Angus Nicholls, Hans Blumenberg on Myth and the Human Sciences
New York and London, Routledge, 2015, 277 pages, hardcover £90, e-version £34,99, ISBN: 978-0-415-88549-2
I am fully convinced that this book will become an important tool in research and teaching, not only on the twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) but in the wider areas of myth and anthropology. It may even be of interest to an even more diverse audience, bringing a new level of complexity to current debates between religion and evolutionary theory. The title of the book itself holds the possibility of bridging the gap between cultural studies and natural sciences and reclaims the term “science” from the latter. It demonstrates, through Blumenberg’s work, how interwoven mythologies and the natural sciences actually are. The border between logos and myth is, according to Blumenberg, a fictive one.
Nicholls’ monograph is the very first comprehensive English-language introduction to Blumenberg’s theory of myth, but even compared with introductions that are available in German, it is unique in its commitment to making Blumenberg’s arguments accessible combined with an extraordinary depth of scholarship on his intellectual background.
Blumenberg’s highly original theory of myth, outlined in the volume Work on Myth (1979; English translation 1985), distinguishes him as the most important German theorist of myth of the second half of the twentieth-century. His work has resonated internationally across academic disciplines ranging from literary theory, philosophy, religious studies and anthropology, to the history and philosophy of science.
Blumenberg’s theory of myth is deeply related to debates within the broad field known as the ‘human sciences,’ particularly to philosophical anthropology and evolutionary biology. Emerging from his view of humans as ‘creatures of deficiency’ – organisms which, by virtue of their capacity for reflective thought, find themselves at odds with the order of nature – his theory breaks with enlightenment ideas by ascribing to myth a rational function. Indeed, the distinctive feature of Blumenberg’s approach is his view of myth as the solution to a problem relating to human evolution rather than a pre-rational mode of thought. Blumenberg, so Nicholls tells us, found that while other organisms adapt to their situations through instincts associated with natural selection, a large part of human adaption is cultural, and is constituted by the construction of stories. Myths constitute human attempts to rationalise and control anxieties concerning the indeterminate and uncontrollable forces of nature by anthropomorphising these forces into distinct and individual mythic objects. The division of the powers of nature into the polytheistic pantheon of myth, says Nicholls, summarising Blumenberg, enables these powers to be tamed and makes them accessible through mythic images and stories. In functioning as the fundamental cultural coping strategy adopted by humans, myth is, in Blumenberg’s view, always an attempt to conceptualise and understand reality by dealing with it in images. This, however, should not be understood as a rational or theoretical approach to a question or dilemma: rather than being such a response to it, myth covers a question in order for it not to become acute, and is therefore not able to produce a fully controlled state between question and answer. Blumenberg asserts that as long as there are elements of external reality that resist the wishes of humankind, there will always be a place for myth within human thought.
The fundamental adaptive and cognitive functions of myths enable us to survive the most hostile surroundings and, therefore, they are the most powerful evolutionary tool that we have. The ‘absolutism of reality’ designates a state in which man is helplessly exposed to natural forces of which he can have no sure understanding, to which he can impute no benign intentions, and from which he needs to distance himself in order to secure his survival as a species. For Blumenberg, all the achievements of human culture presuppose that this state of sheer biological nonviability, this nightmare scenario of ultimate selective disadvantage, has been put behind us through nothing but our ability of telling tales. In this sense, myth is already an attempt to render the world comprehensible, to identify divine or demonic powers, and to manage them, for example, by means of sacrifice or supplication.
It is especially appealing that Nicholls, in the conclusion of his introduction, reflects on Blumenberg’s peculiar neglect of political mythology in his published work, while extended reflections with Ernst Cassirer’s Myth of the State, as well as a departure from the analysis found in his Nachlass, entitled Remythisations. Nicholls also found a text on Hitler’s self mythologisation through a key concept Blumenberg calls ‘Präfiguration,’ a retrospective creation of predecessorship, or quasi magical lineage, which might be what he referred to as the ‘missing chapter’ of Work on Myth in a letter. Nicholls skillfully contextualizes these reflections with Blumenberg’s background in philosophical-theological studies, where he must have been familiar with Auerbach’s discussion of the notion of Noah’s Ark as a praefiguratio ecclesia or Moses as a figura Christi. In analogy to this concept Blumenberg outlines Hitler’s self-mythologisation as the culmination point of a Prometheus project in which Alexander the Great, Frederick the Great and Napoleon were his predecessors. This discovery and an exploration of this avoidance or self-perceived failure to publish those reflections (suggestive perhaps of biographical motives) gives this book a special significance in Blumenberg studies.
Nicholls gives his readers some insight into possible biographical reasons for this (whilst steering clear of any simplistic biographical speculation) that also explain Blumenberg’s delayed presence in the Anglophone intellectual world. Being classed as ‘half-Jewish’ meant that he had to endure gradually worsening hardships from 1933 onwards. He was excluded from the formal part of graduation celebrations at secondary school: he wrote a speech as he had come top of the class, but it was read out by a classmate. Catholic theology was the only subject choice subsequently open to him, as it was offered by the church and not by the state. He then spent time as a compulsory worker at an aeroplane manufacturer before finally being imprisoned in a work camp (where he only survived as a personal protégée of the large-scale industrialist (and NSDAP-member) Heinrich Dräger, a producer of gas masks. After the war, Dräger financed Blumenberg’s university education. However, until the very end of his life, Blumenberg remained unwilling to explore any personal motives for his interest in mythology. He is being largely unknown outside Germany, since he was neither a part of the émigré Jewish elite, nor a part of those implicated for their collaboration with the Nazi regime, but he had an extraordinary career in Germany as a modern academic who recognized the necessity of networking, building influential research clusters and inviting debate, while simultaneously being enviably productive publishing single-authored monographs.
The chapters of Nicholls’ monograph that address different contextualisations of his work within philological, phenomenological, and anthropological discourses (as well as the political reception of his main volume, Work on Myth) stand independent of one another, each comprising a thorough body of references, which will enable scholars from different fields to access Blumenberg’s work more easily. By displaying and introducing his many sources, disciplinary affiliations and comprehensive studies, Nicholls also contextualises Blumenberg’s arguments in relation to philosophers and anthropologists such as Arnold Gehlen, Jacob Taubes, or Erich Rothacker, whose texts are not currently accessible to non-German speaking readers. Context is also provided in relation to the better-known phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the Heidegger-Cassirer debate, and the philosophers and sociologists of the Frankfurt School. Among those chapters another highlight of this introduction is what Nicholls describes as Blumenberg’s ‘Goethe Complex”'(p.155). in which he analyses Goethe’s Prometheus Fragment and portrays Goethe’s self creation as a culturally constructed massif, that rises up before the reader (p. 158), and then unfolds into an impressively lucid effective history of this poem based on Blumenberg’s analysis.
Nicholls’ remarkable familiarity not only with Blumenberg’s extensive and published and unpublished oeuvre (archived at the Literaturarchiv Marbach where Nicholls was a visiting fellow), but also with the many discourses and disciplines with which it is interwoven, makes this book a treasure trove for anybody with an interest in philology, myth, phenomenology, anthropology, or the intellectual life in 20th century Germany.
Tina-Karen Pusse, is a Lecturer in German Literature at the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at NUI Galway in Ireland, where she is PI of the Research Cluster Transnational Ecologies and Co-Chair of the cluster Gender, Discourses, Identities. Publications include studies on Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Fictionality and Factuality in Autobiography, Theory of Laughter, Elfriede Jelinek and Heinrich von Kleist. Forthcoming in 2016 are the edited volumes “Madness in the Woods. Ecopsychopathologies in Film, Gaming and Literature” as well as an Introduction in Ecocriticism.