Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth: Part I, Chapter 4, "Procedural Regulations"

In preceding chapters, Blumenberg had considered the function of myth in a hypothetical original situation (the "absolutism of reality"): as a way of representing and differentiating the forces and dangers that beset human beings to make them more bearable and seemingly manageable. The present chapter considers the elaboration within myth itself that makes the representative entities themselves less fearsome.

On the generations of the Greek gods: "Myth represents a world of stories that localizes the hearer's standpoint in time in such a way that the fund of the monstrous and the unbearable recedes in relation to him." (117)

Even though I distinguish, in discussing connections that are evident in literature, between myth and its reception, I do not want to leave room for the assumption that 'myth' is the primary, archaic formulation, in relation to which everything subsequent can be called reception. Even the earliest items of myth that are accessible to us are already products of work on myth. In part, this preliterary phase of work has passed into the compound of myths, so that the process of reception has itself become a presentation of its manner of functioning. (118)

Myth represents a "constitutionalization" of divine power, circumscribing and dividing it.

Here an elementary dichotomy appears among the ways in which man can arrange matters with superior powers, so as to live without anxiety or only be subject to definable conditions of 'fear of the Lord.' There must be a weakening of the superior power which is not / carried out only by man, and there must be proofs of its reliability, at least preliminary forms of lawfulness and fidelity to agreements. The technique of weakening operatoes through the division of power, the exclusion of omnipotence; rivalry and entanglement in affairs; the mutual jealousy and envy of the powers; their precinct and department mentality; the complication of their genealogies and successions; and the god's defined weaknesses and capacities for distraction. The procedure by which reliability is demonstrated is more historical in nature. What is to be demonstrated is the god's continual adherence to his vows, for example, to God's vow in the bible, which is confirmed by the rainbow, not to carry out a second extermination of mankind by water, and not to let any faithlessness on man's part drive him to break his oath. (124-125)

Chronology as an essential element of dogma: it centers the story of human beings and their relationship to God in the playing out of history.

Myths do not answer questions; they make things unquestionable. (126)

Myth cannot be seen to have been constructed, which would undermine its place as an account that just is.

Although myth refuses, and must refuse, to provide explanations, it does 'produce' another life-stabilizing quality: the inadmissability of the arbitrary, the elimination of caprice. That is why it cannot be / allowed to fall under the suspicion of being an artifact. It must be accepted as a "psychological product of nature." (127-128)

Blumenberg notes the ambiguity and lack of definitiveness of myth, in contrast to, for example, the biblican and dogmatic account of creation, but does not see this as a sign that it was incomplete. It is, he claims, "an expression of the way it thinks." (129) To put it in my own terms, it is a feature, not a bug.

What distinguishes dogma from myth is just this, that it claims to contain, and institutionalizes, what amount to 'eternal facts.' Although, it return for that, it also contains eternal entanglements that no atonement can blot out entirely... (132)

Blumenberg contends that even our earliest sources of Greek myth already bear traces of 'work on myth.' That is, they already contain devices, like reversal and parody, that attenuate the fearsomeness of the mythic gods. Aesop's fables as reversing the anthropizing of the gods by illustrating human qualities and foibles through animal characters. Proteus as a parodic figure in epic.

An extended discussion of the impulse of the Old Testament Hebrews to regress to animalistic depictions of gods.

Concludes the chapter with a discussion of 'circumstantiality' as the common element of myth's modes of procedure.

Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth: Part I, Chapter 3, "Significance"

Blumenberg sets out in this chapter to discuss, not the origins of myth (which he states is unknowable), but the history of the study of myth. He characterizes it as riven by dualisms. The main competing accounts of the origin of myth are that is either spontaneous free expression (poetry) or the response to a frightening world (terror). (Although Blumenberg claims not to be taking a position in this debate, the function that he proposes for myth has something in common with the latter one.) Whereas the Enlightenment saw the recession of myth as a gain for truth, Romanticism reclaimed myth as having value. There is also in Romanticism a different prospect for the historical arc of myth, seeing it as something that can be recovred and recapitulated.

A discussion follows of the numinousness or "the holy" in the characterization given by Rudolf Otto. Blumenberg sees this as a mythic function -- to take indeterminate fear, and to localize it, make it discrete. This, according to Blumenberg, is already a process of rationalization of the world.

'Reason' just means being able to deal with something--in the limiting case, with the world. If the numinous is supposed to have been the primary interpretation, it is still already interpretation and not the thing itself that is interpreted. But we possess no other reality than the one we have interpreted. It is real only as the elementary mode of its interpretatation, in contrast to what is excluded from it as the 'unreal.' (63)

Blumenberg describes myth as a "way of looking at the world" (67) among others that include theory, dogma, and mysticism. The distinctive character of myth as a way of looking at the world is significance.

Significance
(1) draws from the subjective value of phenomena; in being subjective value, it is individual, and thus related to finitude
(2) also requires an objective element, but in the sense of attachment to what is given, familiar, rather than what can be established by scientific method
(3) not something that can be attached to things by design or choice


Following Goethe and Burckhardt, Blumenberg describes significance as "imprinted form" (geprägte Form) and "pregnance" (Prägnanz) (68-69).

Blumenberg insists that significance is not just something whose form is durable, but also capable of elaboration and extension.

Blumenberg lists a non-exhaustive list of tropes through which he claims significance operates: "simultaneity, latent identity, the closed circle pattern, the recurrence of the same, the reciprocity between resistance and heightened existence, and the isolation of a thing or action, in the degree of reality ascribed to it, to the point of excluding every competing reality." (70) He illustrates two of these, latent identity and the closed circle, through the non-mythical story of Goethe's (mediated) encounter with the charlatan Cagliostro. Goethe is able to compensate the poor relatives whom Cagliostro had defrauded in Palermo with funds which he pretends had come from Cagliostro himself, but which had apparently (at least as Goethe's friends perceived it) been made possible by the proceeds from his play about the man. Choosing a modern example of the operation of these tropes shows, for Blumenberg, why myth can never really be brought to an end: because its characteristic approach to the world operates even on contemporary materials.

Blumenberg follows this up with some instances where the trope of resistance informs myths: Odysseus and Sisyphus.

Blumenberg next surveys how the trope of return in Odysseus and the parable of the prodigal son is played with, rejected, or transformed by later writers in order to appropriate the resonance of the mythic content for their own ends.
Marcion rejects the parable of the prodical son, because in his Manichean system salvation is escape from the world by a god that had no part in creating it.
Dante: Odysseus never returns, but seeks the end of the world (a representative of excessive curiosity about the world).
Goethe: Hermann and Dorothea tweaks the pattern of a return home: Dorothea can never return to her origin, but finds a new home.
Joyce: In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom echoes the role of Odysseus, but (1) the time and space is compressed to Dublin in a single day, so in effect he never leaves
(Surprisingly, Blumenberg does not note that Odysseus' return home is not permanent even in the epic itself: in the end, he journeys inland with an oar to find a place where the sea is unknown.)

A short discussion of parodic treatments of the Oedipus myth by Diogenes and Kleist leads into an extended meditation on Freud and myth, beginning with the Oedipus complex and leading into the death instinct. Both the Oedipus complex and the death instinct reprise the pattern of return: to the mother and to the original state of inorganic matter. Beyond that, the theory of drives or instincts -- primarily the dualism of eros and the death instinct -- enabled Freud to treat the psychological makeup of human beings as a story -- in other words, to mythify it. Finally, Blumenberg notes the possible personal function of the discovery of the death instinct as a means of absolving himself in a friend's suicide.

Blumenberg then contrasts the operation of myth with that of Christian dogma. Dogma is a mode of high abstraction, exhibiting indifference to both time and place. The significance of myth, however, relies on particularization, differentiation, a filling up of space and time.

Blumenberg sees a paradoxical relationship between historical consciousness and myth. On the one hand, being conscious that we are creatures with a history is a prophylactic against falling back into mythical thinking, not least that there is a template that can and necessarily must be repeated. (Blumenberg sounds very much at this point as if he views a turn to myth as a regression in thinking.) On the other hand, history is useful for us to the extent that it allows us to orient ourselves in time, and the kind of history that does this relies on periodizations, epochs, segments of time defined by a beginning and an end. But this process of defining and naming periods not only has an inevitable element of arbitrariness, but is itself a kind of mythicization of time.

Blumenberg takes an excursus through the treatment of the history of the life of Jesus in the Gospels and Christian dogma. He makes the point that the apostles and church fathers were not fussed about inexactitude or even conflict in chronology if that allowed the story to encompass simultaneous events (for example, astronomical ones). The simultaneity of extraordinary events, Blumenberg notes, enhanced the pregnance of the Jesus' story. Blumenberg relates the affinity for preganance in events to the need to see history as a realm of action rather than just necessity. He shows that this is not solely a Christian phenomenon, as classical antiquity was also filled with such claims of astronomical simultanaeity.