Initially in college and then throughout my career, the writings of the German philosopher and historian Hans Blumenberg (1920 – 1996) have been my secret talisman, warding off the tedium of routine academic labor by conjuring, with poetry and precision, higher powers of thought. I read him first for his fabulous, inimitable German style, which blurs the boundaries between historical survey, philosophical meditation, and creative fiction. Then I found how consistently useful his writings could be for taking a new viewpoint on one's own work, whatever one might be working on. The phrase work on itself figures in the title Arbeit am Mythos, one of Blumenberg's many enormous and forbidding tomes. Jewish on his mother's side, he spent the war in forced labor, then in hiding, and he so resented the time lost for work that he slept only six nights a week and lived and taught reclusively, refusing (except once) even to be photographed. But it is impossible to summarize what Blumenberg, through five decades of ceaseless labor, worked on. Most famously, he undertook a fundamental reevaluation of the “modern,” rescuing it from attempts (by Carl Schmitt, Karl Löwith, and others) to strip it of its legitimacy as something authentically new. Blumenberg also rethought ideas about time (human and cosmic), myth, legibility, reality, science, theory, and philosophy, the last of which he himself pursued by way of a sustained, sometimes antiphilosophical attention to metaphor. His interlaced projects often took the form of sprawling, eccentric histories that visited, usually in chronological succession, thinkers both great and obscure. His legendary Zettelkasten method allowed him to weave together memoires of an obscure nineteenth-century German school reformer with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and to connect Ludwig Wittgenstein's “fly bottle” with Plato's cave as stations on a picaresque itinerary leading from our troglodyte past into the posthuman future. Such itineraries are impossible to survey from above, as Blumenberg's chapter titles are cryptic, and the material covered is best gleaned from footnotes, which are brief and sparse.Few readers will travel the whole of even one of Blumenberg's journeys, but to tag along even briefly is always dazzling and rewarding. History, Metaphors, Fables is a perfect place to begin. Bajohr, Fuchs, and Kroll have gathered, in the best translation this great prose stylist has received, fundamental short texts by Blumenberg that were the seeds of his later encyclopedic volumes. Also represented are a number of essays written for a general audience, for example on Franz Kafka, Aesop, William Faulkner, pensiveness, and Goethe (Blumenberg's patron saint). A lesser-known 1964 piece on Paul Valéry's objet ambigu, included among a group of texts on “Nature, Technology, and Aesthetics,” grabbed me with the same force that arrested me, now forty years ago, browsing through some pages on the Rosetta Stone contained in Blumenberg's (untranslated) Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (The Legibility of the World). Once again, I felt torn between continuing to read and rushing back to my desk to what I had been trying to write. Blumenberg is hard to read not because of the length or difficulty of his books, but because, while reading him, one becomes both refreshed and envious.
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Oct 1, 2024
Maria Koch Gregersen 
Open Access