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.