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.

Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth: Part I, Chapter 2, "The Name Breaks into the Chaos of the Unnamed"

The first half of this chapter is an exercise in delightful erudition about naming, with the key theme being that names make the world familiar and trustworthy to humans. This leads into a discussion of why philosophy failed to displace myth. Blumenberg's answer is that myths themselves have an indispensible 'rationality', that the burden of naming and story-telling that they have carried establish a field of comprehensibility in which further rational investigation becomes possible. He also notes that slyly notes that philosophical system-making--not least Heidegger's--has the structure of naming a 'subject' throguh which a history of throught can be grasped.

Blumenberg proceeds to a discussion of mythogonies-- theories of the origins of myth. He notes (but does not commit to) the contention that the content and forms of myths are widely shared across cultures. This leads to a pair of implausible althernatives: that an original shared content is preserved in different cultures over many eons, or that the content is embedded in human nature.

Blumenberg finishes with a historically recent exercise in making part of existence comprehensible through a process of naming: the psychoanalysis of Freud. The hypstatizations of ego, id, and super-ego are quite different from Freud's original psychological approach, which seems closer to a mdel of electrical circuitry.

Myths are stories that are distinguished by a high degree of constancy in their narrative core and by an equally pronounced capacity for marginal variation. these two characteristics make myths transmissable by tradiation: Their constancy produces the the attraction of recognizing them in artistic or ritual representation as well [as in a recital], and their variability produces the attraction of trying out new and personal means of presenting them. (34)

To equip the world with names means to divide up and classify the undivided, to make the intangible tangible [greifbar], though not yet comprehensible [begreifbar]. The setting up of means of orientation also counteracts elementary forms of confusion--of perplexity, at the least, and, in the limiting case, of panic. (42)

Myth is a way of expressing the fact that the world and the powers that hold sway in it are not abandoned to pure arbitrariness. However this may be signified, whether by a separation of powers or through a 'legalization' of relationships, / it is a system of the elimination of arbitrariness. (42-43)

The answer to the question why philosophy as enlightenment was not able to accomplish what it had claimed to accomplish could be of the following kind: The philosophical 'destruction' was aimed at and adapted to contents that were easy to hit; and for that very reason it failed to appreciate the intellectual and emotional needs that these contents had to satisfy. Further, it imagined the process of such a destruction as a critical coup de main with which, overnight, / the walls of La Flèche were to be torn down. Finally, it saw seriousness only on its own side, in its determination to pursue denudation, and not on the side of the secure situations [Geborgenheiten], which it regarded as superficial. (47-48)

[T]he antithesis between myth and reason is a late and poor invention, because it forgoes seeing the function of myth, in the overcoming of that archaic unfamiliarity of the world, as itself a rational function, however due for expiration its means may seem after the event. (48)

Affinity to myth always consists in finding and naming the subject of which the last of the correct stories can be told. Even what is traditionally most abstract can become a name, as soon as it is transformed into an acting or suffering subject. It can be as insubstantial in appearance as "Being." When it has become the name of a subject / that is pregnant with stories, this can be gathered from people's considering the possibility of, or actually, no longer writing it like the old abstract noun. What makes the story of Being into another piece of romanticism is the circumstance, which is presupposed in it, that the true future can be nothing but the true past. Not as the 'turning back' of man who has been promoted to the status of the subject of history, but as the 'return' of the Being that was hidden, throughout an epoch, by metaphysics. Its return--not foreseen, but only to be awaited--is not better than the new creation that must result from the impending chaos, at whatever price. (51-52)

Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth: Part I, Chapter 1, "After the Absolutism of Reality"

Blumenberg sets out by focusing on the significance of prehistorical humanity's lack of mastery of reality. This is, he admits, not a situation about which we can adduce evidence. Rather, he proposes thinking about it through a a limiting concept, a predicament that he supposes must have been the case, in the way that social contract theory supposes a state of nature (status naturalis). This concept is the absolutism of reality.

Blumenberg notes that the earliest humans underwent a transition in their environment from rain forest to open savanna, and in their posture to standing erect. In the forest, our primate ancestors could flee and hide from threats. Once humans were standing in the open, however, they were more perspicuous. Though they were able to see further, they could also be seen. Threats could arrive more quickly from any direction, and immediate refuge was not at hand. They were exposed. This put pressure on humans to anticipate threats, and thus to give themselves time to prepare to flee or fight. In order to anticipate, they had to be in a constant state of alertness to whatever was on their horizon, or might lurk beyond it. This constant state of alertness was a source of anxiety, and even terror. Living this way was an overwhelming burden. Humans needed to reduce the burden of this anxiety.

In the first place, Blumenberg describes this reduction as a process of naming, which divided the undifferentiated mass of possible threats into specific ones which might be managed. He quickly moves on to discussing the stories and images as human means for managing reality.

I must entertain some doubt about how the actual transition to being a bipedal, plains-dwelling species could be related to the onset of myth-making. I would surely think this transition was pre-lingustic, and even predated language by eons. Of course, humans remained an exposed species from that time forward, so I suppose that the anticipatory pressure would still exist whenever language did come about, and that language could then manage the pressure in the manner that Blumenberg suggests.

In any case, Blumenberg sees myth as providing a field of symbolic action through which humans could manage what had seemed unmanageable, thus supporting a "beneficent illusion" (12) that humans were more capable of dealing with existence than was truly the case.

The polytheism of the myths is in this respect, according to Blumenberg, an essential feature rather than a defect. Polytheism manages the sense of facing overwhelming power by dividing it and perceiving each part as circumscribed and set against others. It creates a sense of separation of powers.

At this point, Blumenberg begins to focus on the reception of myth by Christianity and the Enlightenment. Christian writers focused on the immorality of the gods. This is a theme that the Enlightenment takes up, but also turns against Christianity. the Enlightenment critique gave special attention to the sacrifice of Isaac, which was compared to the sacrifice of Iphigenia by the Hellenes setting off for the Trojan War. In both cases, Blumenberg accuses the critique of mistaking the actual function of the stories, which was to provide an explanation for why human sacrifice, which otherwise would be seen as a necessary sign of complete dedication to a deity, would no longer be permitted.

Blumenberg, at this point, digresses into what seems like a crucial point: the essential place of emotion in the human economy of attention. He notes that an adapted stimulus-response mechanism had to be replaced when humans took leave of their original environment. The ability to pay attention filled this role, and emotion, above all, facilitated this ability.

Having reviewed the critique of poytheism by its successors, Blumenberg now considers, in a seemingly a priori manner, the consequences of monotheism. In the first place, he claims that replacing the Other with the Other One creates the possibility of the god having a character, of hawing a personality that can be trusted and negotiated with (although why this is not just as possible with polytheistic gods is not really made clear). Such a god is capable of promises, and capable of entering into a contract, which would limit His actions. Such a god would expect exclusivity (and in any case, since this god is self-limiting, the restraint of a separation of powers provided by polytheism would become superfluous). Blumenberg notes that there would be doubts about the reliability of this singular god, but, by making part of himself human, he could commit himself irrevocably to having an interest in humanity (thus deducing a kind of necessity of Christology). Finally, the one god would both reflect humanity and more fully occupy the conscience of human beings, while the polythesitic gods retained an essential foreigness to humanity.

The essential problem of medieval theology, according to Blumenberg, is that it cannot accept this God entangled with humanity. Having taken over an ancient metaphyics that saw the essence of divinity in being outside of influence (as he has already noted with respect to the gods of Epicurus).

Entwined with this discussion of the distinctive character of monotheism is another one focussed on the relationship between polytheism and theory. The departure point for the second discussion is Thales' observation that the world is full of gods. The suggestion is that myth had exhausted its ability to explain the world. And, theory, beginning with Thales' prediction of an eclipse, began to show its capability for explaing reality. Yet, in seeing myth only as an account of objects which it seeks to supersede with a better account, theory misses the 'work of logos' that has already been done by myth to constitute the field of objects and to provide the space and time to consider them.

The concept of the limit toward which the extrapolation of tangible, historical features into the archaic tends can be formally defined in a single designation: the absolutism of reality. What it means is that man came close to not having control of the / conditions of his existence and, what is more important, beleived that he simply lacked control of them. It may have been earlier of later that he interpreted this circumstance of the superior power [Übermächtigkeit] of what is (in each case) other [i.e., not himself] by assuming the existence of superior powers [Übermächten]. (3-4)

What is here called the absolutism of reality is the totality of this situational leap [note: from rain forest to savanna], which is inconceivable without superaccomplishment in consequence of a sudden lack of adaptation. Part of this is the capacity for foresight, anticipation of what has not yet taken place, preparation for what is absent, beyond the horizon. It all converges on what is accomplished by concepts. Before that, though, the pure state of indefinite anticipation is 'anxiety.' To formulate it paradoxically, it is intentionality of consciousness without an object. As a result of it, the whole horizon becomes equivalent as the totality / of the directions from which 'it can come at one.' (4-5)

In turn, while this attitude to reality can be maintained episodically for longer periods, it cannot be managed indefinitely. The generalized exitement and suspense must always be reduced, again, to the assesssment of specific factors. Put differently ... this means that anxiety must again and again be rationalized into fear, both in the history of mankind and in that of the individual. This occurs primarily, 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. Something is 'put forward,', so as to make what is not present into an object of averting, conjuring / up, mollifying, or power-depleting action. By means of names, the identity of such factors is demonstrated and made approachable, and an equivalent of dealings with them is generated. (5-6)

It will be as a means of maintaining a position in the face of an overpowering reality, through milleniums, that stories, which could not be contradicted by reality, were successful. (7)

Homo pictor [man the painter] is not only the producer of cave paintings for magical practices relating to hunting, he is also the creature who covers up the lack of reliability of his world by projecting images. (8)

The boundary line between myth and logos is imaginary and does not obviate the need to inquire about the logos of myth in the process of breaking free from the absolutism of reality. Myth itself is a piece of high-carat 'work of logos.' (12)

[I]t will be incomparably more important to describe myth itself as already the manifestation of an overcoming, of the gaining of a distance, of a moderation of bitter earnestness. (16)

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 10, "Geometric Symbolism and Metaphorics"

Blumenberg begins by explaining the contrast he wants to draw between symbolism and metaphorics with reference to Fontenelle's critique of geocentrism at the end of the previous chapter. Fontenelle portrays geocentrism's function not as giving an orientating response to a conceptually unanswerable fundamental question (which would make it an absolute metaphor) but as projecting an image of unequal social conventions into the natural world and thus providing an after the fact justification for them. A symbol merely identifies a relationship; it's content has no significance.

Blumenberg spends most of the chapter examining how the circle and the sphere have been used in the history of cosmological metaphorics. The spherical form of the cosmos in Plato assures that it is complete and bounded, in contrast to the threateningly infinite cosmos of Democritus. The model of the cosmos as a stationary, spinning sphere also imitated the combined activity and rest attributed to the divine. This marks a beginning of transfer of attributes of perfection from the Ideas to the cosmos. Aristotle extends this thought to its limit, giving comprehensive scope to the propagation of the ideal of circular motion to nature. The Stoics take this idea even further, attributing even the inner cohesion of objects to a kind of circulation within them. In distinction from Aristotle, however, for the Stoics it is centripetal rather than circular motion which is natural: circular motion results from the displacement of of something from the center due to the natural centripetal movement of some other thing.

Plato requires circular movement for heavenly bodies because he holds that it is most perfectly rational (and hence, the best imitation of the ideal). For Aristotle circular motion is the result of the eros of the first sphere for the unmoved mover. Plotinus synthesizes these accounts, describing circular motion as a physical imitation of the theoretical activity of the unmoved mover ("thought thinking itself"). This circular motion is composite for Plotinus, however. The natural motion of the cosmic body is a straight line; the cosmic soul, in attempting to draw the cosmic body to itself, adds a second component to the motion that results in circular motion. The circular motion that the soul induces in the cosmic body is a metaphor both for the soul's desire for the Mind and for the impossibility of ever consummating it.

122-123: "One cannot talk of 'symbolism' here: the symbol stands in the service of knowledge and must therefore be fixed and static, whereas here we can already detect the highly complex movement that must be represented, indeed 'accomplished', in the geometric expression. Metaphor is capable of movement and can represent movement; there can be no more impressive confirmation of this than Cusansus's self-transcending 'explosive metaphorics', which operates with geometric figures even as it transforms them."

Negative theology does not seek to transmit a body of knowledge, but to train one's intuition in a spiritual process. Cusanus's doubling of circles and spheres is such a process; it begins with steps which are easy to apprehend, but which continue indefinitely is overwhelming. "The aim is to make transcendence something that can be 'experienced' as the limit of theoretical apprehension ..." (123)

Blumenberg does not classify Cusanus's mathematical explosive metaphorics as an absolute metaphor, because it is seen as a positive means to knowledge, not as a means of filling in a vacuum of orientation at the base of thought. But it is similar to absolute metaphors in that its function is pragmatic: it seeks to create a mystical attitude.

Kepler took the traditional metaphorical superiority of the structural center seriously, although the sun rather than the earth now occupied that position for him, and he took equally seriously the metaphorical superiority of circular orbits. This metaphorical realism was a step back from the metaphorical idealization of Copernicus (whose saw man's centrality consisting in his rationality), to say nothing of the acentric universe of Bruno. Nonetheless, this lapse was a key to his systematic accomplishment. In the first place, it allowed him to conceive of a force from the the sun as the source of planetary movement. Furthermore, once the orbits were seen as the result of a solar force, it was possible for him to examine them not as a static idea but as the result of a process, and thus to abandon the ideal assumption of a circular path.

Newton's conception of planetary paths as the result of a composition of different forces itself became a metaphor beyond the realms of astronomy and physics. Montesquieu, Mandeville, and Kant all examine society and history as the result of the composition of actions of individuals or social institutions.

Blumenberg notes that the emergence of modernity can be comprehended in part as and abandonment of circle metaphorics -- and so it is unsurprising that that those, like Nietzsche, who are disenchanted with modernity and seek to overturn it also seek to revive such metaphors.

Reading this, I have been able to see, really for the first time, a sense in which Nietzsche is an authentically anti-modern thinker.  I had seen unmasking as the essential move of Nietzschean philosophy, which seemed to make it characteristically modern.  Blumenberg's exposition of Nietzsche's metaphorical commitments has complicated my view -- and made me think that Heidegger was not so wrong to see him as the last of the metaphysicians, after all.

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 9, "Metaphorized Cosmology"

Copernicus's geocentric model provoked a reassessment of metaphors relating to man's stature. While for some, like Goethe, the implication was a vindication of man's dignity as a being able to think freely, most, like Nietzsche, have seen it (although not necessarily with the same glee) as displacing man from a privileged position in the cosmos.

Copernicus conceived of his work as preserving the rationality of the universe and of man's place as a being uniquely able to grasp it. But the reception of the theory was not so straightforward. Even those who thought the theory validated man's value as a rational agent started from the premise that it displaced man from a teleologically favored location: they saw man's dignity shown by his ability to stand for himself without teleology. The anti-Copernican reaction also began from a metaphorized assessment of his theory as challenge to man's privileged position in the universe. Geocentrism only became Christian dogma under the pressure of the implicit metaphorical challenge of Copernicanism to Christian teleology.

For Aristotle, the attribution of a central location to the earth did not signify elevated status, but the opposite: the most dignified positions were the outermost spheres of the world-system. Man was neither the highest being nor the end served by the whole. Anthropological teleology was limited to the sublunary sphere, and even then it did not really set man apart; it amounted to the consideration that nothing was created without a purpose, but no more than that.

In Stoic cosmology, on the other hand, the earth's position at the center of the cosmos did signify a priority in rank. For the Stoics, the cosmos was not a static assembly of distinct strata, it was homogeneous in composition and movement, with all things seeking to move toward the center. Man's existence at the central point of the cosmos, the earth, supports a thoroughgoing anthropocentric teleology, where the purpose of the universe is to serve man's needs. Man is also distinguished in Stoic thought (taking a theme picked up from Plato's Timaeus) as the agent who can contemplate the beauty of the heavens, so everything is referred to man in an aesthetic as well as a cosmological sense.

Medieval cosmology used an Aristotlelean model of the cosmos, but integrated into it the contradictory Stoic material of high esteem for the centrally located earth and for man, especially in his role of contemplator (now understood to have God as his object). Copernicus sought to salvage man's (teleologically destined) position as contemplator while sacrificing the cosmological geocentrism which, in any case, only metaphorically endowed him with dignity; but the metaphorical debasement proved to be more compelling than the attempted theoretical elevation.

107: "Metaphorical realism is a factor of first importance in the formation of historical life. No paradigm is better suited to demonstrating this than the one discussed here. Subtle idealizations, such as those undertaken by Copernicus on the model of teleological anthropocentrism, fail to take hold and revert to their metaphorical quality. The replacement of the central position by a central function proved unable to establish itself as a legitimate 'transition', even if it was wrested as an 'achievement' from man's metaphorical eccentricity ..."

Galileo sought to raise the earth's rank within the medieval system of metaphorical valuation by showing it was really another star -- stellarization. Understanding this helps explain his preoccupation with finding evidence for the earth's movement and luminosity -- two features which would mark it as a star.

Cusanus had also attempted to establish the earth as a star among other stars, but in order to neutralize its value cosmologically rather than elevate it. This neutralization then opened the way for him to establish the earth's dignity as a consequence of the unique trait of bearing human beings.

Galileo's dogmatic retention of elements of Aristotelean cosmology -- such as the perfectly circular orbits of the heavenly bodies -- derive from his interest in preserving the system's attributes of stellar perfection while he elevates the earth to that status. The Aristotelean dicta that he rejects -- like the inferior status of what moves compared to the unmoved -- are those that would challenge the dignity of the stars, among which he would place the earth.

Fontenelle, as a representative of the Enlightenment's reception of Copernicus , sees the overturned cosmological geocentrism as a projection of the spirit of anthrpocentric teleology which is embedded in human nature. It is of a kind with all claims of priority or status by privileged individuals within human society --and similarly without merit.

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 8, "Terminologization of a Metaphor: From 'Versimilitude' to Probability'"

Blumenberg now considers the phenomenon of transition from a metaphor to a concept. He focuses on a transition where both the original metaphor and the succeeding concept use the same German word, Wahrscheinlichkeit. The literal meaning of the word (which is incorporated in the old metaphorical usage) is the resemblance of truth. In modern usage it has come to mean probability.

Plato's eikos -- likelihood or what looks like being true -- from the Phaedrus and Timaeus -- taken up by 'truthlikeness' in Aristotle's Rhetoric -- translated as verisimile by Cicero. A reliance on such a concept in a Platonic tradition isn't as odd as it first appears, which is to say that the distance from Platonism to Skepticism isn't that great. The heightened demands for truth to be transcendent in the later Plato makes it ever more difficult to come to grips with it, to the point where in the Timaeus Plato admits eikos as a sufficient guide. In the Critias, Plato contrasts the certainty and exactness which characterizes our everyday activities with the faintness of our knowledge of the transcendent. (82-83)

In Academic Skepticism, the probable is held up specifically as a guide in practical human concerns, without being seen as evidence of theoretical truth. Cicero associates the probable with verisimilitude, the appearance of truth, but the actual closeness to truth implied is only given weight pragmatically. (83-84)

In Epicureanism, by contrast, the appearance of truth is granted to all manner of theoretical explanations of celestial phenomena, but this serves only to neutralize the claims of all the contending theories, thus securing man's peace of mind. (84)

For Lactantius, verisimile is seen only negatively, as the false appearance of truth which misleads men. In this, he is reclaiming the Stoic view of probability that Cicero had left aside -- that what is merely probable should not be assented to, and that instead judgment should be suspended. (85-86)

Augustine revives the metaphorical content of verisimile in arguing against the Academic tradition. He contends that it is impossible to make sense of verisimile without first having possession of the truth itself -- for how can one know if something resembles the truth without knowing the truth it refers to? (86-87)

Late medieval theology again severs the true from what seems to be true. With the growing theological insistence on the transcendent nature of truth, a new skeptical tendency affirmed faith even while conceding its apparent absurdity. In so doing, it reversed the Platonic assessment (from the Critias) of the relationship between knowledge of the divine and worldly -- now knowledge of the divine is held to be certain while knowledge of nature is held to be merely probable. This separation of faith and the appearance of truth provided autonomous space for speculation about the probable -- at least up to a point. Thus, the Church's response to Copernican and Galilean doctrines depended on its willingness (ultimately rejected) to tolerate probable claims which conflicted with revealed truth. (88-89)

Blumenberg links the development of mathematical probability with a desire to give an account for the world without reference to teleology or theology. Chance could only provide a rational alternative to these forbidden premises if it could be made predictable and quantifiable -- a labor taken up first and foremost by Pascal. Blumenberg notes that Leibniz endorsed the study of probability as a legitimate science, but cast doubt on its usefulness for addressing religious questions. Here, Blumenberg detects a residue of the metaphorical meaning of verisimilitude, for Leibniz's objection is that religious mysteries have the appearance of being false even when they are true, so an argument from probability cannot successfully confirm their truth. (where the seeming false captures the metaphorical content of the term) (89-91)

Mendelssohn adopts the Wolffian notion of probability as incomplete truth (I think the significance of this is that it puts probability on a continuum with truth), and he holds that probability applies to judgments about the past as well as the future. He objects to the idea that there are some probabilities about which it is impossible even for God to have knowledge that goes further than the probability (which some saw as a requirement of free will). (92-94)

Mendelssohn's defence of Copernican theory represents a benchmark in the transition from metaphorical to logical verisimilitude. His argument on behalf of Copernicanism is probabilistic: it reduces the number of independent factors needed to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies, and thus the reliance on an apparent coincidence of separate causes; reducing the number of required coincidences makes the explanation more probable. (94-95)

Maupertuis and Diderot object to the consequence of seeing probability as an incomplete truth. Truth cannot be established from probability -- in particular, for Maupertuis, the existence of a designer for the solar system cannot be deduced from the improbability of a close coincidence between the plane of the planetary orbits. With Diderot, the point is amplified by bringing together probability with a new metaphysical background assumption of infinite time. Given infinite time, the universe has unlimited chances for anything to occur, so no outcome is truly improbable. The explanatory function of a divine creator is thus replaced by chance. but since the creator had already become arbitrary and capricious in the development of Christian theology, this was a gain rather than a loss for a feeling of security about the world. Chance at least has its own laws. (95-97)

Blumenberg briefly considers how the the term verisimilitude had been transferred from classical to modern aesthetics. Classical aesthetics based on mimesis put a higher value on verisimilitude than truth in art. It was more important for a work of art to resemble an unrealized ideal rather than faithfully portray an existing object. Lessing (the modern example to whom Blumenberg restricts himself) also puts higher value on verisimilitude than faithful representation of reality in art. He conceives of verisimilitude in art as an ability to appeal to our inner sense of probability, to persuade us of its reality. (97-98)

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 7, "Myth and Metaphorics"

77: "[M]etaphorology -- as a subbranch of conceptual history, and like the latter itself considered as a whole -- must always be an auxiliary discipline to philosophy as it seeks to understand itself from its history and to bring that history into living presence. Our typology of metaphor histories must accordingly endeavor to distinguish and work through particular aspects ... of philosophy's historical self-understanding. In the process, it is above all the transitions that will allow the specificity of each metaphor and its expressive forms to appear in sharper focus."

Blumenberg explores the transition from myth to metaphorics in Plato and his followers. Myth in Plato, like absolute metaphors, is not simply a preliminary and inadequate form of reason: it circumscribes and provides answers to those aporias which resist reduction to reason but are necessary to deal with in order for the argument to proceed.

78: "In myth, too, questions are kept alive that refuse to yield to theoretical answers without thereby becoming obsolete. The difference between myth and 'absolute metaphor' would here be a purely genetic one: myth bears the sanction of its primordial, unfathomable origin, its divine or inspirative ordination, whereas metaphor can present itself as a figment of the imagination, needing only to disclose a possibility of understanding in order for it to establish its credentials."

The myth of final judgment in the Gorgias functions as a postulate which the philosopher is compelled to assent to in order to risk his life on behalf of truth. It is turned to when the hopes of proving that justice will ultimately be done are exhausted.

The myth of the cave from the Republic draws on a background tradition of cave mythology. Its fundamental image is a movement from darkness to light. There are already intimations of this theme in the Prometheus myth of the Protagoras and the cosmological myth of the Phaedo. Blumenberg sees more to the use of this myth by Plato and his successors, however, than anchoring the fundamental narrative of the self-liberation of human reason. Plato's elaboration of the myth allows him to use it as a model which explains, for example, how the Sophist is possible.

According to Blumenberg, the myth of the cave has become an absolute metaphor with the Neoplatonists, Gnostics, and Church fathers. Porphyry (the stand-in Neoplatonist here) -- the cosmos as a cave separated from a transcendent reality which is not reachable by learning alone. Gnostics and church fathers -- salvation irrupting into existence like light into a cave.

Plato's myth of the demiurge in the Timaeus amounts to a constructive model explaining how the world is generated given certain premises. Blumenberg likens it to Descartes' hypothetical cosmogonic model in the Principles. The Church fathers claimed this myth derived from Genesis. This created a problem of assimilating the different consequences of the metaphor of creation by hand in the myth of the demiurge (which is fundamentally constructive and attempts to explain everything) and creation by mouth, which is to say by command, in Genesis (which seeks submission and attempts to explain nothing).

background metaphor - metaphor that implicitly anchors use of terminology
absolute metaphor - metaphor that provides a way of bracketing or provisionally answering otherwise unresolvable questions

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 6, "Organic and Mechanical Background Metaphorics"

Background metaphorics - background of images that makes it possible to reconstruct and understand seemingly non-metaphorical (and even purely theoretical) statements.

The language of imaginative horizons here is reminiscent of Heidegger and Gadamer.

62-63: "Metaphorics can also be in play where exclusively terminological propositions appear, but where these cannot be understood in their higher-order semantic unity without taking into account the guiding idea from which they are induced and 'read off'. Statements referring to data of observation presuppose that what is intended can, in each case, be brought to mind only within the parameters of a descriptive typology: the reports that will one day be transmitted to us by the first voyagers to the moon may well require us to engage in a more thorough study of American or Russian geography if we are to grasp the selective typicality of these reports, corresponding to the eyewitnesses' (anticipated) background. Faced with an artificial structure of speculative statements, the interpretation will only 'dawn' on us once we have succeeded in entering into the author's imaginative horizon and reconstructing his 'translation'. What preserves genuine thinkers from the crabbed scholasticism of their imitators and successors is that they keep their 'systems' in vital orientation, whereas academic routine uproots concepts and suspends them in idiosyncratic atomism. In undertaking an interpretive reconstruction, we will succeed in reviving such translations, which we propose to call 'background metaphorics', only within the parameters of a certain typology, and this is most likely to occur where a prior decision between opposed types of metaphors -- between organic and mechanical guiding ideas, for example -- has been made. It is not just language that thinks ahead of us and 'backs us up', as it were, in our view of the world; we are determined even more compellingly by the supply of images available for selection and the images we select, which 'channel' what can offer itself for experience in the first place."

Blumenberg argues that the contrast between mechanical and organic metaphors is itself not fixed, but emerges in the post-classical world. The classical machina has a broader meaning than the modern machine, referring to all sorts of contrivances and tricks. Lucretius' machina mundi does not yet have the connotation of automatism that would come with later clockwork metaphors, it merely contrasts the world as contrived or artful in contrast to the Stoic metaphysics of providence. The distinctive use of machine as a concept opposed organism arrives with the French Enlightenment. Blumenberg thinks that this emergence is more than coincidental, given how it serves the materialistic program of Enlightenment thought. (63-64)

For Plato, the universe was both constructed and living. It had to be conceived of as alive because it was understood to move itself, and ability to move oneself was the criterion of life. Mechanical models, like Archimedes' sphere, were seen by classical authors like as inferior imitations which merely demonstrated the rationality which must exist to a superior degree in the original. In Lactantius we see a Christian recasting of the interpretive function of Archimedes sphere: now it shows that the universe can be in motion after an initial impetus without requiring any animation. There is a clear theological interest behind this: reducing the world to a mere mechanism leaves God alone in transcendence. (64-66)

Nicolaus of Cusa characteristically saw Archimedes' model as a projection of the human mind, an invention created in place of divine creativity rather than an imitation of the universe. While an Aristotelian view of technology as mimetic lent itself to organic metaphors, Cusanus' opens a way to distinctively mechanical metaphors. (67)

Descartes abjures the project of understanding what the world or organisms are in themselves. Instead, he proposes to understand them externally, by transferring our knowledge of mechanical devices as hypothetical stand-ins. Having made the metaphorical substitution of machine for world or organism, however, Descartes is also able to substitute a pragmatic view of the aims of inquiry for a theoretical one: since there is a surplus of possible mechanical constructions which could be made to stand in for any natural entity, the choice between them is made on the ground of what works best (and if the model works better than its natural counterpart, then it a truer example of the original function than what is in nature). (68-70)

Blumenberg contrasts the book of nature and clockwork universe metaphors. The output of the clock -- the actual display of time -- is not significant in the use of the metaphor; what matters is its predictable functioning. For the book of nature, on the other hand, the informative content is critical; what is significant in the metaphor is that there is a message that could be communicated. (71)

The clockwork metaphor emphasizes God's initial creative act at the expense of God's continuing involvement in the world. (71-72)

With the book of nature, man remains external to the metaphor, as the intended reader. Human beings are among the things brought under the clock metaphor, however, in the works of Voltaire and Vauvenargues. The French moralists typically indentified the passions with the internal working of the clock, and reason as the display (in a way that hoped to gain assent and accomplish their aims) of those hidden instincts and passions. (72-73)

In The Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl metaphorizes the scientific enterprise itself as a mechanism, and metaphorizes the implicit goal of the enterprise as an ideal textbook which puts together all of its achievements in a coherent whole. (75-76)

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Ch 5, "Terra Incognita and 'Incomplete Universe' as Metaphors of the Modern Relationship to the World"

Blumenberg explores how the terra incognita and unfinished universe metaphors shape the modern attitude towards the world. Terra incognita (along with its metaphorical substitutes America and even Africa) refers back to the discovery of unknown and even unsuspected geography early in the modern age and the subsequent exploration of previously uncharted continents. Taking this as the metaphorical model of knowledge meant being prepared to see every advance of knowledge as just a preliminary to making a much greater discovery. This expectation encouraged a disposition to expect and labor for new knowledge, and brought along with it a positive reappraisal of the new and novel, of curiosity, of infinity, and of imagination.

The metaphor of the incomplete universe suggested not only that the world was still evolving, but that it had no fixed end -- so that human beings were free to shape it. The classical conception of the cosmos, with its assumption that all change amounted to the completion of already established forms, proved particularly resilient. Cartesian cosmogony remained wedded to a fixed teleology, which saw the world as it already existed as its end state. Even Kant's conception of a universe in an unending process of change doesn't quite shake free from earlier cosmological ideas -- the worlds in his universe still have a fixed pattern of development and decay, and man plays no active part in it.

Friedrich Schlegel first gives the incomplete universe a pragmatic turn -- an incomplete universe means that life is not futile, that there are tasks for humans to accomplish. Schlegel's insistence on organic metaphor for the incomplete world actually suggests greater resistance to human action than a purely mechanical interpretation.

Schlegel also puts forth the metaphor of "almighty man" as an aggregated force that brings order to the incomplete universe. This raises the question of how the fragmentary forces of individuals are integrated into the task of completing the universe. Modern thought throws up two concepts which answer this question, method and collective. Method is a way of unifying generations of human beings into a single subject of knowledge. Collective is a way of conceptualizing the aggregate of labor that is ready to be deployed to reshape an unfinished world -- and thus, in communist thought, it provides the background assumption of a force that needs an unfinished world to be created by revolution, which liberates society from stasis, in order to be put to use.

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 4, "Metaphorics of the 'Naked' Truth"

Blumenberg follows up on another metaphor used by Lactantius: the nakedness of truth.

This metaphor brings up the issue of the appropriateness of the truth for human beings, who after all are the creatures who have adopted clothing to conceal nakedness. Blumenberg cites Werfel and Kierkegaard expressing distaste for the barbarity of the passion for unconcealed truth.

Augustine and Rousseau use the image of the nakedness of the soul before God (and also, for Rousseau, before his fellow men) to describe a confession of the truth of one's life. Rousseau also uses nakedness as metonym for the natural state of man before his distortion by society, and grounds his political critique on conceptually stripping away humanity's accumulated cultural and technical heritage. Stripping off the disguises of society becomes a common trope of modern political rebels, deployed in turn by bourgeois French revolutionaries and by Marx.

Pascal, responding to Montaigne, takes issue with this kind of critique. For Pascal, the whole point of institutions is that they are made. They are imaginative constructs, and our recognition of and respect for the garb and other conventions of office, rather than reason, is what makes them work.

Another issue that really only comes to foreground due to metaphors is the relationship between truth and happiness. While the Skeptics had deployed many arguments casting doubt on our ability to find truth, and thus the desirability of pursuing it, they had nothing to say about whether it could ever provide fulfillment even if were attained. The Christian tradition of Biblical exegesis, however, had to confront a text in which truth was often conveyed in images. This was seen by Thomas among other medieval thinkers as a form of protection from having to confront unmediated truth.

There was scant support in the Aristotelian tradition for the use of intermediary images to grasp truth, however, and the most faithful (Averroistic) adherents of that tradition were strident advocates for the nakedness of truth, that is, for the idea that truth should be presented without literary adornment. This striving for a pure truth (Blumenberg calls it a will to truth) disturbed humanists who upheld the value of richer figurative expression of truth, which they captured with in the concept of sapientia (wisdom).

In Pico Della Mirandola's letter to Ermolao Barbaro, the Averroist is depicted as desiring to hide the truth from the uninitiated by making it plain and unattractive. But the modern reception of truth as science made any exclusive access to truth untenable, although the expectation of a plain style of presentation remained. Blumenberg cites Bacon and Lessing to show that the naked, undisguised truth was now apprehended as shared, public truth. Lessing, in addition, insists that all truth is equally valuable; it is the formal property of being true that matters, not practical significance, because what matters is that all truth contributes to an overall state of enlightenment.

The development of historical consciousness undermined the assumption behind the naked truth metaphor. Winckelmann first sees historical "disguises" of truth not as superficial decoration but as constitutive of the way truth appears to us. Husserl's appreciation of Galileo's theories as not the naked truth, but a "well-fitting garb of ideas" shows a kind of adaptation of the metaphor to this new perception.

A new skepticism emerges in modern times about the power of truth to provide happiness. One way this plays out is in Lessing's thesis that satisfaction comes in the pursuit of truth rather than in its actual uncovering. Rousseau's contrasting take is that the concealed truth (metaphorically hidden at the bottom of a well) is best left undisturbed, that even pursuit of it is more like to lead to error and unhappiness than satisfaction. We see a culmination of the consequences of this skepticism for the metaphor of naked truth in Kierkegaard, who sees shared, external (and thus metaphorically naked) truth as unable to provide the satisfaction which can only be obtained through truth which provides internal meaning.

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 3, "A Terminological and Methodological Cross Section of the Idea of Truth"

In this chapter Blumenberg takes a break from tracing truth metaphors through time. He notes that this approach presupposes that each chosen appearance of the metaphor has been properly understood in its contemporary conceptual context. He proposes to provide such an accounting for a truth metaphor in one instance -- to show that a "cross section" can be provided at an arbitrary point along a given temporal "longitudinal section." He chooses Lactantius as suitably mediocre thinker to investigate -- one who represents the ideas of his age but poses no threat to overturn them.

Lactantius constrains the effect of the metaphor of the force of truth (vis veritas) with a second metaphor: the truth as God's property, which he has the right to reveal or conceal. In consequence, in the introductory passage to his "Divinae institutiones," Lactantius holds that men are not able to grasp truth simply by their own efforts, and that the pagan philosophers thus failed to find it. The evidentness of truth only makes itself felt when, in an act of grace, God chooses to reveal it. Among other things, the status of truth as a secret of God (arcanum dei) preserves the proper distance between man and God.

Lactantius does not strictly maintain this view strictly throughout his work. He finds all sorts of "advances" of revelation to the pagan philosophers. Since he conceives of truth as homogeneous -- that is, since he has no place for truths which are only accessible through faith -- this means that in principle all of the truth was accessible to the ancient philosophers. This means he has to account for their failure to find it, and he uses a number of metaphors for this purpose. He depicts the pagan philosophers as looking in the wrong direction, because God had not shown them the right one: truth is "above" but they looked for it "below." Or he describes their encounter with truth in terms of of perception, particularly of touch or smell, which lack real certainty. The key point, for Lactantius, is that they lacked the criterion to verify the truths they had. So he is able to hold that truth was widely dispersed -- all sects had at least some part of it -- but was never recognized as a whole because men lacked the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood. Revelation provided the criterion by which truth could be recognized and integrated.

Another way Lactantius depicts the philosophers as leading up to Christianity is by treating falsehood as a kind of world in its own right and the apprehension of falsehood as a separate matter from discerning truth. Then the pagan philosophers can be conceded to have done the easier task -- recognizing what is false -- without being able to find truth. This trope depends upon a reversal of classical predicates: now the false is evident and the true is hidden. Truth compels men with its essential force only when God releases it from concealment.

Lactantius struggles, without real success, to account for the role of rhetoric when truth is supposed to have the power to convince all on its own. His own experience may lead him to feel the power of rhetoric, but his commitment to the compelling force of truth on its own leaves no place for rhetorical assistance.

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 2, "Metaphorics of Truth and Pragmatics of Knowledge"

Blumenberg starts by thematizing the truth value of absolute metaphors. This truth, Blumenberg claims, is pragmatic: absolute metaphors have historically provided a guiding or orienting function with respect to the world as a whole.

Blumenberg suggests that absolute metaphors can no longer perform this function adequately in an era like ours which is conscious of them, and that their function has been increasingly taken up instead by art.

14: "Absolute metaphors 'answer' the supposedly naive, in principle unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence."

14: "[W]e ask once again about the relevance of absolute metaphors, their historical truth. This truth is pragmatic in a very broad sense. By providing a point of orientation, the content of absolute metaphors determines a particular attitude or conduct [Verhalten]; they give structure to a world, representing the nonexperienceable, nonapprehensible totality of the real. To the historically trained eye, they therefore indicate the fundamental certainties, conjectures, and judgments in relation to which the attitudes and expectations, actions and inactions, longings and disappointments, interests and indifferences, of an epoch are regulated."

Cosmos is an answer to the question of what the world as a whole is that has proved enormously durable.

Blumenberg's turns to the metaphor of the mightiness of truth to see what a pragmatic approach to its meaning can uncover. He notes first that the power which is attributed to truth is related to an expectation that it is easy to find. He goes on to note that historically the metaphor emerged in the context of a concern with salvation. It is a characteristic first of all of Hellenistic thought and its therapeutic deployment of truth. Blumenberg argues that this new attitude toward the function of truth is the key to the divergence of Classical and Hellenistic thought. Where truth was the goal and consummation of human existence for Classical philosophy, it becomes a corrective in Hellenistic philosophy. Where Classical philosophy had an expansive agenda for truth , Hellenistic philosophy seeks to create a protected sanctuary for those truths which are necessary for salvation. Although Blumenberg does not make this explicit, the classical idea that truth reveals itself does not seem far off from the ease of finding truth implied by the mightiness of truth. The key change is that perspicuous truth is no longer assumed to be universal, but instead is understood to be restricted to a small set of truths.

Patristic thought takes up this economy of truth, and puts out of bounds as unnatural any inquiry which leads neither to salvation or any practical application. These restrictions on theoretical curiosity lent an air of the forbidden and unnatural to the pursuit of new research. With truth robbed of its naturalness, an explicit consciousness of method involved in acquiring truth comes to the fore.

With Francis Bacon, we get the metaphor of the world as a tribunal where the truth is found out and the association of the concepts of truth and labor.

Aristotelean pure reality -> Medieval pure activity -> world possesses truth because of God's creation -> modern conception of the truth as a product of human effort, and the concomitant valorization of the artificial in art and research.

Blumenberg traces the metaphor of knowledge as work in Descartes, d'Alembert, and Montesquieu. Among the consequences of the metaphor is the valorization of the machines and methods used for investigation. Blumenberg claims this drove development of apparatus and technique ahead even of the actual demands for them -- in a sense, new tools and methods created their own demand for use.

Goethe's attempt to revive the Classical harmony of man and nature involves a commitment to truth as open and self-revealing.

(An epilogue from LTG describing the Classical view: "Truth is there and you just have to look at it.")

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 1, "Metaphorics of the 'Mighty' Truth"

Blumenberg begins by noting the thinness of the conceptual history of truth, which he relates to the parsimony of its definition within the Western philosophical tradition. He suggests that the metaphors associated with the concept of truth are contrastingly rich and supple. He notes that the metaphor of light is most closely associated with the concept of truth, and then he claims that this metaphor must be seen in relation to the unstated but foundational questions regarding the status of truth. 7: "The metaphorics of light cannot be translated back into concepts; analysis seeks to disclose the questions to which answers are sought and risked, questions of a presystematic nature whose intentional fullness 'provoked' the metaphors, as it were." (This insistence that there is a dialogical, question-answer underpinning to concepts reminds me of Blumenberg's approach to historical systems of thought in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age). Some of these "naive" questions regarding truth: how much truth can we have? how easy is it to get? how much is it good for us to have? 7: "These are all questions that barely a philosophical school has attempted to answer with systematic means; we nonetheless maintain that everywhere in the language of philosophy, indications can be found that answers to these questions have always already been given in a subterranean stratum of thought, answers that, although they may not be contained in the systems in propositional form, have never ceased to pervade, tincture, and structure them."

Blumenberg contrasts the metaphors of truth that forces itself on one to the metaphors of truth that must be forced to reveal itself. The former is characteristic of ancient thought up to the time of Aristotle, and is associated with metaphors of light, openness, and transparency. The latter is associated with the Stoics and their doctrine of cataleptic presentation -- an argument which presents evidence so overwhelming that the hearer is compelled to assent (with the presumption being that one would be wary of granting assent). This is associated with the metaphor of imprinting.

The classical metaphorics of powerful, self-activating truth was taken up later in patristic thought and scholasticism. It survives even into the modern era, but more often in a subsidiary function. The force of truth is an assumption, for instance, of Vico's theory of error, but his focus is on the linguistic means by which human beings resist that force. For Hume, there is a skeptical reversal, in which whatever idea compels us most strongly is what we call true (although his view is made palatable by a rather benign teleology of nature).

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Introduction

The Cartesian goal for philosophy -- obtaining truth that is both perspicuous and expressed in unambiguous concepts -- implies the twin redundancy of figurative language and the history of concepts. There is no longer a use for them in a system of thought whose concepts provide a complete and definitive account of the world. But the superfluity of metaphor had been a premise of philosophy from Plato onward. Philosophy has seen metaphor as an a mere adjunct, as a tool used to make an argument more persuasive without changing its content, so that, in principle, a metaphor could be replaced by explicit argument. Blumenberg posits the existence of (and will seek evidence for) metaphors that cannot be replaced in this way, because they provide a foundation for philosophical language. He calls these absolute metaphors. He sees them as akin to the symbols of the ideas of reason in Kant's Critique of Judgment. He notes that calling these metaphors absolute does not mean that they are fixed and their functions cannot be replaced by other metaphors; it only signifies that they cannot be reduced to concepts. This fungibility of absolute metaphors means that they can have a history, and that this history underlies the history of concepts.

Hans Blumenberg, "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric" in After Philosophy: End or Transformation

Related antitheses in philosophical anthropology and rhetoric: man as a rich or a poor creature, rhetoric as the means of communicating truth or of coping with the lack of it.



Formulating the condition of lacking truth as a consequence of an anthropological deficiency implies expanding the domain of rhetoric to include a broad range of conventional interactive behavior.


430-431: "The epistemological situation that Plato imputed to Sophism is radicalized, anthropologically, into the situation of the "creature of deficiencies," for whom everything becomes part of the economy of his means of survival, and who consequently cannot afford rhetoric -- unless he has to afford it. A consequence of this anthropological intensification of the initial conditions is that the concept of a rhetoric that is associated with those conditions must also be formulated in a more elementary of fundamental way. Then the technique of speech appears as a special case of rule-governed modes of behavior that produce something to be understood, set up signs, bring about agreement, or provoke contradiction. Keeping silent, visibly omitting some action in the context of connected behavior, can become just as rhetorical as the reading aloud of an outcry of popular wrath, and the Platonic dialogue is no less rhetorically inclined than the Sophist's instructional discourse, which it opposed by literary means. Even when it is below the threshold of the spoken or written word, rhetoric is form as means, obedience to rules as an instrument."


Philosophical tradition: language as referential, good as what is evident to reason
Rhetorical tradition: language as pragmatic, assumption of the lack of evidentness of the good


The metaphysical tradition has divided the world into two orders -- ideas and nature. Man, awkwardly, doesn't fit on either side of the divide, and in fact seems to be governed by both. This has been solved in the tradition by subordinating one aspect to the other -- and the quashing of this tension means that metaphysics has had no real insight into man.


Rhetoric reflects a fundamental condition of man -- a lack of pregiven structures that order behavior -- action must take the place of automatic processes. What distinguishes man is not language but a deficiency of ready-made behaviors and responses; language is significant for its ability to make up for this deficiency.

433: "Action compensates for the 'indeterminateness' of the creature man, and rhetoric is the effort to produce accords that have to take the place of the 'substantial base of regulatory processes in order to make action possible. From this point of view, language is a set of instruments not for communicating information or truths, but rather, primarily, for the production of mutual understanding, agreement, or toleration, on which the actor depends."

Skepticism creates an opening for coming to terms with the anthropological deficits and determining how to manage them. Blumenberg takes Descartes' provisional ethics -- which was to guide man until the completion of science made a definitive ethics possible -- as an example of the avoidance of this opening. Descartes envisions this provisional ethics as static. Blumenberg notes that this overlooks the possibility of an indefinite delay in accomplishing the project of a complete knowledge. A static provisional ethics avoids dealing with change, fluidity, and indeterminateness in actual circumstances.

435: "The 'method's' promised final accomplishment gets in the way of man's process of self-understanding in the present and also gets in the way of rhetoric as a technique for coming to terms in the provisional state prior to all definitive truths and ethics. Rhetoric creates institutions where evident truths are lacking."

436: "This difference [between persuasion and force] is understood as one of language and education, because persuasion presupposes that one shares a horizon, allusions to prototypical material, and the orientation provided by metaphors and similes. The antithesis of truth and effect is superficial, because the rhetorical effect is not an alternative that one can choose instead of an insight that one could also have, but an alternative to a definitive evidence that one cannot have, or cannot have yet, or at any rate cannot have here and now. Besides, rhetoric is not only the technique of producing such a[n] effect, it is always also a means of keeping the effect transparent: it makes us conscious of effective means whose use does not need to be expressly prescribed, by making explicit what is already done in any case."

The language of shared horizons in the first sentence above sounds strikingly like Gadamer's vision of hermeneutics.

Even science depends on consensus, and hence in a sense rhetoric. But science, as an institution whose work can always be passed on to others, can endure the provisionality of its results indefinitely. Rhetoric assumes a constraint to act.

Rhetoric can substitute a verbal action for a physical one. Cassirer's anthropology sees substitutions of the verbal for the physical as something of a free act of man's symbolic nature, but Blumenberg notes that this creates a discontinuity between what man needs for existence and what his "nature" is. The capacity for symbolic action must be seen in light of its ability to secure man's existence.

On social contract theory as a prototype of an approach that converts what are assumed to be creative expressions of human nature to functional requirements of human existence, 438-439: "What is philosophical about this theory is not primarily that it explains the appearance of an institution like the state (still less that it explains the appearance of the absolutist state), but rather that it converts the supposed definition of man's nature as that of a zoon politikon ['political animal' -- Aristotle] into a functional description. I see no other scientific course for an anthropology except, in an analogous manner, to destroy what is considered 'natural' and convict it of its 'artificiality' in the functional system of elementary human accomplishment called 'life.'"

439: "Man's deficiency in specific dispositions for reactive behavior vis-a-vis reality-- that is, his poverty of instincts -- is the starting point for the central anthropological question as to how this creature is able to exist in spite of his lack of fixed biological dispositions. The answer can be reduced to a formula: by not dealing with this reality directly. The human relation to reality is indirect, circumstantial, delayed, selective, and above all 'metaphorical.'"

Metaphor is not a just a rhetorical ornament, it is the paradigmatic structure of man's rhetorical relationship to reality.

Blumenberg sees this rhetorical relationship extending not just to substituting representations for things, but to substituting actions -- particularly verbal actions -- for other actions which might be more direct and therefore risky. He notes the importance of this for social contexts, and particularly international politics.

Roles are another kind of rhetorical-metaphorical means of managing not just interaction, but identity and self-understanding. (References made to Simmel and Goffman) It works by establishing a framework which retains a sense of consistency and continuity, which is preserved by avoiding contradiction.

442: "The 'agreement' that has to be the goal of all 'persuasion' (even of self-persuasion) is the congruence -- which is endangered in all situations and always has to be secured afresh -- between one's role consciousness and the role expectations that others have of one. Perhaps 'agreement' is too strong a term, because approval would always already go beyond what is called for. Fundamentally, what is important is not to encounter contradiction, both in the internal sense, as a problem relating to consistency, and in the external sense, as a problem relating to acceptance."

Substitution and roles are creations, but unlike artistic production they are not necessarily designed to gain attention. Such creations need to be explicitly recognized in order to affect action, however, and this means that at some point they must have been advocated, campaigned for. I think there is a gesture here toward saying that it is turtles -- which is to say rhetorical conventions -- if not all the way down, then at least as far as is immediately visible. For these rhetorical creations are not just conventions that can be assumed and used, their conventional place is itself the product of a consensus which was arrived at rhetorically.

Blumenberg now introduces an antithesis between rationality -- particularly technical rationality -- and rhetoric: rationality accelerates and "saves" time while rhetoric slows time and delays action. (444-445) The essay turns here to considering rhetoric as a tool for one who does not want to act (or more to the point, react), at least not right away or in the most obvious way. There is an obvious tension with the previous account of rhetoric as the resource of those who are constrained to act -- to the point where a pure delaying tactic like a filibuster is portrayed as belonging to the category of force rather than persuasion (see 437). Certainly Blumenberg is incorporating into his conception of rhetoric here conventions and behaviors which would not be included in it.

These different functions and means of rhetoric, however, simply reflect the different means needed in order to achieve deliberation in different contexts. Rhetoric as a delaying operation serves a characteristically modern need. We are increasingly surrounded with automated processes and rapid access to information. These create momentum for rapid decisions -- or rapid acquiescence to pre-programmed decisions. The rhetorical building of consensus as a ground for action is lost; and different kinds of procedural delays and reviews provide an opportunity to make what is done more a matter of conscious, deliberative action again. There's even a defense here of liberal education for providing a pattern of thinking which isn't just functional and aimed at efficiency.

447: "If classical rhetoric essentially aims at a mandate for action, modern rhetoric seeks to promote the delaying of action, or at least the understanding of such delay -- and it does this especially when it wants to demonstrate its capacity to act, once again by displaying symbolic substitutions."

447 (continuing immediately in next paragraph): "The axiom of all rhetoric is the principle of insufficient reason (principium rationis insufficientis)."

prayer as a form of rhetoric -- which presumes a persuadable God -- what an insight!

Rehabilitation of opinion as opposed to the presumed superiority of knowledge or science, 448: "But the principle of insufficient reason is not to be confused with a demand that we forgo reasons, just as 'opinion' does not denote an attitude for which one has no reasons but rather one for which the reasons are diffuse and not regulated by method."

In practical affairs, where endless inquiry is not feasible, it is irrational to expect that decisions can be justified on the basis of complete knowledge. Even scientific advice as it bears on public affairs is liable to be incomplete, and so while the advice may borrow the dignity of science, it still operates on the plane of persuasion as well. (Curiously, I think in America today there is rather too acute a consciousness of the rhetorical entanglement of scientific recommendations (see the short shrift given to global warming), while the proclamations of business leaders are treated as a kind of pure knowledge.)

Public policy depends on postulates about human beings which have not been and possibly cannot be scientifically validated. In particular, much policy assumes that human beings can be shaped significantly by exogenous factors. If anything, however, scientific methodology leads toward a bias in favor of theories favoring endogenous factors -- because such factors are less diffuse and thus easier to isolate and test. (I think this insight is mostly sound, but recent rethinking about the effects of fetal environment on the inheritance of characteristics through multiple future generations shows that methodology allows for more flexibility than Blumenberg appreciated.) Blumenberg considers such postulates of practical reason (and the reference to Kant is explicit here) as part of the rhetoric of ethics -- they enable us to persuade others (and ourselves) that action to improve our lot is not futile.

Man as the "the subject of history" as a rhetorical assumption of modernity. Metaphors of transfer of power make it easier for individuals and groups to persuade themselves that they have the right and the ability to assume the role of the subject of history.

For Blumenberg, rhetoric is not a surplus creative talent that marks out man as having special dignity. It is a way of coping with not always having the fullness of reason available to us. 452: "... I would like to hold to the idea of seeing in [rhetoric] a form of rationality itself -- a rational way of coming to terms with the provisionality of reason."

Blumenberg's critique of Hobbes' assertion of the superiority of "right reason" over rhetoric (and of today's assertion of the need for "critical reason"): First, how can one determine whether right reason is being employed except through the exercise of right reason? In other words, the critique is circular. Second, rhetoric is, after all, something that men have it in their power to control -- unlike the anti-rhetorical absolute dictatorship that Hobbes prefers.

For Hobbes, reason is based on concepts while rhetoric is based on metaphors, but metaphors do not grapple with the things themselves. Blumenberg notes that Hobbes' own theory of concepts is that they are entirely artificial, and thus they have no natural affinity with the things in themselves, either. Moreover, Hobbes own deduction of the necessity of an absolute state depends on mutually incompatible organic and mechanistic metaphors.

453-454: "Now metaphor is in fact not only a surrogate for concepts that are missing but possible in principle, and should therefore be demanded; it is also a projective principle, which both expands and occupies empty space -- an imaginative procedure that provides itself with its own durability in similes."

Classical polarity: rhetoric as art; reality as nature. But reality today is not simple nature, it is nature mediated through artificial processes (and thus mediated through rhetoric, in the broad sense that Blumenberg uses the term). The admonishment to return "to the things themselves" is itself a rhetorical trope. (455: "If reality could be seen and dealt with 'realistically,' it would have been seen and dealt with that way all along.") Such programs fall short on actually providing the things themselves, and end up focusing rhetorically on the illusions which are supposed to have prevented us from getting to reality.

Man's weakness for rhetoric -- his susceptibility to being influenced -- leads to Blumenberg's final point: there is no transparent relationship to oneself, either. 456: "Man has no immediate, no purely 'internal' relation to himself. His self-understanding has the structure of 'self-externality.'" So there isn't any direct access to our true desires and character that stands cleanly apart from rhetoric; self-persuasion is an intrinsic part of our predicament.

The means that we have to understand ourselves are themselves rhetorical, and foremost among these is the contrast with what we are not -- above all, the contrast with God.

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Chapter 6, "Shipbuilding out of the Shipwreck"

This quirky chapter combines investigation of shipwreck metaphors in the rhetoric of science with a favorite Blumenbergian topos, the question of what can be expected from reason. Blumenberg finds a characteristically hopeful but modest answer from the 19th century physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond, in reference to Darwin's theory of natural selection: it is a plank that keeps us afloat. Here, Blumenberg notes, the actual shipwreck event has been removed from the frame of vision altogether -- it is something that has already happened. In fact, the entire background to the metaphor, the reference to voyages and destinations, has also been so removed. What remains is just survival, though du Bois-Reymond acknowledges that some would take away even that by saying that the plank is but a straw. (73-75).

73-74: "Shipwreck has lost its story setting. What has to be said is that science does not achieve what our wishes and claims had expected of it, but what it does achieve is essentially unsurpassable and suffices to meet the demands of maintaining life."

75: "In the reception histories of metaphors, the more sharply defined and differentiated the imaginitive stock becomes, the sooner the point is reached where there seems to be an extreme inducement to veer around, with the existing model, tn the most decisive way and to try out the unsurpassable procedure of reversing it.
The shipwreck metaphorics seem to have escaped such a reversal, even if the image does seem to be wound backward by considering the shipwrecked man and his efforts to salvage, from what was almost the end of his sea voyage, a Robinson Crusoe-like new beginning of self-preservation."

Paul Lorenzen, in his dispute with the logical positivist Otto Neurath about the difficulties of providing a sound linguistic foundation for thought, resorts to just such a metaphor of shipbuilding from a shipwreck. Neurath had illustrated his position that about the limits of our ability to create language anew by comparing language to a ship on which we are already embarked on an endless voyage, and which can only be repaired as it sails. Lorenzen retorts that the ship had once been built at sea, by our ancestors, from material they found afloat around them. The implication is that it would be possible to jump off the ship and start building anew. Blumenberg remarks that the metaphor actually pulls us a way from such a resolve, however, because of the central position it gives to the security of the already existing ship. (75-78)

78-79: "The demiurgical, Robinson Crusoe longing of the modern age is also present in the handiwork of the constructivist who leaves home and heritage behind in order to found his life on the naked nothingness of the leap overboard. His artificially produced distress at sea does not come about through the frailty of the ship, which is already the end result of a lengthy process of building and rebuilding. But the sea evidently contains material other that what has already been used. Where can it come from, in order to give courage to the ones who are beginning anew? Perhaps from earlier shipwrecks?"

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Chapter 5, "The Spectator Loses his Position"

Now we take up with the shipwreck-with-spectator metaphor in Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer makes the distancing of reason from the turmoil of life the key to his (all-too-Hegelian, according to Blumenberg) philosophy. The human being is both an agent of will, entangled with the pursuit of life, and a subject capable of detachment from this struggle. Appropriately, as Schopenahuer uses the metaphor in his exposition, the distinction between sufferer and spectator is extinguished; man is both at the same time. (59-61)

The distance of the spectator in Schopenhauer's reception of the metaphor is paradigmatically the distance of memory. Because he thinks that we experience pain directly, while happiness is a product of reflection on the absence of suffering, memory is essential to his conception of happiness. (61-63)

Schopenhauer's subject-spectator is also able to look towards the future and recognize that his demise is inevitable, although it is not quite clear whether this too counts in favor of happiness as a withdrawal into contemplation. (63)

Schopenhauer also describes his dual theory of man with another spectator metaphor, this time drawn from theater -- man as one who is both an actor in a drama and a spectator. Schopenhauer depicts the calm distance of the spectator as ultimately an asset to the man of action -- his ideal man is the Stoic. Of course, if the the role of actor is given up entirely, then there is no more life. Blumenberg notes this conclusion had already been drawn by the Enlightenment, which saw calm reason stripped of the passions not as a preparation for action but as its extinction. (64-66)

Heine's story about Boerne is notable for the justification he gives for remaining an unhelpful spectator while his friend ca,me to political grief -- in preserving himself, he was preserving a cultural heritage acquired from Boerne for the future. "This is the frightful formula of all those who refuse the little humanity of the present in order to fulfill the allegedly greater humanity of the future. So the expression used by the poet who sails past the shipwrecked man is of the most singular and frigid precision: ' I was carrying on board my ship the gods of the future.'" (66-67)

Blumenberg sees the reception of the shipwreck metaphor becoming increasingly detached from its original reference to the relationship between man and nature. During the 19th century, the metaphor becomes almost exclusively used to explore the great dilemma of historical knowledge, the tension between objective detachment and human engagement. Burckhardt, in his lecture "On Good and Bad Fortune in World History," holds that the historian must avoid a focus on fortune or misfortune, personal hope or despair, because these have a merely particular, subjective relationship to events. Nevertheless, he sees history as having the unity of a single dramatic narrative for an ideal spectator unattached to any particular interest - though this ideal of pure narrative knowledge can never actually be realized by the historian. (Here, once again, Blumenberg discovers a thinker in danger of becoming the Hegel he is struggling against.) (67-69)

Burckhardt paradoxical seafaring metaphor for historical knowledge -- the historian is a sailor who would like to see the wave his ship is riding, but he himself is the wave. (69-73)

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Chapter 4, "The Art of Survival"

Here Blumenberg turns his attention to a kind of political deployment of the shipwreck metaphor. The touchpoint of the discussion is Goethe's reaction to the French victory over Prussia at Jena, as reported decades later by his contemporary Heinrich Luden. Goethe disappointed Luden (as he would disappoint German nationalists again by meeting Napoleon a year later) by adopting an aloof pose with respect to the event, referring to his situation as that of a spectator to a shipwreck.


Blumenberg points out that a younger Goethe had himself once been annoyed by the pose of political spectatorship. He had used the image of Voltaire observing storms in a mirror from his bed to mock a poem of his contemporary Gessner. Essential to understanding this annoyance is that Voltaire portrayed his lakeside residences as havens free from political interference or involvement -- they were part of a pose of autarkic indifference he fashioned for himself.

Blumenberg asks: "What has changed?" His answer takes us back to the purpose behind Lucretius' philosophy, which was to above all to liberate men's minds from fear of natural events. Even the fear of human action that exposes men to disaster can be neutralized, once human action itself is understood as governed by drives and passions that are themselves part of nature. (In fact, Blumenberg sees Voltaire's inclusion of curiosity among men's passions, and thus his nature, as in this sense a step to realizing the full potential of Epicurean philosophy).

Goethe's dispassionate spectatorship, on the other hand, is notable for its disciplined resistance to natural feeling -- its studied artificiality. Goethe observed the battlefield of Jena a year later and discussed the event without betraying any feeling at all. In respect to this, Blumenberg makes an observation about Goethe's stance that is difficult to interpret. "The observer of the battlefield appeals to the ancient poet's comparison precisely in order to protect his history from history per se, insofar as the latter is always, and must remain, the history of others. However, it is no longer possible to put historical catastrophes on the same footing with physical ones." (52) (Why "no longer"? And is this meant globally or just about Goethe?)

At this point, Blumenberg takes an excursus to ask what use Hegel made of Lucretius' metaphor for his philosophy of history. Hegel incorporates the metaphor into account of how reflection transforms perception of the apparent suffering and tragedy in the world. Reflection reveals that these world-historical travails contribute to the deeper rational order of the progress of freedom.

Goethe is not in sympathy with either Lucretius' philosophy or Hegel's. Goethe sees the aim of Lucretius' philosophy -- overcoming the fear of death -- as fundamentally in conflict with being human. In Goethe's invocation of the shipwreck metaphor, the key to the sense of distance is not reflection but rather escape from danger. It is not the spatial distance of an observer in real time, but the temporal distance of a survivor recollecting his own shipwreck.

Blumenberg notes Goethe's temporal configuration of the shipwreck metaphor in another instance -- a consolation letter to his friend Zelter -- and remarks that it again puts the focus on personal survival. He then pursues the peculiar image which concludes Goethe's use of the shipwreck motif in his letter -- "the sea already is hungry for figs again." (56) Blumenberg notes that this classical saying, perhaps taken up via Erasmus, showed up in a number of configurations, but he takes special notice of its use in a story about a sailor who is shipwrecked once carrying a cargo of figs, and demurs taking to the seas again.

Finally, Blumenberg draws attention to another of Goethe's seafaring metaphors -- the metaphor of the ship's trace which disappears behind it, which he uses in his critique of the Enlightenment's expectations of progress.

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Chapter 3, "Aesthetics and Ethics of the Spectator"

I learned from taking notes on the first two chapters that it's hard to get a handle on Blumenberg's approach to his material. It isn't an argument in any usual sense, nor is it a typology or a narrative. His organization is loosely thematic, in that he takes up some variant or aspect of the seafaring metaphor and examines it for some stretch before moving on to another topic. Within his exploration of these topics, he tends to follow the series of treatments chronologically, but not rigidly so. So while there is no overarching account of either the structure or the genesis of the metaphor, there is episodic insight into both. In pursuit of a better understanding of sum of these insights, I will seek to record not just Blumenberg's observations about the different treatments of seafaring metaphors, but the logic of his transitions, insofar as I understand them.


In the image of the shipwreck with spectator, the spectator carries on the ancient ideal of theory as contemplation, but with a new object. Instead of the cosmos, the object of contemplation is man's own consciousness. (26-27)


Lucretius describes the forms of the natural world as being like debris from a shipwreck thrown up from an inexhaustible ocean of atoms -- making the point that man would do well to remain a spectator to these forms instead of trying to comprehend them. The birth of a human being is also depicted as a kind of shipwreck, like a sailor being thrown ashore from the sea. The notion that seafaring is unnatural informs these uses of the shipwreck metaphor. This analogy is metaphorical and literal at the same time -- seaborne commerce really is driven by a refusal to accept all limits to desires as natural limits. Remaining content within the boundaries of natural needs = staying ashore. Wanting and pursuing in excess of those needs = taking to the seas and risking shipwreck. (27-29)

The Enlightenment, by contrast, sees the danger of shipwreck as the price that must be paid in order for their to be wind, and therefore sea commerce, at all. (29)

29: "In complete contrast to this, it will be one of the fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment that shipwreck is the price that must be paid in order to avoid that complete calming of the sea winds that would make all worldly commerce impossible. Through this figure is expressed a justification of the passiones, the passions, against which philosophy discriminates: pure reason would mean the absence of winds and the motionlessness of human beings who possess complete presence of mind."


This formulation of the Enlightenment attitude is taken almost directly from the debate between Herostratus of Ephesus and Demetrius of Phalerum in Fontanelle's Dialogues of the Dead -- with the omission of an explicit reference to the possibility of shipwreck. (The context is that Herostratus, destroyer of the temple of Ephesus, is arguing for an equal claim to fame with Demetrius, who had erected 360 statues in Athens, because the destructive work of the passions is a prerequisite for clearing the ground in order for new human achievement to be possible.) (29-30)


Blumenberg proceeds to another dialogue from Fontanelle's work in which shipwreck is thematized -- the argument between Margaret of Austria and Hadrian about whose death was better. In the case of Margaret, this was an imagined death by shipwreck rather than her actual one. Margaret sees her reckoning with this death, expressed in a poem, as superior because it was not planned ahead of time. Hadrian sees his as superior because his calm acceptance, also expressed in poetry, achieves the classical ideal. Hadrian poses the question whether her poem was not actually composed after her brush with shipwreck, to which Margaret counterposes the question whether his poem was not actually composed well before his death. The dialogue is resolved on the acceptance of moderation even in virtue. Blumenberg finds irony both in the ultimately unacknowledged fact that the poetic ideal was separated from actualization in both cases, and in the exaggerated metaphysical distance of the interlocutors from the human predicament in that they are dead and thus beyond any threat of disaster. (30-32)


A shipwreck metaphor also comes up in Fontenelle's pioneering Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, which imagines the Earth as it would be seen through the higher rationality of an intelligent alien. The work's protagonist, the marquise, boldly wishes for a shipwreck of such aliens on the Earth so she could see what they look like. She has to be warned, none too successfully, that the aliens could reverse the role of spectator and specimen, since they could just as well catch her like a fish as be shipwrecked. (32-33)


Voltaire and his circle focus on the passions as the indispensable moving force in human existence. Candide, for instance, may retreat to his garden in the end. But he does not start with renunciation like Lucretius' spectator. Rather, it is the actual experience of the arbitrariness of shipwreck which extinguishes his passion for believing that things could be better. In the Marquise de Chatelet's "On Happiness," reflection is portrayed as a force that delays action until it is too late to achieve happiness. She counsels that time is short, and feeling and thinking must not be delayed by too much careful preparation -- like a ship always in port being caulked rather than being made use of while it could. For Voltaire, moreover, even the role of spectator with shipwreck is seen as the result of a passion -- curiosity -- rather than, as Lucretius would have it, as an opportunity to dispassionately comprehend one's own security. And he believes that animals share the passion of curiosity. (34-36+)

Voltaire describes himself in his letters as shipwrecked when he hastily escapes from the Prussian king. Compares his feeling of security to that of passengers who are saved from a shipwreck, and look back at their experience from a safe harbor -- but then goes on to express doubt that there is a safe harbor in the world. (37)

Voltaire's Micromegas describes a shipwreck caused by curious alien giants examining what, to them, are tiny vessels -- so small that they are unable to perceive the men in them at all. Through this story, Voltaire hopes to illustrate triviality of human history. Here Blumenberg says that man is removed from the possibility of even being a spectator, as in Fontanelle's story, of more advanced beings , and is only an object -- but in fact it seems he is not even that! (37-38)

Voltaire takes on Lucretius' account of the spectator again in his article "Curiosity" for the Encyclopedia. He shows his revulsion with an analogy to an angel who would use his observation of the sufferings of the damned as an occasion to reflect on his his own imperviousness to suffering; this angel, according to Voltaire, would be indistinguishable from a devil. And he goes on to say that it is his experience and that of others that curiosity rather than taking pleasure in safety drives people to gawk at a shipwreck. (38-39)

Abbe Galiani contradicts Voltaire in a letter to Madame d'Epinay. Curiosity only exists where there is security, he contends, otherwise men would be occupied with his own immediate concerns. Moreover, animals do not share the ability to be curious, because they lack the capacity of detachment from what is strange and frightening, and the sense of security it brings. Galiani forgoes the shipwreck metaphor altogether in his argument, preferring the to illustrate his point with the image of a theater. There, spectator are able to take interest in the drama because they are sheltered and secure. Blumenberg notes that the dangers of the spectacle to which the audience devotes its interest are not even real, so that in preferring this metaphor to that of the shipwreck Galiani aestheticizes what was originally a moral relationship. In suppressing the shipwreck metaphor in this case, Blumenberg also sees an abandonment of the classical implication of precarious human existence in the face of nature. Instead, in his Dialogues sur la commerce des bles, Galiani portrays the relationship between man and nature as a somewhat equal struggle between to indefinite powers. And so seafaring and shipwreck metaphors are made available for use to illustrate the proper prudence of administration informed by the best available evidence. (39-41)

Blumenberg notes that the first appearance of the shipwreck with spectator theme in German comes in Ewald's short poem Der Sturm from 1755. The poem has an intense, present tense description of a storm and shipwreck, with a an abrupt transition to a past tense coda when the topic switches to the "I" which is revealed to have been only a spectator. (41-42)


Blumenberg takes this as an opportunity to revisit Horace's employment of the shipwreck and spectator theme. Here the spectator's interest is justified by an attempt to warn the battered ship to return to port -- the involvement is moral rather than aesthetic. This leads to a reflection on the relative degree of involvement of Cicero's narrator and the narrator of the Greek poet Alcaeus' shipwreck story (which Cicero had used as his model). Although Alcaeus' narrator's experiences the storm aboard the boat, his involvement is in a way both more passive, because it is the perspective of confused immediacy, and more detached, since it is the view of an even that has passed. The orientation of Cicero's narrator, on the other hand, is toward the future, and an attempt to prevent the imminent peril to the ship. In this sense, the view from the Alcaeus' surviving passenger is more that of a spectator, than is the view of Cicero's actual spectator. (42-43)

And from here, we have a remarkably stream-of-consciousness set of transitions. Blumenberg notes that Ewald's poem was written in 1755, the year of the Lisbon earthquake which shattered Leibnizean metaphysical optimism. Then he notes that Herder, in turn, used the shipwreck metaphor in 1792 to describe the relationship between the German public and the French Revolution. He then turns to trace the succession of Herder's use of seafaring references, starting back in 1769. In that year, when he sailed from Riga to visit the Enlightenment thinkers in France, he uses sea exploration as a metaphor for philosophical discovery. On the return voyage the next year, Herder was shipwrecked on the Dutch coast; though it does not seem that Herder himself made this into a metaphor of anything, Blumenberg notes the irony of the sea intransigently asserting its power in light of the previous year's remarks. By 1774, Herder is using the shipwreck metaphor to express the current situation of philosophy in his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. In his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity of 1792, he turns this metaphor, and the metaphor of the theater, to the task of accounting for the reception of the French Revolution in Germany. He sees the relationship between the events in France and the German public as a comfortably distant one (secured by the difference of language) akin to that between spectators and actors, or a spectator and a shipwreck. Blumenberg notes that the shipwreck metaphor is deployed with an unusual destabilizing twist, however: Herder suggests that a demon toss the spectator into the sea. Also, as with Galiani, Blumenberg notes that the shipwreck is presented as the superficial level of a more profound metaphor of theatrics. (43-46)