Hans Blumenberg

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Hans Blumenberg (born 13 July 1920, Lübeck – 28 March 1996, Altenberge) was a German philosopher and intellectual historian.

He studied

philosophers of the century. He died on 28 March 1996 in Altenberge (near Münster
), Germany.

Blumenberg created what has come to be called "metaphorology", which states that what lies under metaphors and language modisms, is the nearest to the truth (and the farthest from ideologies). His last works, especially "Care Crosses the River" (Die Sorge geht über den Fluss), are attempts to apprehend human reality through its metaphors and involuntary expressions. Digging under apparently meaningless anecdotes of the history of occidental thought and literature, Blumenberg drew a map of the expressions, examples, gestures, that flourished in the discussions of what are thought to be more important matters. Blumenberg's interpretations are extremely unpredictable and personal, all full of signs, indications and suggestions, sometimes ironic. Above all, it is a warning against the force of revealed truth, and for the beauty of a world in confusion.

Life

Hans Blumenberg finished his university entrance exam in 1939 at the

German Research Foundation, a professor at several universities in Germany and a joint founder of the research group Poetics and Hermeneutics
.

Work

Blumenberg's work was of a predominantly historical nature, characterized by his great philosophical and theological learning, and by the precision and pointedness of his writing style. The early text Paradigms for a Metaphorology (German: Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, 1960) explicates the idea of

history of ideas
and philosophy. According to Blumenberg, metaphors of this kind, such as "the naked truth", are to be considered a fundamental aspect of philosophical discourse that cannot be replaced by concepts and thus brought back essentially to logic. The distinctness and meaning of these metaphors constitute the perception of reality as a whole, a necessary prerequisite for human orientation, thought and action. For Blumenberg, "That these metaphors are called 'absolute' means only that they prove resistant to terminological claims and cannot be dissolved into conceptuality, not that one metaphor could not be replaced or represented by another, or corrected through a more precise one. Even absolute metaphors therefore have a history".[4] The founding idea of this first text was further developed in works on the metaphors of light in theories of knowledge, of being in navigation (Shipwreck with Spectator, 1979) and the metaphors of books and reading. (The Legibility of the World, 1979.)

In Blumenberg's many inquiries into the history of philosophy the threshold of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance provides a focal point (Legitimacy of the Modern Age and The Genesis of the Copernican World). Inspired by (amongst others) Ernst Cassirer's functional perspective on the history of ideas and philosophy, and the concomitant view of a rearrangement within the spiritual relationships specific to an epoch, Blumenberg rejects the substantialism of historical continuity — fundamental to the so-called "theorem of secularization" – according to which the conceptual systems of modernity are not considered something new, but a simple becoming mundane of the theological principles of Scholasticism. Instead, the Modern age in Blumenberg's view represents an independent epoch opposed to Antiquity and the Middle Ages by a rehabilitation of human curiosity in reaction to theological absolutism. "Hans Blumenberg targets Karl Löwith's argument that progress is the secularization of Hebrew and Christian beliefs and argues to the contrary that the modern age, including its belief in progress, grew out of a new secular self-affirmation of culture against the Christian tradition."[5] Wolfhart Pannenberg, a student of Löwith, has continued the debate against Blumenberg.[6]

In his later works (Work on Myth, Out of the Cave) Blumenberg, guided by Arnold Gehlen's view of man as a frail and finite being in need of certain auxiliary ideas in order to face the "Absolutism of Reality" and its overwhelming power, increasingly underlined the anthropological background of his ideas: he treated myth and metaphor as a functional equivalent to the distancing, orientational and relieving value of institutions as understood by Gehlen. This context is of decisive importance for Blumenberg's idea of absolute metaphors. Whereas metaphors originally were a means of illustrating the reality of an issue, giving form to understanding, they were later to tend towards a separate existence, in the sciences as elsewhere. This phenomenon may range from the attempt to fully explicate the metaphor while losing sight of its illustrative function, to the experience of becoming immersed in metaphors influencing the seeming logicality of conclusions. The idea of 'absolute metaphors' turns out to be of decisive importance for the ideas of a culture, such as the metaphor of light as truth in Neo-Platonism, to be found in the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The critical history of concepts may thus serve the depotentiation of metaphorical power. Blumenberg did, however, also warn his readers not to confound the critical deconstruction of myth with the programmatical belief in the overcoming of any mythology. Reflecting his studies of Husserl, Blumenberg's work concludes that in the last resort our potential scientific enlightenment finds its own subjective and anthropological limit in the fact that we are constantly falling back upon the imagery of our contemplations.

Works

Hans Blumenberg is the author of:

  • (1947) Contributions to the problem of the originality of the medieval-scholastic
    doctoral thesis
    , unpublished).
  • (1950) The ontological distance. An investigation into the crisis of Husserl's phenomenology (
    habilitation thesis
    , unpublished).
  • (1966) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
  • (1975) The Genesis of the Copernican World
  • (1979) The Legibility of the World
  • (1979) Work on Myth
  • (1986) Lifetime and world time
  • (1987) Care Crosses the River
  • (1993) St Matthew Passion

Works in English translation

References

  1. ^ Angus Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg's Theory of Myth, Routledge (2014), p. 11
  2. Frankfurt am Main: AStA-News. pp. 5–8. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help
    )     Bloomenberg's friend, the priest and former Frankfurt student chaplain Walter Kropp (1919-2019), shared a room with Blumenberg during the university period.
  3. ISBN 0-8132-1089-5
  4. ISBN 978-0-8014-4925-3
    .
  5. ISBN 0-8226-3055-9
    .
  6. ISBN 0-664-20971-8
    .

Secondary literature

Bibliography

English

German

Italian

Spanish

External links
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