of the heavenly bodies and insisting on its truth. He worked with “a new and absolutely universal claim to truth. Within the world there was no longer to be any boundary to attainable knowledge, and thus to the will to knowledge” (LMA, 361; LN, 422). One of the critical steps in this was, of course, the annulation of the qualitative distinction between the heavenly bodies, on the one hand, and the earth, on the other, astronomy and physics, to which different degrees of intelligibility corresponded. Copernicus levelled the difference, regarding the earth as another planet, part of one homogenous cosmic order, with none of its zones off limits for theoretical inquiry. He also subtly unsettled the schematic opposition between that which is close at hand, deserving and demanding our attention, and that which is remote and therefore of no concern. For it was precisely studying the orbits of the faraway planets, in particular the movement of the sun, one of our most self-evident experiences, that brought about the new conception of the earth, as a planet itself rotating and orbiting around the sun just like its counterparts, the other planets.

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While one can regard this move as an Umbesetzung of the pattern used to denigrate theoretical curiosity—as the pointless preoccupation with irrelevant, faraway matters—and indeed, with that, as a vindication of the will to knowledge, the more consequential reoccupation or rather revaluation would be a different one. Again, I am singling out two particular moments from an account that is at once elaborate and wide-ranging, moving deftly from Petrarch and Dante to Leonardo Da Vinci, on to Marlowe’s Faust, Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Kepler and Galileo. The process of rehabilitation that Blumenberg lays out is complex. Nonetheless, the conjoining of two moments stands out. It is the combination of two arguments frequently adduced to limit or dismiss the desire for knowledge that goes a long way in overcoming its “discrimination” without the appearance of hubris. It is, on the one hand, the ideal of absolute divine knowledge upheld against the encroachments of human inquisitiveness. And on the other, it is the stigma mentioned earlier, the interminable and unsatisfiable nature of this instinct, a characteristic aggravated by the lost match, the missing proportionality between the inquisitive mind and the world, opening up an infinite number of opportunities for the seekers of knowledge to disperse and lose themselves. But it is precisely the fact of its interminableness and insatiability in combination with the idea that all efforts can only ever approximate the absolute certainty of divine knowledge that would provide a new kind of licence to proceed. The result is a model of knowledge as infinite process characterized by asymptotic progress and fallibility. But in this model the very failure drives and moderates the process without resulting in resignation. The pattern is first anticipated by Nicholas of Cusa, who combined “the recognition of the human craving for knowledge, in its unrestrictable dynamics, with the humility of finitude that was specific to the Middle Ages” (LMA, 355; LN, 416): The justification of the inquisitive instinct now is precisely not that the authority of nature stands, so to speak, behind it, and a teleologically coordinated and guaranteed objectivity before it, but rather that its own nature first begins to dawn on it, in the difference between pretension and the impossibility of complete realization, only when it does not resist this nature, does not set for it the limits that the discrimination against curiositas had wanted to erect. […] The inexhaustibility of the desire for knowledge in any stage of realization that it can ever arrive at is the reason why we can achieve

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something more than knowledge, namely wisdom, the knowledge of what knowledge still does not know. (LMA, 356–7; LN, 417)9

Cusa’s docta ignorantia is a humble science that gives “the inexhaustibility of the desire to know” a positive end, for all its futility, finding it not at all at risk of overreaching but an exercise in moderation that nevertheless does not abandon, dismiss or stigmatize the inquisitive instinct. “There is no longer any need to put a taboo on theoretical curiosity, or to put moral restrictions on it, because the process of the theory itself continually destroys the illusion of its finite realizability” (LMA, 358–9; LN, 420). It would take some time, however, before the idea would be resumed. It was Galileo who provided another elaboration of seemingly reduced ambition combined with a positive account of the interminable character of the desire to know in his Dialogo de massimi sistemi (1632), the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The divine mind, we learn in the first dialogue, undoubtedly surpasses human intellect when it comes to mathematical truths, above all, in that it knows them all. However, in the few mathematical truths the human mind succeeds to grasp the degree of certainty is the same as God’s and no higher level of certainty is possible (Cf. LMA, 392; LN, 460).10 Apropos of an objection voiced by one of the participants in the dialogue, Simplicio, who is given the part of orthodoxy, namely, that God can bring about natural phenomena in ways different from the ones humans use to explain them, another figure, Salviati, argues that theoretical curiosity, in Blumenberg’s words, “has its economy between the futility to which the omnipotence proviso [Allmachtsklausel] means to relegate it and the definitiveness in which belief in the completed possession of knowledge would fix it” (LMA, 394; LN, 462). While never fully equal to its divine counterpart, human knowledge is not doomed to resignation, for approximate or partial understanding of the world is indeed possible. But it is not at risk of complacency either, for the separation from the divine ideal keeps it active; its own findings are continually superseded by further discoveries, its achievements are provisional, but there is nonetheless incremental progress. “It is not what the progress of knowledge has already yielded and is yielding now that legitimates the 9  The last sentence is paraphrasing two quotes by Nicholas of Cusa, from De venatione sapientiae and De docta ignorantia. (LMA, 638n; LN, 417fn). 10  Kepler had offered a similar idea in a letter to Herwart, 9–10 April 1599. See LMA, 391; LN, 457.

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cognitive drive that keeps it in motion but rather the function for consciousness of what lies before it at any given time, which gives everything that has been achieved the mark of finitude and provisionality” (LMA, 395; LN, 463). Blumenberg’s “trial proceedings” do not end here. But the main obstacles in the way of human self-assertion by way of the legitimate pursuit of theoretical curiosity are overcome. The point of Blumenberg’s painstaking reconstruction of discrimination and rehabilitation is that it is precisely the obstacles, the limitations imposed on the inquisitive drive, that served as a catalyst for its ultimate realization. Blumenberg’s story seeks to deflate dramatic accounts of one-time breakthroughs, enacted by the heroic protagonists of early modern science and the Scientific Revolution. Such a picture is replaced by a set of protracted transformations in which the precise moments of overcoming the boundaries hitherto in place are difficult to locate. The right to theoretical curiosity was not established by an act of usurpation, nor must it be regarded as a courageous act of self-­ foundation, out of nothing and against the odds. Rather, it must be seen as the result of a complex process of shifts (Umbesetzungen) and negotiations between conflicting claims and under constraints whose weight and tensions eventually strained the system to the point where it gave way to a new conception. The modern self-assertion of which curiositas is the paradigm is not triumphalist, but characterized by moderated aspirations. As noted earlier, the price is the divorce of eudaimonia (happiness) and theoria (contemplation/knowledge) as well as accepting the incongruence between the individual’s capacity—both intellectually and in terms of lifespan—and the proliferation of science. The “trial” or “process” of theoretical curiosity, der “Prozeß der theoretischen Neugierde”, is also the story of the differentiation, temporalization and professionalization of science: science as an enterprise whose operations and procedures no single individual could oversee and master and whose results continually outdo and overturn earlier achievements. It is the gap between the infinite process of scientific enquiry and finitude that is the mark of its human agents—one of Blumenberg’s abiding themes11—that would lead to the suspicion of, and estrangement from, science, at once indispensable and disconcerting, indispensable for human existence and disconcerting in its power, ubiquity and opaqueness. As Blumenberg acknowledges in the introductory  See especially Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).

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chapter to the third part of his book, in the modern world of science very little is left of the impulse whose vicissitudes the following chapters trace in such remarkable detail.12 Instead what prevails is a certain malaise and wariness. Apart from a few observations in the introduction, “The Trial of Theoretical Curiosity” does not deal with this new discrimination, the modern suspicion of science, aggravated dramatically in our times of climate crisis. All the efforts of the third part of the book are focused on the origins of a process whose apparent autonomy and self-perpetuation have eclipsed the complicated circumstances of its genesis. Blumenberg did, however, deal with the modern critique of science in a long essay “Lebenswelt und Technisierung”, written around the same time as Legitimacy and which, along with a few other texts published between the late 1950s and mid-1960s, prepares and informs his first magnum opus.13 The exponent of this critique is Edmund Husserl, whose late work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) is a prescient attempt to call into question the pre-eminence of the sciences (note the plural in Husserl’s title) and of objective-natural science as paradigmatic for all kinds of human understandings of and reflections on our relations to, and place in, the world.

The Crisis of European Sciences The Crisis of European Sciences can be regarded as a retrial of theoretical curiosity, albeit one that proceeds in the idiom of phenomenology. It is therefore no surprise that Husserl’s account of the emergence and development of early modern science is very different from the crowded historical canvas we get in Blumenberg. In comparison to the latter’s erudition,  See LN, 273; LMA, 238–9.  “Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter Aspekten der Phänomenologie” (1963) in Hans Blumenberg, Wirklichkeiten, in denen wir leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981 [1996]), 7–54. Unfortunately, this essay has yet to be translated into English. (All translations are mine.) Other essays that belong in the vicinity of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age include “‘Nachahmung der Natur’. Zur Vorgeschichte der Idee des schöpferischen Menschen,” in Blumenberg, Wirklichkeiten, 55–103; “Ordnungsschwund und Selbstbehauptung. Über Weltverstehen und Weltverhalten im Werden der technischen Epoche,” in Helmut Kuhn/ Franz Wiedmann, eds., Das Problem der Ordnung (Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1962), 37–57; “‘Säkularisation’. Kritik einer Kategorie historischer Illegitimität,” in Helmut Kuhn/Franz Wiedmann, eds., Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt (Munich: Pustet, 1964), 240–265. 12 13

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Husserl’s version tends to be schematic, even deliberately so.14 In other circumstances, this might be a virtue, but in relation to Blumenberg’s “Trial of Theoretical Curiosity”, it makes the comparison tricky, at least at first. Yet, Blumenberg himself engages with Husserl at great length and in depth: we know from posthumous publications of the past two decades that Husserl was an extremely important interlocutor and that Blumenberg was at work on a Phenomenological Anthropology for a long time (published posthumously as Die Beschreibung des Menschen, 2006). The crisis that is Husserl’s subject is serious, its implications and consequences are grave, and the prescription offered to remedy the situation comes with a sense of urgency, pathos and imminent revelation. Husserl’s characterization of the mindset, the scientific attitude, he takes to be the distinctive mark of “Europe”, is profoundly ambivalent. He is eager to mitigate any sense that he was diminishing science and its undeniable accomplishments. In fact, at times there is an outright enthusiasm in his invocation of the sciences. He locates their origin in the theoretical attitude in Ancient Greek philosophy, an attitude that is then resumed and transformed in the Renaissance, paving the way for its subsequent narrowing into the modern scientific outlook. Husserl calls the idea of science that springs from this renewal in the early modern period “almost a miracle” (Crisis § 12, 66; VI 68). He clearly shares the excitement in view of the promise to determine “the rational systematic unity of the world” (Crisis § 12, 65; VI 66). Quite similar to Blumenberg in this regard, Husserl writes that the process this entails consists of “an infinite progression”, always only “approximating what is given sensibly and intuitively in the surrounding life-world to the mathematically ideal” (Crisis § 12, 65–66; VI 67). However infinite and approximate reaching the goal of “omniscience” (ibid.) may be, the very sense that the world, though infinite, has a determinate and thus determinable rational structure represents a veritable watershed in human history, even though ultimately Husserl wants to question the type of rationalism he praises here. For, in spite of all the indisputable insights and revelations the work of scientific idealization has produced—Husserl’s main example is Galileo’s mathematical 14  See Husserl’s own comments in § 15 of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 70–73 (henceforth cited as Crisis in the text); Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie in Gesammelte Werke (Husserliana), Vol. VI, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), 71–74 (henceforth cited as VI).

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physics, largely ignoring Galileo the prototypical experimenter—the rationalist paradigm conceals what for Husserl is in fact the greater wonder, or rather puzzle: the life-world. It is what, in his mind, ultimately grounds the sciences as much as the natural attitude and whose recovery is, in a way, the task of The Crisis of European Sciences and of Transcendental Phenomenology at large.15 Crucially, Galileo and his modern successors failed to give an account of how the idealizations that became operative so successfully in science and technology arose from the life-world. The fact that they take on a life of their own, reinforcing the conviction that these rational structures exist independently, “objectively”, is, Husserl suggests, at the root of the fateful misconception that takes the natural-objective sciences as the only conceivable type of science, one critically predicated on the separation of objectivity and subjectivity, with the latter relegated to scientific-empirical psychology, the discipline dissected in the third part of Husserl’s book. If we regard Husserl’s Crisis as a later reiteration of the “trial of theoretical curiosity”, we must recognize it engaged in a similar way to Blumenberg’s Prozeß, if under a more restricted set of terms, in discrimination and rehabilitation, lamenting the impoverishment of science and the natural attitude, both of which Husserl suggests come out of the life-­ world, out of the correlation between consciousness (life) and reality (world). Instead, science is exclusively concerned with nature as the realm of physical entities and the underlying laws that allow us to account for, intervene in and manipulate the world, oblivious to the constitutive operations of consciousness. For the other side of the coin is, if you will, the salvaging or recovery of the life-world and a truly universal science encompassing both world and mind and their constitutive correlation which Husserl regarded as his great if yet to be accomplished task and contribution.16

15  The natural attitude is the stance we adopt in the life-world. The scientific attitude moves beyond the natural attitude but without questioning the existence of the world. Husserl’s call is for investigating the life-world as the irreducible, indeed transcendental ground of both. See Sebastian Luft, “Husserl’s Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude” in Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 37–51. See also David Hyder and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, eds. Science and the Life-World. Essays on Husserl’s ‘Crisis of European Sciences’, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 16  See especially the last section of the Crisis, § 73.

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If the life-world has never before become the focus of scientific enquiry, it is because it is what is obvious. Indeed, it is so obvious that it is continually overlooked and forgotten, even though it is the world in which the first proto-scientific activities—Husserl’s examples are surveying and measuring as precursors to geometry—grounded in sensory intuition, take place and without which subsequent developments would not have occurred. Instead, abstraction and formalization take over, cutting any ties to the intuitions at their origin; the sciences become part of a self-­ perpetuating process whose subjects no longer bother to give themselves an account of what enables and constitutes this complex process, oblivious to the obviousness of the life-world, above all to the irreducible (and admittedly less obvious) role of consciousness, the crucial concern of phenomenology. Husserl’s critique of the narrowing of science to the mathematical and natural sciences aims to make way for a new science: Transcendental Phenomenology, a science which by offering an account of the life-world will also be developing an account of the constituting operations of consciousness, a far richer field than the one-sided subject area of the sciences limiting themselves to the investigation of physical nature and providing the (restricted and restricting) paradigm for all scientific knowledge. Why is the return to the life-world imperative as a task for philosophy? Because modern science leaps over, skips and omits the different stages and steps of its genesis, above all the crucial and by no means obvious transition from life-world to the modern world conception according to which the only “real” world is the one construed scientifically. In more colloquial terms, we might say that modern science takes impermissible shortcuts that collide with Husserl’s ideal of accounting for things in full. Husserl considers the challenge before us as the recovery and integration of the missing links in this complicated process.17 The underlying supposition is that modern science has taken a fateful detour, one that makes reason miss its mark, as it were, for the ultimate realization of the mind, of reason, cannot be achieved if we restrict the field of study to “nature”, and fail to give an account of how “nature” came to be the pre-eminent 17  The virtually untranslatable German verb Blumenberg uses to describe the “therapy” Husserl proposes to undo the forgetting of the genesis of science and technology (but also of the “hidden teleology” of European history [Crisis § 7, 18; VI 16]) is “nachholen”, to do something one failed to do when one should have done it, also: to catch up, to make good for something, to repeat, to re-enact.

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subject it is and with that of the mind’s own constitutive role in this process. Like the structure of consciousness that consists of continually seeking to fulfil its intentional acts by achieving intuitive evidence, the history Husserl proposes or, rather, posits has its telos in nothing less than Selbstverständnis, self-understanding (echoing, not coincidentally, the venerable ancient ideal of self-knowledge). Blumenberg’s assessment of Husserl is characterized by distance and proximity. He is clearly sympathetic to the latter’s effort to convert Selbstverständlichkeit, the kind of obviousness and familiarity that is in fact a form of obliviousness, into Verständlichkeit and Selbstverständigung, into intelligibility and self-awareness.18 But he parts ways with Husserl, at least on the face of it, when it comes to the proposed solution to the fundamental fix into which science and technology got “European man” (the subject of Husserl’s concern—unabashedly Eurocentric). At issue is not, as one might think given Blumenberg’s title (“Lebenswelt und Technisierung”), that science has undone the primordial, undisturbed familiarity of the life-world to cast modern man into the alienated world of technology. Like Husserl, Blumenberg is far from lamenting the negative consequences of technologization (Technisierung).19 As a matter of fact, he is at pains to dismantle the antithesis of nature and technology in a discussion of different anthropological theories in turn decrying and defending man’s creative abilities as a mark, alternately, of his excellence or decadence.20 The problem is, rather, that technologization has turned into a second kind of life-world, forming a realm of ob(li)viousness, unquestioned and unquestionable, that undercuts human self-understanding and autonomy.21 It would be wrong, Blumenberg writes, to think Husserl was advocating a return to the (pre-scientific and pre-technological) life-world, as though repeating Rousseau’s alleged summons to return to nature.22 Husserl’s turn to the life-world is a turn to the analysis of the correlation between the structures of consciousness and the ways the world is given to us, intended to highlight that “nature” as conceived by the natural

 See Blumenberg, “Lebenswelt und Technisierung,” 23.  The term “Technisierung” appears in Husserl’s Crisis (See § 9). Blumenberg prefers it over technology, which suggests a set of tools, devices and machines; Technisierung, by contrast, draws attention to the processes of science and technology transforming the world. 20  See Blumenberg, “Lebenswelt und Technisierung,” 14–16. 21  See ibid., 40. 22  Ibid., 24–5. 18 19

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sciences is far from the inevitable and necessary paradigm of the world in all of its dimensions. Husserl locates the root of the problem of technologization in the discrepancy between expertise and insight, technological know-how and full understanding of how such expertise came about, of its genesis. “Technologization” is indeed the name of processes divorced from their life-worldly ground. It is the name of science whose practical success distracts its subjects from the higher calling of giving themselves a full account of what they are doing so as to achieve clarity about themselves. (Importantly, this account would also extend to the transcendental dimension, namely to what it is that makes what they are doing possible in the first place, that is, transcendental subjectivity.) The German terms Blumenberg uses to describe Husserl’s ambitions are Selbstergründung, self-exploration, and Selbstbegründung, both self-constitution and self-­ justification.23 It is the Urstiftung, of which Husserl is so fond of talking, the original foundation, brought about by Greek philosophy’s embrace of the theoretical attitude, that has set “European humanity” on the path of universal science.24 This universal science is achieved not in the objectivist natural sciences but in Transcendental Phenomenology. The “historical teleological reflection”, as Husserl called the Crisis in an earlier introduction to the work, aims at recovering the meaning of the Urstiftung so as to bring what was began then, but lost on the way, to a close, to achieve its final completion.25  See ibid., 46.  Blumenberg devoted the third part of Lebenszeit und Weltzeit to Husserl’s “Urstiftung”. The first part of the same book, suggestively titled “Das Lebensweltmißverständnis”, revisits the question of the life-world. See Barbara Merker, “Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit. Zwischen Lebenswelt und Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit” in: Franz Josef Wetz, Hermann Timm, eds., Die Kunst des Überlebens. Nachdenken über Hans Blumenberg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 68–98; for a more comprehensive account of Blumenberg’s engagement with Husserl, see Nicola Zambon, Das Nachleuchten der Sterne. Konstellationen der Moderne bei Hans Blumenberg (Munich: Fink, 2017). 25  See VI XIV fn. 3. The phrase is quoted in the introduction to the German edition and is not included in the English translation. I owe the reference to Dermot Moran, Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 139. Other passages in which Husserl mentions the teleology he is after include Crisis § 15, 70, VI 71; Crisis § 16, 74, VI 76; Krisis § 73, VI 276 (not included in the English translation). The term translated here as “reflection” is Besinnung. It is operative throughout Crisis. For further discussion see James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), 1–5. 23 24

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In a sense, Blumenberg shares Husserl’s description of technologization. However, he does not share his assessment of it. On the contrary, in Blumenberg’s view, the very predicament Husserl identifies as the cause for the fateful aberration from the trajectory towards an ever more universal science is inevitable. Indeed, formalization and methodization, which Husserl regards as forms of blind application, divorced from insight and intuition, are essential to the functioning of science, whose findings and achievements cannot be reiterated by every individual scientist. Rather, science “works” incrementally, precisely because it can be carried on over time without requiring its participants to always rehearse anew the different steps on which their research builds. The separation between philosophy and science Husserl seeks to overcome was “necessary and legitimate”.26 What Husserl laments as the loss of meaning was, in the words of Blumenberg, in reality “a self-imposed renunciation of meaning” resulting from the infinite progression to which modern science is committed.27 It is indeed the very split between an infinite process and finite subjects with which the account of Blumenberg’s “Trial of Theoretical Curiosity” ended earlier—on a note at once resigned and relieved from pressures of “theological absolutism” —that returns centre stage as the antinomy of philosophy and science in Husserl. But even at the level of Husserl’s own phenomenological analysis, “the antinomy of infinity and intuition”28 necessitates formalization. The empirical equivalent to the ideal of pure intuition cannot do without leaps and shortcuts, as its syntheses of the intentional object are always selective. It is simply not possible to intuit the object from all angles, to go through all its possible adumbrations, as one would theoretically have to do in order to achieve the ideal of complete givenness. Thus, “even on the most fundamental level of its operations [Leistungen] the human intellect is already engaged in formalisation”.29 In spite of the many overt dissimilarities between the Crisis and Blumenberg’s “Trial of Theoretical Curiosity”, there are some striking convergences: first and foremost, the key role assigned to Galileo and, secondly, the inevitable disconnect between the progression of the

 Blumenberg, “Lebenswelt und Technisierung,” 42.  “Der Sinnverlust, von dem Husserl gesprochen hat, ist in Wahrheit ein in der Konsequenz des theoretischen Anspruches selbst auferlegter Sinnverzicht” (ibid., 42). 28  Ibid., 43. 29  Ibid., 43–4. 26 27

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sciences and human finitude.30 For Husserl, this apparent discrepancy between the natural and the scientific attitude is secondary, though—in fact, the scientific attitude is but an extension of the natural one—in comparison with the more demanding task of exploring the dimension that grounds them both, transcendental subjectivity in its correlation with the life-world: another interminable and potentially unachievable task, but one that constitutes the phenomenologist’s very calling. It surely comes as no surprise that Blumenberg keeps his distance vis-à-­ vis Husserl’s emphatic notion of a hidden historical trajectory and his teleology of reason so clearly reminiscent of Hegel, whose name, however, is only mentioned in passing in the Crisis. Sympathetic though he may be to the ideals of Selbstverständnis and Selbstverständigung, Blumenberg ultimately considers Husserl’s strenuous efforts at the “transcendental self-­ exploration of subjectivity” as symptomatic of “the philosophical subject’s failure in the face of its own claim of radical self-constitution and interminable self-justification”.31 Perhaps the most striking point of divergence between the two accounts concerns the stance on the “theoretical attitude”. For Husserl this crucial shift or reorientation, this Umwendung, is not associated with any one philosopher or proto-scientist of Greek Antiquity. It is true, the anonymous and rather obscure Urstiftung took place in Antiquity, a voluntarist act that brooks no further investigation. What requires thorough examination, however, is how it was diverted from the straight path it had ahead of itself. Compare this with Blumenberg’s discussion of “theoretical curiosity”, which is also without a particular, dateable point of origin, but it is not conceived as somehow containing programmatic universal science that was lost and needs to be recuperated and completed. On the contrary, the point of tracing the trial or trials, Prozeß and Prüfung, of theoretical curiosity is to stress the vicissitudes of its history and how rather than heroically prevailing over its discrimination, the very restrictions imposed on it would be the catalysts of its “rehabilitation”. Yet, for all these reservations regarding the unending task the founder of phenomenology had set himself, and which nonetheless earned him Blumenberg’s admiration, it is hard not to notice the great extent to which 30  Another important figure for both is Descartes. However, the cast of authors Blumenberg discusses is so large that it is difficult to single out individual authors. Galileo and Descartes are certainly key protagonists, but so are, say, Ockham, Cusa and Bruno. 31  Ibid., 46.

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Blumenberg’s own method is indebted to the phenomenological approach to history. His erudite historical recapitulations continually measure what came to be against the range of options and possibilities contained within a given constellation, tracing the inconspicuous shifts and shadings, the adumbrations, to use Husserl’s term, that would eventually usher in a new order whose obviousness is mostly a matter of hindsight and owed to what has been consigned to oblivion. Blumenberg’s elaborate and meticulous reconstructions of the genesis of the modern age are attuned precisely to the manifold positions that played a part in this genesis but whose role was often lost from view in the process. This accounts, I believe, for the kaleidoscopic character of Blumenberg’s massive studies, revolving around turning points, epochal thresholds and putative breaks between the aeons, it is true, but ultimately most interested in, and devoting most time to, tracing the countless permutations—or adumbrations—of a given set of terms, of patterns of argument and counterarguments, and reclaiming our interest for what is lost or reputedly “overcome”.

Bibliography Blumenberg, Hans. “Ordnungsschwund und Selbstbehauptung. Über Weltverstehen und Weltverhalten im Werden der technischen Epoche.” In Helmut Kuhn and Franz Wiedmann (eds), Das Problem der Ordnung. Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1962. 37–57. Blumenberg, Hans. “‘Säkularisation’. Kritik einer Kategorie historischer Illegitimität.” In Helmut Kuhn and Franz Wiedmann (eds), Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt. Munich: Pustet, 1964. 240–65. Blumenberg, Hans. “Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter Aspekten der Phänomenologie.” In Wirklichkeiten, in denen wir leben. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981a. 7–54. Blumenberg, Hans. “‘Nachahmung der Natur’. Zur Vorgeschichte der Idee des schöpferischen Menschen.” In Wirklichkeiten, in denen wir leben. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981b. 55–103. Blumenberg, Hans. Lebenszeit und Weltzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Blumenberg, Hans. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit [LN]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [LMA]. Translated by Robert Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Dodd, James. Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004.

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Flasch, Kurt. Hans Blumenberg. Philosoph in Deutschland 1945–1966. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2017. Goldstein, Jürgen. Nominalismus und Moderne. Zur Konstitution neuzeitlicher Subjektivität bei Hans Blumenberg und Wilhelm von Ockham. Munich: Alber, 1998. Husserl, Edmund. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie in Gesammelte Werke (Husserliana), Vol. VI, edited by Walter Biemel, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Hyder, David and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds). Science and the Life-World. Essays on Husserl's 'Crisis of European Sciences', Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Luft, Sebastian. “Husserl's Phenomenological Discovery of the Natural Attitude.” In Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011. 37–51. Merker, Barbara. “Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit. Zwischen Lebenswelt und Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit.” In Franz Josef Wetz and Hermann Timm (eds), Die Kunst des Überlebens. Nachdenken über Hans Blumenberg. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999. 68–98. Moran, Dermot. Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Zambon, Nicola. Das Nachleuchten der Sterne. Konstellationen der Moderne bei Hans Blumenberg. Munich: Fink, 2017.

CHAPTER 8

Infinite Progress and the Burdens of Biography Charles Turner

Not the least of the remarkable features of Hans Blumenberg’s books is that they are as dense as they are long, single pages or even sentences sometimes seeming to condense an entire career of sustained writing and intense yet unimaginably broad reading, and suggesting numerous avenues of further enquiry. His rules for writing fat books were neither those gently mocked by Walter Benjamin, where numerous examples of the same phenomenon are piled up, nor those of Niklas Luhmann, where a machine is cranked up and the words tumble out. In this respect the scholar he most resembles is perhaps Max Weber, especially the Weber of Economy and Society. While their chief substantive concerns only overlap here and there, in this chapter I use two thin yet robust slices of Blumenberg to make a sandwich much of whose meat is provided by Weber. The first slice is a statement about progress in science; the second is an account of time and the life of the politician. The meat in between is Weber on both, with some Simmelian trimmings.

C. Turner (*) University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_8

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Visions of Progress At the end of the chapter of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age titled “Progress Exposed as Fate”, Blumenberg writes: It was certainly a result of the quick disappointment of early expectations of definitive total results that the idea of progress underwent expansion into that of “infinite progress” … the introduction of infinity … was hardly the winning of a divine attribute for human history; rather it was initially a form of resignation. The danger of this hyperbolizing of the idea of progress is the necessary disappointment of each individual in the context of history, doing work in his particular situation for a future whose enjoyment he cannot inherit. Nevertheless, the idea of infinite progress also has a safeguarding function for the actual individual and for each actual generation in history. If there was an immanent final goal of history, then those who believe they know it and claim to promote its attainment would be legitimised in using all the others who do not know it and cannot promote it as mere means. Infinite progress does make each present relative to its future but at the same time it renders every absolute claim untenable. This idea of progress corresponds more than anything else to the only regulative principle that can make history humanly bearable, which is that all dealings must be so constituted that through them people do not become mere means. (LMA, 35)

This comes at the end of Blumenberg’s first effort to dismantle the idea that the nineteenth-century philosophies of history of Hegel, Comte and Marx, regardless of whether they inspired the unbearable politics of the twentieth, were a secularized form of Christian eschatology. He had begun the argument with a caricature of Weber, arguing that formulae like “the modern work ethic is secularized monastic asceticism” are of limited methodological utility in assessing how the past bears on the present, suggesting, as they do, that historical change, or at least ideational change, involves the same substance taking on new forms (LMA, 5). Weber himself of course had claimed that the relationship between the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism was not like this at all, but rather the equally awkward one of elective affinity, and so no more a matter of a substance changing its form than was Nietzsche’s spirit of music turning into tragedy. Weber does sometimes look like he is saying “B is the secularized form of A”, notably when he compares the modern business club to the Puritan sect, but it is more of an aside than a serious thesis about change and how

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to think about it.1 On the other hand, he understood the idea of infinite progress only too well, and, whatever sort of liberal he was, he would have endorsed Blumenberg’s formulation of it. But he also said something more urgent and dramatic about it, in what one of my students once called “that Weber quote you always read out”: Abraham, or some peasant in ancient times died “old and satiated with life”; because he stood in the organic cycle of life, because on the eve of his days his life had given him everything it had to offer, including whatever meaning it had, because for him there were no more puzzles he wished to solve, and so he could have had enough of it. A man of culture, however, placed within a civilization continually being enriched by ideas, knowledge, and problems, can become “tired of life”, but never “satiated with” life. Because from whatever the life of the spirit brings forth ever anew, he extracts only the minutest part, and always something provisional not definitive, and so for him death is a meaningless event. And because death is meaningless, the cultural life that stamps death with meaninglessness is itself meaningless through its “progressiveness”.2

That is an observation not about the dangers of politicians offering to know where history is heading, but about what Georg Simmel called the triumph of objective over subjective culture. The problem for all modern people, Simmel thought, was how to absorb into oneself or make something of the cultural achievements that, with increasing rapidity, pile up around us; their tragedy was never being able to make more than a fraction of it mean something inwardly. When death comes, it puts an arbitrary stop to a process of cultural accumulation that is in principle endless. Another difference between the two statements is this: in 1917 Weber assumed that infinite progress is effectively the default philosophy of history of societies in which culture has been set free from whatever religious constraints it was once placed under; by contrast, Blumenberg, 20 years after the end of the European civil war that lasted from 1914 to 1945, thinks that infinite progress is a principle that needs defending. Weber died in 1920, a month before Blumenberg was born, and shortly thereafter a version of his “polar night of icy darkness and hardness” descended 1  Max Weber, “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in From Max Weber, trans. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), 307, 311. 2  Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1988), 595.

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on Europe,3 as political leaders sought to bend societies to the pursuit of a finite historical goal, and demanded and got the participation of tens of millions in bringing it about. While the darkness was lifted from one half of Europe in 1945, and both sides of the iron curtain settled down to the pursuit of growth (with one side’s growth rather more infinite than the other’s), their populations were then haunted by the spectre of nuclear annihilation, and here it was common for intellectuals to attribute this less to the pursuit by one side of a finite historical goal than to the Cold War divide-defining and divide-transcending “military-industrial complex”, with its pursuit of limitless technological possibility. In the West, this critique of technology fed readily into the more general critique of uncontrolled growth-oriented economic expansion. When Blumenberg defended infinite progress, then, as a principle of modesty, he was responding both to older ideas of historical inevitability which some neo-Marxists still espoused and to the anti-modern, anti-progressive romanticism of the student movement and critical theory. It is significant here that Blumenberg finds the version of infinite progress worth defending embodied most clearly in the practices of modern science, the pursuit of truth being what Popper called an unending quest; and he sees the refusal of definitiveness as a principle extendable to politics, where the greatest danger still comes from those who believe that they possess answers that will close off the need for further questions. According to Christopher Lasch: “the idea of progress, contrary to received opinion, owes its appeal not to its millennial vision of the future but to the seemingly more realistic expectation that the expansion of productive forces can continue indefinitely. The history of liberalism – which includes a great deal that passes for conservatism as well – consists of variations on this underlying theme.”4 Yet, as Peter Wagner has suggested, built into the liberal view was an assumption that this strong concept of progress was only worth defending if it fostered the capacity of individuals for autonomy and the exercise of their reason; as with modern democracy, the institutional reality of which (universal franchise, a political career a possibility for all citizens) lagged behind the articulation of its basic principles, so for much of the 3  Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Political Writings, edited by Peter Lassman and Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 368. 4  Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: progress and its critics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 39.

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nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the strong liberal idea of progress contrasted sharply with an institutional reality in which the individual’s room for manoeuvre, or his or her capacity for enlightenment in Kant’s sense, was curtailed, not least by arrangements specifically set up to do just that.5 Blumenberg’s principle of extending to politics a concept of infinite progress peculiar to science misses this, so much so that it seems to reverse a formula that had traction in liberal circles for much of the twentieth century, namely that if science itself was not to regress, all political restrictions on it needed to be removed: political progress was a condition of epistemic progress, not the other way round. Lasch himself claimed that “a social order founded on science … seems to have achieved a kind of immortality undreamed of by earlier civilizations”,6 by which he meant that we can imagine it blowing itself up but not dying a natural death, a remark that looks naïve in view of what we know about climate change. Indeed, we may say that if the scientific attitude has been extended beyond the limits of science, then it is not the principle of modesty that has triumphed; even assuming that the conditions for infinite progress in science have been met—that as Richard Rorty once put it, freedom is taken care of so truth can look after itself—a major difference between infinite progress in science and in society is that in science there are clear criteria of success and obsolescence, disciplined by the search for truth, whereas in the economy, for instance, obsolescence is built in, not because of repeated successes, but because of the commodity’s evanescent character and because of the quest for ever-new sources of profit.7 Between science and the economy, the two most forward-­thrusting activities we know, lie areas of institutional life whose temporal structures offer more stability and continuity, and there is a politics of time to the extent that efforts are made to subordinate one temporality to another.

 Peter Wagner, Progress: a reconstruction (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).  Lasch, True and Only Heaven, 39. 7  It is also worth noting that, contra Löwith and Blumenberg, theologians such as Karl Rahner argued that the eschatological attitude, far from fostering an aggressive, millenarian politics based on a final goal for history, was more likely the basis of scepticism towards the idea that history had any discernible shape or direction. 5 6

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Lasting Significance What, then, of the burdens of biography for individuals whose lives are inserted into activities with their different and possibly competing temporal structures? In one respect of course they are demonstrably different from the ones that Weber and Simmel articulated 100 years ago. Then, while the professions were expanding along with the implied audience for the message of “Science as a Vocation”, the biography of most people was if not quite what George Steiner once called “a grey transit between domestic spasm and oblivion”,8 then at least one where people worked, reached retirement age and almost immediately died. Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel themselves barely made it past 60, and not merely because they were exhausted after packing in more scholarship and writing into one life than entire university departments can manage today. Today people are living to 90 and 100, and while the dominant public policy question is “how can we pay for them all?”, for those who can look forward to 30 years of post-work life, two questions hover over their future, one related to work, the other to leisure: “what have I achieved?” and “how much objective culture have I inwardly absorbed?”. Simmel himself implied that such questions would not be a source of disquiet, since the characteristic attitude of the elderly was one of reflectiveness and the consolidation of an accumulated “substance”, while a focus on the “process” of life was a matter for the young. A form of life such as the adventure, for instance—in which a discreet experience is sought that takes the individual out of the continuities of their regular existence, but in which the content or substance of the experience is less important than the process of having it—was not something that made sense in old age: What is called the subjectivity of youth is just this: The material of life in its substantive significance is not as important to youth as is the process which carries it, life itself. Old age is “objective;” it shapes a new structure out of the substance left behind in a peculiar sort of timelessness by the life which has slipped by. The new structure is that of contemplativeness, impartial judgment, freedom from that unrest which marks life as being present. It is all this that makes adventure alien to old age and an old adventurer an obnoxious or tasteless phenomenon. It would not be difficult to develop the

8

 George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 87.

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whole essence of adventure from the fact that it is the form of life which in principle is inappropriate to old age.9

Be that as it may, the healthiness and longevity of the old today, and their continuing determination to be attached to the process as well as the substance of life, has brought with it the very quest for adventure—from global travel to marathon running, bungie jumping to love affairs—that Simmel thought obnoxious. There was something ironic in this, since, if Simmel himself harboured an ideal of personhood, it was that of the balanced personality, one who draws on a variety of sources of cultural sustenance but takes only as much from each as he or she needs. The old’s adventurousness might look like an innocent enough attempt to correct the balance. Weber rather mocked Simmel for this in a section of Economy and Society called “Excursus on the Cultivated Man”, contrasting his superficial all-sidedness with the specialist’s ability to put on blinkers and devote his or life to one arena of activity.10 Today though, in developed welfare states, our most general sense of social progress is linked with the idea of a gradual increase in the capacity of individuals to live how they want, and while Weber did have something to say about that, his own question was more specific and more austere: what are the chances that someone whose life is necessarily limited to one arena of activity can achieve something of lasting significance? This way of putting the problem owed a lot to Luther and something to Machiavelli: from the former—who he thought “towered above everyone else”—he took the idea of Beruf, vocation, from the latter the idea that it was only in politics that a human being could hope to outwit fate and achieve lasting glory. By exploring these burdens in two arenas, scholarship and politics, the one his own vocation and the other what he called his secret love, he challenged everyone to think about how their finite lives measure up against an immeasurable future. 9  Georg Simmel, “The Adventure,” in Simmel on Culture, edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 210. 10  Max Weber, “Excursus on the Cultivated Man,” in Economy and Society (California: University of Berkeley Press, 1978), 1001. There is an irony here, because if anything it was Simmel who achieved a greater singleness of purpose, seeing the world and everything in it from a position that did not move very much, while Weber jumped about between economic history, law, philosophy and political commentary. Moreover, his version of the sociology that would transcend the other human sciences is rather less self-assuredly synthetic than that of his friend.

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If Luther and Machiavelli are obvious reference points for Weber’s vocation lectures, a less obvious one is Adam Smith. Indeed, Lasch suggests that “it is to Smith and his successors rather than to second rate thinkers normally associated with the idea of progress  – Condorcet, Comte, Spencer – that we should look for the inner meaning of progressive ideology”.11 Smith believed that the key to the success of commercial society was the modest expenditure of ordinary consumers and the uninterrupted efforts of individuals to improve themselves, both of which were decidedly non-utopian principles: central to the social psychology of liberalism is learning to lower one’s expectations in return for bearable disappointments or, as Durkheim recommended for France, having sociologists come up with ways of lowering them. And yet Smith—and here he was indeed a true precursor of Weber—also thought that while a world made up of states geared up for commerce was preferable to one organized for war, politics in general and war in particular were themselves among the “great schools of self-command”, fostering magnanimity when people were faced with the proximity of the human situation.12 This harder, starker idea of testing, and proving, oneself is all over Weber from the Protestant ethic onwards, and that is perhaps why, in contrast to Durkheim’s efforts to accord the same significance to all professionals and their professional ethics, he thought long and hard in particular about the burdens that attend the scientific and political vocations, and also gave a nod to the artist: all three were vocations where the ideal Puritan combination of steady improvement and modest expectation were haunted by the prospect of spectacular success and more lacerating disappointment. In the end he thought that both science and art offered an institutional means for coming to terms with such disappointment; politics did not. We may say something here about scholarship through a single example. Like most German sociologists, Wilhelm Baldamus (1908–1991) never really retired, and so, in 1982, aged 73, sitting in his armchair in retirement in Leeds, England, he found himself looking through his first published paper. “The Self-Destruction of Liberal Political Economy” had appeared in 1933, in Ständisches Leben, an Austrian journal edited by Othmar Spann. The individualist view of life, the 24 year old had written,  Lasch, True and Only Heaven, 36.  Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 181. 11 12

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comes to grief when it splits up into a chaos of numerous autarkic meanings for one and the same reality, and on an increasingly widespread anxiety concerning the load-bearing capacity of its foundations, an anxiety the resistance to which leads of necessity to helplessness and to a deeper entanglement in the relativity problematic. If thinking this question through to its self-­ destructive conclusion is bound to be ponderous and slow, then psychologically this is explained by the fact that specialised disciplinary knowledge, which has accumulated over a century and a half and which is constantly developing, stands before us as something apparently self-evident and unchallengeable.13

In a letter from December 1986, Baldamus reflects on this rereading and recalls that half a century on, the gothic script used by the journal had given the article a sinister feel. However, to my surprise, there was not a single word in it which I would have wanted to change. So here was a piece of enduring knowledge. And yet it is totally obsolete. With historical hindsight my (rather arrogant) prediction that the ruling paradigm of liberal (neo-classical) economics was in a state of self-­ destruction was plainly mistaken.14

This splendid paradox responds both to Nietzsche’s famous question— “Can you bear the thought that if you had to live your life again you would have to do so in the same way with nothing added and nothing taken away?” “Can you turn ‘thus it was’ into ‘so I willed it’?”—and to Weber’s admonishment—“Can you as a scholar accept, can you want, that others will come along and make your work obsolete?” Nietzsche’s question appears to be about our relationship to the past; if you answer yes, you might experience regret or embarrassment, guilt or shame, but you will never disown anything, and will accept responsibility for everything, including for things that you think merely happened to you. Yet it is also about the future, about how not to be inhibited by new possibilities and, at an extreme, how anyone might live an experimental life, or make of it a private poem or work of art. Weber’s paraphrase of Nietzsche is more overtly about the future, about how someone about to 13  Wilhelm Baldamus, “Die Selbstzersetzung der liberalistischen Nationalökonomie,” Ständisches Leben 3 (10), 1933, 56. 14  Charles Turner, “The Structure of Sociological Inference: a forgotten classic?” in Paradox and Inference: the sociology of Wilhelm Baldamus, edited by Mark Erickson and Charles Turner (London: Ashgate, 2010), 68.

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embark on a scholarly career should conduct him or herself towards it and towards those who come after, long after he or she is gone. Weber sets up his question by means of a contrast between science and art. The pertinence, nay cruelty, of the question about wanting your work to become obsolete lies in the fact that science is chained to the course of progress while art is not: unlike in science, a new tool or a new art technique—his example is perspective—cannot make the art of one era superior to that of another: “a work of art that is a genuine achievement can never be overcome by another that is also a genuine achievement, it will never grow old…the individual may judge their personal importance differently, but he will never be able to say of one work of art that it has surpassed another.”15 By contrast, the fate, the meaning of the work of science as he calls it, is that in 10, 20 or 50 years it will be antiquated. Moreover, this is the aim of science. A new achievement in science does not bring something to an end; on the contrary, it only produces new questions. “We cannot work without hoping that others go further than we do. In principle this progress is infinite.” And yet, he says, it is not clear that something that is subordinated to such a law can have any meaning in itself. Which raises the question of why one pursues such an activity that can end. Weber’s own answer—to see how much he could stand—has never really satisfied anyone.16

 Weber, “Wissenschaft,” 592.  Wilhelm Baldamus, The Structure of Sociological Inference (London: Macmillan, 1976), 33. One thing that follows from the idea of infinite progress in scholarship is that while there may be such a thing as scientific classics, they are not worth reading, which makes the fact that we in the social sciences and humanities are still puzzling over the words of nineteenthcentury sociologists, either a sign of failure—very possible—or an index of the fact that they are as much arts as sciences (though current sociology journals provide little empirical evidence for that claim). If the latter is true there is a proviso: the reason that the work of one era does not surpass that of another may have less to do with their being equally worthy achievements than with the existence of a different sort of law, not of infinite progress but of intellectual fashion, which offers a form of security for those for whom the idea of scholarship as an unending quest is too much to bear. As Baldamus put it, the development of sociological theory may well be “nothing more than a discontinuous sequence of ad hoc inventions thrown up by the intuitive inspirations of prominent scholars” (Baldamus, 1976). In which case, the history of social science and of art in the twentieth century are not so different: just as one art movement succeeds another without rendering it obsolete, and older styles get rediscovered, so social science fashions in theory—functionalism, structuralism, network theory, game theory—and in methods—ethnography, action research, surveys—come and go and come again. 15 16

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What then of Baldamus looking back at his first published article half a century on? Had he taken Nietzsche’s advice about retrospectively willing everything that had happened to him since then, he would have willed being arrested twice by the Gestapo, fleeing Germany and gaining refuge in Britain courtesy of Karl Mannheim, being imprisoned by the UK authorities for ten months on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien, having to refuse Ralf Dahrendorf’s request for PhD supervision because he was only junior faculty, and having to wait until the age of 62 for a full professorship. Seen in those terms, it was perhaps easy enough for him to say he would not have changed a word of his little essay on liberalism. Yet Weber’s way of putting his question—can you bear the thought that your work will be surpassed?—is as cruel as the last line of “Science as a Vocation”, where he says you can bear the fate of the times if you find the daemon that holds the very fibres of your life. For the mark of a true scholar, he says, is not simply accepting one’s own obsolescence in retirement, grateful that one no longer lives in a world where the Gestapo exists; it is actively wanting to become obsolete even as one writes one’s first papers! That entails a particular faith in the scholarly community; as a community of the dead, the living and the not-yet born, to be sure, and extended forward in indefinite time, but also one that offers some relief from the burden of disappointment, in so far as the scholar can consider himself the custodian of a single tradition of enquiry defined by a quest for the truth. And if this is what scholarship offers, then it turns out to be similar to what art offers but politics does not: a record of demonstrable achievement in the pursuit of a definable but elusive goal. Weber always presented the relationship between science and art as one between mutually irreconcilable value spheres, but they had something in common: they were value spheres, and they were also disciplines (politics is a vocation but it is not a discipline, which is what makes it so dangerous, as we will see). Blumenberg saw mythmaking in these terms too, an activity of drawing on a repository of cultural resources, with a discipline of a sort built into it, attendant on the fact that every variation on a myth is tied to the myth’s original purpose: self-preservation through overcoming the absolutism of reality. Just as science is an unending quest, myth can never be brought to an end. What enables us to live with the disappointment of this infinity is the thought that it would be unendurable to possess or know an absolute truth or a final myth. Science and art live not only through an ultimate value but also through the institutionalization of a procedure: as he puts it two pages before the passage with which we began, “the idea of [Descartes’]

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method is not a kind of planning … but rather the establishment of a disposition: the disposition of the subject, in his place, to take part in a process that generates knowledge in a trans-subjective manner” (LMA, 33). Science and art institutionalize the thought that there is always something more to say, albeit that the criteria for deciding what needs to be said are different. It is interesting that Weber told his students that they would have to want their work to be surpassed near the end of a career in which he had repeatedly had to face the thought that those who came after him might not be as good as him and not capable of going beyond him. Indeed, he often took upon himself the task of going further. In later life he described his Freiburg inaugural lecture of 1895 as one of the “sins of my youth”; and he was constantly rewriting, amending, adding and responding to critics of the protestant ethic for 15 years so that the footnotes finally took up more space than the main text. We can call this simple open-­mindedness, a willingness to rethink, but perhaps he did not really trust his successors to make him obsolete in the right way: better to correct one’s own mistakes, atone for one’s own sins, give an account of oneself to oneself before anyone else can do it for you. That was partly his Protestantism, but also an answer to another of his paraphrases of Nietzsche: “Can you bear the thought of seeing mediocrity after mediocrity rise to positions above you?” The Nazi accession to power made this as prophetic as Weber’s claims about “a polar night of icy darkness” descending on the future. This phrase is used in “Politics as a Vocation”, after the great war had finished, a war that had been less Smith’s great school of self-command than a slaughter house that deprived millions of young men of the chance to experience what disappointment means.

Politics There is a basic difference between the burdens of biography faced by scholars and artists on the one hand and politicians on the other: whereas both science and art are in principle universal, in that there is only one scientific and one artistic community, or at least a sense of a common enterprise, every political community is resolutely particular, an arbitrary version of what a political community is. Moreover, its temporal structure, far from being a framework for the activity it contains, is an object of that very activity: how we think about the relationship between the dead, the living and the not-yet born in politics is a matter of dispute in a way it is

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not in science or art; that does not mean that there is no dispute in scholarship or art, no effort, for instance, on the part of the artist to discard completely the achievements of the past while other artists revere them; yet the range of variation in politics is greater, not least because there is, as Weber said in the language of his day, no ultimate value that defines politics as politics, merely the pursuit and management of power. Think of the fact that states that began with a founding act have difficulty invoking much that happened before it; or that states that have experienced several military coups have difficulty in making their citizens think in terms of a long unbroken tradition before the last coup; and of the fact that, on the other hand, there are polities so stable that sociologists can at least claim that they have remained unchanged for 300 years,17 or where the origins of a particular practice are so shrouded in obscurity that to ask when they began is almost tasteless. Put another way, the Burkean idea of a political community of the dead, the living and the not-yet born makes more sense of art and science than it does of many of the political communities to which he sought to apply it, little sense in a lot of places. As custodians of what political tradition, for instance, can politicians in former communist societies think of themselves? Blumenberg says that only an idea of infinite progress makes history humanly bearable, because once politicians appear claiming to know what history’s goal is, they will be more likely to treat others as a means to their own ends. That may well be true if we see freedom—of individuals, and of each generation not to be used as a means to the ends of another generation—as the supreme value of all; on the other hand, if Weber is right to say that it is our fate to die tired of life but not satiated with it, having extracted from it only a fraction of what might make it significant for us, then we may think about the compensations available to those who cannot be scholars or scientists. Death through sheer exhaustion was common enough before 1914, but if the infinite progressiveness of culture made death meaningless even for the expanding leisure class, then death in war, Weber suggested, might provide an answer to the question “for what am I to die?”. He said this in 1917, having proclaimed to the shocked Sunday circle in Heidelberg in August 1914: “this war is great and wonderful, whatever happens now.”18 Blumenberg refers somewhere to Descartes’ 17  W.G.  Runciman, Very Different, But Much the Same: The Evolution of English Society Since 1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 18  Marianne Weber, Max Weber: a Biography (New York: Wiley, 1975), 521–2.

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claim that to build new cities you first had to destroy old ones and jokes that not even World War II provided support for that proposition; World War I provided no support at all for Weber’s claims about where a meaningful death might be found. On the other hand, consider the idea of history having a goal and the great totalitarian movements of the twentieth century that were premised on it. These movements offered millions of those who followed them the chance to become, yes, a means to an end, a cog in a machine, but also a contributor to something larger than themselves that might have a finite purpose. When Blumenberg in his defence of infinite progress says that it is what makes history bearable, he was neglecting the possibility that people might want history to be a winnable battle and to feel themselves to be on the winning side.19 If the institutions of science and art relieve artists or scientists of the burden of biography by inserting them in something within a demonstrable record of achievement, political institutions do not obviously offer the citizen something similar. That has always been precisely the conservative argument; political institutions are not there to serve citizens but to prevent them from harming one another in the pursuit of their otherwise apolitical lives. It is when they break down that politics becomes participatory and offers more, the prospect of not having to work things out for oneself, of doing something while not taking any responsibility for it; totalitarianism and populism both feed off this impulse: for the first time, the citizen may say, or be tempted to say, my vote matters and I am not responsible for the consequences. Yet someone must be responsible, must bear the burden of our engagement with history. Which brings us to political leadership. Now Weber was notoriously sanguine about the fact that politics was about the management of power. But in “Politics as a Vocation” he says something extraordinary about the attitude required from the ideal politician. Leadership, he says, involves the sort of stubbornness that the scientist is not permitted, because in science there are criteria for what does and does not work, for genuine achievement; we know what it means to make a mistake and we know that others who come after us will correct ours. By contrast, the 19  In Chris Marker’s documentary about the Russian filmmaker Medvedkin, the critic Marina Goldovskaya reflects on the May Day parades in Red Square from the 1930s to the 1950s and on the smiling proletarian faces of those participating in them. She says these smiles were genuine, and that this was because the parades made them feel that “they were winning people”.

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politician’s stubbornness consists in adhering to his ultimate beliefs even when reality gets no nearer to realizing them. Yet Weber also expects the political leader to bear personal responsibility for all the consequences of his actions, regardless of how many others have been involved in realizing them. Whereas the scientist confronts evidence along with others who, subscribing to the same methods, share the burden of enquiry, boring their hard boards together, and the artist has total responsibility only for his or her own work, the politician, in Weber’s eyes, makes himself responsible not only for everything he has done, but for everything others will do as a result of his decisions. What makes politics a distinctive profession is that it is difficult for the politician to see himself as the custodian of a tradition, because the relationship between failure and success is so unstable, the criteria so elusive. This instability means both that nothing the politician does makes a difference and that everything does; the scope of significance of one’s actions is so ill-defined that one cannot say where the boundary between responsibility and irresponsibility lies. Hence the need, as Weber sees it, for the true political leader to assume the greatest burden of all: personal responsibility for everything. Such an austere criterion makes it easy for us to see our least favourite politicians as feckless charlatans, and doubtless the charge is often justified. Yet Weber’s idea of radical responsibility towards the future—a kind of inversion and then intensification of Nietzsche’s radical responsibility towards the past, where one says “I will it” to things that will happen to others as well as to oneself—is so hard that one may wonder whether any politician can meet it. When Machiavelli said that it was only in politics that one can achieve lasting glory, he meant that that one should assume that people will come after one, in a future for which one cannot oneself be responsible. In other words, even if one’s own political community is different from others in its temporal structure, there is an important sense in which, like the scientist or the artist, the politician can be relieved of the ultimate burden by knowing that he or she is contributing something towards a communal effort extended in time. Or to put it in the terms with which we began: the one who thinks he knows what history’s final goal is may still make himself merely into the chief instrument for attaining it and treat everyone else’s burdens as his own, sacrificing himself for the greater good or greater bad. Trotsky once said of Stalin that the principle of his rule was not “L’État, c’est moi”, but “La societé, c’est moi”. True enough, but that remains a form of political absolutism in which the

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General Secretary, like the First Consul, may be seeing himself, just about, as the first servant of society. And in all these cases, it entails one key if obvious assumption: that the world will continue after my death. Yet what if someone enters the political arena lacking even that degree of modesty and believes not only in a final goal but that everything that it is possible for him to achieve must be achieved within his own lifetime, someone for whom the very concept of a necessary disappointment is meaningless, someone who, we might say, has twisted Weber’s idea of radical responsibility in such a way as to make his decisions and their consequences fit one another perfectly? In Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, Blumenberg explored just such a case: In the limiting case of paranoia, the one and only life which one has becomes the condition for the realisation of historical and political meaning, so that one can see the failure of one’s life’s goal as that of the world’s meaning: if one is condemned to failure due to some external disturbance of one’s life’s work, then everything is condemned to failure. A unique life defines its meaning by the demand that no subsequent life is permitted. In an extension of Freudian language one would be entitled to call this “absolute narcissism”.20

Blumenberg adds that one would normally treat this as just that, a hypothetical limiting case, were it not for the fact that we have on record a statement of it. Shortly before Germany’s inevitable collapse, in the Berlin bunker, Hitler says to his adjutant, von Bulow: “We will never capitulate, never. We could go under. But we will take a world with us.” The Nero Order, the scorched earth policy of the last days, designed to make Germany uninhabitable for its conquerors, followed from this. Hitler’s statement is the culmination of a development which begins with a decision to subordinate his political timetable to that of his own life, a decision which, Blumenberg argues, echoing Weber’s thesis about the circumstances in which modern death can be meaningful, could not be anything other than a decision in favour of war: War is always conducted under the illusion that it is the only form of political action in which waiting plays little or no role. In this sense it was not the Second World War which was Hitler’s personal means of bringing his lifetime into congruence with that of political world time; it was his voluntary  Hans Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), 80.

20

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entry into World War I, even if his participation provided incomparably less support for the illusion.21

The tragedy of the Germans, Hitler believed, was they had never had the time that other peoples had had, that they had “always been buffeted about by circumstance”. The others had had time because they had had sufficient space or because of their ideological patience with history and with life, whose goals are to be fulfilled either in the beyond or in an indeterminate future: “I by contrast stand under the command of fate to achieve everything within a short human life … That for which others have an eternity, I have merely a few meagre years.”22 For Blumenberg this constitutes Hitler’s unprecedented apolitical madness: For Hitler politics was not fate, as Napoleon put it. It was rather a substitute for fate, a surrogate for life, and as such dependent upon unconditional totality under pain of meaninglessness. There was life only as a single life. As soon as that has become the dominant idea, it becomes unbearable that the world had existed indifferently before this single life and could continue after it. To bear this however rests on the ability to relativise one’s own life, in other words, on a world horizon. Hitler had no world. That is why he used the expression with the indefinite article.23

Conclusion “‘Tis too late to be ambitious”, wrote Sir Thomas Browne in the seventeenth century. “The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs.”24 That might still be as good a warning as any to politicians with delusions of grandeur, as well as to poets needing to face up to the fact that the first works of their tradition are already so advanced. Yet since then, the range of things to have designs about has vastly extended, and the number of individuals who can hope to have those designs has increased exponentially, along with the potential disappointments. The study of social institutions is partly the study of the means people have available to them for making the burden of such  Blumenberg, Lebenszeit, 81.  Blumenberg, Lebenszeit, 83. 23  Blumenberg, Lebenszeit, 84. 24  Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Urne Buriall (New York: New  York Review of Books Classics, 2012), 152. 21 22

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­ isappointments bearable, either by fitting themselves into traditions of d practices or, failing that, by more heroic individual efforts. People like Blumenberg and Weber, sensitive to the ways in which those institutions might not always be up to the job, help us to think in more nuanced ways about what is at stake in those efforts.

Bibliography Baldamus, Wilhelm. “Die Selbstzersetzung der liberalistischen Nationalökonomie,” Ständisches Leben 3.10 (1933). Baldamus, Wilhelm. The Structure of Sociological Inference. London: Macmillan, 1976. Blumenberg, Hans. Lebenszeit und Weltzeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [LMA]. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1982. Browne, Thomas. Religio Medici and Urne Buriall. New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2012. Erickson, Mark and Charles Turner (eds). Paradox and Inference: the Sociology of Wilhelm Baldamus. London: Ashgate, 2010. Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. Runciman, W.G. Very Different, But Much the Same: The Evolution of English Society Since 1714. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Simmel, Georg. “The Adventure,” in Simmel on Culture, edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone. London: Sage, 1997. Smith, Adam. The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Steiner, George. In Bluebeard’s Castle: some notes towards the redefinition of culture. London: Faber and Faber, 1974. Wagner, Peter. Progress: A Reconstruction. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. Weber, Marianne. Max Weber: A Biography. New York: Wiley, 1975. Weber, Max. From Max Weber. Translated by H.  Gerth and C.  Wright Mills. London: Routledge, 1948. Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Berkeley, CA: University of Berkeley Press, 1978. Weber, Max. “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1988. Weber, Max. Political Writings. Edited by Peter Lassman and Ronald Spiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

CHAPTER 9

The Ideal of Optics and the Opacity of Life: Blumenberg on Modernity and Myth Oriane Petteni

Interrogating modernity is, in part, a matter of attending to the photology and the ocularology that grounds it—this is the claim at the heart of several studies such as (i) D.M. Levin’s collection Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, which includes an essay by Blumenberg himself on the various shifts undergone by the metaphor of light in the history of philosophy; (ii) Jonathan Crary’s work on the “modern observer”1; and (iii) Rosalind Krauss’s The Optical Unconscious, which stresses the structural figure/ background opposition underlying the modernist pictorial field. Jacques Derrida also makes a similar suggestion in Writing and Difference, when he states that “the whole history of philosophy may very well be a photology”.2 It is in this vein that this chapter argues that interrogating Blumenberg’s relationship with modernity must proceed by way of 1  See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1990), and Jonathan Crary, Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 2000). 2  Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), 31.

O. Petteni (*) Liège University, Liège, Belgium © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_9

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scrutinizing his extensive work on light metaphors and, more broadly, the motif of visuality in his work. In the first section, I suggest that Blumenberg’s depiction of the modern age as the epoch of geometrical optics strongly impacts on his conception of restricted rationality as characteristic of modernity. And, indeed, restricted rationality, understood through a Kantian lens, is paradigmatic for modern reason. Hence, I briefly indicate the intimate relationship between geometrical optics and Kant’s critical project, so as to transition into the next part of the chapter, where I bring together Blumenberg’s account of modern rationality with Herder’s opposition between visuality and tactility developed in his Sculpture.3 With Krauss, I argue that visuality—or rather, a restricted use of the retina—incarnates the modernist sense par excellence; indeed, it economically bypasses the patient work of tactility, so as to introject immediately a foreign reality. Since the confrontation between the human subject and “absolute reality” stands at the core of Blumenberg’s anthropology, I argue that his Herderian conception of vision and tactility should be read in this anthropological context. Secondly, Blumenberg’s conception of visuality is to be put into dialogue with his monumental Work on Myth. That is, the construction of mythical significance works in exactly the same way as tactility’s patient negotiation with its environment. This process is therefore opposed to the way in which the modernist eye operates. Work on Myth thus represents a way of caring for those pre-modern stratifications of meaning that modernity tends to make invisible or suppress. However, modernity cannot completely eradicate them. And in this vein, the third and final part of the chapter offers a reading of Kafka’s last story, Der Bau, along Blumenbergian lines. I argue that the way the story is constructed mirrors the process of endless significance, that is, the very process of myth-building according to Blumenberg.

Photology, Ocularology and Blumenberg’s “Restricted Rationality” In “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation”, Blumenberg points to Descartes and Bacon’s shifting accounts of light as a distinctive feature of modernity—one carried 3  Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture, ed. Jason Gaiger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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forward into Enlightenment epistemology. The main feature of the new conception of light at the threshold of the modern age rests on a utilitarian conception of the light ray. It is henceforth understood as being “at man’s disposal”.4 This means that light is no longer seen by the moderns as the homogenous, unquestioned medium of visibility securing the presence of what can be seen (as was previously the case). The use of “local tints” in painting (e.g. the use of colours without considering light’s accidental values on objects and colours) perfectly exemplifies the pre-modern account of light. Nor is light understood by the moderns as the guiding principle towards the dazzling vision of the first principle, as it was for Neo-Platonists, exemplified in the poet’s final vision in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Rather, Blumenberg argues, in Bacon’s and Descartes’ rationalisms, the light ray became a tool that subjects phenomena to examination. Indeed, in the modern age, truth no longer reveals itself; instead, it must be revealed by decisive action. This new conception of light clearly announces Kant’s Copernican revolution, and Deleuze sums up Kant’s critical gesture in precisely these terms: “The first thing that the Copernican revolution teaches us is that it is we who are giving the orders”.5 Thus, both Cartesian and Kantian philosophy renounce access to the absolute, and consequently they accept man’s irremediable finitude. Indeed, as Louis Girard suggests, the Cartesian God’s reasons are unknown to the human subject and so the latter is placed in a “middle position between God and nothingness”.6 The human subject is enslaved to his deity’s will. Kant’s critical project inherits the Cartesian break between God and the human subject. Consequently, according to Kant, the latter is left face to face with a threatening reality, foreign to him, that must be mastered. As for the absolute, it gains the status of an “obsessive absence”.7 The modern conception of rationality thus requires assistance from technical devices in order to overcome human’s finitude; as Blumenberg writes: “Truth is of a constitutionally weak nature and man must help it back on its feet by 4  Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michel Levin (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993), 53. 5  Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tolimson and Barbara Haberjamm (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), 14. 6  Louis Girard, L’argument ontologique chez Saint Anselme et chez Hegel, (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1995), 48. My own translation from the French. 7  Ibid., 647.

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means of light-supplying therapy”.8 Further on, Blumenberg specifies the nature of this therapy: Phenomena no longer stand in the light; rather, they are subjected to the lights of an examination from a particular perspective. The result then depends on the angle from which light falls on the object and the angle from which it is seen. It is the conditionality of perspective and the awareness of it, even the free selection of it, that now defines the concept of “seeing”.9

Blumenberg’s depiction of light in modernity closely corresponds to Crary’s depiction of the modern age as the epoch of the camera obscura: this optical device became the dominant paradigm for objectivity in modernity.10 The camera obscura is a device that subjects the light ray to its own ends: to reproduce truthfully an object by transferring its outline point by point onto a white screen. In order to do so, one drills a hole in a dark box to ensure only straight light rays pass through. This operation enables the projection of the object’s outline on the white screen placed at the bottom of the box, via straight light rays—and so the practitioner can reproduce the object “truthfully”. The camera obscura dispositive grants an objective representation of the object. In modernity, light—no longer dazzling, diffuse or iridescent—becomes a “focused and measured straight ray”.11 This treatment makes it particularly suitable for the practice of the perspectiva artificialis, a technique of representing reality based on the principles of geometrical optics and the camera obscura. Modernity, as Tim Ingold’s Lines: A Brief History12 demonstrates, is obsessed with straight lines. The latter are indeed the most economical way for the eye to reach an object—that is, to recognize what Gestalt theory famously calls “good forms”. Such forms enable the subject to orient itself easily in the perceptual field. Consequently, as Krauss argues, in the age of the camera obscura, the observer becomes master of the coordinates of perception. Or so he thinks—as we shall see when exploring Blumenberg’s account of the modern subject.

 Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth …”, 52.  Ibid., 53. 10  See Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer”, in October, Vol. 45 (Summer, 1988), 3–35, http://www.jstor.org/stable/779041 11  Ibidem. 12  Tim Ingold, Lines. A Brief History (London-New York: Routledge, 2007). 8 9

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In his Theory of Unconceptuality, Blumenberg precisely addresses the issue of the “economy” motif as a distinctive feature of modern theories of knowledge, such as Cartesianism, Kantianism or, more recently, Positivism. The theme of a “restricted economy”13 of theoretical means—in opposition to expenditure, which takes the form of Freud’s death drive—strongly influenced Kant’s critical project and its restricted account of rationality. Blumenberg views the latter as serving anthropological interests of self-­ conservation, by means of a capitalization of restricted stocks of theoretical energy. In Blumenberg’s anthropological account of the biological needs driving the production of knowledge, concepts labour on behalf of the life drive. From this perspective, concepts become powerful tools working for a restricted rational economy—that is, within the global framework of a rational economy. As Blumenberg states, it means that concepts exemplify a very specific form of rationality—one that both accounts for and fails to account for the pretension of reason to embrace totality. One could reformulate this point along Bataillian lines: an “accursed share” of rationality always escapes from the concept’s specific operations, pointing to an unconceptualizable totality. It is important to stress that concepts are understood by Blumenberg in the Kantian sense of the term, namely as specific categorical productions of the human understanding. Blumenberg presents them as ready-made devices, that is, fixed terminologies. They offer comfort by rationing the expense of theoretical energy required to undertake the long, awkward work of system-manufacturing. Concepts are ready-made forms and categories that capture the sensible factuality of the outside world. In Derridean terms, concepts offer a convenient way to “pre-vent”14 (pré-voir), to see-coming. Blumenberg mentions several examples within the history of philosophy (Descartes, Kant, Husserl) of the overcoming of the apparent opacity of language in order to build an unequivocal one—the feature all these philosophical projects share is a conception of syntax as transparent, unequivocal and homogeneous. This conception is a key way to stabilize and master the contingency of the outside world. Against these reductionist views of language, Blumenberg emphasizes the key role played by 13  To speak in George Bataille’s terms: The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 14  Jacques Derrida, “Penser à ne pas voir,” in Penser à ne pas voir. Écrits sur les arts du visible 1979–2004 (Paris: La Différence, 2013), 59.

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metaphors in the course of the history of philosophy and more broadly in language practices. Indeed, if metaphors are seen by modern and positivist philosophies as expensive literary ornaments or detours on the way to conceptual clarity, it is nevertheless the case that conceptual, philosophical, scientific15 or speculative16 texts cannot get rid of them, despite all their efforts. In opposition to the supposed univocity of the concept, Blumenberg describes metaphors as elements of disturbance in the course of a fluid, economical and utilitarian readings. Metaphors therefore temporarily suspend the subject’s usual reading habits. In Suspension of Perception, Jonathan Crary translates this operation of suspension into visual terms: I am suggesting the problematic and contrary notion that the fixed, immobile eye (at least as static as physiological conditions ever allow) is what annihilates the seeming “naturalness” of the world and discloses the provisional and fluid nature of visual experience, whereas the mobile glancing eye is what preserves the preconstructed character of the world. The latter is the eye that habitually, familiarly caresses objects, extracting only previously established relations from among them. Once the eye stops moving, a potentially volatile situation arises: after a relatively brief period of time the immobile eye triggers a ferment of activity—it is the doorway to both trance and to perceptual disintegration.17

Applying this framework, I would like to suggest that metaphors work in the discursive context in the same way as the fixed eye in the visual context. For what follows, it is important to underscore the connection between the textual space and the efficient use of the eye—a move suggested by Lyotard in Discourse, Figure.18 In fact, in Theory of Unconceptuality, Blumenberg associates the concept and its specific properties with sight’s mode of operation: sight works according to various scopic regimes: the focal regime, the peripheral regime, the mobile regime, the fixed regime, 15  On the centrality of metaphors in the scientific discourse, see, for instance, Donna Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors That Shapes Embryo (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2004). 16  See Daniel Whistler, “First Reflections on the Idea of a Speculative Pragmatics,” in Speculation, Heresy and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute, ed. Matthew H. Farris and Joshua Ramey (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). 17  Crary, Suspension of Perception, 300. 18  See Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 152–156.

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and so on—but, in the conceptual context, it just works according to a “certain ideal of optics”.19 Consequently, Blumenberg identifies the mode of operation of the concept specifically with the operation of geometrical optics grounded in focal vision. On this idealized understanding of sight, light proceeds in straight lines from the eye of the observer to the object and vice versa. Geometrical optics, Blumenberg stresses, requires a transparent and empty space—Kantio-Newtonian inert space—to undertake its specific operations. It means that focal vision requires a space clear of all the potential obstacles that might obstruct its economical course towards the object. Blumenberg implies that conceptual space works in exactly the same way. Geometrical optics must prevent any possible material densification of the idealized and abstracted space it operates in. From this perspective, colours—and, more broadly, the dense concreteness of the life-world that enables “human beings to breathe”20—appear as a threat to the ideal of optics, as well as to conceptual operations. Indeed, according to Blumenbergian anthropology, concepts work the same way as traps do, trying to capture some hints of a threatening outside reality, without genuinely being exposed to it. What follows is that concepts must be fluid enough to fit a large range of objects not yet present at hand. To use a Lacanian metaphor21: concepts must be ready-to-wear. In the same way, Blumenberg—drawing on Schopenhauer—argues that the defining property of the concept rests on the emptiness of its formalism and in its monochromatism, which allows it to accommodate to the largest possible range of phenomena. To the sense of sight—understood through the lens of geometrical optics—Blumenberg opposes the sense of touch, which directly deals with the concreteness of the object present at hand. The antithetical properties of sight and touch provide a way to tackle the great problem bequeathed by modern cosmology22—namely, the gap between the realm of thought and the realm of life as experienced by an embodied subject. Given that Blumenberg’s anthropology famously draws on Herder’s Treatise on the 19  Hans Blumenberg, Théorie de l’inconceptualité (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2017), 11. My translation from the French. 20  Ibid., 11. 21  Jacques Lacan, Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978), p. 333. 22  On modern cosmology as the age of abstract objectivity, see Didier Debaise, Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible, trans. Michael Halewoord, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

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Origin of Language,23 I wish to advance the hypothesis that his appeal to the dichotomy between sight and touch as a way of explaining this gap created by modern cosmology—from which the Cartesian and Kantian projects resulted—may be directly imported from Herder’s Sculpture. The eighteenth-century German philosopher presents the sense of sight as the sense of surfaces, planes, speed and abbreviation. One could reformulate such views in a more contemporary way—along Lyotardian lines: when restricted to focal vision, sight incarnates the structural sense per se; it enables the instantaneous—that is, economic—grasp of homological relations, forms and figures. Herder thus associates sight with painting’s synchronic property. Touch, on the other hand, enables human subjects to grasp bodies, the thickness of the material world and its three-dimensional aspect. It is the sense of the slow exploration of the material world, responsible for the genesis of our judgements. In this framework, according to Herder, sight abbreviates the patient results of the tactile exploration of the world. Sight condenses experiences of the lived world (Erlebnis). In his Theory of Unconceptuality, Blumenberg goes a step further than Sculpture. He argues that the double requirement of the ideal of optics and the thickness of the lived world is antithetical rather than complementary.

The Ideal of Optics and the Modernist Eye Sight’s distinctive features according to Herder and Blumenberg—that is, abbreviation, speed and superficiality—match those of the modernist eye as enumerated by Krauss in The Optical Unconscious. She characterizes the modernist tendencies of painters such as Mondrian or Frank Stella as an inflation of visuality over tactility: Modernist painters, she argues, aim at “visual plenitude”24 by eliminating the “sculptural illusion”.25 They embrace painting’s two-dimensional aspect. In order to do so, objects must be isolated from their background. Krauss identifies this background with the social world—it is the very property of speed that enables sight to detach form from its social and carnal background. Krauss writes:

23  See, for instance, Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “The Rhetoric of Culture. Hans Blumenberg, Ernst Cassirer and the Legacy of Herder,” in Rethinking Culture and Cultural Analysis, ed. Joaquim Braga and Christian Möckel, (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 1992), 23–32. 24  Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 2. 25  Ibid.

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To see so fast that the blur of that white smudge {a basketball thrown in the air at high speed presented by Krauss as the icon of modernism} could be exploded into pure contact, pure simultaneity, pure optical pattern: vision in touch with its own resources. In that speed was gathered the idea of an abstract and heightened visuality, one in which the eye and its object made contact with such amazing rapidity that neither one seemed any longer attached to its merely carnal support… as a moment of pure release, of pure transparency, of pure self-knowledge.26

Krauss’ The Optical Unconscious challenges the modernist background/ figure opposition, where figure is favoured at the cost of a neutralization and, eventually, a repression of the background. Lyotard—one of the main sources for Krauss’s project—underlines in Discourse, Figure that vision is originally blurred. Vision is primary peripheric and lateral. Focal vision, which enables the subject to recognize forms in the perceptual field in order to fulfil its specific biological needs, always comes second. The shift to focal vision thus represents a conquest over lateral vision. The latter is located in the peripherical zone of the retina, that is, the most sensible one, and so it exhibits the highest rate of sensibility—at the cost of spatial resolution and clear vision. According to Lyotard, the periphery of the retina represents the zone of loose attention, where visual events might occur. In this sense, peripheral vision can be viewed as the visual equivalent to the unconscious in Freud’s metapsychical model. Peripheral vision is the blurred background over which (modernist) focal vision is constructed. As Krauss states: Empirical vision must be cancelled, in favour of something understood as the precondition for the very emergence of the perceptual object to vision. To a higher, more formal order of vision, something we could call the structure of the visual field as such […] The perceptual field is, after all, forever behind its object; it is their background, their support, their ambiance.27

In order to challenge the modernist eye’s severance of figure from its surrounding “milieu”, Krauss turns to the “theorists”28 of its rejection: George Bataille and Roger Callois, with Freud in the foreground and

 Ibid., 7.  Ibid., 15. 28  Ibid., 22. 26 27

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Lacan in the background—and she does so to address modernism’s “blind spot”29 and “pocket of darkness”.30 Links between Blumenberg and the above-mentioned thinkers are numerous. The most obvious is the recourse to Freud, one of the main resources utilized in Blumenberg’s Work on Myth. However, Callois, Lacan, Blumenberg and Kafka, I will argue later, are similarly interested in the anthropology of “camouflage” phenomena: in an interview with Marion Schumm, Heins Wismann underlines that “one of Blumenberg’s underground themes is camouflage, that is, the effort to subtract oneself from the gaze of the other”.31 He also stresses that “his thought is strongly marked by the worry not to remain at the surface of things”32—and that he hated to have his image fixed in a photograph.33 Against modernist superficiality, Blumenberg’s aesthetics tends to emphasize the dense latency and patient stratifications of meaning characteristic of the cultural process. Indeed, Blumenberg’s work is cut through by a fundamental anthropological tension: on the one hand, there is the tendency to expose oneself to external reality in order to master it; and, on the other hand, there is the tendency to hide oneself from a threatening reality. This movement of expansion-contraction corresponds to that of the Freudian life and death drives. Moreover, Blumenberg’s anthropology, as I understand it, is fundamentally grounded in a cosmic account of the specific conditions that make possible life on earth; for example, he opens his Genesis of the Copernican World as follows: 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.34  Ibid., 87.  Ibid., 21. 31  Marion Schumm, À propos de Hans Blumenberg, in Cahiers philosophiques 123 (2010), 91. My translation from the French. 32  Ibid., 91. 33  Ibid. 34  Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert. M.  Wallace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987), 3. 29 30

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The Earth requires both exposure to the Sun for complex lifeforms to arise and protection from direct exposure to sun rays, which would otherwise threaten to consume every living thing. The exposure to light requires—for the Earth as well as for human beings—a kind of filter or screen. It must be thick enough to prevent lethal exposure, but at the same time transparent enough to enable living forms to benefit from light’s vital properties. The emergence of lifeforms therefore necessitates a subtle balance between light and opacity. Blumenberg derives his anthropology from this physical, biological fact. According to him, human beings are trapped in the same kind of optical tension between exposure and protection. The human’s evolution from an animal on all-fours to an upright being corresponds to a rotation of the human gaze from the ground to the horizon. This rotational movement turns the human being into “a frontal optic creature” (WM, 175–6), facing a distant horizon to which it is simultaneously exposed. Standing upright turns the human being into a “grounded and axiomatic man”,35 since, in this posture, the human being can master the horizon. That is, she can prevent and “see-­ coming”. However, human beings are also in the position of being mastered by the absolute reality—as Blumenberg puts it, “we have to live under the condition that a large part of reality lies behind us and is something that we have to leave behind us” (WM, 175). To rephrase: in modernity, human beings think of themselves as the origin of the coordinates of perception, according to the camera obscura model; however, human beings only master a restricted field of vision. Human vision is genuinely partial, and it possesses numerous blind spots. Consequently, human beings are also effects of the global field of vision, which positions and masters them. In this section, I am mainly interested in the first moment of this dialectic, in which human beings attempt to master absolute reality by objectifying it. As we shall see in the last section, the second moment of the dialectic is related to myth-production. The anthropological rotation towards a vertically oriented horizon enables human beings to see what is coming—that is, to anticipate unknown dangers by organizing their representational field inside the spatial frame generated by the horizon. In this way, potentially dangerous and unknown objects that always threaten to emerge from beyond the horizon play the role of vanishing points in 35  David Lapoujade, Deleuze, les mouvements aberrants (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 2014), 281.

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the organization of the representational field. The potential danger of the unknown object is reduced as soon as the representational field captures it by representing it—that is, as soon as the unknown object takes on shape. Gestalt theory dubs this very process Prägnanz: Man’s upright posture brings with it the possibility of a distance, of contemplation, of domination. We are able to behold things in the plane of fronto-­ parallel Prägnanz and of transparent distance. Prägnanz is the word for a structure that due to its simplicity is able to cohere as a shape.36

Drawing on Jackson Pollock’s paintings, Krauss emphasizes that the canvases of the abstract expressionist were originally painted horizontally on the floor, with Pollock walking on all-fours, in a “regressive” anti-modern posture. Only subsequently does the modernist critic “straighten [them] up37” by hanging the canvases horizontally on the wall. Krauss writes: The bounded, flattened plane of painting, after all, functions like the mirror described by Lacan, reflecting back to the subject the flattering picture of Pragnanz, of the organization and order of the good gestalt always there in potentia and, by means of its reflection, always assuring the viewing subject a concomitant logical and visual control.38

Verticality and Pragnanz, she argues, are two characteristics of the modernist eye. Pragnanz signifies relief: it gets rid of noise as well as  Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 247.  Ibid., 246. See also the following quotation: “Freud had told that story years before, had he not? ‘Man’s erect posture,’ he had written, could in and of itself be seen to ‘represent the beginning of the momentous process of cultural evolution.’ The very move to the vertical, he reasoned, is a reorientation away from the animal senses of sniffing and pawing. Sight alone, enlarging the scope of attention, allows for a diversion of focus. Sight alone displaces excited humanoid attention away from its partner’s genitals and onto ‘the shape of the body as a whole’. Sight alone opens the possibility of a distanced, formal pleasure to which Freud was content to give the name beauty; this passage from the sexual to the visual he christened sublimation. ‘Sight alone’ was very much the province of gestalt psychology, which in those years was running fullback for Freud’s fancy speculative passing plays in this matter of a psychohistory of the senses. The animal can see, the psychologists wrote, but only man can ‘behold.’ Its connection to the ground always ties the animal’s seeing to touching, its vision predicated on the horizontal, on the physical intersection of viewer and viewed. Man’s upright posture, they argued, brings with it the possibility of distance, of contemplation, of domination.” 38  Ibid., 319. 36 37

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background—both regarded as obstacles in the process of recognition or, what Krauss calls, “visual control”. The concept of Pragnanz plays a key role in Blumenberg’s Work on Myth as well: he makes use of the concept in his own account of the connection between human biological needs and the origins of myth. In other words, by way of a focus on mythogenesis, Blumenberg connects myths and metaphors with biological and anthropological needs. This is a strategy that aims to overcome the dominant progress narrative of myth, whereby they are relegated to a primeval, pre-­ rational and pre-modern epoch. As Blumenberg argues, the persistence of myths in the modern age—despite the claims of the latter to achieve rational mastery through science alone—rests on their “significance” (WM, 59). Blumenberg describes significance as “something that possesses pregnance as opposed to indifference” (WM, 69)39—that is, they resist the tendency towards “erosion, entropy” (WM, 109). Significance constitutes a shaping principle against what Brassier (drawing on Callois and Minkowski) calls thanathoprism; he defines the term as follows: “An attraction by space: organic individuation loses ground, blurring in its retreat the frontier between the organism and the milieu”.40 In this context, the absolute reality against which myths takes shape might be reformulated in terms of the inorganic realm from which life emerges via a traumatic scission. According to Blumenberg’s anthropological framework, while the ontological distance of the horizon certainly enables the subject to “see what is coming”, it also confronts the subject with the expectation of an unknown object. This tension resonates with Kierkegaardian and Heideggerian descriptions of anxiety: anxiety manifests whenever the subject is confronted by the threat of pure dispersion or entropy—that is, by the return to the inorganic. In order to domesticate anxiety, the subject needs to give it shape. This shaping process (as well as the building 39  He continues, “As with the aesthetic object, part of the definition of significance is the way it emerges from the diffuse surrounding field of probabilities. History, like life, works against the tendency of a situation to be increasingly determined by probability, against the ‘death instinct’ as the point toward which the levelling-off process converges. The outcomes and artefacts of history impress us as notions that one wouldn’t have believed any brain capable of. Pregnance is resistance to factors that efface, that promote diffusion; resistance especially to time, which nevertheless is suspected of being able to produce pregnance through the process of aging.” 40  Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 43.

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process, as we shall see with Kafka) represents the human act of becoming familiar with and being-at-home in the world. Indeed, according to Blumenberg, myths play the role of a “phantom body” (WM, 125)—that is, of a strange artificial/organic prosthesis protecting human beings as a screen against “absolute reality” (WM, xii). Myths are exposed—in place of the subject—to the indifference of inorganic absolute reality. Their value lies in their capacity to fight against indifference, that is, the death drive. Krauss’ modernist eye eliminates the uneasiness of the perceptual adventure by way of recognition of forms. To achieve this goal, modernism favours the contemplation of a static form that has attained equilibrium: a pregnant form. Blumenberg’s account of significance is different. In my view, it is closer to Herder’s account of touch. Significance can be seen as a patient negotiation of the cultural product with its environment. Blumenberg calls this negotiation process the “pressure of selection” (WM, 4). When it comes to myths, the “natural selection” process (to use Darwin’s words) should not be understood in economic terms; it is rather a slow, repeated, risky and sometimes failed attempt to attain a shape capable of resisting the pressures of the inorganic. As with touch, which is understood by Herder as a pre-specialized relationship with the world, it is impossible to provide a rational account of the myth’s grounds of selection; nor is it possible to consider the subject as mastering this phantom body. Instead, the subject is formed by myths. Moreover, the significance of the myth should not be understood as a fixed meaning; it is rather a dense stratification of meaning, forming its energetic core—that is, analogous to a high-temperature energetic core, the meaning of the myth is never completely crystallized. On the contrary, its meaning must be plastic enough to respond to new environmental constraints. Consequently, Blumenberg argues, the complexity of myth-production explains why “logos comes into the world through the break with myths” (WM, 70). As suggested above, geometrical optics shape the ideal of logos and this ideal is antithetical to touch’s modes of operation. In the modern age, humanity affirms itself against absolute reality, by trying to be the master of the world instead of being mastered by it. Blumenberg takes the example of Cartesian reason, expressed in an architectural metaphor: “The best way to build cities rationally was to begin by razing the old cities” (WM, 163). One might interpret this radical Cartesian gesture in Lyotardian terms as a foreclosing of difference in order to create a geometrical space of meaning:

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The gap between the respective positions of the mythical tale and the discourse of knowledge is not hard to define: in the first, the sensory lends itself to being scripted and the script is figural; in the second, the script is strictly textual, while the sensory shifts to the referential pole of scholarly discourse. One can see why the two kinds of discourse on space cannot share the same taxonomy: the first entails the transfusion of the two spaces into one another, figural and textual; the second, their separation. A mythological culture represses difference in the sense that it covers up the sensory figure with a function of language, but also in that the repressed figural order reemerges within mythological language itself as its unconscious ordering, its narrative form. A scientific culture forecloses difference because it evacuates the latter from its discourse and can only encounter difference as returning from without.41

According to Lyotard, myths and metaphors belong to figural discourse, characteristic of the unconscious. Blumenberg follows a similar line of thought by insisting on the myth’s opacity, particularity and locality: Significance makes possible a “density” that excludes empty spaces and empty times, but it also makes possible an indefiniteness of dating and localisation that is the equivalent of ubiquitousness … Myth by its nature is not capable of an abstract system of dogma that would leave local and temporal particularities behind it. On the contrary, it is oriented specifically toward these… Against [the dogmatic mode of thought] the characteristic differentiation of the mythical “significances” stands out as a structuring that is opposed to the intolerable indifference of space and time. (WM, 96–7)

To conclude this section, according to Blumenberg, then, myths and metaphors offer sufficient density to resist modernity’s process of homogenization, in which it constructs a neutral space of meaning, similar to the one required by the ideal of geometrical optics.

Kafka’s Der Bau: The Endless Significance of Myth-Production In the last section of the chapter, I would like to offer a Blumenbergian reading of one of Kafka’s last stories, Der Bau—often translated into English as The Burrow. There are at least two reasons for this choice. First,  Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 163.

41

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Blumenberg places his Work on Myth under the auspices of an epigraph in which Kafka refers to the need for human lungs to have air (WM, 3).42 Likewise, he concludes his monumental work with a chapter on Kafka’s Prometheus. Kafka’s Der Bau, written while the Czech writer was dying of lung disease, features a narrator obsessed with the weird noises entering its burrow. Stevenson interprets those noises as multiple “invading micro-­ organisms”43 announcing his impending death, and so Der Bau can be read as that Kafkian story which deals precisely with those very biological questions at stake in Blumenberg’s anthropology. On this reading, Der Bau performs the narrator’s own phantom body. Secondly, as suggested above, myths represent—from Blumenberg’s perspective—a strategy of “becoming familiar”44 when confronted with a distressing external reality. Kafka’s story precisely details a narrator who is constantly dealing with the reorganization of the burrow’s construction— that is, reorganizing that underground shelter that is intended to be a living space subtracted from the gaze of the Other.45 The narrator in fact builds the burrow to prevent a possible attack from an unknown enemy.46 The very lack of detail the reader possesses concerning even the species of the narrator gives the story a more generic anthropological tone and allows it to resonate remarkably with Blumenbergian anthropology. And, what is more, the immersion of the story into the animal’s stream of consciousness enables Kafka to reconnect reason and rationality with a natural body, as well as with biological necessities. 42  The epigraph reads in full: “They could not put the determining principle at sufficient distance from themselves; the whole pantheon was only a means by which the determining forces could be kept at a distance from man’s earthly being, so that human lungs could have air. – Kafka to Max Brod, August 7, 1920.” 43  Frank W. Stevenson, “Becoming Mole(cular), Becoming Noise: Serres and Deleuze in Kafka’s ‘Burrow,’” in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 30.1 (2004), 3–36. 44  Franz Kafka, “The Burrow” in Kafka: The Complete Short Stories, trans. Martin Secker (London: Vintage Classics, 2005), 357: “Yes, the more thought of the door itself, the end of the domestic protection, brings such feelings with it, yet it is the labyrinth leading up to it that torments me most of all. Sometimes I dream that I have reconstructed it, transformed it completely, quickly, in a night, with a giant’s strength, nobody having noticed, and now it is impregnable; the nights in which such dreams come to me are the sweetest I know, tears of joy and deliverance still glisten on my beard when I awaken.” 45  Ibid., 360: “No, I do not watch over my own sleep, as I imagined; rather it is I who sleep, while the destroyer watches.” 46  Ibid., 350: “I am not as strong as many others, and my enemies are countless; it could well happen that in flying from one enemy I might run into the jaws of another.”

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The construction of the burrow—the narrator’s home—represents the very movement that guides the short story. One can even say that the very construction of the story coincides with the construction of the burrow. It is important as well to notice that neither the construction process nor the narrator can ever attain a fixed state of tranquillity.47 The story follows a movement that goes from relative states of tranquillity—where the construction is stabilized—to states of anxiety motivated by the projection of an unknown enemy, which is exemplified by the disturbing noises. In the former state, one can recognize features of modernity’s pretention to have mastered and domesticated distressing external reality: There have been happy periods in which I could almost assure myself that the enmity of the world toward me had ceased or been assuaged, or that the strength of the burrow had raised me above the destructive struggle of former time.48

However, the stillness of the burrow proves to be deceptive. A noise emerges, pointing towards the presence of one or numerous enemies. And it is this repeated eruption of anxiety that drives forward the narrative and results in a constant reorganization of its structure. The anxiety is provoked by the narrator’s inability to attain a panoptical point of view, from which it could completely master the visual field and the impending danger: I seek out a good hiding place and keep watch on the entrance of my house – this time from outside – for whole days and nights. Call it foolish if you like; it gives me infinite pleasure and reassures me. At such times it is as if I were not so much looking at my house as at myself sleeping, and had the joy of being in a profound slumber and simultaneously of keeping vigilant guard over myself […] And strangely enough I discover that my situation is not so bad as I had often thought, and will probably think again when I return to my house.49

Mastering the entirety of the visual field—if it were even possible for a finite being—would mean leaving the burrow to obtain a panoramic view 47  Ibid., 364: “Now the truth of the matter – and one has no eye for that in times of great peril, and only by a great effort even in times when danger is threatening – is that in reality the burrow does provide a considerable degree of security, but by no means enough, for is one ever free from anxieties inside it?” 48  Ibid., 359. 49  Ibid., 358–9.

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over reality, without in turn being exposed to the gaze of the Other. This exposure is precisely the danger which led to the narrator building its underground fortress in the first place. Through the very writing of the short story, Kafka reconnects this attempt to master the world with the anxiety permeating the production of the cultural body. In this sense, the narrator can be viewed as the solipsist modern subject trying to build a world for itself while trying to build its own self. Indeed, as Blumenberg writes, “the fact that what seems to work toward rationality nevertheless counts as a renunciation, like the surrender of the character of the world as finite ‘housing’, at the beginning of the modern age, is something that can be felt as self-denial only after a long delay” (WM, 98). However, in Kafka’s story, the narrator quickly realizes that even the burrow itself will have blind spots where enemies can hide, which makes it constantly change its observation posts and constantly re-arrange the burrow’s structure. If we then return to the macro-structure of the story, it is immediately obvious that there is a cyclical movement at stake. First, the narrator finds itself in the burrow; secondly, it goes out of the burrow into the upper world; thirdly, it returns to the burrow. The closed-circle pattern is one of the distinctive features of significance as described by Blumenberg in Work on Myth and thus drawing on Freud’s account of the psychological apparatus, which is itself inspired by the second law of thermodynamics. On this interpretation: The identity of the organic system maintained at huge expense [the Kafkian narrator keeps insisting of the great labour and costs required by the burrow O.P.] against all destructive probabilities. This risky outsider status of the organic realm as a whole is merely reflected in the existence of the individual outside the mother’s womb, in the risky situation in which he is abandoned to his own self-preservation – this most exposed state to return from which can only be the most secret of all wishes. (WM, 90)

However, the narrator’s return to the burrow does not coincide with the end of the story, but rather with a liberation of energy and an opening of new potentialities: I have changed my place; I have left the upper world and am in my burrow and I feel its effect at once. It is a new world, endowing me with new powers, and what I felt as fatigue up there is no longer that here. I have returned from a journey dog-tired with my wanderings, but the sight of the old house, the thought of all the things that are waiting to be done… all this

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transforms my fatigue into ardent zeal; it is as though at the moment when I set foot in the burrow I had wakened from a long and profound sleep.50

I want to suggest that Kafka’s Der Bau can be read as a work on endless significance—that is, as a work on myth-production in the Blumenbergian sense. Politzer suggests looking at the Burrow as the “most appropriate cipher for [Kafka’s] work”51 and Snyder glosses, “Kafka wrote ‘The Burrow’ (‘Der Bau’) in 1923 during the final stage of his terminal illness. It is probably the last manuscript of any magnitude to tax the author’s declining health.”52 Thus, if we take the construction of the burrow as Kafka’s final reflections on the totality of the symbolic world he had been himself constructing through his literary works, we cannot help but notice that it remains unfinished. The entrance to the burrow can never be definitively closed in on itself; indeed, as long as human beings are finite, they must constantly re-invent and re-arrange the moving horizon that surrounds them. The modern geometrical space of meaning remains an ideal that always lies out of reach. Kafka’s unfinished story can be taken as a never-ending answer to Blumenberg’s interrogation—which is itself provoked, in turn, by a commentary on Kafka’s Prometheus at the end of Work on Myth. At this point in his book, Blumenberg pauses to consider the possible extinction of the stock of myths and asks rhetorically: Why should the world have to continue in existence if there is nothing more to say? But what if there were still something to say after all? (WM, 636)

Conclusion In this chapter, I have described how one might draw on Blumenberg’s work on vision to underline the importance of geometrical optics for the modern project of building a neutral and geometric space of meaning, free from all difference. The modern space of meaning, with its specific properties, results in what Blumenberg calls a restricted account of rationality— one that ignores phenomena such as myths or metaphors. Indeed, the latter are understood as temporary obstacles obscuring the transparent  Kafka, “The Burrow,” 366.  Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka. Parable and Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 321–2. 52  Verne P.  Snyder, “Kafka’s Burrow: A Speculative Analysis,” in Twentieth-Century Literature 2 (Vol. 27, 1981), 113–26. 50 51

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space of meaning and are, for this reason, ultimately supressed by modernity. However, on the basis of his anthropology, Blumenberg denounces the illusion of a modern subject who would succeed in emptying the space of meaning of all differences, thereby completely mastering the coordinates of a threatening horizon. Geometrical optics is based on focal vision, which represents a restricted use of the retina. Taken as a whole, the eye in not exclusively modernist in its operations; it does not only recognize, in an economical fashion, “good forms” separated from their backgrounds. Rather, a global use of the retina includes peripheral vision, that is, a kind of vision devoted to the perception of the background and to the collection of blurred environmental information. Finite subjects do not live in a transparent space, but rather in a dense, compact one, and this enables them to breathe. Likewise, according to Blumenberg, myths and metaphors are the linguistic and textual background in which the human being evolves: they create a dense cultural environment in which the human being can breathe. At the end of this chapter, I suggested that one can read Kafka’s story Der Bau as a reflection on the biological process of myth-production.

Bibliography Barash, Jeffrew Andrew, “The Rhetoric of Culture. Hans Blumenberg, Ernst Cassirer and the Legacy of Herder.” In Rethinking Culture and Cultural Analysis, edited by Joaquim Braga and Christian Möckel. Berlin: Logos Verlag, 1992. Bataille, George. The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Blumenberg, Hans. The Genesis of the Copernican World. Translated by Robert. M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Blumenberg, Hans. “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation.” In Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by David Michel Levin. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993. Blumenberg, Hans. Théorie de l’inconceptualité. Translated by Marc de Launey. Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2017. Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Crary, Jonathan. Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000.

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Debaise, Didier. Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible. Translated by Michael Halewoord. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tolimson and Barbara Haberjamm. London: Athlone Press, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. “Penser à ne pas voir.” In Penser à ne pas voir. Écrits sur les arts du visible 1979–2004. Paris: La Différence, 2013. Girard, Louis. L’argument ontologique chez Saint Anselme et chez Hegel. Amsterdam: Éditions Rodopi, 1995. Haraway, Donna. Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors That Shapes Embryo. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2004. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Sculpture. Edited and translated by Jason Gaiger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Ingold, Tim. Lines. A Brief History. London: Routledge, 2007. Kafka, Franz. “The Burrow.” In Kafka: The Complete Short Stories. Translated by Martin Secker. London: Vintage, 2005. Lacan, Jacques. Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978. Lapoujade, David. Deleuze, les mouvements aberrants. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 2014. Lyotard, Jean-François. Discourse, Figure. Translated by Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Politzer, Heinz. Franz Kafka. Parable and Paradox. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962. Schumm, Marion. “À propos de Hans Blumenberg.” Cahiers philosophiques, 123, (2010). Snyder, Verne P. “Kafka’s Burrow: A Speculative Analysis.” Twentieth-Century Literature 27.2 (1981). Stevenson, Frank W, “Becoming Mole(cular), Becoming Noise: Serres and Deleuze in Kafka’s “Burrow.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 30.1 (2004). Whistler, Daniel, “First Reflections on the Idea of a Speculative Pragmatics.” In Speculation, Heresy and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute, edited by Matthew H. Farris and Joshua Ramey. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.

PART IV

Modernity and Method

CHAPTER 10

World-Modelling and Cartesian Method: Blumenberg’s Hyperopia Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

As Hans Blumenberg demonstrates time and again, periodization is a messy thing. However, periodizing modernity is particularly difficult for the specific reason that the chronological parameters of this “time” are not at all clear. The German term, “Neuzeit”—or even worse “frühe Neuzeit”—merely adds to the confusion. What is a “new time”, and what does it mean for one to discuss the “early part” of this new time—if not by naming it via another common name, the “Renaissance”? Can one put one’s finger on the exact moment when the Renaissance turned into modernity, and should one think of the Renaissance as internal or rather external to the early modern period? For Blumenberg, Renaissance and modernity are anathemas. In his interrogation of the legitimacy of modernity, Blumenberg betrays a manner of vision that I would like to parallel with that of a hyperopia, or “farsightedness”. In this kind of a common optical disorder, the subject is very capable of seeing details in a telescopic manner of what is faraway, but at the same time what is close by becomes

A. Efal-Lautenschläger (*) University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France University of Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_10

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for the hyperopic subject blurred and unapproachable. This disorder catches some of Blumenberg’s approach to modernity. Blumenberg places at the centre of his understanding of the modern age a critique of the concept of secularization, expressed literally, but also metaphorically, by the German word “Verweltlichung”—which can also be translated as “profanation”. Blumenberg’s entire interpretation of modernity is developed as a commentary on this German term, whose literal translation may better be expressed as “de-worlding” or even “in-­ worlding”—that is, as “unworlding”1: something happens to the world at the beginning of the early modern period2: the world gradually becomes “profane” and exposed to all that the extra-theological frame of discussions now permits. In this process of the profanation of the world, there is one central epistemological agent that undertakes most of the labour— method. The following chapter examines this conception of “in-­worlding” with respect to the emphasis on the concept of method in Descartes’ philosophy. World and method are two concepts temporally bound to the transition between the Renaissance and the modern era—and this is evident in an exemplary manner in Cartesian philosophy. Blumenberg draws our attention to an “epochal-threshold” (“Epochenschwelle”) (LN, 531–57) existing roughly between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which, as he also observes, is characterized, in part, by the explosion of works dealing with the question of method. Blumenberg’s epochal-threshold is an extremely fertile historiographical category, and, in this present chapter, I try to make sense of this term from the point of view of the history of the concept of method.3 I suggest that we understand this threshold as a “methodical threshold”.4

1  Jan Rohls, “Entweltlichung und Verweltlichung”, Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift 63 (2012): 194–204. 2  Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Hamburg: Meiner, 2013 [1927]), 219; Edouard Mehl, Descartes et la fabrique du monde: Le problème cosmologique de Copernic à Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019), 61–125. 3  On the history of the concept of method, see Neal W. Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960). 4  I prefer the term “methodical” to “methodological”, as the latter is anachronistic to the early-modern period, and also conceptually problematic insofar as it encompasses both “method” and “logos”, pointing to a more reflexive and disciplinary-related endeavour, one undertaken in the humanities and the social sciences. The rather common-usage term “methodical”, meaning, for example, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “Arranged, characterized by, or performed with method or order; 2: habitually proceeding

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In order to show this, I suggest the following framework. The “methodical threshold” encapsulates roughly three epistemic moments: (1) the encounter with the unaccounted-for new, experienced as (2) the acknowledgement that (roughly speaking) “something is wrong with our given set of tools”; and this in turn demands (3) the emendation of the intellect.5 For Blumenberg, this moment generally signifies an aberration, caused by the nominalist disposition of the late Middle Ages shaking the very premises of “Catholic” Christianity: the age of nominalism is thus crowned, according to Blumenberg, by Cartesian philosophy, since an absolutely chaotic view of reality necessitates the establishment of the system of two abstract and rigid substances (the res extensa and the res cogitans). Indeed, Blumenberg’s critique of nominalism may help shed light on the relationship between Cartesian and Bergsonian nominalisms: both view reality as entirely evanescent, demanding, in the same breath, its capture by the various tools of reason—plastic, yet indispensable. In the seventeenth century, there takes place—within the French Academy, above all—the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns; the “moderns” sought to acknowledge the new and the “ancients” held to the classical and scholastic tools of reasoning and eloquence.6 This quarrel is paradigmatic of the historiographical figure under discussion. Employing the concept of the Epochenschwelle (with an added hint of Bergsonianism), we can say that as soon as a name exists, as soon as nomination has already been made7—that is, as soon as members of the Academie des Lettres began referring to themselves as “moderns” (or even before, when Francis Bacon and René Descartes began talking of their “new” sciences or organons)— then we are already at the end of the third moment enumerated above, when emendation has been accomplished. In this sense, when we talk of a self-conscious modernism, this is to be located on the way-out of the according to method”, seems fitting to what concerns us here. See https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/methodical [consulted 02.12.2019]. 5  See most explicitly in Benedict de Spinoza, Improvement of the Understanding, trans, R.H.M. Elwes (London: Tetens, 1901). 6  See Anne-Marie Lecoq (ed.), La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (XVIIᵉ -XVIIIᵉ siècles) (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 7  See Daniel Whistler, “‘Unutterable Utterances’ and ‘Mysterious Naming’: Nomination in Badiou and the Theater of Mysticism”, International Journal of Badiou Studies 5, https:// badioustudies.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/3-daniel-whistler-e28093-e28098unutterable-utterances_-and-e28098mysterious-naming_-nomination-in-badiou-and-the-theaterof-mysticism.pdf [consulted 30.11.2019].

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threshold. The discourse of modernity is the attempt to name a changeof-­attitude already underway. At the very end of the chapter dedicated to the concept of the “epoch”, Blumenberg writes with venom: “History knows no repetitions of the same: ‘Renaissances’ are its opposite” (LN, 700). Thus, from the moment we enter the age of history—the historicist age, the age of nominalism that permits no repetition—the concept of renaissance becomes strictly impossible. This is perhaps Blumenberg’s most convincing argument against classing the early modern period as merely a “renaissance”. The concept of the Renaissance belongs to the former part of the threshold: but from the point of view of historicism, the whole history becomes a nominalist stream of particular happenings, such that even the Renaissance forms only one moment in an ever-swirling historical vortex. Applying this insight to the domain of the historiography of modernity, the passage from epoch to epoch requires wonderment at the new: whenever we recognize that we are in a “new” epoch, we are already found at the end of the process of undergoing the requisite emendation—that is, we already need to give an account of some method. It is exactly this historiographic “lag” that is captured as a defining feature of modernity. Indeed, from the point of view of such a nominalist historicism, an absolutely new beginning—a kind of historical or intellectual “tabula rasa”—is thereby made possible—and this was something that was, in fact, impossible in the age of mythology. In precisely this manner, the emergence of Cartesianism is thereby made possible. In other words, Cartesian method is the apogee, rather than the beginning, of the modern threshold: it acts as a belated restoration of such profanation and thus—rather than separating modernity from the Middle Ages— it separates the very threshold of modernity from modernity itself. Within the Cartesian framework, methodical know-how presupposes a cosmological foundation and, what is more, the realist content of Cartesian method presupposes that knowledge about the world can only be achieved through method. This realist content is achieved only on the condition of the reformation of thought, that is, accounting for the mistake or error that necessitated this emendation of previous ways of determining the true.8 Therefore, on this reading, Cartesianism is the end, and not a beginning, of such a modern Epochenschwelle, the two edges of which are traceable to the sixteenth and 8   On this see Ernst Cassirer, “Descartes’ Wahrheitsbegriff,” Descartes Lehre— Persönlichkeit—Wirkung (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1938), 9–38.

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eighteenth centuries, at which points they fade away, rather than halting abruptly. What we call the modern tout court exists as the aftermath of the methodical, reformed moment that effectuates in-worlding.

What Happened to the World The question of the “new time”, according to Blumenberg, is intrinsically bound to changes in cosmology and the conception of the world as such: As soon as one leaves the sphere of influence of the theological system of categories, the world to which to the modern age [Neuzeit] appears to have turned its full attention can be an “unworldly” world in regard to its concept of reality or to the nature of its intuition as compared to an immediacy ascribed to the ancients. Only where the category of substance dominates the understanding of history are there repetitions, superimpositions and dissociations—and also, for that matter, disguises and unmaskings. (LMA, 9)

This passage describes the beginning of the process of in-worlding as a transition into the system of substances—and this reformation in our concept of the world was first effectuated by Giordano Bruno, and then by Descartes, before being further pursued by their followers and critics. The repetitions, superimpositions, disassociations, maskings and unmaskings described above are what made the concept of substance the centre-­point for the understandings of both nature and history, and they constituted the daily bread of all Cartesian methods during the seventeenth century. In this way, we come to understand the relationship between the concept of substance and the concept of method: in-worlding and un-worlding are the two faces of the same threshold.

The Becoming-Substance of the World: From Bruno to Descartes Bruno was one of Descartes’ closest predecessors in this regard. He made nature an infinite extended being and thereby prepared the ground for both the Cartesian res extensa and the Spinozist “pantheism”. As one learns from the last part of Legitimacy, it was the heretic-fanatic Bruno who serves for Blumenberg as the perfect example of an intellectual figure placed between theologism and secularism, on the doorstep of the “new time”—and this is what generates that peculiar esoteric, occult character

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to his thought: denying the figure of Christ, while at the same time insisting on the infinity of the universe and practising a hermetic tradition of the conservation of meanings through the recollection of symbols. Bruno’s manner of thinking was thoroughly and profoundly theological, but at the same time also anti-Catholic and, for that matter, heretical. Moreover, Bruno’s world—if he indeed has any in the classical sense—is already entirely subsumed under the parameters of infinite substance, and this is what makes the whole labour of figuration possible. Instead of the figure of Christ, Bruno was fascinated by the variety of figures in nature that were for him entirely physical: these figures and emblems, scattered all around him, made it possible for Bruno to develop his elaborate system of spatial memory—aided by precisely these schemes, emblems and figures.9 Memory in Bruno is not only an extended realm, but also a true language: in this sense, learning to memorize means learning to write and read one’s own past. We will see that this linguistic character of Nolan memory participates in the new paradigms of world-modelling and world-imaging. In the last part of Legitimacy, Blumenberg places Bruno (after Nicholas of Cusa) as representative of the modern threshold, as preliminarily sketching, that is, the isomorphic cosmological skeleton of modern science. His description of nature as infinite extension makes possible the generation of a world-model—one that identifies the world with the infinity of matter. According to Blumenberg, a distinction should be made between the ancients’ world of immediacy and a world based on a conception of substance—that is, an indirect world mediated by the establishment of a res extensa. And it is Bruno’s infinite world which represents for Blumenberg the paradigm for this process of world-modelling. And yet, even if it is to Bruno that Blumenberg repeatedly appeals, all of the above-mentioned characteristics also pertain to the Cartesian framework. It is the world of Descartes which brings into fruition this res extensa based on the indefinite possibilities of figurations. The Cartesian world, according to Blumenberg, is entirely subsumed under the needs and rules of human comportment. It is a world read as a book: The most important step, from the point of view of the history of concepts, was to free the expression “world” from its orientation towards nature, and 9  Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language, trans. Stephen Clucas (London: Continuum, 2006), 81–96.

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to integrate it into the universe of men, into their expressive and cultural achievements. Montaigne contributed the most to this process. When Descartes says that one could learn to read the “great book of the world” on a “Cavalier journey”, the priority of nature can no longer be detected. In his own description of his education, no other science follows after the “étude de lettres” except that which is to be found in himself or in the great book of the world (ou bien dans le grand livre du monde). This gives rise to the next stage: to collect more experience of the world, and then to proceed to the experience of the self.10

Travel, movement and reading are fused as one sequence in Cartesian method. The experience of the world is to be imprinted on the soul of the searcher by way of various figures that need to be reread, analysed and collected methodically. This world is not only the world of the rules of nature, but also the world of men, their habits, cultures and dialects. Another way of putting this is that the world is constituted like a language—and not just any language, but a language one has been expressly invited to learn and to adopt. Reading the world correctly thus means already using the world and participating in it: The great book of the world therefore contains much else than what Descartes had initially planned under the title, “The World”, leaving it [unpublished] when he heard in 1633 of the condemnation of Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue on the World-Systems. After Montaigne […] the experience of the world demands self-experience. According to Descartes’ own narrative, the book of the world reveals to the travelling cavalier the view from royal courts and armies, various nations and different states. When encountering them, the traveller is aware of what kinds of adequate behaviour are needed [….] The self is to be experienced according to the measure of the world, as compatible or not with its changing conditions.11

From within the storm of the nominalist arbitrary and swirling reality, the book of the world acts as a meeting point between the human agent and his surroundings; it demands and involves a constant attempt to synchronize between the two—and this is no longer something as dramatic as withdrawing inwards into the vita contemplativa or bursting outwards into the vita activa. It is an exchange between a text and a reader moving 10  Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 92. My translation. 11  Ibid., 92.

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within the text, going back and forth, looking for marks and trying to decipher and interpret the difficult passages. In so doing, the reader undertakes an “interpretation” of the book of the world and so rewrites or reforms it: Although, for Descartes and his time, man no longer sits at the centre of the universe, in order to sit at the centre of nature he is nevertheless significantly positioned as the reference point for knowledge of nature, for the totality of the sciences. This gives rise to a difference between the total-representation of nature, on the one hand, and, on the other, the purposive determination of the totality of natural knowledge, which will come to hold the highest significance in what follows. For the first time, the “world-image” and the “world-model” were separated from each other; indeed, their fundamental distinction here becomes apparent for the first time.12

Blumenberg emphasizes this distinction between world-model and world-­ image, where world-modelling coincides with the technical tools of Cartesian philosophy. Nevertheless, as initially enticing as this distinction might seem, it is necessary to put it under some scrutiny, since it is not that clear that—at least according to the Cartesian framework—one can indeed differentiate between these two in-worlding strategies as neatly as Blumenberg wants. Here are the definitions he gives of these two kinds of epistemic procedure: I must clarify these two concepts. By “world-model” I understand the total-­ representation that is dependent on the respective state of the natural sciences and the entirety of its claims concerning the total-representation of empirical reality. By “world-image” I mean the conception of reality in which and through which man understands himself, orients his evaluations and intentions, grasps his possibilities and necessities and indicates to himself his own essential needs. The world-image has a “practical power”, as Kant would put it.13

Blumenberg chooses to put his concept of reality on the side of world-­ imaging, instead of world-modelling. This demonstrates his basic neo-­ Kantian position: reality is understood as belonging to the arena of  Ibid., 92.   Hans Blumenberg, “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle”, Nachrichten der Giessener Hochschulgesellschaft 30 (1961): 69. My translation. 12 13

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representations or of world-imaging. World-imaging—and, with it, reality itself—has an interpretative orientation: the reality that results from the image of the world is designated as an act of reading. The image-world is readable and translatable. Blumenberg wants to specify the difference between world-modelling and world-imaging as one between the scientific, mechanistic reconstruction of the physical world and a more meaning-­ oriented and teleological picture that one creates of the world. Blumenberg places Descartes’ philosophy between “world-modelling” and “world-­ imaging”; he emphasizes that, in Descartes, the image of man stays in the middle of the “world-image”, and yet, from the aspect of “world-­ modelling”, it is the case that “the body-automaton that […] was initiated with an ego cogito, has nothing to do with human self-consciousness”.14 These are extremely harsh words, testifying in the best manner for Blumenberg’s reluctance to endorse the Cartesian overture to early modern philosophy. The problem, however, is that, as a matter of fact, according to the Cartesian framework which Blumenberg places ambivalently between world-modelling and world-imaging, the mechanistic construction of the world is immediately and exclusively accomplished through strategies of geometrical figuration destined to serve, even if Blumenberg does not admit this, some specific, vulnerable and very much self-reflexive human aims.15 There is no mechanistic modelling in Descartes that does not, at some point, play some role within a teleology of negotiating with nature and directing it. Hence, the distinction that Blumenberg draws between imaging and modelling the world is—at least in the framework of Cartesian method—invalid. I will flesh this out by turning in more detail to the methodical movement itself.

The Methodical Process of In-worlding In the Cartesian context, method is a process by which a “wrong” is recognized within pre-existing (moral, intellectual, stylistic) comportments, and this in turn demands a reformation that will result in a comportment that fits better the ratio between the seeker and the essentially uncapturable reality he seeks to capture. This is what Blumenberg has many times refered to as modern nominalism.  Ibid.  See Adi Efal-Lautenschläger, “The figural go-between in the Cartesian conception of science” in Interdisciplinary Science Review 42.3 (July 2017): 269–75. 14 15

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What is a “wrong” in this context? Rancière’s notion of a “tort” is helpful here. A “wrong” is to be understood as a gap, an incommensurability between two systems of measure.16 In that sense, a wrong is like a transmission “bug” between two systems, making the two systems (let us call them System 1 and System 2) irreconcilable. In this situation, there are four possible outcomes: (1) System 1 will adapt itself to System 2, (2) System 2 will cede to System 1, (3) incommensurability will prevail and no communication will be possible (divorce) or finally (4) both will accommodate to each other. Method proceeds down the fourth way—that is, in parallel, both our concept of the world and our concept of our own epistemic instruments adjust themselves to each other. This is the framework of “in-worlding”. Within this framework, “in-worlding” names a process in which man puts himself in a ratio, in a relation, to a world, whereas method names a manner of reforming this proportion between mind and reality. One knows that one needs a method when one becomes aware of the aforementioned “wrong”. When, in the midst of implementing pre-existing know-how, a moment is reached in one’s observations or acts when one must exclaim, “This cannot be!”, it is at that moment that emendation is required. This exclamation occupies a point of irrationality between two momentary observations. I am thinking here of Descartes’ realization that it is not the case that the stick is broken into two parts whenever it is sunk into a cup of water; however, I could equally point to a similar exclamation in Descartes’ response to Arnauld’s objection regarding the miracle of the Eucharist.17 Arnauld writes, “What I see as likely to give the greatest offence to theologians is that according to the author’s doctrines it seems that the Church’s teaching concerning the sacred mysteries of the Eucharist cannot remain completely intact.” This is exactly the very incommensurability between two systems that I outlined above. Without here going into the details of the controversy, what Arnauld points to is a discrepancy between a scientific account of the world and the miraculous turning of the bread into Christ’s body. In other words, we are talking about incommensurability between the mechanical system of explanation and the theological, miraculous system of explanation. Everything that appears as a  Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente: politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995), 43–67.  René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 3 vols, trans. John Cottingham et  al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. 2, 152–3; René Descartes, Œuvres. ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1996), vol. VII, 217–8. 16 17

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miracle calls for an emendation of rationality. Descartes uses his mechanical physics to explain the miraculous sacrament: he proposes a physics of minuscule pores in the bread that facilitate its transfiguration into the body of Christ. Emendation is thus called for every time one thinks about wonders in general and attempts to provide a better account of their occurrence. It is therefore not surprising that among the opening words to The World one finds this sentence: “God will never perform any miracle in the new world, and that the intelligences, or the rational souls, which we might later suppose to be there, will not disrupt in any way the ordinary course of nature.”18 Descartes’ The World is, in this specific sense, a methodical script: an experiment in explaining all that is miraculous in terms of mechanical physics. Descartes achieves this through a method of postulating “another” world, a “model” world—one very similar to ours, but which we are not obliged to identify as ours. Indeed, Descartes is operating by way of estrangement through method: “our” world is “merely” being imitated, being remodelled. Descartes’ intention is for his “model” world to be free of miracles, so as to minimize descriptive gaps as far as possible; he intends to establish a new order of world-machine in which miracles and wonders will become redundant (at the same time, of course, God’s presence is still nevertheless required to maintain the interaction between minds and bodies).19 In his article on loss of order (Ordnungsschwund) and self-­determination (Selbstbehauptung),20 Blumenberg presents a simultaneous process of abandonment of the centre and positioning within the self at the heart of the early-modern world. It is primarily Bacon who serves as Blumenberg’s example for this process; however, if we are to learn anything about modernity from Descartes, it is that man is not what replaces the disorder created by the collapse of the Ptolemaic world-model, but, rather, a new model emerges at this moment in time to improve the old order and fill up the gaps opened up by a culture of miracles. The use of modelling to reform the relation between man and world is constructionist—that is, all miracles call for an emendation of the intellect and thus for the formation  Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1: 97; Descartes, Œuvres vol. XI, 48.  Daniel Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 263–306. 20  Hans Blumenberg, Schriften zur Technik, ed. Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2015), 138–162. 18 19

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of a method to accomplish this emendation. And this is because what is more miraculous than the new itself? Nothing that is in itself novel can be explained on the basis of pre-existing reasons; one forever needs an emendation of the intellect whenever one encounters the new. In this sense, the “new world” itself—the discovery of the Americas, or of the heliographic structure of the universe, or of blood circulation—demanded many methodical emendations—that is, extensive in-­worlding. However, if my framework is plausible, then it is also the case that these revelations were already the result of some wrong having been emended, because it is at the very moment that the old order is put into methodical relation with a new one that one becomes aware of such errors, that is, the incommensurability of the old and the new. And it is at this moment that there arises the demand for the theorization of method. This is the key point: recourse to this retroactive theorization of method seems to provide a way of reconstructing the historiography of early-modern philosophy.

Anthropology or Humanism For Blumenberg, modern cosmology develops out of an anthropological foundation: it involves a new positing of man as the measuring-­token that differentiates between medieval nominalism and modern constructivism. And although there are numerous references to Descartes in the Legitimacy, Blumenberg’s Descartes is certainly not the only player in this drama of in-worlding. Indeed, Cartesianism appears not as the epigone of modernity but, rather, as an instance of “Epochenschwelle”, of a trough between epochs. The “new” had already been attained when Descartes walked onto the stage. And so the questions become: what exactly was achieved methodically? What was that method of emendation? And what was the nature of the wrongs that were emended? Blumenberg writes, In Descartes’ method, the consequences of the ontological break find their of its almost completed explication. Man poses for himself the power of his thought on the foundation of absolute truth. He becomes for himself the principle of the possibility of his own existence.21

 Ibid., 44. My translation.

21

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As an alternative to Blumenberg’s anthropological and post-romantic vocabulary of curiosity (LN, 263–528) and self-determination,22 one might simply name this moment “humanism” to classify the era of methodical emendation. Humanism is not so much the science of man, but rather the science of poiesis—the science of the unnatural, the science of the new. In this humanistic framework, particularly in its Cartesian variant, nature and method are synonymous. Otherwise put: nature in Descartes’ philosophy has a methodical reality. In this sense, the interest Descartes has in method is inseparable from his interest in nature: the more one develops one’s methodical instruments, the more one possesses nature. Nature, from this perspective, is identical to the ingenium, that virtual, innate and always singular capacity to conceive, and the task of method is merely to direct this ingenium, not to alter it. To understand this, we must rethink the meaning of the term “simple natures” which appears in the early Regulae ad directionem ingenii (c. 1628). These simple natures, in our humanist reading of Descartes, are inherently artificial, even if unquestionably validated as true. They are, indeed, second natures, as we will show just bellow. Blumenberg considers Descartes’ “humanism” to be extremely problematic. He portrays Cartesian self-modelling as a violent instance of scientific isomorphism: It is just not the way that Descartes imagined it to be when he wrote his “Discourse on method” and thereby gained his reputation as founder of modernity and its scientific spirit. Descartes wanted an insightful method accessible to everyone—one that would precede all practices of knowledge and normalize them. This method was not only to ground and secure science as something to be mastered, but as the perfect self-possession of man. Theory and morals should in the end be one, and, in this unity, man was to be safeguarded in his self-perfection and happiness.23

It is man’s ability to pursue the sciences, rather than a divine property, that grounds truth: The truth of the knowledge of beings does not ultimately rest on the fact that God has created it, but on the fact that man could make it… The evidence that the first rule of the Discourse demanded is applied in the second  See ibid., 138–162.  Blumenberg, “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle”, 68–9. My translation.

22 23

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and third rules, which contain the schema for the rational construction of the object.24

And, Blumenberg continues, it is an anthropological feature that makes possible the construction of the objects of science. This is Blumenberg’s hyperopia when it comes to the Cartesian moment: his all-encompassing eye is so close to the phenomenon, he cannot ultimately see it in focus.

In-worlding and Simple Natures I have argued that Blumenberg’s distinctions do not (pace Blumenberg himself) exist as bare oppositions but are, instead, intrinsically woven into the very texture of the Cartesian corpus. This becomes particularly clear through a consideration of the notion of “simple natures” which, in effect, stand at the basis of Cartesian epistemology. Simple natures are already named as one of the pillars of certainty in the 1620s in the Regulae—and, a few decades later in the 1660s, they developed into the concept of a “true idea”, that is, one that is simple and guarantees the validity of method. As Spinoza puts it, “For the certitude of truth, no further sign is necessary beyond the possession of a true idea.”25 True ideas in Spinoza enable the entire method to take shape, and a good method will “show us how the mind should be directed, according to the standard of the given true idea”.26 In both Descartes and Spinoza, there is a tendency to ascribe to thought the capacity to possess simple, true knowledge—knowledge which acts as the fundament or the anchor of method. Thus, a method can be understood as a re-possession of nature. Leinkauf has noted that “the indifference between matter and method belongs to the most intrinsic problems of theories of universal science”27—that is, when it comes to early modern universal science, which reads the whole of reality like a book or an atlas, method is matter and matter is method. This is a point of view which we can indeed find in Descartes and many of his followers. Hence in respect to the distinction between method and world, it is important to differentiate between the early-modern and the modern periods: in the former, which  Blumenberg, Schriften zur Technik, 45. My translation.  Spinoza, Improvement, 10. 26  Spinoza, Improvement, 12. 27  Thomas Leinkauf, Mundus combinatus. Studien zur Struktur der barocken Universalwissenschaft am Beispiel Athanasius Kirchers (1602–1680) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 15. 24 25

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still contains something of a “renaissance”, there is a necessary connection between method and the book of the world. Reading the world is working out one’s method. This is how Descartes refers to the relation between nature and rules in The World: he argues that what we refer to as rules of nature are—to some extent—free from divine intervention. Rather, nature is primarily to be conceived in terms of the res extensa and its qualities: I do not want to delay any longer from telling you by what means nature alone can untangle the confusion of the chaos of which I have spoken, and what the laws of nature are that God has imposed on it. Note, in the first place, that by “nature” here I do not mean some goddess or any other sort of imaginary power. Rather, I am using this word to signify matter itself, insofar as I am considering it taken together with all the qualities that I have attributed to it, and under the condition that God continues to preserve it in the same way that he created it. For it follows of necessity, from the mere fact that he continues thus to preserve it, that there must be many changes in its parts which cannot, it seems to me, properly be attributed to the action of God (because that action never changes), and which therefore I attribute to nature. The rules by which these changes take place I call the “laws of nature.”28

Cartesian laws of nature express everything that cannot be explained by divine eternity and benevolence. Laws of nature therefore exist in the world: they are the principles of movement in the world. And so they are to be literally read in the book of the world. It is for this reason that laws of nature are both evident and valid: The knowledge of these truths is so natural to our souls that we cannot but judge them infallible when we conceive them distinctly, nor doubt that if God had created many worlds, they would be as true in each of them as in this one. Thus, those who are able to examine sufficiently the consequences of these truths and of our rules will be able to recognize effects by their causes. To express myself in scholastic terms, they will be able to have a priori demonstrations of everything that can be produced in this new world.29

Descartes refers here, even if implicitly, to the famous “regressive” method of explanation, which, according to the very influential Jacopo Zabarella,  Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1: 92–3; Descartes, Œuvres, vol. XI, 36–7.  Descartes, Philosophical Writings 1: 97; Descartes, Œuvres vol. XI, 47.

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does not only show how a certain effect is produced by a cause (from a special case to its principle), but also how a cause produces a certain effect (from a principle to a special case)30—a structure of reasoning that was at the centre of intense philosophical discussion from the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the same way, Descartes’ method is not only interested in explaining certain natural phenomena by their causes, but also in showing how, from a certain cause, a certain effect is brought about. In the eighteenth century, for example, in Kant, the dependence of nature on method will begin to be emphasized and this, in turn, results in a modern “subjectivism” that culminates in nineteenth-century Idealism. This is a tendency that could be classed as modern. However, when it comes to the threshold period of “in-worlding”—that is, roughly between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—method is conceived as nature, that is, method is based on nature. In other words, at this point, we are not yet in a subjectivist world that revolves around the conditions of experience, but rather in a world which is conceived as restored by method’s ways. To develop a method or to practise a method means to act naturally, to act from nature or to act in nature. And to act naturally, in the seventeenth century, means to act causally and mechanistically: it means to follow causes and effects. To obtain the truth of things is to find their active, proximal cause, that is, the manner by which they came about. Therefore, to develop a method is to develop causes for thought—and, on this reading, simple natures are to be identified with these causes of thought. Method rectifies nature in analogy to the lenses Spinoza polished, the Dioptrics Descartes devised or the model of the “new” world fabricated in The World. What is more, this explains why method in Renaissance philosophy has an immanently technical character. In other words, method is the technē of early-modern intellectual culture. Method’s task is both productive and reproductive: it is responsible for the reproduction of nature. In that sense, practising a method is almost divine, for one thereby becomes responsible for creation—and such is the heretical and perhaps even occult potential of any method. If Spinoza’s method strives to teach the good life, then Descartes’ method is merely intended to make possible a better anchoring for the starting-point of any life (he does not, I think, ever make happiness as such 30  See Jacopo Zabarella, Über die Methoden/De methodis—Über den Rückgang/De regressu (Munich: Fink, 1995), 318–38; Gilbert, Renaissance concepts, 170–2.

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a goal for his philosophy). The “methodist” framework31 addresses a user: the personal, private user or the disciple. This user is a reader, and so there are many methods of ensuring that the reader tarries with “the book”. As Descartes writes in the seventh chapter of The World, I do not promise you to set out here exact demonstrations of all the things I shall say. It will be enough if I open the way which will enable you to discover them yourselves, when you take the trouble to look for them. Most minds lose interest when things are made too easy for them. And to present a picture which pleases you, I need to use shadow as well as bright colours. So I shall be content to continue with the description I have begun, as if my intention was simply to tell you a fable.32

Descartes here models a philosophical mask to seduce the reader. However, he also warns his reader in advance that he is so masking himself in order to make the reader conscious of this artifice. This strategy suggests a dramatically ambivalent position towards technology or the unnatural: technology must be employed as if it were nature, and nature must be observed as if it were technology. The reader should bear in mind that a mask is being worn, but at the same time see this mask as a new nature. To begin, therefore, method advises the seeker to don a mask, seducing his disciple, piquing his interest in some enquiry that might have been too tiring or annoying if undertaken in the seeker’s own name. It is important to note that Descartes makes no claim here to absolute veracity; on the contrary, he wants his reader to enjoy the benefit of the doubt, to become conscious of the idea that everything Descartes has written is only a fable. It is for this reason that Blumenberg’s characterization of Descartes is a little misleading: Descartes believed himself capable of eradicating the threat of the evil demon from the world, since he believed he could obtain a proof for the necessary truthfulness (veracitas) of the most perfect essence.33

Blumenberg is, once more, a little quick in his understanding of Descartes. Yes, Descartes did think that he had attained a basis allowing for 31  See Daniel Schneider, “Spinoza’s Epistemological Methodism” in Journal of the History of Philosophy 54.4 (2017): 573–575. 32  Descartes, Philosophical Writings 1: 97–8; Descartes, Œuvres vol. XI, 48. 33  Blumenberg, Lesbarkeit, 118. My translation.

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establishing truth by reason, but this does not mean that it is correct to state that, for Descartes, reality loses the power of figuration. In fact, the opposite is far truer—and also far more complicated: for Descartes, the power of figuration is to be employed as a tool of truth. Figuration is a mask which truth can don, while nevertheless remaining valid and sound. Did Descartes believe that he had purged the world of demons? What I am suggesting is that Descartes’ demons are, in fact, close to Socrates’ inner demon, or rather “inner voice”, to which Descartes refers explicitly in a letter to Elizabeth from November 1646: [W]hat is commonly called the “inner voice (le genie)” of Socrates was undoubtedly nothing other than his being accustomed to follow his inner inclinations, and his believing that an undertaking would have a happy outcome when he entered upon it with a secret feeling of cheerfulness, but an unhappy outcome when he was sad.34

According to Descartes, demons are nothing but passions: they are inner passions that influence our capacity to perform. And the final aim of Les passions de l’âme (1649)—a book that (as far as I know) Blumenberg did not explicitly address—was to get to know this “demonic” world, to bring some order to it and reshape it as an instrument of world-modelling.

Emendation and Reformation The modern world is a reformed world. In this sense, to be modern is to be “reformed”, and, in the Blumenbergian context, this also means to be nominalist, historicist and profane (but not necessarily an atheist, of course).35 Many authors, artists and thinkers of the period of in-worlding were in the process of passing through transfigurative processes of conversions and reformations of mind—changes that took them to the very threshold of the Catholic framework they inherited—and it is this process of reform that they describe in their philosophies and artworks: Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Melanchton, Bacon, Dürer, Da Vinci, Bruno and Descartes are the most exemplary figures of this epochal phenomenon. Hence, to make sense of the modern age, an account of something like  Descartes, Philosophical Writings 3: 297; Descartes, Œuvres IV, 528–9.  If this is true, then the Catholic Baroque of the seventeenth century, which was at its core a counter-reformation movement, is to be understood generally as unmodern, even as anti-modern. 34 35

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“transfiguration” becomes necessary. And to theorize transfiguration demands a new beginning; it demands that attention is paid again and again to the manner of beginning, to the manner in which one sets off (again) on a search.36 In fact, the entire story I have been telling above is essentially concerned with Blumenberg’s fundamental disavowal of the Protestant Reformation.37 What I have been arguing is that despite appearances to the contrary, the Protestant moment appears to Blumenberg as a mere deviation from the norm of Catholic truth. According to Blumenberg, in-­ worlding, which, I have shown, is intrinsically bound to method and to emendation, was a moment of concealment—a moment in which the true order was veiled. For Blumenberg, at this moment, “knowledge receives the character of work”.38 This is surely true, but what Max Weber understood more clearly than Blumenberg is that it is precisely the work-­vocation of knowledge that is of interest to us today.39

Bibliography Blumenberg, Hans. “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle.” Nachrichten der Giessener Hochschulgesellschaft 30 (1961): 67–75. Blumenberg, Hans. Die Lesbarkeit der Welt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [LMA]. Translated by Robert Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Blumenberg, Hans. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit [LN]. Erneuerte Ausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996. Büttgen, Philippe. “Certitude et Affirmation. La réforme Blumenberg.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 73 (2012): 35–51. Cassirer, Ernst. Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance. Hamburg: Meiner, 2013. Cassirer, Ernst. Descartes Lehre—Persönlichkeit—Wirkung. Stockholm: Bermann-­ Fischer Verlag, 1939. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 3 vols. Translated by John Cottingham et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 36  See Édouard Mehl, “Descartes ou la philosophie des (re)commencements” in Archives de Philosophie 81.1 (2018), 49–67. 37  See Philippe Büttgen, “Certitude et Affirmation. La réforme Blumenberg” in Revue de métaphysique et de morale 73 (2012), 35–51. 38  Blumenberg, Schriften zur Technik, 46. 39  Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1920).

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Descartes, René. Œuvres. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Paris: Vrin, 1996. Efal-Lautenschläger, Adi. “The figural go-between in the Cartesian conception of science.” Interdisciplinary Science Review 42.3 (July 2017): 269–281.   Garber, Daniel. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Gilbert, Neal W. Renaissance Concepts of Method. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960. Lecoq, Anne-Marie (ed.), La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (XVIIᵉ -XVIIIᵉ siècles). Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Leinkauf, Thomas. Mundus combinatus. Studien zur Struktur der barocken Universalwissenschaft am Beispiel Athanasius Kirchers SJ (1602–1680). Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. Mehl, Edouard. Descartes et la fabrique du monde: Le problème cosmologique de Copernic à Descartes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019. Mehl, Édouard. “Descartes ou la philosophie des (re)commencements.” Archives de Philosophie 81.1 (2018): 49–67. Rancière, Jacques. La Mésentente: politique et philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1995. Rohls, Jan. “Entweltlichung und Verweltlichung.” Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift 63 (2012): 194–204. Rossi, Paolo. Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language. Translated by Stephen Clucas. London: Continuum, 2006. Schneider, Daniel. “Spinoza’s Epistemological Methodism.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 54/4 (2017): 573–599. Spinoza, Benedict de. Improvement of the Understanding. Translated by R. H. M. Elwes. London: Tetens, 1901. Weber, Max. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1920. Whistler, Daniel. “‘Unutterable Utterances’ and ‘Mysterious Naming’: Nomination in Badiou and the Theater of Mysticism.” International Journal of Badiou Studies 5, https://badioustudies.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/3-danielwhistler-e28093-e28098unutterable-utterances_-and-e28098mysteriousnaming_-nomination-in-badiou-and-the-theater-of-mysticism.pdf, consulted 30.11.2019. Zabarella, Jacopo. Über die Methoden/De methodis—Über den Rückgang/De regressu. Munich: Fink, 1995.

CHAPTER 11

Umbesetzung: Reoccupation in Blumenbergian Modernity Sonja Feger

The topic at stake in the following is, on first blush, a simple one, for it concerns the ways in which humans deal with reality. And yet, historically, humans have not always responded to reality in one and the same way. As Blumenberg emphasizes repeatedly, reality has been approached and dealt with very differently over the course of history. This chapter is a first attempt to take up two theoretical figures in Blumenberg’s work and to link them. On the one hand, in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg furnishes a historical account of epochal change, and in Part IV of the book, especially, introduces the notion of “reoccupation” (Umbesetzung) to explain how epochal change can be grasped. On the other hand, and in other texts, he provides a historical analysis of what he calls “reality-concepts” (Wirklichkeitsbegriffe). In this chapter, I attempt to bring these two concepts into line with each other; that is, I ask whether the idea of reoccupation is applicable to the historical sequence of reality-concepts. In what follows, I will begin by providing an overview on Blumenberg’s four reality-concepts, before turning to the idea of reoccupation. Here, I S. Feger (*) University of Koblenz-Landau, Landau, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_11

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will answer the questions as to what exactly “reoccupation” means and what function the concept is meant to fulfil. To do so, I will draw from Blumenberg’s phenomenological account of subjectivity and reflection as well as from his anthropological conception of “self-assertion”. These two contexts will prove key to better understand Blumenberg’s endeavour to provide a historical account of the modern age. Before concluding, I will dedicate some thoughts to the question of a “historical substance” within Blumenberg’s account of epochal changes.

Blumenberg’s Fourfold Concept of Reality In one of his earlier texts titled The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel, Blumenberg approaches the question as to how man deals with reality from a specifically historical angle.1 The text is Blumenberg’s contribution to the first session of Poetik und Hermeneutik, an interdisciplinary research group which existed from 1963 until 1998. With its numerous collected volumes dedicated to different thematic focuses, the Poetik und Hermeneutik group furnished a remarkable contribution to the shaping of the German intellectual landscape. Blumenberg’s contribution The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel is based upon the assumption that literature has always been associated in one or another way with reality, that is, that “literature refers to a given outside reality” or that it creates “a reality of its own”.2 Against the background of his attempt to conceive of a work of art—such as the novel—as legitimized in terms of “its relation to reality”, Blumenberg 1  Hans Blumenberg, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,” in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton University Press, 1979); Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” in Nachahmung und Illusion: Kolloquium Gießen Juni 1963. Vorlagen und Verhandlungen, ed. Hans R.  Jauss, 2nd ed., Poetik und Hermeneutik 1 (München: Fink, 1964). I consider this chapter the main source for a systematic reconstruction of Blumenberg’s fourfold concept of reality. However, he draws on this distinction in several other publications, too—for example: Hans Blumenberg, “Vorbemerkungen Zum Wirklichkeitsbegriff,” Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz. Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, no. 4 (1974); Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Staatstheorie,” Schweizer Monatshefte 48, no. 2 (1968); Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos,” in Terror und Spiel: Probleme der Mythenrezeption, ed. Manfred Fuhrmann, Poetik und Hermeneutik 4 (München: Fink, 1971). 2  Ibid., 30.

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introduces what he calls “historical concepts of reality”.3 For each epoch of intellectual history, he asks after what he calls its respective “concept of reality”. In so doing, he assumes that humans have not always related to reality in one and the same way; rather, he claims that each “concept of reality” is submitted to historical change; that is, that reality is conceptualized differently depending on the epoch. It is important to note that in this context, by “conceptualizing”, no definition, that is, no catalogue of sufficient and necessary criteria for something to fall under a particular concept is understood. Rather, and this should become clearer in the course of this chapter, Blumenberg emphasizes the functional status of reality-concepts by conceiving of such concepts as a nexus of questions and problems pertinent during a specific epoch of intellectual history (and thus simultaneously essentially shaping it).4 In total, Blumenberg distinguishes four concepts of reality and relates each of them to one of three epochs in intellectual history: namely, Antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity. To begin, I restrict myself to merely briefly summarizing each reality-concept’s most defining traits. It goes without saying that each of the four reality-concepts Blumenberg introduces might itself form the subject of a study in its own right, for it is not at all self-evident that (Western) intellectual history has consisted in exactly these four ways of conceptualizing reality. The “first historical concept” is the “classical concept of reality”5 and is characterized by “instantaneous evidence” (momentane Evidenz), according to which “the human mind immediately and with total confidence realizes that it is confronted with the ultimate and unsurpassable reality”.6 It is “unsurpassable” because, once something is recognized as “something real”, there is no need to revise or correct this knowledge. The evidence ascribed to the classical reality concept is instantaneous, because the insight is assumed to show no indication of genesis or, what is more, none of degeneration either. Although Blumenberg insists that the classical concept of reality is not to be confused with the Platonic Idea, it still ­resembles  Ibid.  It goes without saying that the intellectual act of “conceptualizing reality” bears on further epistemological questions I cannot touch on here. In this respect, I shall not ask after the epistemic status of “reality”—that is, whether they have the status of transcendental or empirical concepts. For it is not clear whether one and the same intellectual act is at stake in conceptualizing empirical objects (such as, say, animals) and in conceptualizing reality. 5  Ibid., 31. 6  Ibid., 30. 3 4

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it insofar as the property of being “unsurpassable” relates to the Platonic assumption that there cannot be what in Ancient Greek is denoted a “mallon on”, a surplus to the being of ideas.7 According to Blumenberg’s chronology, the second reality-concept is that of the Middle Ages and is a matter of “guaranteed reality” (garantierte Realität).8 Reality and, more precisely, knowledge about what is “real” becomes something that has to be guaranteed by some divine authority: The Middle Ages of High Scholasticism had seen man’s relation to reality as a triangular relation mediated by the divinity. Cognitive certainty was possible because God guaranteed man’s participation in His creative rationality when He brought him into the fellowship of His world idea and wanted to furnish him, according to the measure of His grace, with insight into the conception of nature. (LMA, 391)

Here, God as the divine authority is taken to be “the guarantor of the reliability of human knowledge”9—that is, God not only guarantees the possibility of true knowledge for man, but also the possibility of meaningfully integrating this knowledge into one’s overall notion of world. Thirdly, Blumenberg turns to modernity as the epoch defining reality “as the actualization of a context in itself” (in sich einstimmiger Kontext).10 Blumenberg also describes this concept of reality as an “open context” or an “open consistency”, according to which reality is “the result of an actualisation and of a persisting and yet never fully guaranteed reliability”, only allowing for a “certainty on alert”.11 Unlike the classical concept of reality, in this “open consistency”, there is nothing “which, if presented to us, outdid any illusion and proved itself as that which is fully”—and therefore unsurpassably—“real”12 (I will return to this reality-concept’s theoretical proximity to phenomenology).

7  “[Platonic] ideas are of a such a kind that there cannot be a mallon on, a surplus to their reality”, Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Staatstheorie,” 127 (translation mine). 8  Blumenberg, “Possibility of the Novel,” 31–2. 9  Ibid., 32. 10  Ibid., 32. 11  Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos,” 36 (translation mine). 12  Blumenberg, “Vorbemerkungen,” 6.

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Finally, Blumenberg alludes to a fourth concept of reality “based on the experience of resistance” (Widerstand).13 Unlike the preceding three concepts, he is hesitant to identify the experience of a resistant and barely manageable reality with one specific epoch in intellectual history. However, since Blumenberg proceeds chronologically in his presentation of a historical sequence, there is strong evidence that both the third and the fourth concept are linked to modernity. (I will give further details concerning the location of the reality-concept of resistance in modernity when turning to Blumenberg’s anthropology). Several questions emerge from such a brief description of Blumenberg’s historical account of a fourfold concept of reality. In the following, I shall focus on the relation between the four reality-concepts, and the central question here concerns their structural pattern. For, prima facie, it is not self-evident that Blumenberg’s four concepts are more than arbitrary in their ascription to different epochs of intellectual history.

The Notion of Reoccupation as a Functional Pattern of Questions and Answer Positions Of course, epochal changes are not clean-cut breaks in intellectual history. Pointing to events that have belatedly been singled out and declared “historical” is only a makeshift way of identifying turning points; it does little to reflect the very process of epochal change in its entire scope. Hence, historical philosophy is given the urgent task of grasping this phenomenon in its entirety. What is remarkable about Blumenberg’s approach to this task is his use of the language of wear and tear. According to Blumenberg, what underlies epochal changes is a process of increasing dysfunctionality: as we learn more, concepts of reality gradually expire; they use themselves up. He writes, “it becomes clear that concepts of reality do not simply take over from one another, but that the exhaustion of their implications and the excessive strain on their capacity to answer questions inspire a search for a new basis.”14 However, this still tells us little about how exactly one particular reality-­ concept is eventually replaced, as it were, by a subsequent one. In this regard, in addition to the language of decay and exhaustion, Legitimacy  Blumenberg, “Possibility of the Novel,” 33–4.  Blumenberg, “Possibility of the Novel,” 32, n. 5.

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also makes use of the language of questions and answers, of problems and (sometimes only tentative) solutions. As we will see, the idea of a functional relation between problems and solutions, or between questions and answers or assertions, will prove key to a better understanding of the historical sequence of reality-concepts. That is, what precisely is “exhausted” in epochal change is the set of solutions or answers an era has laid out in response to its pertinent questions. If concepts of reality can be considered pivotal features of a particular epoch’s mindset—that is, the set of assertions and doctrines operative in the background of human understanding—and if this set of assertions can undergo a process of decay (insofar as they accord less and less with their respective questions), it is possible for another way of conceptualizing reality to manifest itself. It is for this reason that philosophy has a “hermeneutic task” which “consists in relating assertions, doctrines and dogmas, speculations and postulates, as answers to questions whose projection into the background of what is documented is what constitutes our understanding”. (LMA, 20) And this is because, in Blumenberg’s words, “every occurrence, in the widest sense of the term, is characterized by ‘correspondence’; it responds to a question, a challenge, a discomfort; it bridges over an inconsistency, relaxes a tension, or occupies a vacant position”. (LMA, 379) The task of philosophy—to trace epochal changes historically—must be hermeneutic insofar as epochal turns remain for the most part unnoticed. As “there are no witnesses to changes of epoch” (LMA, 469), the task is to identify signs of epochal change hermeneutically. Blumenberg takes this hermeneutic task seriously: he elucidates signs that diagnose eras, even though (as well as, because) epochal change cannot be caught red-handed, so to speak. It is only retrospectively that it is possible to historically encounter an epochal threshold: “one of the preconditions for attaining clarity in relating doctrines to one another, and thus in differentiating them, is the possibility of demonstrating, through dissection, an identical fundamental system of elementary assertion needs, notions of the world and the self, on both sides of the [epochal] threshold” (LMA, 469).15 15  It is not surprising that this is exactly how Blumenberg himself proceeds in Part Four of Legitimacy. In focusing on two historical figures he locates on this side and on the other side, respectively, of the epochal threshold—namely, the Cusan [Nicholas of Cusa] and the Nolan [Giordano Bruno of Nola]—he makes the epochal turn philosophically discernible. It is important to note that the endeavour of Legitimacy emerged against the background of Karl Löwith’s thesis that the modern age is but a secularized version of Christian eschatological

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Turning to the four reality-concepts again, and in order to make sense of the relation between them, it is helpful to focus on Blumenberg’s emphasis on the relation between questions and answer positions in Legitimacy. In his Translator’s Introduction to the English edition, Wallace emphasizes the “system of ‘positions’” he believes Blumenberg identifies in historical processes—and such a suggestion proves useful for my purposes. Wallace suggests conceiving of Blumenberg’s discussion of the legitimacy of the modern idea of progress as an “instance of a pattern that Blumenberg describes as affecting quite a number of equally important modern ideas”.16 For Wallace, the notion of “reoccupation” plays the role of a “model”17 which serves to explain further historical phenomena (such as, for example, the emergence of “political absolutism”): “Blumenberg does not use the terminology of ‘reoccupied positions’ here, but I believe that the same idea underlies what he says.”18 If Wallace is right in identifying a pattern in Blumenberg’s portrayal of intellectual history and if this pattern is applicable to several historical phenomena or “occurrences”, the question arises as to what extent Blumenberg’s four concepts of reality are themselves candidates for the reoccupation pattern. In this sense, I suggest that the idea of “occupied”—and, more importantly, of “reoccupied”—positions can indeed be made use of in this context. Blumenberg does not typically offer determinate definitions; yet, in Legitimacy, we find a description of “reoccupation” which can serve as an operative definition. He speaks of “the reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated” (LMA, 65). In terms of the pattern of questions and answers, “‘reoccupation’ means that different statements can be understood as answers to identical questions” (LMA, 466). Although it might be more appropriate to speak of a gradual transition rather than of a “substitution”, Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink emphasizes this point when he comments: faith. For a detailed portrayal of the debate, see Robert M. Wallace, “Progress, Secularization and Modernity: The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate,” New German Critique, 22 (1981). 16  Robert M. Wallace, “Translator’s Introduction” to LMA, xi–xxxi. 17  There are further phenomena—such as the anthropological assumption of self-assertion, the opposition of “matter” and “will” in the conception of nature, Marxism and the opposition of a theological and political absolutism—that Wallace takes to represent the pattern of reoccupation. See ibid., xxi–xxv. 18  Ibid., xxiv.

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“theoretical reactions to current needs vary with respect to the historical context they occur in. Reoccupation designates the very process of substitution of a no longer satisfactory solution by a new one.”19 Precisely this could be said of reality-concepts, too. For if solutions and answer positions which an era has brought about undergo a process of exhaustion inconspicuously, eventually indicating that there must have been an epochal change, reality-concepts and the course of their transition are not merely a case in point. It is important to note that “reoccupation”, that is, the English term Wallace uses to translate the German word Umbesetzung, does not allude to anything antagonistic; it is not about any kind of (intellectual) conquest or usurpation. Rather, the term brings into focus the process-character of epochal change. This process is characterized by a pattern of functions underlying the reality-concepts’ change. Thus, I would claim, “reoccupation” serves as an open heuristic concept, emphasizing the functional role a particular epoch’s “questions” and “answer positions” play, rather than the change in terms of these “questions” content. Reality-concepts are likely to occupy a paramount role in shaping an “identical fundamental system of elementary assertion needs, notions of the world and the self, on both sides of the [epochal] threshold” (LMA, 469). If historical processes rely on the relation of questions and answers, this raises the question not only of how change comes about but also of what exactly it is that changes. Is it that “questions” are constant, whereas the “answers” vary with respect to their historical situation? This would be an all-too-simple image. Rather, as Blumenberg tells us, [w]e are going to have to free ourselves from the idea that there is a firm canon of the “great questions” that throughout history and with an unchanging urgency have occupied human curiosity and motivated the pretension to world and self-interpretation. Such a canon would explain the changing systems of mythology, theology, and philosophy by the congruence of their output of assertions with its content of questions. (LMA, 65–6)20 19  Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, “Umbesetzung,” in Buch and Weidner (eds), Blumenberg lesen, 359 (translation mine). 20  Here, it is more helpful to go back to a similar formulation found in an earlier text on secularization, reckoned to be the template for Legitimacy: “Wir werden uns von der Voraussetzung freimachen müssen, es gebe einen festen Kanon der großen Fragen, die in der Geschichte durchgehend die menschliche Wißbegierde bewegt hätten, und diesem Kanon entsprächen die wechselnden Systeme der Mythologien, Theologien und Metaphysiken”,

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In order to understand what is implied here, it is important to stress the subjunctive “would”: If there were a “firm canon of the ‘great questions’”, it would furnish us with well-shaped and easily accessible explanations. Obviously, this is not how we usually approach, grasp or explain complex phenomena methodologically. Indeed, a “firm canon of the ‘great questions’” would free us from the “hermeneutic task” of searching for correspondences between problems and doctrines historically. Rather, when it comes to the scrutiny of such correspondences, it is neither the assertions nor the questions in their concrete content one must focus on. Instead, it is “identical functions entirely heterogeneous contents can assume in certain positions within man’s interpretation system of world and self”.21 The meaning of this claim can be clarified on return to the project of Legitimacy. For when the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity is examined, “the modern phenomenon (interpreted as secularization) of the reoccupation of vacant answer positions is not bound specifically to the spiritual structure of this epoch”. Rather, Blumenberg believes that there are analogies in terms of the functions these answer positions fulfilled: “The Christian reception of antiquity and the modern taking over of explanatory functions of the Christian system have largely analogous structures as historical processes” (LMA, 69). Thus, if there is “an identity in the historical process” to be found, this identity “is not one of contents but one of functions” (LMA, 64). And if we take “answer positions” to encompass a rather large variety of “assertions, doctrines and dogmas, speculations and postulates”, “reoccupation”—taken as an open heuristic concept—may serve as a helpful explanatory approach to historical processes, designating a pattern of a functional relation between questions and their answer positions, regardless of their respective concrete contents.

The Background of Phenomenological Subjectivity Not only does Blumenberg claim that there are different concepts of reality attributable to different eras of intellectual history, he also believes that a reality-concept can only be made explicit under certain conditions. At Hans Blumenberg, “‘Säkularisation’: Kritik einer Kategorie historischer Illegitimität,” in Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt, ed. Helmut Kuhn (München: Pustet, 1964), 250. 21  Blumenberg, “‘Säkularisation’,” 249–50 (translation mine).

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first, an epoch’s reality-concept is an implicit feature operative in the background understanding of the epoch. It is only once the validity of this reality-concept has become precarious that it can be determined: “it is quite natural that the most deeply hidden implication of an era—namely, its concept of reality—should become explicit only when the awareness of that reality has already been broken.”22 This claim is not self-evident. First, Blumenberg is not clear about what he means by a “broken awareness of that reality”. A rather broad explanation might be that a reality-concept (in terms of its current content) no longer counts among the most pertinent ideas of an epoch, that it can serve less and less as a tool of orientation or world-explanation. This interpretation, however, relies on presupposing Blumenberg’s language of decay and wear and tear. Secondly, from this condition of a broken awareness of reality, it seems to follow that it is impossible for an era to determine its own particular way of reality-constitution, as long as this very constitution is still in operation. The subject as historically situated can only account for earlier concepts of reality, not current ones (and this, in turn, refers back to the above-mentioned hermeneutic task Blumenberg sees in identifying epochal turns throughout intellectual history). It is, however, not self-­ evident that this claim holds true for every era at every time, and especially for the modern era. Can we moderns not give an account of our conceptualization of reality?23 Must we assume that the two notions of reality Blumenberg associates with modernity, namely that of an open context and that of the experience of resistance, have already been surpassed—otherwise we would not have been able to make these two concepts explicit? Bound to our historical situation, can we not give an account of the dominant reality-concept of the present time? With respect to these questions, Dieter Henrich makes a very helpful remark in his discussion of Blumenberg’s contribution to the Poetik und Hermeneutik session with which this chapter began. Henrich points to the third concept of reality—the reality-concept of an open context—identifying it with the notion of reality that is at play in Husserlian  Blumenberg, “Possibility of the Novel,” 39.  When asked by Henrich whether we would have to assume a fifth concept of reality “of a totally different structure” which included “the notion of the subject”, Blumenberg determinately denies this option. However, throughout their discussion, it becomes clear that Henrich and Blumenberg presuppose different notions of the “subject”. See Hans R. Jauss, ed., Nachahmung und Illusion: Kolloquium Gießen Juni 1963. Vorlagen und Verhandlungen, 2nd ed., Poetik und Hermeneutik 1 (München: Fink, 1964), 225–26. 22 23

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phenomenology.24 Blumenberg agrees. He explains in more detail: “Perhaps I should have insisted on being more precise—it is the reality concept made explicit by phenomenology.”25 Thus, in contrast to past eras, Blumenberg assumes that modern philosophy, and specifically phenomenology, has in fact been able to give an account of the current constitution of reality.26 However, if reality-concepts are taken seriously as merely implicit features of an era, it is not clear how a phenomenological explication of these two concepts could have been possible. Since phenomenology is still practised and applied, it is likely that both the reality-concept of the open context and that of the experience of resistance have not yet been fully surpassed, but are rather still dominant. In other words, the assumptions of a gradual constitution of a reality-concept by consciousness—or, phenomenologically speaking: by transcendental subjectivity—and of reality as an experience of resistance are still plausible candidates for reality-concepts valid in our times. If this holds true, there is little evidence that—when it comes to modernity and its reality-concepts in contrast to past eras—the “awareness of that reality has already been broken”. What Blumenberg has in mind, I believe, is that an era can very well develop its characteristic gearing towards reality and yet need not make explicit that there is a conceptualization of reality underlying and accompanying this behaviour. At stake here is the distinction between essential features an era—both implicitly and explicitly—ascribes to reality (and, accordingly, the way the subject behaves towards reality) and the thematization, that is, the conceptualization, of reality. That is, making a reality-­ concept explicit draws on the distinction between an object (i.e. a certain behaviour towards reality) and reflection on that object. It is precisely a characteristic trait of the phenomenological method to adopt an abstract 24  Blumenberg, “Possibility of the Novel,” 32 n. 5. In fact, I think it is even possible to show that not only the third, but also the other three concepts of reality draw on a notion of consciousness that is strikingly influenced by phenomenological theory. See for example: Sonja Feger, “Hans Blumenbergs Wirklichkeitsbegriff aus phänomenologischer Perspektive.” Phänomenologische Forschungen 2020, no. 1 (in press). 25  Blumenberg, “Possibility of the Novel,” 32, n. 5 (translation and italicization modified). 26  As large parts of Blumenberg’s work are influenced by (Husserlian) phenomenology, I adopt the term “constitution” from Husserl’s phenomenological vocabulary. However, it is important to note that the process of constitution does not imply that reality (or any other noema) is created by phenomenological consciousness as, for example, constructivist epistemologies would assume.

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standpoint and yet retain at hand everything which is concrete and which fleshes out the transcendental subjectivity’s interest. Put in phenomenological vocabulary, transcendental consciousness both carries out and simultaneously reflects upon the process of (reality-) constitution. Thus, phenomenology, taken as an instantiation of modern philosophy, is able to identify both past conceptualizations of reality and the reality-­concept constituted according to its own methodology. It is important to note that Husserl himself had not thought of this simultaneity as a historical heuristic tool, but rather restricted it to the epistemological scrutiny of the structures of transcendental consciousness. In this sense, and—unlike Husserl himself—transferring this kind of simultaneity within the act of reflection to the historical dimension, Blumenberg thematizes modernity when introducing his four reality-concepts. Whereas phenomenology offers a rather ahistorical account of consciousness-constituting reality,27 Blumenberg’s approach consists in avoiding the positions of both a (speculative) philosophy of history and an ahistorical phenomenology.

Blumenberg’s Anthropology Accompanying Blumenberg’s emphasis on a pattern of questions and answers, there is an assumption I would label quasi-anthropological. This has to do with the focus on the “problems” and “questions” man is confronted with: these terms must be conceived of in an anthropological light, indicating a bundle of essentially human needs and concerns. As Wallace puts it, “the problem to be addressed has more the character of a need, or perhaps an obligation, than the articulate, conceptual character of an explicit question.”28 That is, the increasing dysfunctionality of answers in the course of changing reality-concepts is itself based on the presupposition of a human need for answers. This is what Wallace points to when he writes that it “is this quality of ‘need’ or ‘obligation’, this absence of derivation and formulation as a question—and the ‘translations’ that these qualities make possible between one epoch and the succeeding one—that lead Blumenberg to use the metaphor of a system of ‘positions’ that are 27  However, it is not the case that Husserl’s project of transcendental phenomenology remained entirely ahistorical. For example, in the Crisis as one of his later works, Husserl laid out a teleological account of history: see Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 28  Wallace, “Translator’s Introduction” to LMA, xxv.

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‘occupied’ (and ‘reoccupied’) by ideas”.29 This anthropological view is endorsed by Blumenberg himself when he describes modern consciousness. He writes, “Modern man is a being that is overwhelmed; his concept of reality is structured for avoidance of anything unexpected, for stemming, for consistency in the case of inconsistency.”30 The reality-concept of resistance thus comes closest to Blumenberg’s anthropological assumption of (modern) human consciousness being engaged in “self-assertion”. Describing the motif of “self-assertion” as an “existential program, according to which man posits his existence in a historical situation and indicates to himself how he is going to deal with the reality surrounding him and what use he will make of the possibilities that are open to him” (LMA, 138), Blumenberg identifies a specifically modern way for man to confront reality. Thus, in both cases, the modern subject finds itself confronted with reality as something “non-compliant”, and “as that which cannot be mastered by the self, i.e., which resists it”.31 This is why the modern subject is motivated to secure its existence, that is, to assert it. Blumenberg diagnoses the modern era in terms of the subject’s “suspicion” of what has not (yet) been intellectually secured for himself: “An index of the beginning of the modern age is the fact that the suspicion of an obscure field of possibilities, a preponderance of terra incognita round about the known, arises and determines the directions of thrust and needs” (LMA, 557). This suspicion can be identified with one of Blumenberg’s anthropological commitments to the modern individual as an overwhelmed and overtaxed being essentially engaging in “self-assertion”. The need and necessity for man to manage and master reality determines both man’s behaviour and his intellectual performances. In other words, according to Blumenberg, man undertakes these actions to minimize his experience of powerlessness and to avert threats of any kind. With regard to modernity, reality itself is to be counted among such threats. In different contexts, Blumenberg calls this the “absolutism of reality”.32 29  Wallace, “Translator’s Introduction” to LMA, xxvi. However, considering Blumenberg’s elaborate concept of metaphors, the “system of ‘positions’” in question here is not adequately captured by the term “metaphor” Wallace uses. See Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010). 30  Blumenberg, “Vorbemerkungen,” 9 (translation mine). 31  Blumenberg, “Possibility of the Novel,” 34; italicization modified. 32  By “absolutism of reality” Blumenberg means that “the world adopts something like an ‘obstinacy’ according to which the self’s expectations are dismissed in order to forcefully provoke the subject’s recognition of its experiences as ‘something real’. Reality’s absolutism

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This is how Blumenberg can claim, “Man’s impotence consists essentially in his reckoning with, and seeking to behave appropriately toward, only those realities that he knows of or thinks he knows of” (LMA, 557). The thematization of reality also consists in confronting those—both actual and potential—realities most likely to be handled by modern man. It follows that in modernity, not only does man seek to respond to reality in an appropriate way (for this is the case for past eras too), but also modern man’s appropriate behaviour towards reality consists precisely in conceptualizing it, in taking a reflective distance to it and in distinguishing different forms of how reality can be conceived. In other words, it is precisely the activity of reflecting on man’s engagement with reality, on his (both intellectual and practical) strategies to manage and master a purportedly absolute and superior reality that constitutes modern reality-­ concepts. This activity of making his behaviour towards reality explicit—and by drawing from phenomenology in particular—occurred only in modernity. This is implied when Blumenberg reflects: “But I doubt whether this description of the constitution of reality could have been possible at any time.”33 This, in turn, explains the role played by phenomenology, as one of the currents of modern philosophy as a whole, when considered against the background of past eras in intellectual history. There is no historical teleology implied when it is claimed that it is phenomenology which is able to give a valid account of modernity.34 Rather, Blumenberg seems very aware of the contingency of his own historical situation. That is, it was not does not only come into existence forcing the subject’s subjugation, yet it launches its history as soon as it becomes conscious, i.e., as it enters ‘life’ from ‘lifeworld’s’ edge”, Hans Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 67 (translation mine). For further details concerning the opposition of lifeworld and the absolutism of reality, see, for example, Barbara Merker, “Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit: Zwischen Lebenswelt und Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit,” in Die Kunst des Überlebens: Nachdenken über Hans Blumenberg, ed. Franz J. Wetz and Hermann Timm (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999). 33  Blumenberg, “Possibility of the Novel,” 32, n. 5. 34  Similarly, in his review of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Richard Rorty praises Blumenberg for “not fall[ing] back into the totalising metaphysics which backed up Hegel’s story. He gives us good old-fashioned Geistesgeschichte, but without the teleology and purported inevitability characteristic of the genre”, Richard Rorty, “Against Belatedness: Review of Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” London Review of Books 5, no. 11 (1983), accessed October 11, 2019, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v05/n11/richard-rorty/ against-belatedness

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necessary that he, as an author in modernity, came to dispose of the tools needed to “determine what such a phenomenological thematization presupposes” and say “since when it could have been written and understood”.35

Historical Substantialism and the Reoccupation Pattern However, as promising as “reoccupation” might be in its application to the four concepts of reality, it certainly does not eliminate many theoretical problems. For example, when it comes to the description of change in history, the critical question whether there is an underlying principle motivating this process still remains. In other words, the question of a “historical substantialism” lies unanswered. In a letter to Jacob Taubes, Blumenberg lays out what he thinks a philosophical assessment of intellectual history has to accomplish and what restrictions he believes historical scrutiny should be subjected to: Obviously I despise any philosophy of history if it pretends to possess any or much knowledge of [historical] “events”; philosophy of history, however, is equally apt to join in the very modest question of other disciplines, namely what kind of questions promise an increased understanding at all with respect to historical process and how we should proceed to get them answered one day.36

Moreover, these comments are in line with Wallace’s remarks that Blumenberg was sceptical of the pre-eminence accorded to modern theories of history: Blumenberg’s explanation for the predominance, among modern philosophies of history, of over-ambitious theories of progress as the pattern of history as a whole, is that modern thought in general was unable to neutralize critically questions (like that of the meaning and pattern of history as a whole) that it inherited from Christianity, as easily as it had discredited the Christian answers. (And in fact Blumenberg points out that Christianity  Blumenberg, “Possibility of the Novel,” 32, n. 5.  Hans Blumenberg and Jacob Taubes, Briefwechsel 1961–1981, ed. Herbert KoppOberstebrink (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 256 (translation mine). 35 36

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itself had an exactly similar problem in relation to the ancient world, and with similar results.)37

Thus, the modern thematization of reality-concepts, both in their historical sequence and in their modern manifestations, is a matter of historical conditions—conditions that include there being predecessors from past eras. One can thus agree with Wallace that it is Blumenberg’s project “to demonstrate that modernity”—and with it the explication of a historical sequence of reality-concepts—“is not an arbitrary commitment”.38 Again Wallace: “In other words, our modern commitments are highly determined by our history.”39 In the functional pattern introduced above, it is easy to disqualify both questions or problems and their respective answer positions as candidates for a historical substance: neither the questions nor their respective answer positions are suited to play this role: “The term ‘substance’ was to be avoided in this context because every type of historical substantialism […] relates, precisely, to the contents, which are shown in the process of ‘reoccupation’ to be incapable of this very permanence” (LMA, 466). How then, can we ask, is it still possible to talk about “identical questions”, about reoccupation as a “historical pattern” without already having fallen prey to substantialism? That is, although there must be something persisting in the functional pattern of questions and answers (otherwise, it would not be a pattern), it seems that there is no substantialism to be expected “behind” the process of reoccupation. Yet, the “concept of ‘reoccupation’ designates, by implication, the minimum of 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” (LMA, 466). That is, in the conception of reoccupation, something persistent must be assumed—something securing some sort of continuity within this pattern: Even the change of epochs, as the sharpest caesura of all, has a function of identity maintenance, in that the alteration that it must allow is only the correlate of the constancy of the requirements that it has to satisfy. Thus after the great conception of each epochal project, the historical process produces its “reoccupations” as restorations of its continuity. (LMA, 464) 37   Wallace, “Progress, Secularization and Modernity: Debate,” 74–5. 38  Wallace, “Translator’s Introduction” to LMA, xxix. 39  Ibid., xxix.

The

Löwith-Blumenberg

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The idea of a reoccupation itself is evidently not to be confused with any kind of historical substance. Rather, the idea of reoccupation is “meant to explain phenomena of tenacious obstinacy, not to mitigate or to legitimate them” (LMA, 60). What Blumenberg’s idea of reoccupation within the historical process can be reckoned to have achieved is, as I suggested above, an open heuristic concept allowing to mediate between phenomena of change and those of persistence throughout history. As Jürgen Goldstein put it, the reoccupation pattern is used to “designate the process of a functional equivalence of differing solutions which is meant to encompass both the continuity and the dynamics of intellectual history”.40 Blumenberg thus (specifically in his discussion of the phenomenon of secularization) seeks a way to avoid any “historical substantialism of identical ‘ideas’”.41 He writes, “‘experience’ of history” has to “satisfy the transcendental principle according to which the alteration of appearances refers us to something persistent, which, to be sure, in the case of historical consideration only needs to be something relatively longer lasting” (LMA, 469). What is thus preserved throughout historical change is the “reference-frame conditions” (Rahmenbedingungen) which Blumenberg assumes to have “greater inertia for consciousness than do the contents associated with them, that is, that the questions are relatively constant in comparison to the answers” (LMA, 466). It is in this way that the quest for a historical substance is itself modified, insofar as it is not an absolute substance that is presupposed here. Rather, Blumenberg relativizes the notion of substance itself typically understood precisely as non-relative. He writes: “it is sufficient for that which assigns the functional framework to the reoccupations to have a durability that is very great in relation to both our capacity to perceive historical events and the rate of change involved in them” (LMA, 466).

40  Jürgen Goldstein, Nominalismus und Moderne: Zur Konstitution neuzeitlicher Subjektivität bei Hans Blumenberg und Wilhelm von Ockham (Freiburg: Alber, 1998), 76 (translation mine). 41  Daniel Weidner, “Säkularisierung,” in Buch and Weidner (eds), Blumenberg lesen, 251 (translation mine).

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Conclusion Although, at first glance, Blumenberg’s sketch of a fourfold concept of reality seems oversimplistic, it turns out that several philosophical dimensions are woven into it. First, the approach of the fourfould reality-concept it is obviously historical. Secondly, Blumenberg makes use of the simultaneity within the act of reflection, which the phenomenological method furnishes when it comes to both carrying out and reflecting upon this very process of (in phenomenological terms) “constituting” an entity. Thirdly, especially with regard to the fourth concept of reality, philosophical anthropology enters onto the stage, since this reality-concept relies on a presupposition that man has existential needs to which he must respond. Furthermore, if a reality-concept is an implicit feature of a particular epoch, philosophy is given the “hermeneutical task” of grasping the process of epochal changes throughout intellectual history. What Blumenberg has to offer here is an account to grasp historical change. It is his notion of reoccupation which serves as an operative concept to hermeneutically identify epochal thresholds. Rather than pointing out a historical substance, Blumenberg uses “reoccupation” as a functional pattern of questions and answer positions, serving as an open heuristic concept by means of which epochal changes can be approached. Ultimately, Blumenberg’s connecting of phenomenology to both anthropology and historical scrutiny proves fruitful for such a purpose. From the standpoint of modernity, from within which Blumenberg presents his observations, the act of conceptualizing reality is part of modern man’s attempt to deal with it. We can follow Weidner in his judgement that Blumenberg’s “depiction establishes a connection of genesis and validity and seeks to describe the interplay of continuity and rupture by […] conceiving of history essentially as the warding off of ‘impertinences’”.42 In short, according to Blumenberg’s account of (modern) man essentially engaging in detecting and averting threats, Blumenberg’s historical account “defend[s] the possibility of man making history more bearable for himself”.43

42  Daniel Weidner, “Säkularisierung,” in Buch and Weidner (eds), Blumenberg lesen, 251 (translation mine). 43  Wallace, “Progress, Secularization and Modernity,” 79. For their helpful comments, I want to thank Ryan Froese, Christian Hauck, and Tobias Keiling.

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Bibliography Blumenberg, Hans. “‘Säkularisation’: Kritik einer Kategorie historischer Illegitimität.” In Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt, edited by Helmut Kuhn. Munich: Pustet, 1964. 240–65. Blumenberg, Hans. “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans.” In Nachahmung und Illusion: Kolloquium Gießen Juni 1963. Vorlagen und Verhandlungen, vol. 1. Edited by Hans R. Jauss. Munich: Fink, 1964. 9–27. Blumenberg, Hans. “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Staatstheorie.” Schweizer Monatshefte 48.2 (1968): 121–46. Blumenberg, Hans. “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos.” In Terror und Spiel: Probleme der Mythenrezeption, vol. 4. Edited by Manfred Fuhrmann. Munich: Fink, 1971. 11–66. Blumenberg, Hans. “Vorbemerkungen zum Wirklichkeitsbegriff.” Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz. Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, 4 (1974): 3–10. Blumenberg, Hans. “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel.” In New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, edited by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange. Princeton University Press, 1979. 29–48. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [LMA]. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1983. Blumenberg, Hans. Lebenszeit und Weltzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Blumenberg, Hans. Die Legitimität der Neuzeit: Erneuerte Ausgabe [LN]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996. Blumenberg, Hans. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Blumenberg, Hans. Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2015. Blumenberg, Hans, and Jacob Taubes. Briefwechsel 1961–1981. Edited by Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013. Buch, Robert, and Daniel Weidner (eds). Blumenberg lesen: Ein Glossar. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. Feger, Sonja. “Hans Blumenbergs Wirklichkeitsbegriff aus phänomenologischer Perspektive.” Phänomenologische Forschungen 2020, no. 1 (in press). Goldstein, Jürgen. Nominalismus und Moderne: Zur Konstitution neuzeitlicher Subjektivität bei Hans Blumenberg und Wilhelm von Ockham. Freiburg: Alber, 1998. Husserl, Edmund, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Jauss, Hans Robert (ed.). Nachahmung und Illusion: Kolloquium Gießen Juni 1963. Vorlagen und Verhandlungen. Munich: Fink, 1964.

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Kopp-Oberstebrink, Herbert. “Umbesetzung.” In Buch and Weidner (eds), Blumenberg lesen: Ein Glossar. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. 350–62. Merker, Barbara. “Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit: Zwischen Lebenswelt und Absolutismus Der Wirklichkeit.” In Die Kunst des Überlebens: Nachdenken über Hans Blumenberg, edited by Franz J. Wetz and Hermann Timm. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999. 68–98. Rorty, Richard. “Against Belatedness: Review of Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.” London Review of Books 5.11 (1983): 3–5. Accessed October 11, 2019. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v05/n11/richard-rorty/ against-belatedness. Wallace, Robert M. “Progress, Secularization and Modernity: The Löwith-­ Blumenberg Debate.” New German Critique 22 (1981). Wallace, Robert M. “Translator’s Introduction.” To The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1983. xi–xxxi. Weidner, Daniel. “Säkularisierung.” In Buch and Weidner (eds), Blumenberg lesen: Ein Glossar. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. 245–60.

CHAPTER 12

Modernizing Blumenberg Daniel Whistler

The following chapter is, at bottom, an interrogation of Blumenberg’s schema for “understand[ing] the historical processes and structures” of modernity (LMA, 11). I argue that—occupying a vantage point external to, and consequently estranged from, this epoch—he generally gets modernity wrong. Ultimately, this is a problem of historiographical categories, particularly those categories which are complicit in the opposition he establishes between models of reoccupation (Umbesetzung) and transformation (Umsetzung) for historical change.

Blumenberg’s Half-Hearted Defence of the New, or the Post-post-modern Position According to the moderns themselves, modernity—die Neuzeit—is to be defined precisely in terms of its novelty, its “radical break with its past” (LMA, 472). It draws a line under what has come before so as to start again from scratch by recourse to reason configured as a “faculty of an absolute beginning” (LMA, 145). Modernity understands its own origins D. Whistler (*) Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_12

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as “a self-foundation that emerges from nothing” (LMA, 97): the Neuzeit is new precisely as a case of “spontaneous generation” (LMA, 467). According to the Blumenberg of Legitimacy, every typical defence of “what is new, or claims to be new, in history” would usually “assert and defend the legitimacy of its ownership of ideas” against those who “defend the existing state of affairs” (LMA, 70). However, the newness of the Neuzeit is so excessive—so hyperbolically novel—that it entails a refusal to engage in this task. This epoch is unique in not providing a conventional defence of the new; it refuses to play the game of legitimization, insisting instead that the event of its coming-into-being is such as to render legitimization redundant. In Blumenberg’s words, “Reason, as the ultimate authority, has no need of a legitimation for setting itself in motion” (LMA, 145): modern reason situates itself above the fray, concerned neither with its own legitimacy nor with its illegitimacy. Modernity is, on its own telling, a-legitimate. According to Legitimacy, three consequences follow from this claim to a-legitimacy: 1. In an ironic twist, it ends up exacerbating the very debate about legitimacy it was intended to shut down. That is, modernity’s a-legitimacy is perceived by those who “defend the existing state of affairs” as an admission of guilt: a lack becomes a fault. To put it another way, the claim to a-legitimacy actually generates endless talk of delegitimization and relegitimization. In Blumenberg’s own words, modernity’s “self-interpretation directly provokes the countermove of a massive historicism … [And this] historicization of the beginning of the modern age is transformed into a gesture of reproach” (LMA, 146). The “modern event” is retrospectively inserted back into the course of history, “re-establishing its genetic reference” (LMA, 72). 2. This historicization of the new constitutes for Blumenberg the tragic end to the modern project: “There is an element of tragedy in the way in which [modernity] … finally ends with the more or less explicit insinuation that [its historical] inheritance came about in a dishonest way” (LMA, 65). The insinuation that the Neuzeit is not so new—that its claim to newness is a piece of ideological falsification—marks the end of modernity and the beginning of a counter-­ modern reaction that Blumenberg associates with the scholarship of the generation that preceded him: Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Carl

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Schmitt and Erich Voegelin, among others. Their work signals the end of the modern age. And this is because they squarely refuse to endorse any notion of absolute beginnings, of self-grounding rationality or of historical discontinuity. Blumenberg’s project in Legitimacy thus positions itself at the end of a dialectic of delegitimization and relegitimization: it comes after the end of modernity and attempts to recover the modern impulse in a mediated, belated and heavily qualified manner. Legitimacy is a post-post-modern text: it looks back at the modern from a distant vantage point that is twice removed—twice alienated—from the modern age itself. . In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg thus speaks for 3 modernity, not from modernity. He speaks on modernity’s behalf (as the post-post-modern representative for modernity), so as to provide it with a defence which it could never have countenanced itself. Blumenberg disregards the modern claim to a-legitimacy; he presumes to offer the missing legitimating discourse that he thinks is lacking—or, more precisely, that has now become necessary in the face of counter-modern attacks.1 Legitimacy therefore contains no immanent story of modernity’s self-development; rather, it imposes a foreign conceptual framework of legitimacy from outside. It provides a framework intended to compensate for modernity’s most telling blind spot.2 At this point, a question arises that will form the guiding thread for this chapter: to what extent does supplementing modernity’s self-­understanding in this way also falsify it? In one respect at least, Blumenberg blatantly and intentionally gets modernity wrong, since he provides it with a discourse of legitimization that it had resolutely refused to give itself. To write a “legitimacy of the modern age” is to already be unmodern, to take up a 1  Thus, Legitimacy asks “questions that cannot be asked in the context of the system constituted by [modernity’s] basic concepts” (LMA, 145). 2  To put it another way: like so many other post-war German thinkers, Blumenberg implicitly propounds the idea that modernity was enlightened about many things, except itself. And what his own post-post-modern project is meant to supply is “enlightenment about modernity” to supplement “modern enlightenment”. Indeed, it is hard not to discern a slight tone of condescension in Blumenberg’s narrative of modernity, particularly when it comes to its claims to radical novelty: the Cartesian insistence on a radical break with the Middle Ages is frequently treated as mere adolescent posturing to be rethought from the wisdom of post-post-modernity.

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perspective alien from modernity and to undertake a project that no modern should countenance. That is, Blumenberg is one of those who tell the “history of [modernity’s] desire not to be history” (LMA, 146)—in this respect, he is on the side of Löwith, Voegelin and the others: he too ultimately refuses to admit absolute beginnings; he too refuses to talk about modernity in a modern voice. What is at stake here is the extent to which this matters: can an accurate history of modernity still be told from without? Is it possible to properly describe modernity without the category of the radically new? And conversely: what would it look like to write Blumenberg’s book in a way that took modernity at its word? What would it look like to write an “a-­legitimacy of the modern age”?

A Critique of Historiographical Reason (a) The Legitimacy of the Somewhat New Blumenberg’s Legitimacy fights on (at least) two fronts: on one front, it battles the counter-modern delegitimization of the modern, that is, the secularization thesis, and, on the other front, it attacks modernity’s understanding of itself as spontaneously generated. In this section, I want to consider the first of these battles in order to determine more precisely the kind of novelty Blumenberg does grant the Neuzeit. The counter-modern secularization thesis propounded, fairly uniformly (according to Blumenberg), by Jonas, Löwith, Schmitt, Voegelin and others is premised on historical continuity between epochs: something substantial is carried over into modernity that definitively shows that the Neuzeit is not new. For the counter-moderns, the Cartesian image of a radical break with the past is an ideological deception—“epochal self-­ interest” (LMA, 25)—that masks illicit inheritance. As a consequence, according to Blumenberg, what all such secularization narratives have in common is an underlying substantialism, that is, they all share “the unquestioned presupposition of substantial contents that can appear now on one side of the hiatus and now on the other” (LMA, 120). Blumenberg continues elsewhere, “Only where the category of substances dominates the understanding of history are there repetitions, superimpositions and dissociations—and also, for that matter, disguises and unmaskings” (LMA, 9; my emphasis)—that is, the rhetoric of secularization necessitates a substantialist ontology.

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Notably, it is at this point that Blumenberg calls attention to the language of Umsetzung at play in counter-modern secularization theories. As Kopp-Oberstebrink helpfully glosses, Blumenberg makes use of “the conceptual figure of metamorphosis”—along with “a rich arsenal of such concepts: transformation, transposition, repetition, translation, adaption, transformation, to name only a few”—in order to diagnose the counter-­ modern model of history “as mere variation”3—that is, a model of history that makes no room for anything new or original. All novelty is reducible to “mutation” (LMA, 5). And such transformations are epiphenomena; what matters is the trans-historical persistence of the one identical substance. Legitimacy is famously grounded on a decision in favour of Umbesetzung over Umsetzung, in favour of a “functional model of history” (LMA, 59) over “any substantialistic conception of historical identity” (LMA, 29).4 And Blumenberg’s critique of substantialism rests precisely on its refusal of novelty: substantialism “brings the theoretical process to a halt”, and such a “standstill”—or “theoretical resignation”—is an expression of its presupposition that there is nothing new to be known; thinking has no further discoveries to make or truths to uncover (LMA, 113–4). For this reason, Blumenberg replaces such a permanent substance underlying historical change with a series of enduring conceptual forms that are filled or reoccupied over time by very different ideas. That is, Blumenberg’s functional model makes possible the affirmation that modernity was new in terms of content, but not in terms of the ends for which such content was employed. For example, pre-modern Christian eschatology was motivated by questions or needs that carry over to be answered anew in modernity “by heterogeneous material” (LMA, 46). Blumenberg states, “The continuity of history across the epochal threshold lies not in the permanence of ideal substances but rather in the inheritance of problems” (LMA, 48)— that is, the advent of modernity did, he insists with the moderns, bring about “a new quality of consciousness” (LMA, 139), but, he insists with the counter-moderns, such novelty occurs strictly within the framework of 3  Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, “Umbesetzung,” in Robert Buch and Daniel Weidner (eds), Blumenberg Lesen: Ein Glossar (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), 356. 4   On the origins and significance of this function-model, see Kopp-Oberstebrink, “Umbestzung”, 353–4, and Jean Greisch, “Umbesetzung versus Umsetzung. Les ambiguïtés du théorème de la sécularisation d’après Hans Blumenberg,” in Archives de Philosophie 67 (2004), 289.

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old questions and inherited problems. The modern age is new, but not that new; it is a partially clean slate, but not an absolute beginning. Blumenberg’s functional model thus operates according to a binary schema: on the one hand, there are the “positions”, “questions” or “forms” which are relatively stable and persistent over epochs; and, on the other hand, there are the “contents” or “answers” which are generated anew either side of every epochal threshold. With respect to this model, it is important to stress that the formal elements do still alter across history (e.g. thinking in the late Middle Ages “expanded to include new problems” [LMA, 48])—and so Blumenberg does not merely transpose the substantialist ontology from the domain of content to that of form. Nevertheless, he does still talk of the trans-historical “identity” of such formal positions (historical “identity … is not one of contents but one of functions” [LMA, 64])—that is, the relative constancy of forms constitutes a background constraint to historical change. (b) The Illegitimacy of the Radically New This limitation on the novelty of the Neuzeit is made most explicit in the opening to Part Four of Legitimacy. Here Blumenberg finally provides an argument—indeed, a species of transcendental argument—for his functional ontology of history: he translates Kant’s first “Analogy of Experience” into a historiographical context.5 Just as Kant argues that a condition of possibility of any and all experience is the persistence of a substrate in time, so too Blumenberg argues that a condition of possibility of any knowledge of history is some kind of trans-historical identity. He writes, The problem of epochs must be approached from the perspective of the question of the 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 … That which is new in history cannot be arbitrary in each case, but rather is subject to a rigor of expectations and needs, is the condition of our being able to have such a thing as “cognition” of history at all. The concept of “reoccupation” designates, by implication, the minimum of identity that it must be possible to discover, or at least to presuppose and to 5  He writes, “I think there is a connection here with Kant’s first ‘analogy of experience’ against which no experience, the experience of history included, can be adduced as an argument” (LMA, 89).

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search for, in even the most agitated movement of history … “Reoccupation” means that different statements can be understood as answers to identical questions. (LMA, 466)

Blumenberg thus makes use of Kant’s argument only on the condition of transforming it: a strict repetition of the First Analogy would have resulted in the reappearance of substantialism, whose spectre he believes he has already vanquished. Therefore, Kant’s Analogy is refigured under the guise of “a minimal identity”, one that is more minimal than Kant himself envisaged. In turn, the counter-moderns are implicitly found guilty of a “paralogism of historiographical reason”: the illegitimate substantialization of identity as permanent trans-historical content. Instead of a permanent substance, the “minimum of identity” Blumenberg here establishes as a “transcendental principle” of cognizing history is a constant frame of reference, such as questions which “are relatively constant in comparison to the answers”—that is, he continues, they “have greater inertia for consciousness than do the contents associated with them” (LMA, 469). In other words, the experience of any epochal change must “refer us to something persistent, which, to be sure, in the case of historical consideration only needs to be something relatively longer lasting” (LMA, 469). He articulates this elsewhere as “the overlapping of formal identity and material discontinuity in the epoch-making changes in our history” (LMA, 72): whenever the content of history changes, the forms stay the same. Forms may themselves be changing slowly, but their inertia is sufficient for them to remain a stable reference point by which to make sense of any novelty in history. It is this “transcendental principle” of the inertia of forms that leads Blumenberg to deny most explicitly the possibility of absolute beginnings in history. A radical break from the past—a moment of utter discontinuity—cannot be taken seriously on this argument (it cannot even be experienced) and so must be reinterpreted into a weaker, qualified form with the benefit of hindsight. Blumenberg is clear: “The program of the modern age cannot be assumed as a contingent ‘spontaneous generation’” (LMA, 467): the Neuzeit cannot be so new that the “transcendental principle” of formal inertia is contravened; its newness must only be understood within the framework of the old. In short, Blumenberg’s transcendental argument for his functional ontology is precisely meant to demonstrate that modernity is wrong about

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itself, that complete breaks, discontinuities and new beginnings are impossible: “the reality of history” is such that epochs “can never begin entirely anew” (LMA, 116; my emphasis).

Two Small, If Telling Worries Such then is Blumenberg’s attempt to contain the newness of modernity within the limits of a “minimum of identity”: the Neuzeit is both new and old—new in terms of content, but old in terms of form. He half-heartedly recovers the modern event both in opposition to counter-modern secularization theorists and in opposition to the moderns themselves. To begin to reflect on the above, I want to make two fairly banal but, I think, ultimately telling observations about Blumenberg’s historiographical model. (a) The Persistence of the Hylomorphic Schema Between the Middle Ages and modernity many things stay the same for Blumenberg: there is “a constant matrix of needs” (LMA, 463), i.e., the interests and rational desires that motivate the questions which subjects continue to ask; there are also the long-standing “vacant answer positions” themselves—what Blumenberg calls the “empty frame waiting to be filled” (LMA, 68). And these constants “create the appearance of a substantial identity” (LMA, 60) owing to their “excessive longevity” (LMA, 65) (even if they do slowly alter across the centuries). However, there is additionally one other element that remains relatively constant— and that is Blumenberg’s very historiographical schema of reoccupation itself. That is, whatever epoch of human history one describes, it is seemingly appropriate to speak of questions and answers, forms and contents, empty positions and reoccupations. Like Kant, Blumenberg considers his transcendental apparatus to be immutable, to exist outside of the frame of historical change and epochal transformation. What Blumenberg describes as “the way the formal system of positions is filled” (LMA, 68) might alter considerably between epochs, but that there is something that can be described as a “formal system of positions” and that there is some content (whatever it may be) to fill it—these meta-historiographical features persist. The model of Umbesetzung is itself epoch-indifferent. Another way of articulating this point is in terms of the similarities and differences that hold between the three models for understanding (or failing to understand) history at stake in Legitimacy—that is,

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(i) the counter-modern model of substantialism, in which historical change is understood as merely a transformation of one and the same material into different epiphenomenal forms; (ii) the modern model of discontinuities and breaks, in which historical change is understood as a radical transformation between both materials and forms; and (iii) Blumenberg’s own functional model, in which historical change is understood as a reoccupation of enduring forms by different material. There is much that is different in these various models of Umsetzung and Umbesetzung, but what is evidently the same throughout is the understanding of history in terms of the matter-form binary. Blumenberg might contest substantialism, but he does not contest hylomorphism. And so, the presupposition that history is to be described by way of a hylomorphic schema is an ahistorical constant in Legitimacy. And this matters because Blumenberg is happy to describe the modern suspicion of many species of hylomorphism (e.g. its critique of the “shadowy factor of form” [LMA, 210]) within the narrative of Legitimacy itself. As we shall see, he draws attention to the ways in which modern philosophers from Bruno onwards dismantled the hylomorphic legacy of Aristotelianism. And yet, he does not take seriously the idea that this critique might have historiographical implications, that it might put into question his own legitimization of the modern age in hylomorphic categories. Here, we return once more to the question of the alien categorical framework Blumenberg imposes on modernity. (b) Which Modernity? As soon as talk turns to the accuracy of Blumenberg’s narrative, there arises, moreover, the question of the very possibility of talking about one coherent “modernity” at all. Evidently, some modern thinkers did ascribe to a hylomorphic framework and some did not. To articulate this anxiety more generally: which modernities does Blumenberg legitimize, and which does he—intentionally or not—refuse to give legitimacy to? The idea that the modern age is less unitary and cohesive than Blumenberg describes is an objection of the tritest kind—and yet, still, there are ways that this line of thinking does impact significantly on his project. For example, Tracie Matysik has noted that Blumenberg is more open to different variants of modernity elsewhere; in particular, she points to

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“Self-Preservation and Inertia” (published two years after the first edition of Legitimacy),6 for it seemingly eschews Legitimacy’s Cartesian discourse of “self-assertion” for a Spinozist discourse of “self-preservation”. As such, she continues, it “stands in a provocative and supplementary relationship to Legitimacy”: “it opens up a non-anthropocentric category of rationality right next to the very anthropocentric category of self-­ assertion”—and thereby “troubles” any identification of modernity with “the liberal, autonomous subject that his focus on self-assertion might seem to imply”.7 In short, Matysik’s uncovering of “multiple and competing tendencies in modern rationality” within Blumenberg’s work puts into question the very narrative of Legitimacy and its “emancipatory” account of the emergence of a “secular and rational subject”.8 Analogously, I want to suggest in what follows that the possibility of alternative modernities also “troubles” Blumenberg’s static, historiographical model; in particular, his model ends up excluding alternative visions of history as transformative. Take, for example, his claim early on in Legitimacy that “evidence of transformation, metamorphosis” always occurs “along with the identity of a substance that endures throughout the process”, and so, “without such a substantial identity, no recoverable sense could be attached to the talk of… transformation” (LMA, 16). Such a position—that transformation necessarily presupposes substantialism— seems odd when confronted with morphogenetic tendencies in the modern age, whether in Bruno, Diderot or Goethe. Indeed, in their struggle to rethink Aristotelian hylomorphism, modern philosophers were intent on disputing precisely the idea that substantial identity is a condition of the possibility of metamorphosis. Again, we return to the central question of the chapter: does Blumenberg’s alien categorical framework falsify, in important ways, the intellectual achievements of the very epoch he is trying to accurately describe? Is Blumenberg’s Legitimacy too unmodern to do justice to its subject matter?

6  English edition: Hans Blumenberg, “Self-Preservation and Inertia: On the Constitution of Modern Rationality” in Contemporary German Philosophy 3 (1983), 209–56. 7  Tracie Matysik, “Hans Blumenberg’s Multiple Modernities: A Spinozist Supplement to Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” in The Germanic Review 90.1 (2015), 24. 8  Ibid., 24, 30.

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Metamorphosis Without Substantialism (a) Blumenberg as Right Aristotelian One way to elaborate on Matysik’s argument is to note that the intellectual heroes of modernity that populate Blumenberg’s Legitimacy are (for the most part and especially in Part Three) drawn from the moderate Enlightenment tradition: Descartes, Voltaire, Kant and so on. Blumenberg’s canon of modern philosophy is a fairly conservative one (the major exception is Bruno, to whom I will return below). What Jonathan Israel notoriously labels the “radical Enlightenment” or Matysik “the Spinozist modernity of self-preservation” is predominantly missing from the narrative, and this means that some of the conceptual innovations that are most central to this tradition are also taken less seriously in Blumenberg’s account of the Neuzeit. Take, by contrast, Ernst Bloch’s narrative of the left-Aristotelian tradition. On Bloch’s story, a tendency towards dismantling Aristotelian hylomorphism enters modernity by way of Averroes and Avicenna—in Bloch’s own words, “there is a line that leads from Aristotle, not to Thomas Aquinas and to the spirit of the beyond, but to Giordano Bruno and the blossoming nature of universal matter.”9 This generative materialism aims to reshape the form-matter relation, such that forms are no longer stable, transcendent entities that matter subsequently fills (as in right Aristotelianism), but, rather, “the primacy of form disappears completely” and matter is reconceived as “the mother of all forms”.10 Such left Aristoteliansim—what Bloch calls a “glowing naturalism”—thus rejects the Scholastic concept of the formae separatae, the constitution of form as some “fixed transcendent thing”, in order to, on the contrary, convert forms into transitory effects of matter.11 At the epochal threshold of modernity stands the imperative: “The concept of a separate form must dissolve.”12 Henceforth, matter is always producing new forms, always taking on new shapes, always determining itself in different ways: “matter becomes something eternally in flux and alive”, constituted out “of

9  Ernst Bloch, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, trans. Loren Goldman and Peter Thompson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 3. 10  Ibid., 31–2. 11  Ibid., 27. 12  Ibid., 22.

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ferment and pregnancy, of self-creation”.13 Hence, for Bloch, there is a strand of modernity that arises in “the burning aftermath of [this] new matter-­form relationship”.14 Whatever else its value, Bloch’s category of left Aristotelianism has a twofold implication for any critical reading of Blumenberg’s Legitimacy. On the one hand, it can be read as a competing narrative of early-modern thinking which compels an interrogation of Blumenberg’s own account of the epochal threshold. I will return to this point. On the other hand and even more significant is the way Bloch’s narrative impacts on Blumenberg’s historiographical method. For, as I have been attempting to argue, Legitimacy understands change on the model of relatively permanent forms continuously filled up by matter. In other words, Blumenberg reads history as a right Aristotelian: he replicates a doctrine of the primacy of separate forms when narrating the emergence of the modern age. The formal elements of historical structure—systems of positions, questions, anthropological needs—stand over and above the various materials that come to occupy such forms. Or, put differently: content rarely acts on, modifies or creates forms on Blumenberg’s account; instead, forms sit in splendid isolation from the contents that successively occupy them. This species of hylomorphism more resembles, on Bloch’s account, Medieval Thomism than it does the modern “glowing naturalism” of the left-­ Aristotelian tradition. According to Legitimacy, historical form is more inert than historical matter; it functions as a limit to the kinds of change possible between epochs. That is, it restricts the emergence of the radically new and constrains the possibility of what events occur when. More precisely put, the modern affirmation of a radical break with the past fails to acknowledge the constraint of form—for Blumenberg, the modern age is built on a misrecognition of the insuperable limits of historical change, of the fact that some things cannot be transformed into the new. For the Blumenberg of Legitimacy, the inertia of forms operates as an unworkable limit. The question of transformation reappears at this moment. Blumenberg understands transformative metamorphosis on the model of Umsetzung, that is, an alteration of one underlying substance. Transformation is always, on Blumenberg’s reading of post-modern historical substantialism, epiphenomenal, always masking underlying continuities. But there is  Ibid., 20–1.  Ibid., 29.

13 14

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more to transformation than this: Bloch’s left-Aristotelian modernity is also grounded in an ideal of metamorphosis; indeed, Bloch speaks explicitly of the left-Aristotelian substitution of “metamorphosis” for rigid forms, of its recasting of matter as “pregnant with forms, perpetually transforming itself”, as “full of movement, full of form”.15 And yet, this is evidently a very different kind of transformation: it is no longer metamorphosis on the model of Umsetzung (transposition, translation), but on the model of Verwandlung (conversion, transubstantiation). In short, Blumenberg fails to countenance a more radical form of transformation (one that, I want to suggest, is central to much modern thinking)—transformation as the continual production of new forms. Both post-modern Umsetzung and post-post-modern Umbesetzung are premised on inertia and rigidity: the rigidity of substance in the former case and the inertia of forms in the latter. Neither, that is, engage with the possibility of perpetual formal transformation, which thus remains an unthought alternative to the historiographical models considered in Legitimacy. However, it is precisely this model that dominates one variant of modernity. (b) Nolan Nature and Nolan History In addition to the three historiographical models identified in Legitimacy (modern transformation between substances, post-modern transformation of one substance and post-post-modern reoccupation), there needs to be added a fourth: perpetual formal metamorphosis. This model is suggested by Bloch’s left-Aristotelian reading of early modernity founded on a rejection of rigid, pre-existing forms in the name of a manifold, transitory formal productivity. Why, then, does this eminently modern model for thinking history remain unthought in Legitimacy? This is partly, as mentioned above, a product of Blumenberg’s selection of a fairly conservative canon of thinkers: the modernity of Kant and Voltaire is not the modernity of Spinoza and Toland. And yet, this is not the whole story, for, in some ways, the left-Aristotelian tradition is present in Legitimacy, but it is present solely as a model for understanding the natural world (rather than the historical one). This is most obvious, of course, in Blumenberg’s extended commentary on Bruno in the final chapter of the book. Here, the left-­ Aristotelian reinterpretation of the form-matter relation is thematized  Ibid., 37–40.

15

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fairly explicitly: Bruno’s universe is, Blumenberg affirms (with Bloch), “filled with movement and the metamorphosis of forms” (LMA, 569); in it, “forms change unceasingly on the surface of matter” (LMA, 587). And, moreover, this is an explicit result of the Nolan “reinterpret[ation of] the Aristotelian account of the relation of matter to form”, such that Bruno’s “concept of form is not that of the orthodox forma substantialis” (LMA, 587. 589). Just like Bloch, Blumenberg points to Bruno’s “world principle of the metamorphosis of matter” (LMA, 587): “the figure of the substantial form is lost”, thereby eliminating form’s “eidetic firmness”, its “unchangeable and metaphysically guaranteed ‘essence’” (LMA, 590–1). It is here, therefore, that Blumenberg’s and Bloch’s readings of modernity fleetingly converge. They both put Giordano Bruno centre stage, and they both consider the becoming mobile, transitory and immanent of natural forms to be a part of his significance. However, what is striking is that Blumenberg never considers the impact Nolan’s metamorphosis might have on a historiography of the modern age.16 This is partly because Bruno’s reinterpretation of Aristotle is only of passing concern to Blumenberg in Legitimacy. His Bruno is rather a thinker of “incarnation trauma” (LMA, 550), someone who is first and foremost interested in “the transfer of infinity from the divinity to the universe” (LMA, 562). The refiguration of the matter-form relationship is seen as but one consequence of this major doctrinal innovation. More generally, however, Blumenberg’s failure to note the ways in which Bruno’s reworking of natural hylomorphism might impact on his own deployment of historical hylomorphism is a result of a concerted refusal to take seriously the ways in which modern thinking about nature might be salient for historiography. Blumenberg implicitly disdains any isomorphism between nature and history. And, as a result, those radical conclusions drawn by modern philosophers about natural forms, matter and substance appear irrelevant to the historiography of modernity. (c) Morphogenesis and Modernity If Blumenberg fails to take modernity at its word and thus—in some key respects—falsifies it, what then would it mean to do his project in a way 16  Unlike Bloch, who, from the very opening words of Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, acknowledges the effectiveness of formal metamorphosis as a historiographical model (Bloch, Avicenna, 1).

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that immerses itself in modern conceptual schema, modern understandings of form and modern ways of thinking about transformation? While the conclusion to this chapter is no place to set forth a detailed alternative to Blumenbergian historiography, I do want to make a few comments on the intertwining of form and metamorphosis in modernity. One need only mention, for example, Descartes’ suspicion of the very concept of form which acts as the sceptical double to Bruno’s liberation of a univocal plane of forms—or even Spinoza’s subversion “of the terms forma, formari, formale, formalitas” in “a Spinozan art of … metamorphoses”.17 By the eighteenth century, morphē has finally replaced eidos in some traditions as the defining feature of form, such that Diderot’s project, for example, has been characterized as “thinking as a materialist the effective reality of the formal cause, stripped of Aristotelian hylomorphism”.18 What results is a “vertigo of forms”,19 a plastic reality of perpetual metamorphosis—to quote Diderot himself, “To be born, to live and to die is merely to change forms … And what does one form matter any more than another?”20 The twentieth-century heir to this tradition of subverting and exploding the notion of form is Gilbert Simondon, and it is Simondon who most explicitly begins to transpose the above interrogation of natural forms into the mental domain. His work takes the form of a two-pronged attack on both “the self-centered monism of substantialism” and “the bipolarity of the hylomorphic schema”.21 That is, Simondon scrutinizes the very “basis of the hylomorphic model” in order to show how it presupposes a mere “abstract form and an abstract matter” so generic as to be useless for understanding any process whatsoever.22 Hence, Simondon replaces “the notions of substance, form and matter” with “the more fundamental notions of initial information, internal ­resonance, metastability, energy potential, orders of magnitude”23, and so no longer makes sense of “physical, biological, mental, social” processes  François Zourabichvili, Spinoza: Une physique de la pensée (Paris: PUF, 2002), 112.  Annie Ibrahim, “Diderot: forme, difforme, informe,” in Ibrahim (ed.), Diderot et la question de la forme (Paris: PUF, 1999), 2. 19  Ibid., 1. 20  Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew/D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin: 1976), 182. 21  Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” trans. Gregory Flanders, in Parrhesia 7 (2009), 4. 22  Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: PUF, 1964), 27–9. 23  Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 10. 17 18

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by way of a static hylomorphism, but instead has recourse to the “resolution of a metastable system”.24 What matters for my purposes here is that neither matter nor form accounts any longer for the emergence of the new. This extremely cursory, potted history of forms in modernity cannot, of course, make any claim to historical precision or demonstrative proof, but it does, I submit, offer a twofold provocation in the context of the above. First, it suggests that there might exist a modernity that is far more experimental with form than Blumenberg’s own narrative of modernity makes room for. To relegate the rethinking of the Aristotelian matter-form relation to a localized consequence of Bruno’s experience of the “incarnation trauma” is perhaps to fail to do justice to how important the explosion of forms was to a whole tendency of the Neuzeit. Secondly and more importantly, historiographical method is here at stake. In this tradition, forms are the site of the new, rather than what restrains or contains its emergence. This modern tradition of formal metamorphosis is not merely at odds with the inertia of forms presupposed by Legitimacy, Blumenberg’s book fails to countenance its very possibility. He happily writes off the heuristic value of transformations of one substance (the secularization thesis) as well as transformations between substances (the Cartesian radical break with the past), and he happily affirms the successive reoccupation of abiding forms, but he ignores any idea of historical structure as “dynamic forms in development, as morphodynamically (self-)organised and (self-) regulating wholes”.25 The key principle of modern morphogenesis is utterly unBlumenbergian: “Gestaltungslehre ist Verwandlungslehre”, that is, to think formation is to think transformation. Such a principle matters historiographically. Spinoza’s subversive account of form is employed primarily to construct a “physics of thinking”, in which the formation, transmission and development of ideas are traced morphologically. Similarly, Diderot’s transformism entails the impossibility of trans-historically permanent truths; that is, it tells a story about how ideas, too, mutate over time. And Simondon develops his model of metastability precisely for the domain of “mental” events; indeed, Gilles Deleuze’s interventions in the history of philosophy during the 1960s are to be read, in part, as a historiographical working-out of this “Simondonianism of the ideal”. In short, these conceptions of  Ibid., 6.  Jean Petitot, “La généalogie morphologique du structuralisme,” in Critique 620–1 (1999), 110. 24 25

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transformation operate across domains: the perpetual metamorphosis of forms is as valid for historical forms as for natural ones. That is, the leftAristotelian impulse applies in the realm of history too. And so, what I am all-too-­briefly conjecturing is that a modern historiography of the modern would no longer consider form as inert (as Blumenberg does), but as the site of perpetual unrest; it is a historiographical schema that would articulate historical metamorphosis without substantial identity. Thus, to repeat, when Blumenberg writes that “evidence of transformation, metamorphosis” always occurs “along with the identity of a substance that endures throughout the process”, he is ignoring a major tradition of thinking about transformation in modernity. His is a history of modernity that fails to take the conclusions of the moderns themselves seriously—and it is difficult to see how this refusal to countenance formal transformation could not lead to some misrepresentations in his narrative. In other words, what I have been arguing in this chapter is that a modern (a-)legitimacy of the modern age still remains to be written. One that does not condescend to interpret modernity through alien categories, but which immerses itself in its ways of thinking, so as to speak both from and for the modern age. This is what it would mean, I submit, to write The Legitimacy of the Modern Age as a modern book.

Bibliography Bloch, Ernst. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left. Translated by Loren Goldman and Peter Thompson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [LMA]. Translated by Robert Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Blumenberg, Hans. “Self-Preservation and Inertia: On the Constitution of Modern Rationality.” Contemporary German Philosophy 3 (1983): 209–56. Diderot, Denis. Rameau’s Nephew/D’Alembert’s Dream. Translated by Leonard Tancock. London: Penguin: 1976. Greisch, Jean. “Umbesetzung versus Umsetzung. Les ambiguïtés du théorème de la sécularisation d’après Hans Blumenberg.” Archives de Philosophie 67 (2004): 279–297. Ibrahim, Annie. “Diderot: forme, difforme, informe.” In Ibrahim (ed.), Diderot et la question de la forme. Paris: PUF, 1999. 1–15. Kopp-Oberstebrink, Herbert. “Umbesetzung.” In Robert Buch and Daniel Weidner (eds), Blumenberg Lesen: Ein Glossar. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. 350–62.

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Matysik, Tracie. “Hans Blumenberg's Multiple Modernities: A Spinozist Supplement to Legitimacy of the Modern Age.” The Germanic Review 90.1 (2015): 21–41. Petitot, Jean. “La généalogie morphologique du structuralisme.” Critique 620–1 (1999): 97–122. Simondon, Gilbert. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Paris: PUF, 1964. Simondon, Gilbert. “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Translated by Gregory Flanders. Parrhesia 7 (2009): 1–16. Zourabichvili, François. Spinoza: Une physique de la pensée. Paris: PUF, 2002.

Index1

A Adorno, T., 7, 134, 135 Arendt, H., vii, xiv, 123, 123n31, 124, 129, 137–142, 145 Aristotle, 131, 153, 155, 267, 270 Augustine, vii, 87, 157 B Bacon, F., vii, 101, 102, 102n14, 110, 161, 194, 195, 219, 227, 234 Baldamus, W., 182, 183, 184n16, 185 Bloch, E., 15n18, 25, 25n39, 26, 31, 33, 267–270, 270n16 Blumenberg, H. Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, 223 The Genesis of the Copernican World, 202 “Lebenswelt und Technisierung,“ 164, 168 Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, 64–66, 77, 169n24, 190, 250n32

The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, vii–xii, xiin4, xv, 4, 7, 12–17, 15n18, 16n20, 22, 29n45, 34, 38, 42–51, 49n15, 53–55, 62–64, 68, 69, 71, 83–96, 86n3, 88n4, 89n5, 98, 99, 101–105, 105n19, 120, 130, 131, 135, 139, 146, 151, 153–156, 159–163, 162n9, 164n13, 176, 186, 218, 220, 221, 229, 237, 240, 242–245, 249, 250, 250n34, 252, 253, 257–266, 259n1, 262n5, 270, 273 ‘Moses the Egyptian’ and Other Writings, 129, 142, 145 Paradigms for a Metaphorology, xiv, 110 Präfiguration, 142, 143n40 Schriften zur Technik, 227n20, 230n24

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Bielik-Robson, D. Whistler (eds.), Interrogating Modernity, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0

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INDEX

Blumenberg, H. (cont.) Theory of Unconceptuality, 197, 198, 200 Work on Myth, viii, xiv, 26, 26n40, 27, 27n41, 29–34, 122n30, 130–134, 133n7, 141, 142, 143n40, 146, 194, 202, 203, 205–208, 210, 211 Bruno, G., vii, viii, 221–225, 234, 242n15, 265–267, 269–272 Bultmann, R., vii, 44, 62, 65n3 C Cassirer, E., 131, 141 Crary, J., 193, 196, 198 D Dante, 161, 195 Deleuze, G., 195, 272 Derrida, J., vii, xiii, 5, 5n2, 8, 9, 12n16, 18–20, 27, 35, 193 Descartes, R., vii, viii, x–xiv, 3–35, 47, 48, 110, 114, 171n30, 185, 187, 194, 195, 197, 200, 206, 217–235, 259n2, 260, 266, 267, 271, 272 Diderot, D., viii, 266, 271, 272 Duns Scotus, 4, 8 F Fanon, F., 105n17 Foucault, M., 5n2, 53 Freud, S., vii, viii, xiv, 28, 67n6, 83, 129, 132, 134, 137–141, 145, 146, 153, 197, 201, 202, 204n37, 210

G Galileo, G., 160–162, 165, 166, 170, 171n30, 223 Goethe, J.W., viii, 6, 30n46, 32–34, 134, 266 Goodchild, P., viii, 115, 120, 121 H Hegel, G.W.F., 4, 24, 26–29, 57, 101, 114, 115, 135, 171, 176, 250n34 Heidegger, M., vii, xin3, 6, 23, 41, 44, 45, 51, 51n16, 53, 58, 110, 124 Herder, J.G., 194, 199, 200, 206 Hobbes, T., vii, 14–16, 102–105, 113, 123n31 Hölderlin, F., 9 Horkheimer, M., vii, 134, 135 Husserl, E., vii, xiv, 151–172, 197, 247n26, 248, 248n27 J Jauss, H.K., 6, 6–7n3, 15, 15n18 Job, 3–35, 192 Jonas, H., vii, xiii, 37–45, 47–53, 55–57, 258, 260 K Kafka, F., 9, 29, 194, 202, 206–212 Kant, I., vii, 114, 153, 179, 194, 195, 197, 224, 232, 262–264, 262n5, 267, 269 Kierkegaard, S., 9 Kołakowski, L., 22, 22n33, 24n35, 34 Kopp-Oberstebrink, H., 243, 261 Krauss, R., 193, 194, 196, 200, 201, 204–206

 INDEX 

L Lacan, J., 202, 204 Latour, B., vii, xiii, 61–78 Levinas, E., vii, 8, 9, 21n32 Locke, J., viii, xiv, 109–125 Löwith, K., vii, 46, 46n13, 62–64, 70, 71, 73, 77, 135, 136, 151, 179n7, 242n15, 258, 260 Luther, M., 6n3, 26, 29, 29n45, 30n46, 181, 182, 234 Lyotard, F., 198, 201, 207 M Marion, J.L., xiii, 9, 20, 21n32, 23, 24n35, 28, 35 Marx, K., xin3, 10, 62, 118, 135, 176, 180 Matysik, T., 265–267 N Nicholas of Autrecourt, 4, 87 Nicholas of Cusa, 161, 162n9, 222, 242n15 Nicholls, A., x, 130, 134, 136, 141, 143n40 O Ockham, W., vii, 4, 16, 87, 91, 120, 159, 171n30 O’Regan, C., 17n20, 25n38, 27n41, 28n44 P Pascal, B., 24n35, 28 Plato, 20, 131, 139, 155

277

R Rorty, R., x, 179, 250n34 Rousseau, J.J., 7, 112, 168 S Schelling, F.W.J., 26, 30–32, 52n18, 101 Schleiermacher, F.D.E., 21n32, 26 Schmitt, C., v, vii–ix, 62, 77, 102, 104, 124, 258, 260 Simmel, G., 133n7, 177, 180, 181, 181n10 Simondon, G., 271, 272 Spinoza, B., 230, 232, 269, 271, 272 Strauss, L., viii, 40, 57, 112, 114, 114n9 T Taubes, J., vii, viii, 62, 251 Taylor, C., 96 V Vico, G., 131 Voegelin, E., vii, xi, xii, 45, 50, 62–64, 70–73, 75, 77, 109–125, 259, 260 Voltaire, vii, 135, 153, 267, 269 W Wallace, R., x, 135, 243, 243n17, 244, 248, 249n29, 251, 252 Weber, M., vii, xiv, 121, 159n7, 175–177, 180–190, 181n10, 192, 235 Weil, S., vii, xiii, 8, 9, 22, 24n35, 123, 124