In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Löwith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the world from outside. Instead, Blumenberg argues, the idea of progress always implies a process at work within history, operating through an internal logic that ultimately expresses human choices and is legitimized by human self-assertion, by man's responsibility for his own fate.
The Readability of the World represents Hans Blumenberg's first extended demonstration of the metaphorological method he pioneered in Paradigms for a Metaphorology. For Blumenberg, metaphors are symptomatic of patterns of thought and feeling that escape conceptual formulation but are nonetheless indispensable, because they allow humans to orient themselves in an otherwise overwhelming world. The Readability of the World applies this method to the idea that the world presents itself as a book. The metaphor of the book of nature has been central to Western interpretations of reality, and Blumenberg traces the evolution of this metaphor from ancient Greek cosmology to the model of the genetic code to access the different expectations of reality that it articulates, reflects, and projects. Writing with equal authority on literature and science, theology and philosophy, ancient metaphysics and twentieth-century biochemistry, Blumenberg advances rich and original interpretations of the thinking of a range of canonical figures, including Berkeley, Vico, Goethe, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bacon, Flaubert, and Freud. Through his interdisciplinary, anthropologically sharpened gaze, Blumenberg uncovers a wealth of new insights into the continuities and discontinuities across human history of the longing to contain all of nature, history, and reality in a book, from the Bible, the Talmud, and the Qur'an to Diderot's Encyclopedia and Humboldt's Cosmos to the ACGT of the DNA code.
History, Metaphors, and Fables collects the central writings by Hans Blumenberg and covers topics such as on the philosophy of language, metaphor theory, non-conceptuality, aesthetics, politics, and literary studies. This landmark volume demonstrates Blumenberg's intellectual breadth and gives an overview of his thematic and stylistic range over four decades. Blumenberg's early philosophy of technology becomes tangible, as does his critique of linguistic perfectibility and conceptual thought, his theory of history as successive concepts of reality", his anthropology, or his studies of literature. History, Metaphors, Fables allows readers to discover a master thinker whose role in the German intellectual post-war scene can hardly be overestimated.
What role do metaphors play in philosophical language? Are they impediments to clear thinking and clear expression, rhetorical flourishes that may well help to make philosophy more accessible to a lay audience, but that ought ideally to be eradicated in the interests of terminological exactness? Or can the images used by philosophers tell us more about the hopes and cares, attitudes and indifferences that regulate an epoch than their carefully elaborated systems of thought? In Paradigms for a Metaphorology, originally published in 1960 and here made available for the first time in English translation, Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) approaches these questions by examining the relationship between metaphors and concepts. Blumenberg argues for the existence of "absolute metaphors" that cannot be translated back into conceptual language. "Absolute metaphors" answer the supposedly naïve, theoretically 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. They leap into a void that concepts are unable to fill. An afterword by the translator, Robert Savage, positions the book in the intellectual context of its time and explains its continuing importance for work in the history of ideas.
In this accessible collection of short meditations on various topics, Blumenberg works as a detective of ideas scouring the periphery of intellectual and philosophical history for clues--metaphors, gestures, anecdotes--essential to grasping human finitude.
For distinguished philosopher Hans Blumenberg, lions were a life-long obsession. Lions, translated by Kári Driscoll, collects thirty-two of Blumenberg's philosophical vignettes to reveal that the figure of the lion unites two of his other great preoccupations: metaphors and anecdotes as non-philosophical forms of knowledge. Each of these short texts, sparkling with erudition and humor, is devoted to a peculiar leonine presence--or, in many cases, absence--in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and politics. From Ecclesiastes to the New Testament Apocrypha, Dürer to Henri Rousseau, Aesop and La Fontaine to Rilke and Thomas Mann, the extraordinary breadth of Blumenberg's knowledge and intellectual curiosity is on full display. Lions has much to offer readers, both those already familiar with Blumenberg's oeuvre and newcomers looking for an introduction to the thought of one of Germany's most important postwar philosophers.
St. Matthew Passion is Hans Blumenberg's sustained and devastating meditation on Jesus's anguished cry on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Why did this abandonment happen, what does it mean within the logic of the Gospels, how have believers and nonbelievers understood it, and how does it live on in art? With rare philological acuity and vast historical learning, Blumenberg unfolds context upon context in which this cry has reverberated, from early Christian apologetics and heretics to twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Blumenberg's guide through this unending story of divine abandonment is Johann Sebastian Bach's monumental Matthäuspassion, the parabolic mirror that bundled eighteen hundred years of reflection on the fate of the crucified and the only available medium that allows us post-Christian listeners to feel the anguish of those who witnessed the events of the Passion. With interspersed references to writers such as Goethe, Rilke, Kafka, Freud, and Benjamin, Blumenberg gathers evidence to raise the singular question that, in his view, Christian theology has not been able to answer: How can an omnipotent God be so offended by his creatures that he must sacrifice and abandon his own Son?
This major work by the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg is a monumental rethinking of the significance of the Copernican revolution for our understanding of modernity.
This elegant essay exemplifies Blumenberg's ideas about the ability of the historical study of metaphor to illuminate essential aspects of being human. Originally published in the same year as his monumental Work on Myth, Shipwreck with Spectator traces the evolution of the complex of metaphors related to the sea, to shipwreck, and to the role of the spectator in human culture from ancient Greece to modern times. The sea is one of humanity's oldest metaphors for life, and a sea journey, Blumenberg observes, has often stood for our journey through life. We all know the role that shipwrecks can play in this journey, and at some level we have all played witness to others' wrecks, standing in safety and knowing that there is nothing we can do to help, yet fixed comfortably or uncomfortably in our ambiguous role as spectator. Through Blumenberg's seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of letters, from ancient texts through nineteenth-century reminiscences and modern speeches, we see layer upon layer revealed in the meanings humans have given to these metaphors; and in this way we begin to understand what metaphors can do that more straightforward modes of expression cannot. This edition of Shipwreck with Spectator also includes "Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality", an essay that recounts the evolution of Blumenberg's ideas about metaphorology in the years following his early manifesto "Paradigms for a Metaphorology".
