Advancing into Eternal Silence

This chapter discusses Hans Blumenberg's essay “Advancing into Eternal Silence: A Century after the Sailing of the Fram” (1993). This essay was written three years before his death. It offers not just the philosophical reading of an episode in the history of polar expeditions ripe with significance, but draws on an anecdote to muse on the relationship between media-archaeology and nihilism. Blumenberg explains that humans are risky beings, and not just because they seek frontier-pushing adventures like the voyage adrift of the Fram. They are risky for the very reason that their biological origins lie in the narrow span of the last interglacial period, when they learned the ability to cope with life caught between the advancing and receding glaciers; the natural being was now pitted against nature.

The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem

This chapter reflects on Hans Blumenberg's “The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem” (1951), a reception history of technē. Technology has historically constituted itself as applied natural science — as a constructive extension of nature — and this structural continuity would seem to determine the character and methodology of its problems once and for all. The historical reality of human life with technology has failed to confirm this basic assumption, however. Technology, as an objective domain within the modern world, has more and more visibly separated itself from its functional continuity with nature and has entered into new constellations that are sui generis and, indeed, diametrical opposites to natural reality. From the mere use of nature for eking out a living through to the increasing exploitation of nature as a reservoir of energy and natural resources, the development of technical consciousness and the technical will tend toward making a claim for the radical and total transformation of nature as mere materia prima for the exercise of human power.

Socrates and the objet ambigu

This chapter examines Hans Blumenberg's “Socrates and the objet ambigu: Paul Valéry's Discussion of the Ontology of the Aesthetic Object and Its Tradition” (1964). It discusses the origin story of Paul Valéry's dialogue Eupalinos. More than ten years after his letter to Paul Souday, Valéry returns to this prehistory and confirms that he had chosen the form of the dialogue for its elasticity and malleability. And there can be no doubt that it is this form that led to Socrates carrying the dialogue. All this, including the choice of the name “Eupalinos” — an ancient architect Valéry found in an encyclopedia — is of paramount facticity, which, if not labored, was certainly perceived as adequate. But this facticity, which befell the poet, was at the same time provoked by the needs of his poetic self-understanding — and was, of course, stylized in retrospect.

Light as a Metaphor for Truth

This chapter assesses Hans Blumenberg's essay, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth” (1957). With this essay, Blumenberg formulated the seed of the project for which he is, at least in Germany, best known: his “metaphorology.” While metaphorology initially seemed to be an extension of conceptual history — a research project aimed at investigating the semantic changes to central concepts of philosophy — it at the same time called into question the very centrality of concepts and terminologies as the only and authentic bearers of philosophical thought. Instead, it makes the case for studying the role pre- and nonconceptual speech plays in the language of philosophy. Where traditionally theories of truth would be interpreted in terms of their propositional content or logical validity, Blumenberg's article instead looks at the metaphors with which truth is described and which operate, as he puts it in the subtitle, “At the Preliminary Stage of Concept Formation.”

Speech Situation and Immanent Poetics

This chapter looks at Hans Blumenberg's “Speech Situation and Immanent Poetics” (1966), which focuses on poetic language. The three basic ideas of the relationship between language and thought should help one gain a certain orientation to determine the function of poetic language. After all, an immanent poetics will by necessity depend on examining the function of a work's language. The explication of the immanent poetics of a work will therefore depend on asking the “right” questions with regard to this work's language. Of course, hints can be derived from the author's exogenous poetics, from his self-testimony and self-observation, if this is indeed what they are and not simply the “offshoot” of a normative theory of art. This methodical preliminary question deserves not to be passed over. Already the classification of a text by its author as “self-observation” during the process of aesthetic production expresses a certain aesthetic position. This position permits experience to provide relevant information about the process of a work's emergence.