Hans Blumenberg's Anthropology of Instrumental Reason Culture, Modernity, and Self-Preservation

311 Pages·2017·1.73 MB·English

by  Lauren Bliss

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Hans Blumenberg’s Anthropology of Instrumental Reason
Culture, Modernity, and Self-Preservation

Francis Plagne
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9600-4609

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne
June 2017

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Abstract:

This thesis argues that a notion of biological self-preservation is central to the philosophical
anthropology of Hans Blumenberg. It shows how Blumenberg adopts an understanding of
the human being developed in early 20th century German Philosophical Anthropology,
particularly in the naturalistic variant proposed by Arnold Gehlen. This theory of the human
argues that the unique biological make-up of the human being should be the central
consideration in the interpretation of human life and its production (culture). Against the
backdrop of an archaic experience of the power of nature that he calls ‘the absolutism of
reality’, Blumenberg adopts this ‘anthropobiological’ paradigm and uses it as the basis for a
functional interpretation of culture centred on human self-preservation.
The thesis demonstrates that this philosophical anthropology is not only descriptive,
but also has normative and critical aspects. Blumenberg proposes an unsurpassable limit in
the possible transformations of the human relationship to nature, denying the possibility of a
receptive opening to nature that would break with instrumental mastery. This anthropological
limit is formulated in critical dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s work and Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, both of which look forward to a
reconciled relationship between the human and non-human.
It then argues that Blumenberg’s interpretation and defence of modernity is also
grounded in his philosophical anthropology. His account of modernity through the category
of ‘self-assertion’ functions as a complete reversal of the critique of instrumental reason in
Heidegger and Critical Theory. Blumenberg celebrates the modern intensification of the
instrumental relationship to nature as the moment in which humanity first properly
recognised and accepted its true relation to nature. Only by reading Blumenberg in dialogue
with the critique of instrumental reason can these implications of his anthropological position
and account of modernity be brought to the surface.

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Declaration:
This is to certify that:
(i) The thesis comprises only my original work toward the PhD.
(ii) Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used.
(iii) The thesis is fewer than 100, 000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps,
bibliographies, and appendices.

Francis Plagne

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Acknowledgments
I would like to extend my gratitude to my supervisors, John Rundell and Gerhard
Wiesenfeldt, for the expertise, support, enthusiasm, and critical feedback that enabled the
successful completion of this thesis. I am extremely grateful to Lauren Bliss for insightfully
and attentively reading and commenting on the whole manuscript. I thank Michael Ascroft,
James Field, and Simone Gustafsson for reading and responding to unfinished versions of
some of the chapters. For many hours of conversation and help with some translations, my
thanks go out to Giles Fielke.

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Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations.................................................................................................................7
Note on Translations..................................................................................................................8

Introduction..............................................................................................................................9

Chapter 1: Central Themes of Philosophical Anthropology..............................................19
1.1. Max Scheler: Human World-Openness.............................................................................21
1.2. Arnold Gehlen’s Anthropobiology....................................................................................27

Chapter 2: Wresting Significance from the Status Naturalis.............................................37
2.1. Blumenberg’s Anthropogenetic Scenario.........................................................................37
2.2. The Work of Myth.............................................................................................................44
2.3. Significance.......................................................................................................................52
2.4. Mythical and Scientific Logos...........................................................................................59
2.5. The Status of Blumenberg’s Anthropology......................................................................71

Chapter 3: Constructive and Receptive Anthropologies....................................................79
3.1. Against Heidegger.............................................................................................................79
3.2. Contrasting Images of the Human Being..........................................................................90
3.3. Shaping Reality Through Metaphor..................................................................................92

Chapter 4: Dogma and Utopia............................................................................................101
4.1. Jacob Taubes’ Critique of Blumenberg...........................................................................102
4.2. Romanticism and Idealism..............................................................................................117
4.3. Dogma and Utopia..........................................................................................................124
4.4. Blumenberg’s Defence of Existing Institutions..............................................................137
4.5. Concluding Remarks.......................................................................................................144

Chapter 5: ‘Other Possibilities’..........................................................................................149
5.1. Two Naturalistic Anthropologies ...................................................................................153

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5.2. The Rational Function of Myth in Blumenberg..............................................................155
5.3. The Rational Function of Myth in Horkheimer and Adorno...........................................162
5.4. The Ambivalence of Myth..............................................................................................165
5.5. Instrumental and Mimetic Magic....................................................................................171
5.6. Instrumental and Mimetic Language...............................................................................184
5.7. Contrasting Horizons.......................................................................................................187

Chapter 6: Modernity as Self-Assertion.............................................................................193
6.1. Modernity as the Epoch of Instrumental Reason............................................................196
6.2. What is the ‘Legitimacy’ of the Modern Age?
Blumenberg Against the Secularisation Thesis......................................................................207
6.3. Blumenberg’s Interpretation of Modernity as Human Self-Assertion............................223
6.4. Aspects of Self-Assertion................................................................................................238
6.5. Late Modernity: Science’s Autonomy from Life............................................................258

Chapter 7: Outcomes and Limitations of Blumenberg’s Anthropology.........................263
7.1. The Human Self-Image in Modernity.............................................................................263
7.2. Self-Assertion and Self-Preservation..............................................................................270
7.3. The Anthropological Defence of Instrumental Reason...................................................276
7.4. Limitations of Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology............................................283

Bibliography.........................................................................................................................293

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List of abbreviations

Works by Hans Blumenberg:

AAR: ‘An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric’.
Translated by Robert M. Wallace. In After Philosophy: End or Transformation, edited by
Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, 429-58. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1987.
AM: Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979.
ÄMS: Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften. Edited by Anselm Haverkamp.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001.
BM: Beschreibung des Menschen. Edited by Manfred Sommer. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006.
BTB: Hans Blumenberg and Jacob Taubes. Briefwechsel 1961-1981. Edited by Herbert
Kopp-Oberstebrink and Martin Treml. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2013.
GCW: The Genesis of the Copernican World. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1987.
LMA: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 1983.
PM: Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Translated by Robert Savage. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2010.
PNC: ‘Prospect for a Theory of Non-Conceptuality,’ in Shipwreck With Spectator: Paradigm
of a Metaphor for Existence. Translated by Steven Rendall, 81-102. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 1997.
WM: Work on Myth. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985.

Works by other authors:

BT: Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: State
University of New York Press, 1996.
BW: Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper
Collins, 1977.
DE: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
ER: Max Horkheimer. Eclipse of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.

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Note on Translations
All alterations to published translations have been noted, with two exceptions: I have
removed the unnecessary capitalisation of ‘Being’ in texts by and about Martin Heidegger
and italicised all foreign words (including Dasein). Where a translation and original German
text are cited in one note, they are separated by a forward slash (/).

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Introduction
The work of Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) embraces a wide variety of topics that bridge
philosophy and intellectual history. In a series of major books, he analysed the emergence of
modernity and the modern sciences, focusing in particular on the development and
consequences of Copernican astronomy.1 He theorised the genesis and reception of myth and
metaphor, often by means of histories of the reception and reconfiguration of particular myths
(primarily drawn from Greek mythology)2 and metaphors (such as the Platonic exit from the
cave,3 the book of nature,4 and light as a figure for truth).5 These historical and philological
studies were accompanied by works of what Anselm Haverkamp calls ‘more pointed theory
construction’,6 particularly in the form of essays that directly addressed the philosophical
anthropology at play across much of Blumenberg’s discussion of myth and metaphor.7
The intentions behind many of Blumenberg’s historical and philological
investigations can sometimes be obscure, as they do not always betray a clear relationship to
an overarching philosophical agenda. In many of his writings on particular historical and
philosophical topics, Blumenberg makes a contribution to understanding those topics without
necessarily articulating a broader philosophical insight. His writings can be disorienting in
their digressiveness, at times seemingly impelled only by the desire to exhaustively transmit
his enormously wide reading. The fragmented and anecdotal nature of some of his later

1 See GCW, LMA, and the earlier studies collected in Hans Blumenberg, Die kopernikanische Wende
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965).
2 See the long account of the reception of the myth of Prometheus in WM, 299-636.
3 Blumenberg, Höhlenausgänge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989).
4 Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981).
5 Blumenberg, ‘Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stages of Philosophical Concept
Formation’, trans. Joel Anderson, in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30-62.
6 Anselm Haverkamp, ‘Die Technik der Rhetorik: Blumenbergs Projekt’, in ÄMS, 435.
7 The most important of these are AAR (originally published in 1971) and PNC (originally published
in 1979).

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books,8 composed of sometimes tenuous thematic groupings of short pieces (often originally
published in the feuilleton pages of newspapers such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) seems fitting for a thinker who is said to have prepared for
writing by collecting quotations on index cards. These cards were then worked through one
by one and marked as ‘used’ when they had been integrated into the finished text.9 As Angus
Nicholls writes, Blumenberg’s work is ‘materialist’ in the sense that his ideas and theoretical
reflections are usually developed in the course of in-depth commentaries on historical
materials, rather than being presented as the result of theoretical speculation.10
This thesis does not attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of Blumenberg’s
work.11 Instead, it is a study of his philosophical anthropology that argues for the centrality of
the notion of self-preservation to the theory of the human presented in Blumenberg’s work.12
In this interpretation, I draw primarily on Blumenberg’s anthropological writings of the
1970s (which culminate in Work on Myth, originally published in 1979) and the interpretation
of modernity developed in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (originally published in 1966,
then expanded across three volume in a second edition published in 1974) and other related

8 See, for example, Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2010).
9 See Angus Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (New
York: Routledge, 2015), 8.
10 Ibid.
11 Such a work is needed in English. The existing English monographs on Blumenberg treat specific
topics of his thought. Elizabeth Brient’s The Immanence of the Infinite: Hans Blumenberg and the
Threshold to Modernity (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2001) is narrowly
concerned with the argument of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, of which it gives one of the best
analyses. Much of Brient’s book is dedicated to a critique and rectification of what she sees as
Blumenberg’s flawed reading of Nicholas of Cusa. Angus Nicholls’ Myth and the Human Sciences,
although more directly engaged with Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology and broader in its
approach, is primarily concerned with Blumenberg as a theorist of myth, developing an interpretation
of Blumenberg’s position on myth in relation to the experience and aftermath of National Socialism.
In addition to a number of studies of particular facets of his work, there exists in German a general
overview of Blumenberg’s work, but at an introductory level: Franz Josef Wetz, Hans Blumenberg:
zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2004). A comprehensive listing of major literature on Blumenberg
can be found in Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 34-35.
12 I use the gender-neutral designations ‘human being’ and ‘humanity’ whenever possible, but when
directly paraphrasing Blumenberg, Gehlen, or Heidegger, I occasionally use the word ‘man’ to
translate der Mensch.

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