Work on Myth

719 Pages·1988·64.81 MB·English

by  Hans Blumenberg

Work on Myth
Hans Blumenberg
translated by Robert M. Wallace
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought
Thomas McCarthy, general editor
Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique
Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms
Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective
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Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy the Modern Age
Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth
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Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development Critical Theory
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships
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Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age Science
Jiirgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles
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Jiirgen Habennas, editor, Observations on ~The Spiritual Situation the Age"
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Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics Historical Time
if
Claus Offe, Contradictions the Welfare State
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Helmut Peukert, Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology
Communicative Action
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Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy Right
Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and Structuralist
of
Theories History
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Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology Husserl, Heidegger,
Sartre, and Buber
Work on Myth
This translation copyright © 1985 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This work
originally appeared in Gennan as Arbeit am Mythos, © 1979 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt
am Main, Federal Republic of Germany.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means {including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval} without pennission in writing from the publisher.
Publication of this volume has been aided by a grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
This book was set in Baskerville by The MIT Press Computergraphics Department
and printed and bound by Halliday Lithograph in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Blumenberg, Hans.
Work on myth.
{Studies in contemporary Gennan social thought}
Translation of: Arbeit am Mythos.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. History-Philosophy. 2. Civilization-Philosophy.
3. Myth. I. Title. II. Series.
DI6.8.B63131985 901 85-118
ISBN 0-262-02215-X
Contents
..
Translator's Introduction
Vll
Part I
Archaic Division of Powers
1 After the Absolutism of Reality 3
2 The Name Breaks into the Chaos of the Unnamed 34
3 'Significance' 59
4 Procedural Regulations 113
Part II
Stories Become History
1 The Distortion of Temporal Perspective 149
2 Fundamental Myths and Art Myths 174
3 Myths and Dogmas 215
4 To Bring Myth to an End 263
Part III
The Theft of Fire Ceases to Be Sacrilege
1 The Reception of the Sources Produces the Sources of 299
the Reception
2 Sophists and Cynics: Antithetical Aspects' of the 328
Prometheus Material
3 Return from Existential Groundlessness 350
4 Aesthetic Brightening Up 377
Part IV
Against a God, Only a God
Introduction 399
1 "Priming Powder for an Explosion" 403
2 A Conflict between Gods 430
3 Prometheus Becomes Napoleon, Napoleon Prometheus 465
4 Ways of Reading the "Extraordinary Saying" 523
Part V
The Titan in His Century
1 Passage through the Philosophy of History 561
2 On the Rock of Mute Solitude Again 595
3 To Bring to an End, If Not Myth, Then at Least One 627
Myth
Notes 639
Name Index 679
Translator's Introduction
1. Our Antithetical Attitudes to Myth
In Work on Myth Hans Blumenberg addresses a question that has
bothered European thinkers since at least the late seventeenth century,
namely, why, with the triumphant advance of secular, scientific ra
tionality, have the old myths not simply evaporated into thin air?rt
How is it that they have maintained and even increased their hold
on (at least) our literary imaginations?The Enlightenment in general
followed Descartes in categorizing myths among the "prejudices" that
had to swept away in order to make room for the methodical
~be
development and application of scientific knowledge. Romanticism,
particularly in Germany, reacted against this jettisoning of tradition,
and against the unsatisfYing incompleteness and tentativeness of science,
by calling either for a "new mythology" or (more often) for a return
to our old, inherited myths. An appreciation and employment of
mythical themes, which could (with some effort) be interpreted as
indicating the possible return of an encompassing mythical world view,
had in fact been evident even in the midst of the "scientific revolution"
of the seventeenth century-witness writers like Racine and Milton
and this has continued right into the twentieth century, with Joyce,
Valery, Kafka, Thomas Mann, and many others. But theorists are still
not sure what to make of it. Our usual interpretations of science,
whether rationalist, empiricist, positivist, or vvhatever, are all still very
much in the Enlightenment tradition, and ilnply a role for Inyth in
the modem age which is restricted exclusively to the aesthetic ilnagi-
Vlll
Translator's Introduction
nation and is assumed to have no bearing on the preeminent role of
scientific rationality in our serious, practical lives. On the other hand,
those who concern themselves extensively with myth, such as literary
scholars, anthropologists, and psychologists, often tend toward the
other, Romantic extreme-interpreting myth's modem survival as
evidence of its being, in one way or another, inherent in human nature
and even, given its seemingly greater antiquity and ubiquity, of its
being more fundamental to human nature than our ("surface")
rationality.
Blumenberg undertakes precisely to overcome this antithesis, to
extract the truth from the Enlightenment and from Romanticism by
showing that scientific rationality and ongoing "work" on our inherited
myths are not only not incompatible but are both indispensable aspects
of the comprehensive effort that makes human existence possible.
2. A Non-Romantic Alternative to the Enlightenment's
Conception of the Relation between Rationality and Myth:
The Overcoming of the Absolutism of Reality
The last German philosopher to address these questions at length was
Ernst Cassirer. Cassirer was a leading heir of Kant, whose philosophy
b
can be seen as the culmination (in the realm of theory) of the Enlight
enment; but Cassirer's wide reading in the Romantic writers and in
ethnology, his reading of Freud, and finally his agonizing observation
of the role played by "myths" (of the "Fuhrer" and the "master race,"
for example) in Nazism led him to treat the subject more seriously
and more systematically than any philosopher had done before him.
With his theory of "symbolic forms," he tried to do justice to myth's
internal coherence and power by giving it a status equal to that of
knowledge, language, art, and religion, as a fundamental human activity
and construction that could not be dismissed (in the eighteenth-century
manner) as mere fable, mental cobwebs, or "prejudice."
While Blumenberg honors Cassirer's work on this problem (as on
others), he has one fundamental criticism of Cassirer's theory: That
c
he did not manage to overcome the unstated assumption that once
science emerges, myth, despite its supposedly autonomous dignity as
a "symbolic form," is fundamentally obsolete; that once the step "from
mythos to logos" has been taken, it can only be perverse to, as it
were, tum back. If the relation of myth to science is conceived in this
IX
Translator's Introduction
way-as it probably is by most of us who are neither programmatic
Romantics nor specialized students of myth-then (a) the "primitive"
people for whom myth is still a living reality have to be seen as being
largely, if not entirely, deprived of an essential symbolic form (logos,
or science), one that is preferable to the distinctive one that they do
enjoy; (b) the mythical patterns that Freud discovered in the unconscious
are, at most, relics of a (personal and perhaps historical) childhood
that we have left behind us; (c) the role of myth in modem literature
is, at most, that of an object of aesthetic experience, having no bearing
on the practical business of life; and (d) Nazism's relation to myth is
that of an incomprehensible reversion, the reversion before which
Cassirer, in The Myth of the State, stood aghast.
Is this the only rational way to interpret these phenomena? Is there
any alternative to Cassirer's Enlightenment schema of the replacement
of myth by science, other than a Romantic synthesis of the two, which
would amount to a denial of the autonomy of science as a "symbolic
form" (thus casting doubt on the Romantics' commitment to ration
ality)? Blumenberg proposes that instead of always interpreting myth
in terms of what it (supposedly) came before-its terminus ad quem,
science, the arrival of which appears to make it obsolete-we should
try interpreting it in terms of its terminus a quo, its point of departure.
That point of departure is the problem that myth seeks to solve, which
is the source of its real (and lasting) importance, regardless of what
(if anything) comes 'after' it.-::-
What is that problem? Blumenberg calls it the "absolutism of reality."
This phrase designates a situation in which "man comes close to not
having control of the conditions of his existence and, what is more
important, believes that he simply lacks control of them. This is to
"<I
be understood as a "limit concept," which, while it may never have
been fully realized, is a necessary extrapolation, a "limiting case" that
makes sense of what we do observe in myth and in the rest of human
history. In particular, it is consistent, Blumenberg says, with cun-ent
theories of the origin of man - of what happened when our ancestors
adopted an upright, bipedal posture; were displaced from the sheltering
·::Throughout this book, single quotation marks have been lIsed exclusively as 'scare quotes,'
to draw attention to special uses of terms or to emphasize (as ill this case) the problematic
status, in the discussion, of the concepts referred to by the words in question. The only
exception to this mle is a quotation within a quotation (i.e., within a set of double quotes),
which requires single quotation marks for contrast.