Hans Blumenberg
German philosopher and intellectual historian (1920–1996)
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Through Philosophy, Classics and World War II
Life
Hans Blumenberg finished his university entrance exam in 1939 at the Katharineum zu Lübeck, as the only student receiving the grade Auszeichnung ("Distinguished"). But, being labelled a "half-Jew", considering that his mother was Jewish, the Catholic Blumenberg was barred from continuing his theology studies. Instead, between 1939 and 1941 he was to pursue his studies of philosophy at the theological universities in Paderborn and Frankfurt, where he was forced to leave towards the end of this period. Back in Lübeck he was enrolled in the workforce at the Drägerwerk AG. In 1944 Blumenberg was detained in a Nazi concentration camp, but was released after the intercession of Heinrich Dräger, the founder of Drägerwerk AG. At the end of the war he was kept hidden by the family of his future wife Ursula. Blumenberg greatly despised the years which he claimed had been stolen from him by the Nazis. His friend Odo Marquard reports that after the war, Blumenberg slept only six times a week in order to make up for lost time. Consequently, the theme of finite life and limited time as a hurdle for scholasticism recurs frequently in Part 2 of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (German: Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 1966). After 1945 Blumenberg continued his studies of philosophy, Germanistics and classical philology at the University of Hamburg, and graduated in 1947 with a dissertation on the origin of the ontology of the Middle Ages, at the University of Kiel. He received the postdoctoral habilitation in 1950, with a dissertation on Ontological Distance, an Inquiry into the Crisis of Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology (Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung über die Krisis der Phänomenologie Husserls). His mentor during these years was Ludwig Landgrebe. During Blumenberg's lifetime he was a member of the Senate of the German Research Foundation, a professor at several universities in Germany and a joint founder of the research group Poetics and Hermeneutics.
He died on 28 March 1996 in Altenberge (near Münster), Germany.
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Work
Blumenberg's work was of a predominantly historical nature, characterised 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 absolute metaphors, by way of examples from the 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". 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 secularisation" – 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 secularisation 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." Wolfhart Pannenberg, a student of Löwith, has continued the debate against Blumenberg.
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.