Hans Blumenbergs Philosophical Anthropol PDF

Hans Blumenberg’s
Philosophical Anthropology:
After Heidegger and Cassirer
V i d a P av e s i ch
davo s : p h i l o s o p h i c a l s ta r t i n g p o i n t s a n d g o a l s
between 1928 and 1931, davos, switzerland was the site of a colloquium series
dedicated to promoting cooperation between nations and peoples in post-war Eu-
rope. The colloquium is remembered primarily for the famous confrontation in
1929 between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer over the proper interpretation
of Kant and neo-Kantianism, a confrontation that also registered the ascendance
of Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics and the devaluation of Cassirer’s more
traditionally Enlightenment view of civilization as progress from mythos to logos.
Cassirer was the last representative of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, and
Heidegger was the rising star who had recently published Being and Time. When
Heidegger discounted the emphasis placed by the Marburg neo-Kantians on the
structuring role played by reason in experience and Cassirer’s insistence on the
objectivity of symbolic forms, he challenged everything this represented. The
Davos disputation was one more forum for Heidegger to launch his fundamental
ontology and to publicly assert his place to the younger generation of philoso-
phers over against a neo-Kantianism in decline. For many, this encounter was an
absolute watershed: it is of historical and philosophical importance, and it had
political, ethical, and existential ramifications based on very different interpreta-
tions of Kant.1
Less widely studied are Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s divergent attitudes toward
philosophical anthropology, which was a subtheme at Davos, and in their works
generally during this period. In the 1920s and 1930s, the German philosophical
See, for example, Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago,
1
IL: Open Court, 2000), 1; Geoffrey Waite, “On Esotericism: Heidegger and/or Cassirer at Davos,”
Political Theory 26 (1998), 610; and Wayne Cristaudo, “Heidegger and Cassirer: Being, Knowing, and
Politics,” Kant-Studien 82 (1991): 469–83.
Vida Pavesich is Lecturer in Philosophy at California State University, East Bay.
Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 3 (2008) 421–48
[421]
422 j o u r n a l o f t h e h i s t o r y o f p h i l o s o p h y 4 6 : 3 j u ly 2 0 0 8
anthropologists, such as Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen,
maintained that anthropology, understood as a study of the invariant condi-
tions of human existence, should be the central concern of philosophy. As such,
philosophical anthropology was distinguished from empirical disciplines such
as ethnology and physical anthropology. Philosophical anthropology did not
aim for an essentialist conception of human nature, but focused on orientation
problems faced by all members of the human species. In 1928, in Man’s Place in
Nature, Max Scheler set the tone for philosophical anthropology by proclaiming
that “man is more of a problem to himself at the present time than ever before
in recorded history.”2 The anthropologists claimed that solving critical social and
political problems entailed resolving fundamental philosophical questions about
the type of creature a human being is. In varying ways, the anthropologists—and
Heidegger—were influenced by Dilthey’s philosophy of life and advances in the
sciences, particularly biology. At Davos and in Being and Time (§10), Heidegger
claimed that philosophical anthropology was anthropocentric and reductive, be-
cause it made man the center of philosophy.3 And even though he did not wholly
reject the idea of a philosophical anthropology, Heidegger cautioned against
understanding Dasein anthropologically. Furthermore, he regarded Cassirer’s
formalist philosophy of symbolic forms as an anthropocentric anthropology. Al-
though Cassirer denied the charge of anthropocentrism, he had no quarrel with
the label “philosophical anthropologist.” 4 Indeed, in The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms (vol. 4), written during the same period, he affirmed that “the fundamental
answer to the question of the ‘essential concept’ of mankind . . . can come only
from a ‘philosophy of symbolic forms.’”5 This subtheme at Davos concerns the
relation between the question “What is man?” and philosophical inquiry, a legacy
of Kant’s famous fourth question. In Lectures on Logic, Kant had asserted that all
issues in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics ultimately lead back to this ques-
tion, although he was skeptical about formulating a suitable answer.
At Davos, and immediately after in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929),
Heidegger explicitly connected his project with a reinterpretation of Kant’s fourth
question—a question that in his view had become “questionable,” but must not
be answered anthropologically.6 The questionableness of “man” was also a theme
for the philosophical anthropologists, but Heidegger insisted that his questioning
was more fundamental. Given Heidegger’s subsequent influence on the course of
modern philosophy and contemporary suspicions about seeking normative con-
ceptions of human nature, it behooves us to take a fresh look at Davos from this
perspective. This will be the entering wedge for examining Hans Blumenberg’s
possible contribution to these issues. I contend that the Davos debate obscured a
Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Noonday, 1961), 4.
2
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
3
Harper & Row, 1962).

“Davos Lectures” [“Davos”] reprinted as Appendix III to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics [KPM],
4
trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 199, 202, 204, 205 / Kant und das
Problem der Metaphysik [GA 3] (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1973), 283, 288, 291, 292.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, trans. John Michael Krois, ed., John Michael
5
Krois, Donald Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 37–38.
“Davos,” 202 / GA 3, 288.
6
blumenberg’s anthropology 423
middle position that can mediate between Heideggerian groundlessness, on the
one hand, and Cassirer’s claims that culture and symbolic forms fully express a
given human nature, on the other hand. In my view, Blumenberg’s post-Heidegge-
rian reinterpretation of Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms supports an argument
for a minimalist, “decentered” anthropology that has the potential to provide a
normative reference point organically rooted in human needs. This is important
not solely to mediate between Heidegger and Cassirer, but to offer an alternative
to antihumanist and pragmatist (Rorty) repudiations of conceptions of human
nature, as well as to contemporary scientistic reductionisms—all of which are
rightly suspicious of inflated, question-begging notions of human nature, some
of which may be implicated in pernicious ethnocentrisms.
Due to length considerations, I must omit the historical contextualization of
these anthropological themes, which would lead back to disputes between Kant
and Herder, for whom the problem of human orientation arose as a practical,
moral, intellectual, and for Herder, also a biological problem. Gehlen declared
that he was merely updating Herder with the tools of modern science. Here I
will focus on a small portion of the interchange between Heidegger and Cassirer
that goes to the heart of the differences between the two as it relates to the link
between conceptions of human existence and the starting points and goals of
philosophy.
After much skirmishing between Heidegger and Cassirer about the meaning
of neo-Kantianism, freedom, and ethics during the first half of the debate, the
Dutch philosopher Hendrik Pos interjected that the two men were speaking en-
tirely different languages.7 Sympathetic to Cassirer, Pos suggested finding terms
for “Dasein,” “ontic,” and “Being” that could be translated into Cassirer’s language
to facilitate communication. It is here that Heidegger drew attention to their
conflicting ideas about the starting points and goals of philosophy: for Cassirer
“the terminus ad quem [goal] is the whole of a philosophy of culture in the sense
of an elucidation of the wholeness of the forms of the shaping consciousness.”
That is, Cassirer’s philosophical goal is a determination of the logic of symbolic
forms (how one acquires a world-view and the specific logics of myth, language,
science, and so on). Heidegger goes on to say that Cassirer is concerned with only
“a certain dimension of the shaping powers” of consciousness, all of which leaves
the question of his terminus a quo [the starting point, which Heidegger claims is es-
sentially connected with human finitude] “utterly problematical.” Heidegger adds:
“My position is the reverse: The terminus a quo is my central problematic, the one
I develop. For me, this occurs not in the whole of a Philosophy of Culture, but in
the question tí tó Æon, or rather: what in general is called Being?”8 Heidegger will
emphatically reiterate the same view in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.
No anthropology which understands its own particular questioning and the presup-
positions thereof can even claim to develop the problem of a laying of the ground for
metaphysics, let alone carry it out. The necessary question for a laying of the ground of
metaphysics, namely, that of what man is, is taken over by a metaphysics of Dasein.9
“Davos,” 202 / GA 3, 287.

7
“Davos,” 202 / GA 3, 288.

8
Heidegger, KPM, 162 / GA 3, 231.

9
Or, as he states in one of his Davos lectures: the starting point of philosophy in-
volves posing the question of the essence of human beings in a way that is “prior
to all philosophical anthropology and cultural philosophy.”10
Although Heidegger suggests that his own terminus ad quem, or goal, may not be
clear, he understands his project as aiming for liberating answers to the question
of Being, resident in Dasein’s finitude rather than the “progress of spirit unfettered
by a body or its finitude.” This latter remark was directed to Cassirer’s view that
symbolic forms such as language, myth, and science are vehicles of progressive
liberation. Heidegger clarifies his position by drawing on Kant: in the Critique of
Pure Reason, Kant, in his subjective deduction, was “pressed in a way that makes
the proper foundation [of metaphysics] an abyss.”11 For Heidegger, it is not at
all self-evident—as he says it must seem to Cassirer—that we should start from a
concept of reason and ground metaphysics uncritically in a concept of logos. From
Heidegger’s perspective, Cassirer can only be following a philosophical tendency
that began with Descartes and continued in neo-Kantianism of separating the
knower from the world and then interpreting everything from this point of view,
i.e., anthropocentrically. Consequently, Heidegger refused Pos’s attempt at rec-
onciliation: “I believe that what I describe by Dasein [as nothingness, or terminus
a quo] does not allow translation into a concept of Cassirer’s.” 12 For Heidegger,
Cassirer’s exclusive focus on expressiveness and culture precludes theorizing a
proper terminus a quo.
Heidegger stresses the ontological importance of anxiety for identifying the
terminus a quo. Earlier in the debate Cassirer had claimed that the path to infini-
tude is through the realm of form: “man must transform everything in him which is
lived experience into some objective shape.”13 This assumes that there is a human
nature that can be expressed unproblematically, and it also means that Cassirer
has no room for the elements of our makeup that might either motivate or resist
this transformation. Heidegger’s challenge suggests that it may not be possible to
express everything in language, myth, or any of the other symbolic forms. Pascal,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Jaspers had already drawn attention to limit situa-
tions or extremes (signaled in states of anxiety). Even Cassirer acknowledged this
in volume four of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, portions of which were written
during the late 1920s. For example, he recognized that human beings have a basic
capacity for distancing themselves from their drives.14 Yet, Cassirer’s model for
distancing is drawn from Kant’s Critique of Judgment: it is aesthetic distancing—a
detachment “from dependence on [our] actions and sufferings.”15 At Davos, Cas-
sirer resists when Heidegger asks whether the task of philosophy is not to surrender
man radically to anxiety. Cassirer responds that “anxiety throws the earthly away
from us” and that philosophy should free man “from anxiety as a mere disposition”
as part of the process of progressive transformation. In volume four of Symbolic
KPM, 192 / GA 3, 273.

10
“Davos,” 202 / GA 3, 288.

11
“Davos,” 203 / GA 3, 289.

12
“Davos,” 201 (emphasis added) / GA 3, 286.

13
Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, 208.

14
Ibid., 45.
15
Forms, Cassirer’s response to Heidegger is more ascerbic: the antidote to anxiety
is Stoic ethics, which liberates us from the dread of death and raises life “above
the realm of mere care.”16
In my view, despite Heidegger’s reticence about anthropology, he has clarified
its task by linking the terminus a quo (in the double sense of philosophical start-
ing point and feature of human existence) with anxiety and nothingness, and
by drawing attention to a blind spot in Cassirer’s position.17 At Davos, following
the Pos interjection, Heidegger asserted that “what man is” must be posed as the
“central question” of philosophy, even though it must not be posed anthropo-
centrically. He also grants that this central question could yield a philosophical
anthropology, but it must be one in which the “philosopher disregards himself”
and sees the “eccentric character of man” at the same time as standing within
the totality of beings in general.18 In this context, Heidegger seems to be equating
his ontology of Dasein with a kind of philosophical anthropology, and yet he has
claimed that the question of what man is must be prior to all philosophical an-
thropology. In The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (1928), a lecture course that
Heidegger gave between the publication of Being and Time and Kant and the Problem
of Metaphysics—where Heidegger once again cautions against understanding Da-
sein anthropologically—he introduces the controversial idea of a “metontology,”
which proposes a study of the ontic foundations of fundamental ontology.19 In
other words, Heidegger considers a study of how Dasein’s understanding of being,
which presupposes the factical existence of Dasein, is in turn “entangled” in nature
empirically. Metontology would take beings as a whole as the object of study in a
metaphysics or a philosophical cosmology from the perspective of Dasein. Even
though Heidegger drops this idea, the question of how to understand such a
16
“Davos,” 201 / GA 3, 286.
17
Since finishing revisions to this article, a posthumous book by Blumenberg—part of the copious
writings in the Nachlass—has appeared, entitled Beschreibung des Menschen [BM], (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
2006). Here Blumenberg affirms this insight when he refers directly to Heidegger’s destruction of
traditional metaphysics and traditional anthropology, which he claims paved the way for a renewal of
philosophical anthropology (217). Presumably, he is referring to a renewal that addresses Heidegger’s
criticisms.
“Davos,” 204 / GA 3, 291.
18
Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic [MFL], trans. Michael Heim (Bloo-
19
mington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 140, 144, 154–59 / Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik
[GA 26] (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978), 176, 184, 196–203. Steven Galt Crowell provides a clear,
concise review of the debates over the status of metontology among Heidegger’s commentators. He
also presents his view of its place—or lack of place—in Heidegger’s work during this period in “Meta-
physics, Metontology, and the End of Being and Time,” in his Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning:
Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 222–43.
Crowell claims that metontology reflects how Heidegger was stimulated by Max Scheler’s questions
about man’s place in the cosmos and so developed an interest in philosophical cosmology. However,
Crowell argues that as a metaphysical inquiry, metontology is inconsistent with the phenomenological
project of Being and Time, which seeks to bracket the ontic. See also Jean Grondin, “Prolegomena to
an Understanding of Heidegger’s Turn,” in Sources of Hermeneutics (Albany: State University Press of
New York, 1995), 72–73. Grondin also links metontology to a metaphysics of existence, to ontology’s
return “to the ontical metaphysics in which it was already implicitly located.” It was to make up for the
“deficiencies” of fundamental ontology, which had remained “too formal or schematic.” Otto Pög-
geler connects metontology to Scheler’s influence on Heidegger as well and likens it, suggestively, to a
“met-anthropology” in “Heidegger on Art,” in Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology, ed. Karsten
Harries and Christoph Jamme (New York: Holmes and Meyer), 116.
study has some bearing on conceptualizing a philosophical anthropology in Blu-
menbergian terms, one that offers a countermodel to Heidegger’s fundamental
ontology. Given this suggestive cluster of ideas, the question now is how to mine
them, link Heidegger’s insight that Cassirer has failed to adequately account for
his own terminus a quo, and articulate an anthropology that is not reductive, rela-
tivistic, or anthropocentric. The further question concerns whether it is possible
to salvage a logic of symbolic form that incorporates Heidegger’s insights and yet
retains and rethinks the rationality and objectivity valued by Cassirer. Obviously,
I cannot reconstruct fully Blumenberg’s logic in a brief paper or consider in de-
tail Heidegger’s complex relationship to philosophical anthropology. My focus
will be on articulating Blumenberg’s anthropological premises, fleshing out the
conception of human existence that follows from his assumptions, and sketching
in the logic of orientation dependant on those assumptions. I will add here that
Blumenberg—known primarily as a philosopher of history for The Legitimacy of
the Modern Age,20 and as a theorist of metaphor and myth for Paradigmen zu einer
Metaphorologie (Paradigms for a Metaphorology) and Work on Myth21—does not present
a systematic working out of his anthropology, even though it is the methodological
key to understanding his argumentative point of view generally, especially in his
mature work.22 But how it is key is also an issue for a separate study. Before con-
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT
20
Press, 1983) / Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966). For the most complete bibliog-
raphy of Blumenberg’s prodigious output, at least up to 1999, see Die Kunst des Überlebens: Nachdenken
über Hans Blumenberg [Die Kunst des Überlebens], ed. Franz Josef Wetz and Hermann Timm (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1999), 427–51. Since Blumenberg’s death in 1996, many works have been published, and
according to Felix Heidenreich (Mensch und Moderne bei Hans Blumenberg [München: Wilhelm Fink,
2005], 20), there are still 20,000 pages of unpublished material.
Hans Blumenberg, “Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 6 (1960):
21
7–142; Work on Myth [WM], trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985) / Arbeit am Mythos
[AM] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979).
Blumenberg’s commentators usually refer to the fact that Blumenberg has been influenced by
22
philosophical anthropology, but the magnitude of its importance has not been fully appreciated or
not developed by most of his readers. David Adams’s seminal article, “Metaphors for Mankind: The
Development of Hans Blumenberg’s Anthropological Metaphorology” [“Metaphors for Mankind”]
(Journal of the History of Ideas 52 [1991]: 152–66) is the best effort in English at linking anthropol-
ogy to Blumenberg’s overall philosophical vision. Commentators writing in German, until recently,
simply take Blumenberg’s anthropology for granted as the point of departure for his hermeneutics.
See, for example, the collection, Die Kunst des Überlebens: Nachdenken über Hans Blumenberg, ed., Franz
Josef Wetz and Hermann Timm (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999). As I was finishing the revisions to this
article, I discovered two valuable recent books on Blumenberg, both of which provide interpretations
of Blumenberg’s anthropology that converge with mine. Oliver Müller’s Sorge um die Vernunft: Hans
Blumenbergs phänomenologische Anthropologie [Sorge um die Vernunft] (Paderborn: Mentis, 2005) covers ma-
terial from Blumenberg’s dissertation (“Beiträge zum Problem der Ursprünglichkeit der mittelalterlich-
scholastischen Ontologie,” 1947) and Habilitationsschrift (“Ontologischen Distanz: Eine Untersuchung
über die Krisis der Phänomenologie Husserls,” 1950), and many other works that include criticisms of
both Husserl and Heidegger. Müller (Sorge um die Vernunft, 414–15, 321–24) emphasizes how anthro-
pology is primarily a methodological point of view for Blumenberg, one whose fundamental point of
departure is our ongoing need to distance ourselves from absolutes. Felix Heidenreich’s Mensch und
Moderne bei Hans Blumenberg includes two sections on philosophical anthropology: “Eine anthropolo-
gische phänomenologie,” and “Der Mensch als Distanzwesen.” Neither book reconstructs a definition
of human existence. (See my section entitled “Blumenberg’s Definition of Human Existence: Limit
Concepts and Limit Conditions” below.) Most important is the recent publication of Blumenberg’s
BM, probably his most explicit defense of philosophical anthropology—although, again, there is no
explicit definition. I have found no discrepancies in my construction of Blumenberg’s philosophical
anthropology and the view presented in BM.
sidering Blumenberg’s anthropology, it will be helpful to provide some historical
context by briefly examining the contributions to this topic made by the German
philosophical anthropologists mentioned earlier.
max scheler and helmuth plessner:

t h e n e e d f o r o r i e n t a t i o n 23
Scheler and Plessner explicitly thematize philosophical anthropology as a prob-
lem of human orientation, which they understand as the central philosophical
problematic. Modern conditions—the collapse and lack of traditional supports
and the increasing rationalization of the world—make philosophical anthropol-
ogy indispensable because these losses lead us to question our place in the world.
The intervening work in biology and ethnology since Kant and the compelling
influence of the philosophy of life conditioned how the anthropologists were to
conceptualize this philosophical anthropology. All, to varying degrees, took up
the issue of biological nonviability that Herder had first emphasized. They moved
away from ideas of fixed human essences and highlighted the human need for
orientation by emphasizing human plasticity and coping mechanisms, which were
to become central for Blumenberg as well.
In Man’s Place in Nature, published in 1928, Max Scheler began by saying
that we are problems to ourselves as never before. He also observes that we have
inherited a number of incompatible ideas of human nature drawn from philoso-
phy, theology, and the sciences, a “multiplicity” that conceals rather than reveals
man’s nature. Scheler addressed this problem by first plotting a trajectory from
plants to animals to human beings, construing this as a developmental process
but sharply distinguishing man from animals by claiming that only man can say
no to his impulses and affects and become “spirit.”24 Scheler rejects naturalism
even though he acknowledges a continuum with nature, because he argues that
man’s place is not given; the “spiritual” results from transcending “life” in the most
general sense. Echoing Heidegger, Scheler adds toward the end of the book that
man’s separation from nature leads to anxiety, the awareness of nothingness.25
The world-openness that accompanies anxiety and the capacity for transcendence
makes human beings metaphysically unique; it means that they are capable of
objectifying the world, of reflexive self-consciousness, freedom, choice, love, and
kindness, as well as self-destruction.26 Spirit as transcendence requires for its actual-
ization a voluntary inhibition such that impulse can be sublimated and redirected
in light of the images human beings choose. Coping with the loss of traditional
supports entails selecting images appropriate for channeling the energy generated
23
Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen are the most well known of the philosophical anthropologists, but
as Honneth and Joas point out, many others worked within the framework of philosophical anthropol-
ogy, such as Blumenberg’s post-war colleague, Erich Rothäcker, and Paul Ludwig Landsberg, Viktor
von Weizsäcker, and Ernst Cassirer (Social Action and Human Nature, 47). Drawing on Blumenberg’s
textual interlocutors, Wayne Hudson (“After Blumenberg: historicism and philosophical anthropol-
ogy,” History of the Human Sciences 6 [1993], 110–11) includes others with close ties to the anthropolo-
gists: Blumenberg’s long time friend Hans Jonas, Adolf Portman, Paul Alsberg, Hannah Arendt, Eric
Vögelin, Kurt Goldstein, and Odo Marquard.
Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, 4, 6, 7, 40, 46.
24
Ibid., 89.
25
Ibid., 36.
26
by sublimation.27 With the aid of philosophical anthropology, Scheler attempts
to refute mechanistic, reductively naturalistic, and purely formal accounts of hu-
man nature and to reconcile life-philosophy with phenomenology, but he ends
up with a radical, uneasy disjunction between answers to the problem of human
orientation that could be given by the empirical sciences and transcendentally
oriented philosophy.
Helmuth Plessner accepts Scheler’s diagnosis of the modern condition, but he
rejects Scheler’s idealism of spirit. In Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (The
Levels of Organic Being and Man), published in 1928, Plessner formulates the biologi-
cal deficiency thesis as humanity’s “eccentricity” or “positionality.” That is, human
beings are distinct from animals in that they are simultaneously embedded in and
discontinuous from nature and their socio-historical setting. Whereas animals
have a “centric” existence, guided by instinct, human beings are underdetermined
(instinctually poor) and must compensate, which means always trying to strike a
balance between embodiment and the lack of pre-given orientation. For Plessner,
this constitutional rupture is the defining characteristic of the human being. To
achieve balance, human beings become conscious, enlanguaged, and expressive
in speech and gesture. Thus, the phenomenological method will be a naturalistic
hermeneutics that describes the human being and its behavioral possibilities as it
tries to negotiate its environment in relation to bodily constraints.28 Conflicts with
corporeality reveal the limits—”which defy all spiritual and historical change”—that
prescribe this behavioral latitude, limits experienced especially in the distinctly hu-
man experiences of laughing and crying that are breakdowns of customary modes
of orientation (e.g., language).29 To the charges of reductionism, which stemmed
largely from Heidegger, Plessner argues that philosophical anthropology emerges
from an overlap between a “comprehensive philosophy” and a “comprehensive
anthropology.” Unlike Heidegger, we must not abstract from man’s organismal
embodiment.30 Heidegger would ask whether this view reduces all philosophical
questions to a study of man or a subdiscipline of biology and therefore renders
the relation between anthropology and ontology problematic.
arnold gehlen: the creature of deficiencies

To proceed further, one more conceptual element is necessary: philosophical
anthropologist Arnold Gehlen’s notion of the Mängelwesen, or “creature of deficien-
cies,” an idea that originated with Herder, resurfaced in Scheler and Plessner, and
will be taken up by Blumenberg. In Man: His Nature and Place in the World (1940),
Gehlen offers his most complete account of his anthropology. Unlike Scheler
Ibid., 54, 68.

27
Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt
28
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 181–83.

Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, trans. James
29
Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Green (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 10.
Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany: 1831–1933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge:
30
Cambridge University Press), 221. Because of this abstraction, Plessner argued that Heidegger’s
analysis of Dasein was too narrow. More biting is the criticism that “Heidegger’s philosophy takes no
more notice of the human being’s nature than it needs for dying” (quoted in Honneth and Joas, Social
Action and Human Nature, 73, 45).
and Plessner, Gehlen proposed constructing an empirical philosophy of human
nature based on the observation that human beings are creatures of instinctual
deficit: they are incomplete, “world open,” and therefore overburdened with
stimuli from which they need relief. Animals have environments, but man needs a
world and must act rather than react to achieve this.31 To have a basis for action,
human beings develop what Gehlen calls “institutions,” or cultural constants that
reduce the arbitrariness of human existence. For Gehlen, the term institutions
does not refer to consciously set up forums such as a congress or a judiciary, but to
habitual patterns of thought and behavior and mundane forms of social organiza-
tion, including language, manners, and morals, that can supply a platform for a
self-directed process of development. This is necessary because stimulus-response
behavior does not solve the problem of world openness. Gehlen argues that institu-
tions reestablish the “lost link between instinct and response-triggering stimulus
on the higher plane of behavioral patterns that [become] so routinized that they
have become analogous to instinctual behavior.”32 Action requires something akin
to the reliability afforded by instinct.
Blumenberg appropriates Gehlen’s ideas of underdetermination, action, and
institutions, but he rejects what he calls Gehlen’s “absolutism of institutions,” an
idea connected with the contemporaneous revival of Hobbes. Gehlen’s radical
cultural conservatism supported decisionistic political theories that blended eas-
ily with National Socialism. Although Blumenberg agrees with Gehlen that con-
temporary institutions have been degraded by the accelerated pace of change in
modernity, he does not think that they should be preserved indiscriminately and
at all costs. From Blumenberg’s perspective, Gehlen’s “decisionism” precludes
rationally distinguishing between institutions that continue to serve us well and
those that do not and therefore absolves us of responsibility to think for ourselves.
Furthermore, Gehlen is not faithful to his own premises: human existence is es-
sentially risky and this risk is a precondition of the possibility of conscious choice
and autonomy.
hans blumenberg: the terminus a quo
Blumenberg puts to new uses the key insight that human contingency must be
understood as a radical need for orientation. Focusing on the contradiction between
In an unpublished manuscript, Lenny Moss (“Detachment, Genomics, and the Nature of Be-
31
ing Human”) employs the term ‘detachment’ in his work on the warrants for an empirically updated
philosophical anthropology that accounts for human flexibility in the spirit of the early twentieth-
century anthropologists. For Moss, the term refers to the “relative independence of an entity from a
larger milieu . . . [indicating increasing] internal degrees of freedom in an organism” as it becomes
more complex. Moss’s enterprise is to track this increasing detachment from a molecular to a human
level. “To say that humans are the most detached entities in nature is to suggest that humans are less
at the beck and call of any particular stimulus.” As a result, human attention can be directed toward
a multiplicity of objects. As a result of the pain of detachment, humans construct cultural niches
(Gehlen’s “institutions”), or a normatively structured socio-cultural life-world, which itself is “the result
of structured participation in processes of shared attention.” Cultural niches are a hedge against “world
openness.” Moss argues against evolutionary psychologists who locate the capacity for human skills
either in domain specific functional modules or genes that prescript such modules.
Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer
32
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 76.

world openness and continued existence, Blumenberg states: “The first proposi-
tion of an anthropology would then be [that it] cannot be taken for granted that
man is able to exist . . . [man’s] ‘natural’ condition contradicts the conditions of
the possibility of physical existence.”33 In other words, human existence is not self-
evident. Blumenberg places Gehlen’s notion of underdetermination, which can
be understood as a certain amount of “loose play,” in the conceptual slot marked
out by Heidegger’s terminus a quo, and links it to the formation of culture through
an account of the human need for prostheses, such as metaphor, and institutions
such as myth and language (i.e., a “life-world”).34 It should be noted here that
Blumenberg’s term for the entire constellation of symbolic means, which includes
metaphor, myth, and all institutions that make up what philosophers commonly
term the “life world,” and which therefore makes human existence possible, is
“rhetoric.” I will use the term ‘rhetoric’ as shorthand to refer to this constellation.
Another note: metaphor is a key element of rhetoric and a fundamental orient-
ing vehicle for Blumenberg; the need for metaphor is a consequence of the fact
that human beings have neither a vocabulary adequate to reality nor definitive
pregiven orientations. I will return to a discussion of metaphor and rhetoric at a
later point.
The upshot is a conception of human existence that references a universal
problem: the fact of human detachment and underdetermination. This insight
has interesting philosophical consequences: it means that “life” (Dilthey), “Being-
in-the-World,” (Heidegger), a life-world (Husserl, Habermas, etc.), or a full-blown
theory of symbolic forms (Cassirer) cannot be taken for granted because these
are already forms of orientation, which for Blumenberg conceal anxiety-provoking
threats to viability. Even though, for all practical purposes, we begin with some-
thing like a life-world, orientation is not part of the preconditions of existence.
In what may be a response to Heidegger’s charges, Blumenberg points out that
Cassirer does not account for why symbolic forms are set up when he assumes an
unquestioned biological support for his theory of symbolic forms.35 The deficiency
33
Blumenberg, “An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric”
[“AC”], in After Philosophy: End or Transformation, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1987), 438 / ”Anthropologische Annäherung an die Aktualität der Rhetorik” [“AR”], in Rhetorik,
Band 2: Wirkungsgeschichte der Rhetorik (Darmstadt: Wissenshaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991), 294.
This work was originally published in Wirklickeiten, in denen wir leben: Aufsätze und eine Rede (Stuttgart:
Philipp Reclam, 1981).
I do not deny that human beings may have more genetically-conditioned hardwiring than
34
either Gehlen discusses or Blumenberg refers to in these earlier works. However, the basic point that
human beings are “world open,” or more detached from the environment, still stands. Approached
from the perspective of evolutionary biology, we might say that human beings are hardwired to be
flexible. The question remains: how do we cope with this plasticity, which is the source of both our
creativity and our propensity to self-destruct? In BM (esp. 490–91, 539–49), Blumenberg delves more
deeply into evolutionary biology, paleontology, cognitive psychology, and various other sciences rel-
evant to understanding the origins and development of homo sapiens. He continues to maintain that
the life-world, reason, and cultural achievements are efforts of the human organism to compensate
for its organically-based plasticity. He also continues to resist reductive naturalisms as well as Husserl
and Heidegger’s attempts to evacuate philosophical anthropology from philosophy. Blumenberg’s
exploration of possible empirical corroboration for his anthropological assumptions would be a study
in its own right.
“AC,” 438 / “AR,” 294.
35
thesis allows Blumenberg to ask how, given our lack of self-evidence, it is possible
to account for existence and what role culture and customary practices (i.e.,
“rhetoric”) play in supporting it. “The animal symbolicum masters the reality that
was originally lethal for him by letting it be represented; he looks away from what
is uncanny or uncomfortable for him and toward what is familiar.”36 As a result,
human beings survive through indirection, by forming a compensatory culture,
as Cassirer might have it, had he thought through the implications of his assump-
tions. Of course, this de-idealizes (and historicizes) the theory of symbolic forms,
which are now given a distinctly pragmatic turn, as we shall see.
Blumenberg, unlike Gehlen, is not interested in formulating an empirical
philosophy of human nature or in making anthropology the central concern of
philosophy. To leave things at this level would afford no immunity from Heidegger’s
charge of anthropocentrism, and Blumenberg would be no more than an anachro-
nism. Rather, Blumenberg operates with what might be called an “anthropological
optic” based on his formulation of a terminus a quo—a minimalist, deflationary
anthropology that straddles the space between a concept of human nature and an
ontology of human existence. For Blumenberg, this optic is based on features of
human existence, but its function is to delimit a sphere of inquiry by reminding
human beings of their limitations and capacities both as actors and as philosophers:
there are no final actions or definitive truths, just as there is no fixed human es-
sence. Even so, it is possible to say more about his implied conception of human
existence by examining the elements of this optic before returning briefly to the
questions of rationality, objectivity, and anthropocentrism.
blumenberg’s definition of human existence:

limit concepts and limit conditions
Let me begin with the reconstructed definition: human existence is a potentially
self-assertive [intentional or “emergent”] autonomy that is constrained by anthropological
limits and stabilized and humanized by institutions, which by forming a livable world
limit arbitrariness and make action and reflection possible. This definition is a result
of parsing Blumenberg’s ‘terminus a quo’, which refers to radical contingency on
the one hand and what he calls the “absolutism of reality” on the other.37 The
counterpart to a total lack of orientation would be a wholly indifferent reality
beyond our control.38 At the limit of existence, reality poses an absolute threat to
36
“AC,” 440 / “AR,” 296.
37
WM, 3–5 / AM, 9–10.
For Blumenberg, metaphor and myth are the enabling vehicles of human thought; hence his
38
recourse to thought models, which Joseph Leo Koerner likens to “philosophical fables” (“Ideas About
the Thing, Not the Thing Itself: Han’s Blumenberg’s style,” History of the Human Sciences 6 [1993], 2).
In many of his books, Blumenberg works with thought models that remind us of our contingency. For
example, in The Genesis of the Copernican World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), human beings confront
their orientation needs in infinite space. In Work on Myth, to be discussed in this paper, Blumenberg tells
a story of anthropogenesis in relation to “the absolutism of reality.” In Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Lifetime
and Worldtime) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), this existential dilemma plays out as the contradiction
between life time and world time. Höhlenausgänge (Exiting from Caves) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989),
which builds on Plato’s “Grundmythos,” underscores the continuing but ultimately futile effort to
definitively exit from caves (i.e., have a total view). We cannot prove our ultimate assumptions, we
have no God’s-eye view or absolutely stable reference point, we have no fixed human nature, and we
survival. It is a condition without parameters: “the indifference of space [which]
is the equivalence of every location in space without respect to all others” and the
indifference of time, which is “the equivalence of every moment with respect to
all others”39—an anxiety-provoking “state of nature” without rules, customs, laws,
ethics, or order of any kind. At this limit there is no we. The terminus a quo is a limit
concept that refers to this limit situation and to our subjective experience of it.
So, the vanishing point of existence would coincide with a state of pure anxiety—a
nothingness that we must move away from, not toward (Heidegger), in order to
remain viable.40 Blumenberg’s task then is to account for orientation vis-à-vis this
limit. He argues that rhetoric or “symbolic forms,” such as language and myth,
are the cultural constants that make action and reflection, or autonomy, possible
by compensating for a life-threatening deficit.
To imagine this state of affairs, Blumenberg uses a “thought model,” which he
claims is similar in function to state of nature concepts. In Work on Myth, he asks
what lies behind the formation of culture, or the “past’s past,” claiming that we do
not know what happened, but such a story can be justified “within the accepted
theories of anthropogenesis, the confines of our current conceptual apparatus,
vocabulary, research, and inference . . . we must posit that some such problem [i.e.,
a failure of “instinct”] induced the ‘prehuman creature’ to adapt by forming what
we would call a culture.” By adopting an upright posture, this creature confronts
a world no longer amenable to stimulus-response or right or flight behavior. “The
absolutism of reality designates a condition, continually receding into the past in
which man came close to not having control over the conditions of his existence,
and what is more important, believed that he simply lacked control of them.”41
This objective state of affairs correlates with the beginnings of self-awareness. The
absolutism of reality is, as Barbara Merker claims, a phenomenon of consciousness,
known (represented) only because we have coped with the loss it represents, largely
through the formation of myths.42 As Blumenberg puts it, there is no direct rela-
tion to “reality”; the only reality we can know is one we have interpreted. Hence,
the functional importance of symbols, myths, and metaphors.
To return briefly to a suggestion raised earlier: it is possible to view Blumenberg’s
anthropology in response to Heidegger’s notion of a metontology. A complete
treatment of this topic is beyond the scope of this paper, and Blumenberg does
not to my knowledge mention metontology, so my speculation here is based on his
criticisms of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. In Work on Myth, for example, Blu-
menberg acknowledges that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology offers “guidance”
always begin in mediis rebus. So we must use what we do have: analogy and metaphor. Blumenberg would
justify his thought models by what they can explain, arguing that settling for provisional accounts is
necessary because existence itself is provisional. He acknowledges the desire for certainty, but he
insists that it is possible to function with unfulfilled desires. Claims of certainty lead to unfounded or
unexamined assumptions, each with its own unintended and sometimes disastrous consequences.
WM, 98 / AM, 111.
39
WM, 9 / AM, 15.

40
WM, 3–4 / AM, 9–10.

41
Barbara Merker, “Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit: Zwischen Lebenswelt und Absolutismus der
42
Wirklichkeit” [“Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit”] in Die Kunst des Überlebens, 81. I have borrowed Merker’s
framing, i.e., approaching Blumenberg in terms of the two primary limit concepts.
for understanding what is meant by the work of myth.43 First of all, ‘work of myth’
refers to the work that myth initially accomplishes: the simultaneous emergence of
myth and the human form of existence as a confrontation with an overpowering
reality that must be “reduced” or symbolized such that a story (myth) can be told.
This confrontation is the source of a compensatory “significance” [Bedeutsamkeit].
By giving shape and form to existence, human beings distance themselves from
their own contingency, from an immediate relation to reality. Work on myth, in
contrast, presupposes the work of myth and refers to the ongoing historical recep-
tion of mythical themes, much like themes and variations in music.
If we assume that a metontology would be a kind of “met-anthropology,” as
Otto Pöggeler suggests,44 and if it would examine the existentiell grounds of fun-
damental ontology, then it is instructive to examine two sections of Heidegger’s
The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic that bear on this issue: (1) where he discusses
Aristotle’s conception of first or “genuine philosophy” and the brief account of
how Heidegger understands this philosophy to overlap with concepts in Being and
Time; and (2) the passages where he proposes a metontology. Heidegger points out
that “first philosophy”—the possibility of which is present in the highest creature,
man—is designated by Aristotle as qeologeîn, which is the study of the kósmos. “Tó
qeîon means simply beings—the heavens: the encompassing and overpowering, that
under and upon which we are thrown, that which dazzles us and takes us by surprise,
the overwhelming.” This study has a “twofold character . . . which corresponds to
the twofold in Being and Time of existence and thrownness.”45 Steven Galt Crowell
links metontology to the earlier passages about first philosophy and suggests that
we might understand metontology as an investigation of the “ontic ground of the
ontological project.”46 Blumenberg takes up this challenge by presenting something
like a “philosophical cosmology” developed on the basis of the relationship between
thrownness and our anxiety-filled experience of the overwhelming (absolutism of
reality). By means of his thought model,47 Blumenberg lays out the problem posed
by thrownness, which would correspond to a radical need for orientation, plus
a functional account of how significance reduces that which overwhelms. From
Blumenberg’s point of view, Heidegger takes significance (being-in-the-world)
for granted (and in abstraction from finitude) without explaining the functional
relation between anxiety—our reaction to thrownness—and significance. It is
worth quoting a long passage from Work on Myth wherein Blumenberg takes up
43
WM, 110 / AM, 124–25.
44
Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger on Art,” in Martin Heidegger, Politics, Art, and Technology, ed. Karsten
Harries and Christoph Jamme (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994), 106–24, at 116 n. 17.
GA 26, 12–13 / MFL, 10–11.
45
Crowell, “Metaphysics, Metontology, and the End of Being and Time,” n. 17. I do not claim that
46
Blumenberg provides a solution for Heidegger’s project. However, I do think he capitalizes on what
he sees as its shortcomings when he develops a philosophical anthropology that can provide a starting
point for philosophy. Blumenberg rejects the idea of a fundamental ontology as Heidegger conceives
of it because it would be one more instance of what it means to “forget” human beings.
In MFL 148 / GA 26, Heidegger acknowledges that some things can “only be made clear through
47
the use of a myth.” In this context, he is referring to Plato’s use of myth in the Phaedrus, where Heidegger
understands Plato to be clarifying the relation of “the understanding-of-being to time.” Blumenberg
would agree: given the inadequacy of our faculties for comprehending reality, we necessarily make use
of thought models, metaphors, and “philosophical myths” (MFL, 148 / GA 26, 186).
questions raised by Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Beginning with the claim
that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology offers orientation “for efforts to gain ac-
cess to the ‘work of myth,” he goes on to say:
The intertwining of significance and familiarity is a foreground appearance and dis-
guises something that one is not supposed to become aware of in its subjective-objec-
tive ambivalence: the way they correspond to nullity [Nichtigkeit] and the production
of anxiety [Ängstigung]. If significance is the quality of the world as it would not have
originally been for men, then it is wrung from a situation that produces anxiety, the
forcing of which into concealment is brought about and confirmed by that very sig-
nificance. Significance is the form in which the background of nothing [des Nichts],
as that which produces anxiety, has been put at a distance, whereby, without this
“prehistory,” the function of what is significant remains uncomprehended, though
present. For the need for significance is rooted in the fact that we are conscious of
never being definitively exempted from the production of anxiety [because we are
never wholly exempt from the absolutism of reality]. Care, as the “Being of Dasein,”
which is supposed to be disclosed especially in the basic state of mind of anxiety, is
the source not only of the totality of the structure of Dasein but of its wanting signifi-
cance in the world, in its experience, in history. The “naked truth” is not what life
can live with; for, let us not forget, this life is the result of a long history of complete
congruence between [man’s] environment and “signification”—congruence that is
only shattered in its most recent phase. In this history life itself continually deprives
itself of an immediate relation to its abysses, to what would make it impossible, and
thus refuses to obey the summons of its terrifying “authenticity.”48
From Blumenberg’s perspective, Heidegger has ignored how Dasein’s “prehistory”

is a condition of survival, how being-in-the-world is a result of this prehistory. The
life of complete congruence is instinctual life; this congruence is shattered by the
change in biotope, or the emergence of the human form of existence, which is
“eccentric” in something like Plessner’s sense. We must presuppose the millen-
nia-long work of myth that has stabilized human life by means of the significance
and institutions (Gehlen) that allow us to get on with the practical business of
life. The function of significance remains “uncomprehended” in Heidegger’s
work. Crudely put, from Blumenberg’s perspective, Heidegger’s fundamental
ontology is wrongheaded in large part because it is ahistorical and because it
overlooks fundamental human needs. No account of human existence would be
accurate if it ignored the need for the temporal distancing from the “absolutism
of reality” via “symbolic forms.” Nor would it be accurate if it omitted the self-as-
sertion [Selbstbehauptung] necessary to achieve this distance. Self-assertion is made
necessary precisely because of “finitude,”49 which implies that it makes no sense
to bracket the ontic. Blumenberg thus offers a kind of “met-anthropology,” a view
of the relation between human existence and “reality” whose function, moreover,
determines how the hermeneutic method can function.50 (More on Blumenberg’s
use of the term ‘self-assertion’ later.)
WM, 110 / AM, 125.

48
In his discussion of the Davos debates, Oliver Müller (Sorge um die Vernunft, 393) characterizes
49
the differences between Blumenberg, Heidegger, and Cassirer. For Heidegger, human beings become
free for the finitude of Dasein; for Cassirer, human beings become free from the finitude of Dasein. He
adds: for Blumenberg there is pathos in the notion of freedom: through self-assertion, human beings
cope with finitude and renounce their claims to an impossible, unalloyed freedom.
In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg comments on Heidegger during a discussion of
50
hermeneutics. While critiquing the concept of secularization, Blumenberg distinguishes his version
Critics have objected that Blumenberg professes knowledge of origins and
engages in just the sort of “grand speculation” he claims is impossible,51 that he
posits a prehuman “state,” or indulges in metaphysics.52 He may also seem to as-
sume the deep meaning presupposed by some hermeneuticists. However, rather
than the definitive account of origins, Blumenberg offers only an “account that
satisfies our need for such stories,” insofar as we live in a narrated world.53 No
matter which starting point we take up, we will always already be on this side of
what the absolutism of reality concept designates. The initial situation is not the
“deep meaning” contained in mythical origins, because meaning or significance
is already by definition always on this side of the abyss. Because the past’s past is
unknowable, no hermeneutic recovery is possible. Contingency (“thrownness”)
equals meaninglessness.
So far, Blumenberg’s account of the human condition is the terminus a quo and
the evolving cultural constants (a “provisional” life-world) that provide traction in
an alien environment. Thus Blumenberg’s view of anxiety differs markedly from
Heidegger’s: for Blumenberg anxiety “is never realistic”; rather than a harbinger
of authenticity, it signals the breakdown of orientation. By means of form, “life
itself continually deprives itself of an immediate relation to its abysses.”54 Ideally,
anxiety is a transitional moment (Cassirer), one that either degenerates into de-
structive reactive behavior or prompts us to give shape to our experience through
symbolic mediation. I will say more about the process of orientation following the
introduction of Blumenberg’s other main limit concept.55
Human existence must occur between the two limits of no orientation and
perfect orientation. The ideal life-world or utopia of our imagination—which
attempts to bypass contingency—is the other primary limit concept, one put in
place by the absolutism of reality notion. Blumenberg thus uses the concept of
the life-world in two ways; it is the idea of a livable world, similar to that of philoso-
phers such as Habermas, who defines it as “a storehouse of unquestioned cultural
givens from which those participating in communication draw on agreed-upon
of hermeneutics from that of Gadamer. Gadamer has claimed that the concept of secularization
“contributes a whole dimension of hidden meaning to the self-comprehension of what has come to
be and presently exists, and shows in this way that what presently exists is and means far more than
it knows of itself,” and that a concept legitimizes its hermeneutic function by what it produces. Blu-
menberg counters: when discussing how the hermeneutic method should function, it is important
to ask how “hidden meaning” got there in the first place; this will determine how the “hermeneutic
method will operate.” As an aside, he claims that Heidegger is an example of the hidden-meaning
problem: Heidegger starts with the assumption that “‘Dasein’s understanding of Being’ is essential to
it and yet ‘in the first instance and for the most part’ hidden and withdrawn from it” (The Legitimacy
of the Modern Age, 17). Blumenberg deconstructs these connections hermeneutically by providing a
functional account of significance. The permanent problem that we are to ourselves thus determines
how the hermeneutic method can operate.
Robert Segal, “Blumenberg as Theorist of Myth,” Annals of Scholarship 15 (1987), 93.
51
J. M. Fritzman, “Blumenberg and the Rationality of Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 10 (1992): 423–35.

52
Adams, “Metaphors for Mankind,” 161.

53
WM, 110 / AM, 125. It would be more accurate to say that human beings are anxious about
54
not being in the world.

Blumenberg operates with other limit concepts, such as “final myth” or a myth that attempts
55
to end all myths. I omit consideration of these concepts because in essence a final myth would be the
story of perfect life-world, i.e., perfect orientation.
patterns of interpretation for use in their interpretive efforts.”56 However, as a limit
concept, the life-world represents the human longing to be free of contingency,
the wish for perfect congruence between the organism and its environment, the
perfect satisfaction of human needs, as well as a perfect fit between thought and
its objects—all goals of mythical thinking. It would be a world devoid of chaos,
misery, or disappointment. From Blumenberg’s perspective, Husserl, Habermas,
and others do not recognize the unexamined presupposition of a pregiven con-
gruity contained in the life-world concept, which is related to their assumption
that it is an unproblematic starting point.57 Nonetheless, even though Blumenberg
deconstructs this “neo-romantic,” idealistic moment, he acknowledges the (always)
thwarted need for the world intended by this moment. Given this schema, culture
and history are the atmosphere that makes it possible to breathe. The mundane
life-world is a consequence of our need for self-preservation. It refers to rhetoric
and taken-for-granted behavior patterns from the perspective of their function.
In essence, Blumenberg substitutes an implied theory of limits for a traditional
account of human nature that allows us to delineate the parameters of existence.
“What remains as the subject matter of philosophical anthropology is a ‘human
nature’ that has never been ‘nature’ and never will be.”58 But this does not mean
that everything is arbitrary or that there is no logic to experience. Blumenberg
believes that modern philosophy has “forgotten man” (not Being), and so he
offers a reminder of what is necessary to maintain the human form of existence,
a reminder that human existence is risky, that it makes its appearance in “meta-
phorical disguise” and is always an achievement. Hence the importance of what
he calls “self-assertion,” a feature of the definition given earlier, which requires
limits and stabilization. Facts about us provide guidelines.
Initially, the life-world is a product of myth—a story that familiarizes and hu-
manizes reality, whose origins are always receding into the past and are therefore
unknowable. For example, Prometheus is the story of the “self-assertion” that pro-
duces civilization: the story’s ongoing reception history—accessed by realizing that
myth must always be retold from the perspective of the present—records changes
in self and world conceptions.59 As provisional creatures, we always have what Blu-
menberg calls an “affinity for myth,” which is a constitutive need consciousness
has to discover constant meanings,60 despite the fact that there are no constant
meanings. The implied argument in Blumenberg’s Work on Myth, about which I
will have more to say later, is that myth represents our need for varying degrees of
self-evidence (institutions) in order to function at all.
Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and
56
Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 135.

For Blumenberg, the phenomenological method must begin with the realization of the contin-
57
gency of consciousness; see discussion in Heidenreich, Mensch und Moderne bei Hans Blumenberg, 30.
“AC,” 456 / “AR,” 312.
58
As Chiara Bottini (A Philosophy of Political Myth [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007],
59
129) points out, for Blumenberg, myth represents our need to provide significance in constantly
changing circumstances. Hence, Bottini rejects accounts of myth such as Mircea Eliade’s that rest on
formulating unchanging paradigms. Bottini argues, in concert with Blumenberg, that we never leave
our need for myth behind, and that conditions of modernity—rapid change and disorientation—ag-
gravate this need. She goes on to base her analysis of the rise of modern “unmediated” or totalitarian
myths on Blumenberg’s account of myth’s anthropological function.
WM, 51 / AM, 60.
60
the logic of the life-world: self-assertion,
metaphor, and intentionality
There is a certain logic to the formation of a life-world (understood here in
the first sense, as a livable world) that will add density to Blumenberg’s implied
conception of human existence. It is best captured by examining the relation
between self-assertion, metaphor, intentionality, and existential limits (terminus
a quo), connections that are neither obvious nor fully explained by Blumenberg.
References to these ideas are scattered throughout his works, but my main sources
here will be Work on Myth and “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality.” First,
Blumenberg rejects Husserl’s assumption that intentionality is always paired with
an object or that there can be a free-floating theoretical subject. Blumenberg’s
critique of Husserl’s concept of intentionality in Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Lifetime
and Worldtime) is a study in its own right.61 I restrict myself here to elucidating
Blumenberg’s view of the matter as it applies to his conception of human exis-
tence. For Blumenberg, intentionality is an act of self-assertion over against the
terminus a quo,62 a protest against the inhuman limit of reality’s indifference. That
is, intentionality is an expression of the need consciousness has to be paired with
meaning, given that detached creatures need to establish horizons that circumscribe
possibilities; self-assertion therefore refers to the impulse toward self-preservation
that potentially will take the form of a humanly relevant world.63 On this account,
intentionality can be understood as a vehicle for expanding horizons pragmatically
in the interest of self-preservation.64
Blumenberg also claims that intentionality and the horizons that form a livable
world have a “metaphorical” structure in the sense that metaphor, by carrying mean-
ing over from one context to another orients human beings. Blumenberg can be
counted as part of the contemporary metaphor renaissance that began with the
collapse of naïve scientific realism and the rejection of a correspondence theory
of meaning. This has led to a revival of interest in rhetoric and an emphasis on
metaphor’s transformative, inventive function. Ernst Cassirer initiated much of
this change with his explorations of the formative and constitutive role of meta-
Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit. Blumenberg also draws attention to Husserl’s theoretical
61
subject in Beschreibung des Menschen, where he claims that Husserl speaks of consciousness but not
human consciousness, i.e., consciousness circumscribed by human limits (BM, 9). In this book, Blu-
menberg returns to themes that occupied him during his student years, but he makes more explicit
the anthropological basis of his critiques of Husserl and Heidegger. He claims that Husserl’s ban on
anthropology functions like an apotropaic device to defend the position of the transcendental observer
(Zuschauer) (ibid., 91).
Blumenberg, “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality” [“PT”], in Shipwreck with Spectator:
62
Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 98 / “Aus-
blick auf eine Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit” [“AT”], in Theorie der Metapher, ed. Anselm Haverkamp
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 451. See also, BM, 206, where Blumenberg
claims self-assertion is primarily a response to the consciousness of contingency.
In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg claims that self-assertion is the principle of
63
modernity, but it is important not to overlook the anthropological dimension that is the basis for his
critique of the metaphysical humanism that strives for radical self-grounding, a humanism that fails to
recognize the elementary human orientation needs that can be specified by Blumenberg’s conception
of philosophical anthropology. In this way, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age offers a mitigated defense
of modernity, one that underwrites a limited conception of scientific progress and a scaled-down idea
of autonomy appropriate to our limits.
Or, as he states in BM, 76, intentionality is a system of self-stabilization and self-regulation.
64
phorical language for thinking generally. Analytic philosophers, structuralists,
and hermeneuticists have disputed over how this origination is accomplished,
whether and what kind of cognitive force can be assigned to metaphor, the relation
between literal and metaphorical language, and whether metaphor refers only
to other linguistic contexts. Blumenberg, who fits best in the hermeneutic camp,
provides an existential rationale for metaphor’s central place in the construction
of our sense of reality, one that assumes metaphor’s cognitive function rests on
how metaphor facilitates coping with detachment.
This coping is simultaneously a process by which consciousness fulfills its need
for meaning. That is, under the pressure to make sense of a reality that always
exceeds our grasp, we use metaphors, or “substitutes,” to integrate the “unknown
into a system of the known.” Blumenberg claims: “Metaphor is not only a chapter
in the discussion of rhetorical means, it is a distinctive element of rhetoric, in
which rhetoric’s function can be displayed and expressed in terms of its relation
to anthropology.”65 Blumenberg’s extension of the usual sense of the term, ‘figure
of speech’, to address existential needs follows directly from the deficiency thesis,
which prescribes an indirect relation to reality. Since intentionality implies a gap
between consciousness and possible objects and presses toward substitution as a
way of linking up with already existing meaning contexts (life-world or rhetoric)
in order to project a new orientation, metaphor is the orienting edge of inten-
tionality. For example, when Romeo says that Juliet is the sun, this is based on a
previous disruption of Romeo’s customary ways of behaving and his attempt to
assimilate a passionate new experience. As a result, a new pertinence comes into
being based on connecting two heterogeneous ideas. The actor makes things
similar through an insight, which occurs in spite of the differences. Dissonance is
then embraced within a new congruity. In all of this, there is, as Paul Ricoeur might
say, an “iconic moment” produced by how the absent thing has been assimilated
such that its meaning is read on the image to which it is pictorially bound.66 Juliet
is now bound to the image of the sun. Romeo draws on familiar symbolism associ-
ated with the sun, which dazzles everything and is the source and center of life.
Like Plato’s form of the good, Juliet confers reality and intelligibility on his life,
and so on. Anthropologically, resorting to metaphor implies that harmony (life-
worldly orientations that no longer work, have become rationalized, routinized,
and so on) has been disrupted and a new orientation is called for. Metaphors are
directed “back toward the connections with the life-world as the constant moving
support.”67 Metaphors are not true or false but appropriate or inappropriate.
The logic of Blumenberg’s position rests on the view that metaphor and
consciousness would be unnecessary in a state of perfect harmony, such as the
stimulus-response behavior that guides other species more reliably or a perfectly
congruent life-world. The only reality over which we could possibly experience our
own influence is a familiar reality, one within the scope of our possible goals and
practices. Only a detour, a metaphor, puts this familiarity within our grasp. In all
“AC,” 440 / “AR,” 296.

65
“The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon
66
Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 142.

“PT,” 81 / “AT,” 438.
67
of this, metaphor is itself a metaphor that allows us to construct an understanding
of orientation, one that is underwritten by the contingency of all orientations.
There is one more important element in this reconstruction of Blumenberg’s
conception of intentionality: its link to affect. Blumenberg understands affect as
the bodily registering of limits. That is, one dimension of our experience of limits
takes the form of affect. The state of nature story in Work on Myth contains an ab-
breviated account of how intentionality, affect, and metaphor work together in the
process of self- and world-formation. The thought model contains the resources
to extrapolate how and that we interiorize the connection between self and world
through feeling, which anchors an enlarged horizon in what has now become (or
is), as a result of our world openness, an alien and dreaded, or “uncanny” world.
Coping with world openness must involve resolving troublesome relations to our
affects. Specific affects—such as anger, fear, joy, and so on—particularize and fo-
cus the imagination. However, since the account that follows attempts to capture
how affect is related to existential limits, anxiety will be the point of reference for
displaying how objects are particularized and introjected through feeling.
Anxiety is our response to the loss of orientation—either “instinctual” (the state
of nature scenario) or when institutions fail us (the life-world as livable world). To
cope with anxiety, consciousness must become consciousness of something. Blumen-
berg is referring to anxiety when he states that affect is first a kind of despecified
agitation and a condition of paying attention “that had to take over the position
of a habitual adaptive system.” He then draws out the implications:
Affect is the inclusive bracket that unites partial actions that work against the abso-
lutism of reality. Intentionality—the coordination of parts into a whole, of qualities
into an object, of things into a world—may be the cooled off aggregate condition
of such early accomplishments of consciousness, accomplishments that led the way
out of the bracketing together of stimulus and response and that were at the same
time the outcome of this exodus. To that extent there is something in the classical
idea that emotion is the unclarity of the mind feeling its way forward. This schema
of accomplishment is filled not only by sensation and perception but also by names,
figures, and stories, the rituals and machinations that are bracketed together by
the one still-undefined affective condition of overwhelming power [absolutism of
reality].68
If stimulus and response are “originally” bracketed together in the “prehuman

creature,” for which the world’s relevances were given, then world openness is
equivalent to the uncoupling of stimulus and response. This dissonance is the
possibility of conscious behavior because it is also the possibility of consciousness
with an object and therefore a horizon—at which point particularization and
introjection occur. (Having seen Juliet as the sun, Romeo feels that she is his, or
at least that she is the most significant iconic object in his world: a new congru-
ence emerges.) Dissonance is therefore also the possibility of the “metaphorical”
substitution of one thing for another in an attempt to integrate the unknown into
our experience of the known. We feel this uncoupling in states of disorienting
anxiety. The emergent world openness and experience of lack is also a need for
compensatory meaning, which particular affects, such as fear, stabilize into objects.
WM, 21 / AM, 28.

68
This stabilization reduces an anxiety-provoking chaos by eliminating much of the
stimuli coming from the environment. Fear of something substitutes for anxiety,
which can then be named, and this anticipates symbolic, and therefore rational,
behavior. That is, in order to focus our attention onto an object, we must distance
ourselves from what Cassirer and Scheler called our drives, or from the uncanny
awareness of the totality of the wholly other, a totality that is always only partially
digested through symbols, language, and narratives.
Stimulus-response or purely reactive behavior is not conscious and is not emo-
tion, because it involves no interiorization. The consciousness of contingency
coupled with interiorization occurs over against the anxious awareness of the
nonnecessity of existing. At this point, some threads can be connected. We have
a life-world because we need it. This world comes into being as a function of a
double-sided, affectively-tinged horizon that mediates existence in reference to
its limits. The horizon is double-sided because intentionality can be either with
or without an object: Blumenberg has built his anthropological insights about human
risk and contingency into his understanding of intentionality. Anxiety is intentionality
whose horizon lacks an object and is therefore inherently unstable. Only when
intentionality is paired with a meaning does this instability begin to be resolved. In
a state of anxiety, our nonnecessity (lack of a meaningful world) is lived through
lack and dread, and this unstable horizon can be defined as “the sum of directions
from which one has to be prepared for the appearance of undefined things”—a
state that cannot be maintained indefinitely.69 Our limits are also a condition of
our achievements.
Over against this radical instability is the possibility of intentionality with an
object. Intentionality in this sense presupposes filtering out excess stimuli, reducing
anxiety, and focusing on specific possibilities. In this case, the horizon is the “sum
of the directions to which anticipation of possibilities and reaching out toward
them is oriented,”70 which is directed by metaphor and bound together by specific
feelings. This double-sided concept of intentionality suggests that we are an oscil-
lation between two extremes defined by a need for a trusted platform (rhetoric)
in the midst of a hostile or unfamiliar set of circumstances (state of nature) to
which specific affects and the expectations they generate are or can be attached.
This need is expressed in an “I do not yet have” or “I desire” a particular object
or state of affairs. The specific face the world shows is necessarily perspectival,
and this perspective is related to the affective state of the subject.71 The horizon
is filled with nothing or everything (anxiety), or it is filled with dreams and actual
possibilities, which are colored subjectively by joy, fear, anger, shame, and so on.
Emotions particularize, or are the “face” of, the same object, gradually establishing
its significance, contours, and expectations through an evolving relationship to
it. Blumenberg is obviously also referring to the origins and function of language
WM, 6 / AM, 12. For Blumenberg, consciousness can exist fleetingly without an object, because,
69
as Samuel Moyn points out, “preliminary distinctions have not yet been made” (“Metaphorically Speak-
ing: Hans Blumenberg, Giambattista Vico, and the Problem of Origins,” Qui Parle [2000], 58). There
is no prereflexive “life-world.”
WM, 7 / AM, 13.
70
WM, 167 / AM, 185.

71
when, in this context, he borrows Franz Rosenzweig’s phrase: names break “into
the chaos of the unnamed,” or we might say that the word crickets could “sub-
stitute” for what we experienced as noise.72 In the process, emotion expresses a
potentiality for freedom, because it interiorizes the noncoincidence of the self to
the self that correlates with being world-open. But it also interiorizes a sense of
powerlessness, because emotion testifies to the nonnegotiable lack of control over
the object—all of which is conditioned by and therefore intelligible in relation
to reality’s absolutism.
In Work on Myth, Blumenberg dramatizes this process of orientation or world-
formation by tracking how mythical figures distance us from a lethal reality. For
example, over time pure fear coalesced into the figure Medusa, who comes to
stand (be a “metaphor”) for potentially uncontrolled anxiety. Her name implies
a story with procedures (it sets the terms) for dealing with her. A similar process
is involved in the introjection described by psychoanalysis. Alluding to The Future
of an Illusion at the beginning of Work on Myth, Blumenberg claims that “Freud
described the complete helplessness of the ego in the face of overwhelming dan-
ger as the core of the traumatic situation, and saw in the child’s early demand
for love the compensation for such helplessness.”73 The child’s imagined loss of
a seamless connection to the mother accompanies individuation and self- and
other-recognition through introjection. In the Freud example, “love” individu-
ates by particularizing an object. The individual learns to maintain a position by
recognizing and attaching expectations and meanings to a cathected object. Thus,
metaphor, as the vehicle that introjects also involves recognition—just as myth as
institutionalized, introjected cultural meaning supports recognition.
Self-preservative intentionality is therefore roundabout or “circumstantial” and
pragmatic, an increased range of behaviors made possible by narrowing horizons
to human proportions.74 As resistance to arbitrariness and fragmentation, this is
an “accomplishment.” As for Husserl, the correlate is significance, but here it is
tethered to affectively experienced limits. Significance can now be understood, as
Barbara Merker argues, as a surrogate life-world under the conditions of intention-
ality.75 By “bracketing” all socially mediated symbolic constructs, the life-preservative
function of significance, metaphor, and intentionality become visible. Sensations,
perception, names, figures, and stories fill our constitutional world openness and
distance us from nothingness.
Obviously, intentionality may be purely subjective, purely fantasy, “the absolut-
ism of images and wishes,”76 a price we pay for flexibility. Blumenberg needs a
criterion for discriminating between pure fantasy and realistic behavior. “What the
horizon is filled with can lack realism as long as this does not extend to the central
matter of survival.”77 For example, as long as I realize that fantasies of jumping off
cliffs and flying are not actual possibilities, the fantasy is not necessarily harmful.
72
WM, 34 / AM, 40.
73
WM, 5 / AM, 10.
Blumenberg repeatedly uses the word ‘circumstantiality’ to describe our indirect relation to
74
reality (e.g., WM, 142 / AM, 159–60, and “AC,” 439 / “AR,” 295).
Merker, “Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit,” 85–86.
75
WM, 8 / AM, 14.

76
WM, 7 / AM, 13.

77
Blumenberg adds that cases of failure create a zone of realistic but circumstantial
“as if” behavior. For example, Odysseus’s return home is punctuated by bits of cun-
ning designed to outwit all that threatens to prevent this return. He has an arena
of “as if” behavior that, since Odysseus is pragmatic, does not include listening to
the Sirens’ lethal song unless he is securely fastened to the ship’s mast. Over time,
we learn which mushrooms are poisonous and which are not. This behavior is in-
formed by “names that have been raised out of unfamiliarity by means of metaphor
and made accessible, in terms of their significance, by telling stories.”78 Over the
millennia, stories (myths) maintain a life-worldly position, one that acquires its
own “objectivity” and necessity. This position supports human self-preservation by
having stood the test of time. In offering resistance to the leveling out of space-
time contingency, this grounds further metaphorical substitution.
Blumenberg broadens his already idiosyncratic understanding of metaphor
even more in “An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance
of Rhetoric,” when he suggests that our constitution is itself metaphorical. Echo-
ing Kant’s assertion of incomplete self-reflexivity, Blumenberg claims, “Man
comprehends himself only by way of what he is not.” He interprets this as: “it is
not only [man’s] situation that is potentially metaphorical; his constitution itself
already is.”79 ‘Situation’ refers to our ongoing need to resolve our relation to the
unknown; the constitution that “already is” is the dissonance of the deficiency-ab-
solutism of reality heterogeneity. This dissonance can be resolved only indirectly
in particular ways that integrate the unknown into the known. Here he has used his
own analysis of metaphor to suggest metaphorically how we might comprehend
human existence functionally.
Based on these various extensions of the term ‘metaphor’, it follows that no
wholly descriptive and rational account of who we are can be given, because every
content-based account contains a metaphorical surplus that exceeds conceptuality.
For example, the ideas that we are animals, machines, streams of consciousness, or
genes is metaphorically saturated; the content draws on the richness (or poverty)
of available life-worldly meanings. People orient themselves by acting and constitut-
ing themselves through this metaphorical surplus. The history of conceptions of
human nature (e.g., the rational animal or the image of god) is a history of self-
constitution—a history of superseded metaphors or comparisons. Each metaphor
sets the terms of a world-view, set of institutions, customs, and expectations that
maintain a life-world. The function of metaphor itself, apart from specific content,
is to create the ineliminable subjective space necessary for human self-preservation
and cultural reproduction precisely by setting those terms.
We can understand how metaphor accomplishes self-preservation and re-
production by examining Blumenberg’s cryptic and far-fetched sounding claim
that even action can have a metaphorical structure.80 Action, by definition, is not
instinctual, stimulus-response, or reactive behavior. That is, action presupposes at
least some minimal prior mediation of impulse, and it presupposes a wider range
of behavioral latitude, which in turn presupposes the space created by metaphor.
WM, 6 / AM, 12.

78
“AC,” 456 / “AR,” 312.

79
“AC,” 456 / “AR,” 312

80
Metaphor is “an imaginative procedure, a projective principle, which expands
and occupies empty space.81 More precisely, action can be “metaphorical” in the
sense that one action can be substituted for another, such as animal sacrifice for
human sacrifice. Or symbolic behavior can substitute for or interfere with action
that tends toward reaction (stimulus-response). For example, treaties can be
substituted for nuclear proliferation, environmental regulations can be substi-
tuted for environmental degradation, or rhetoric can substitute for terror. In the
rhetoric essay, Blumenberg observes that “without this capacity to use substitutes
for actions not much would be left of mankind.”82 This is obviously problematic
in the technological era where “action [threatens to] shrink to reaction.”83 Here,
Blumenberg extends the meaning of the term ‘substitution’ in order to under-
stand action functionally.
self-assertion and the human

There is one more important feature of the definition of human existence given
earlier. If self-assertion is often blind because it tends to exceed limits, and if the
anthropological meaning of self-assertion is protest against raw contingency, then
an idea of what counts as human orientation and a concern for the ethical impli-
cations of anthropology is implicit in Blumenberg’s texts. Adaptation to circum-
stances requires human beings to self-assertively place limits between themselves
and that which disorients—to put limits between themselves and the limits to
existence that support what I will call a minimal “anthrocenteredness.” To be hu-
man means to recognize limits in a specific way, as Blumenberg explicitly affirms
in an early essay on the link between ethics and the problem of self-preservation
and in a later essay dedicated in part to Cassirer’s achievements.
In an early essay, “Ist eine philosophische Ethik gegenwärtig möglich?” (“Is a
Philosophical Ethics Possible Today?”), Blumenberg claims that Kant’s abstract idea
of humanity as the power to set ends has receded into the background. However,
Blumenberg still invokes Kant when he distinguishes human action from stimulus-
response or reactive behavior (Kant’s “alien causes”). In this essay, Blumenberg
defines ethics as the “self-preservation of the human.” For Blumenberg, it makes no
sense to discuss ethics without first having determined how to meet the orientation
needs that will support value conferral. So he both holds onto a residual Kantian
moment and underscores his own skepticism about the possibility of a Kantian
type ethics. He cites contemporary barriers, such as the ethical deficit produced by
the loss of a “cosmic ought,” the temptation to lead an aesthetic existence (let life
happen rather than lead it), to allow interest in efficiency to override all interest in
ends, or to allow ourselves to be subsumed and crushed by an administered society,
thereby transferring the role of the subject to an anonymous collective84—not un-
like Dasein superimposed on a technological grid or Foucault’s subjected self. All
these threats call for an anthropological reinterpretation of the Kantian postulates,
“AC,” 454 / “AR,” 309.

81
“AC,” 440 / “AR,” 296.

82
“AC,” 446 / “AR,” 302.

83
Blumenberg, “Ist eine philosophische Ethik gegenwärtig möglich?”, in Studium Generale 6

84
(1953), 174, 180–81.

which should be separated from metaphysics and viewed as part of the “rhetoric
of ethics,” whose aim is to “give meaning to improving the conditions of life.” He
adds: we should continue to wager “as though” we can benefit.85
When awarded the Kuno Fisher Prize in 1974, twenty years after the ethics
essay, Blumenberg stated that Cassirer’s Substance and Function had been unjustly
forgotten. Although Cassirer wrote this book in 1910, it contained the germ of
his later theory of symbolic forms. As David Adams notes, in it Cassirer argues that
“the function of symbolic forms is as important as their substance and that relations
between things are as important as the things themselves.”86 Due to length con-
siderations, I cannot go into detail about how Cassirer applied his account of the
invariant requirements for apprehension and objectivity of scientific objects to all
forms of experience, such as language and myth. Blumenberg put these ideas—in
particular, the idea of function—to new uses when he rejected Cassirer’s formalist
and essentially ahistorical treatment of symbolic forms—to which Heidegger also
objected—and emphasized how symbolic form itself answers to our self-preserva-
tion needs in ways I have already discussed, i.e., to become and remain human, it
is necessary to give “form” to existence.
In this same speech, Blumenberg also urges us not to forget Kant and Cassirer’s
guidance in another way, and he cautions against regarding the idea of humanity as
a self-grounding subject by means of which we imagine escaping from contingency
or as a particular conception that can be universalized such that history becomes
one (oppressive) history.87 To be human is to be so in particular ways as this or that
individual. Nonetheless, there are preconditions shared by all for appraising this
state of affairs. The limit concepts mentioned earlier are normatively suggestive in
this regard, although Blumenberg does not explicitly say so. For example, if finite
existence must be a mean between the two limits of deficiency and perfection,
then it is possible to ask whether at any one point in time a subject or a culture is
overpowered by absolutism or has succumbed to magical thinking. Is the move-
ment toward disorientation and anxiety or toward illusions of mastery and utopian
thinking that brackets a reality principle? When Blumenberg asserts that Kant’s
postulates are part of the rhetoric of ethics, I take that to mean that Kant’s aim
for a world of moral self-realization, guided by a conception of the highest good,
is (was) a form of rhetoric that can reflect (once reflected) a desire to act in the
interests of humanity, countering the tendency to efface the human that is built
into the logic of disenchantment.
limit concepts and metaphorics

Ultimately Blumenberg cannot “prove” his hypothesis of limit concepts, his story
of the origin of myth, or his assertion of metaphor’s primacy, as long as the model
is scientific or one erroneously demanded by metaphysics.88 Limit concepts and
“AC,” 450 / “AR,” 306. See Müller (Sorge um die Vernunft, 361–66) for a discussion of Blumen-
85
berg and ethics. He notes that Blumenberg does not present a systematic ethics, but that an ethical
concern motivates his emphasis on “caring for reason.”
Adams, “Metaphors for Mankind,” 154.
86
Blumenberg, “Ernst Cassirer’s gedenkend,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 85 (1974): 456–63;

87
repr. in Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981).

See discussion in Leszek Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
88
2001), 1–2.
metaphors are justified by what they can explain and they (partially) satisfy the need
for atemporal reference points. From an anthropological point of view, neither
metaphysics nor scientific rationalism addresses the need for the humanly relevant
world supplied by enabling vehicles such as metaphor and myth. Blumenberg ob-
serves that, “what we need from history [and cannot get] tends toward indicators
having the clarity of mythical models, indicators that enable the individual subject,
with his finite time, to determine how he can set himself in a relationship to the
large-scale structures that reach far beyond him.”89 In terms of the referents to
myth, or for that matter limit concepts, it is not a question of proof, but rather, as
Leszek Kolakowski claims in The Presence of Myth, a matter of matching up needs
and “areas or sources of energy active in man’s conscious relation to the world.”
Kolaskowsi continues: “the proof-making ability is itself a power of the analytic
mind, technologically oriented, which does not extend beyond its tasks. . . . The
idea of proof, introduced into metaphysics, arises from a confusion of two different
sources of energy active in man’s conscious relation to the world: the technologi-
cal and the mythical.”90 Trying to convert one function into the other or to trying
to prove the truths of mythical consciousness analytically results in confusion,
because the two functions meet different orientation needs.
Blumenberg claims that we operate on the basis of a “principle of insufficient
reason,” that traditional metaphysics is therefore an excessive expectation. The
desire for foundational truth is a correlate of transcendental anthropologies; it
assumes an impossible congruence, the residue of an imaginary lost mythical
orientation.91 This results from an “affinity for mythical thinking” untempered by
a reality principle. By way of anthropology, “metaphorics”—a term that refers to
Blumenberg’s methodology—deflates essentialisms or claims for traditional meta-
physical certainty. This involves discovering the background, or “root,” metaphors
on which claims for definitive knowledge or various self and world understandings
depend. For example, nature may be understood as an organism or as a machine,
and both have theoretical consequences because metaphors set the terms of our
understanding. Once we see the underlying metaphors as metaphors, then the
claims based on these, which we once supposed were definitive, are deflated.
Blumenberg claims that metaphysics has often proved itself to be metaphorics
taken literally or “substantially.”92 That is, we might believe that nature really is
a machine. Metaphorics assumes that we can create distance from “absolute” or
definitive claims and yet preserve the meaning installed by the metaphor.
Problems arise when metaphors are taken literally. For example, genetic es-
sentialism is reductive and may support the belief that genetic manipulation will
solve problems that may have little to do with genetic makeup. At this point in
time, we are also engaged in a confrontation with the artificial world produced
WM, 100 / AM, 113.

89
Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth, 2.

90
For Blumenberg, reason constitutes a paradox. Reason is an adaptation in response to a bio-

91
logical shortcoming and is therefore one way in which human beings distance themselves from the
absolutism of reality. It always remains a contingent achievement, prone to error and hypertrophy.
On the other hand, it is the only tool we have for self-criticism and self-correction. See discussion in
Müller (Sorge um die Vernunft, esp. 325–99).
Blumenberg, “Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie,” 140.
92
by our technological inventions. The guiding metaphor is the computer, which
generates research into computers that will surpass the complexity of the human
mind. Understood as a metaphorical relationship, it is a comparison between our-
selves and computers. Wayne Booth proposes a kind of critical metaphorics, with
which Blumenberg would most likely agree, when he claims that the “quality of any
culture will in part be measured both by the quality of the metaphors it induces or
allows and the quality of the judges of metaphor that it educates and rewards.” He
proposes that understanding metaphors allows us to decide whether to “join the
metaphorist or reject him, and that is simultaneously to decide either to be shaped
in the shame his metaphor requires or to resist.” For example, does it enlarge us
or diminish us to use Freud’s metaphors for the soul, or B. F. Skinner’s?93
If traditional metaphysics is the correlate of transcendental anthropologies,
metaphorics is the correlate of the minimal anthropology implied in Blumenberg’s
texts. There is no perfect congruence between thought and its objects or between
the organism and its environment. There is, however, relative congruence, which
can be conceptualized by reinterpreting how human beings and the environment
do or can “fit” together (Passung).
The “principle of insufficient reason” implies there is no perfect fit.94 The
structure of human existence indicates a gap between the “paradise” of certain
knowledge we once believed we could have and what is possible. The discredited
great questions and great myths persist, which indicates an anthropological need
that cannot be gainsaid or deconstructed. This raises the question of whether
the loss of traditional metaphysics should give way to a neo-Kantian bypassing of
finitude’s pressure or a positivist reductionism that brackets out what it cannot
accommodate as meaningless or anachronistic. Rather, self-evidence can be ques-
tioned by asking what it means within the limits of existence.
objectivity and rationality

I want to return briefly to the issue of objectivity and rationality implied by Blumen-
berg’s conception of existence and its complement, the principle of insufficient
reason. Somewhat counterintuitively, the great myths are the model for what counts
as objectivity and rationality in institutions. Just as myths must be understood in
terms of their reception history—they are tested over time and their success and
our survival is measured by reality’s failure to contradict them—so are all viable
institutions and habits of behavior that would shelter us from threats to viability.
So, objectivity and rationality are context-dependent, with institutions providing
the basis for making (rational) first-order assessments of the arrangements they
embody.
To understand more about what Blumenberg means by “objectivity” and
“rationality,” it is necessary to take a closer look at what he means by “optimized
institutions,” of which the great myths are examples. The term ‘institutions’ refers
to rhetoric from the perspective of its stabilization over time, to what we take for
Wayne Booth, “Metaphor and Rhetoric,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University
93
of Chicago Press, 1979), 63, 66–67.

See discussion in Merker, “Bedürfnis nach Bedeutsamkeit,” 75–76.
94
granted such that further behavioral experimentation is possible. For example,
the use of knives and forks, pens and pencils has been institutionalized; so have
child-rearing patterns, grammar, the use of words to refer to things and ideas.
Although institutions are only relatively constant, Blumenberg claims that they
constitute “burdens of proof” that we have survived and can continue to survive.
It is no accident that this metaphor is drawn from logic, given that optimization
implies the continuing production of “evidence” in this regard. This is not a
theory of progress or a moral category; the concept is shorthand for the histori-
cal formation of any cultural or theoretical construct we may come to take for
granted. For example, scientific theories remain optimal as long as they continue
to account for phenomena and generate further research. Cultural constructs
remain optimal as long as they continue to support value conferral, identity,
communicability, and action. Blumenberg presents his theory as an analogy to
Darwinian evolution; optimization may not always choose what is best, but what
works, and this is “optimal” until it stops working. Optimization is the basis of a
kind of objectivity. He claims:
Even if the term ‘optimization’ can never claim to be applicable to a synchronic
cross section as a whole, it does establish a definite distribution of burdens of proof
for what gives itself out as rationality. At least arguments of the kind that assert that
something can no longer be accepted because it has already been accepted for a very
long time without examination do not have the rational plausibility that is granted to
them at the time. What the heading “institutions” covers is, above all, a distribution
of burdens of proof. Where an institution exists, the question of its rational founda-
tion is not, of itself, urgent.95
The burden of proof metaphor suggests that institutions are plausible accounts,
whose objectivity is conferred on them by their continuing anthropological
relevance and correction by reality. If an institution has endured and supplies a
realistic zone of “as if” behavior, it provides the resources for getting on with liv-
ing. Viewed in this light, the human sciences provide evidence of how, why, and
that choices of world interpretations have already been made that constitute our
history. To return to the metaphor: at least in our justice system, the defendant
is presumed innocent. The burden is on the prosecutor to prove the defendant’s
guilt. Similarly, those who object to the optimized institution bear the burden of
demonstrating its shortcomings. In practice, this is what happens. This says nothing
about the inherent justice of the arrangements, but it does affirm an anthropologi-
cal requirement that there be such arrangements whose plausibility is legible next
to the yardstick of self-preservation. The “rationality” of institutions is coextensive
with its rejection of questions in the sense that they shield us from having the ques-
tion everything at once. Institutions represent elementary commitments that are
necessary because we cannot start from scratch at every moment. Institutions are
burdens of proof that allow us to make some accommodation with the “meager
finitude of life that the thinker-for-himself has disposition over.” They free the
“world observer.”96 So admitting the rationality of institutions lifts the burden of
proof at the same time that it defines this burden by delineating reason’s limits.
WM, 166 / AM, 183–84.

95
WM, 26 / AM, 33.

96
These limits are not just the principle of noncontradiction, but the antinomy of
life and thought, partially bridged by institutions. In this context, reason would
have to mean taking up burdens of proof piece-meal as they are distributed to
us. That is, we move away from problems as we solve them, and the model is the
one overwhelming anthropological problem constituted by the terminus a quo.
Rationality and objectivity are adaptations, qualities of distance from insufficient
orientations and nonviability.
anthropocentrism and “anthrocenteredness”

Why is Blumenberg’s position not anthropocentric? First of all, Blumenberg would
point out that a view must be a view from somewhere. I opt for the term ‘anthro-
centeredness’ because it is necessary to acknowledge the place and constraints on
the place from which we make our claims. The thought model discussed earlier
encourages recognition of our smallness and marginality in relation to a larger
natural setting at the same time that it calls into question grandiose knowledge
claims. Definitive orientations and definitive evidence always exceed our capacities.
This has been overlooked by the more optimistic Enlighteners and technocrats
targeted by antihumanist critiques. The ever-increasing sense of the universe’s im-
mensity further amplifies the discrepancy. In a posthumously published work, Die
Vollzähligkeit, Blumenberg meditates on the immensity of time and space (innumer-
able galaxies) and the powerlessness of Wissen. The size of the universe is an index
of the loss of our significance and also the improbability of our form of existence.
But it is precisely this meditation that deflates and replaces the narcotizing and
grandiose narratives associated with anthropocentrism with narratives that foster
living within our means. Reinforcing a sense of life’s preciousness can become the
basis for how and why we should care. Sorge is not a given any more than life is a
right.97 Like Cassirer, Blumenberg thinks anxiety must be a transitional moment,
but unlike Cassirer, the resolution does not measure progressive self-liberation.
There is no self to liberate and no absolute point of view from which to judge
the process. Awareness of biological limits is key to the philosophical endeavor
itself. Anthropology counsels us to remember human beings by renouncing the
nothingness at the heart of existence, on the one hand, and definitive answers,
on the other hand. This anthropology of limits provides the means to realistically
assess our possibilities. We may not have an overall view of the course of history,
but we do have a non-negotiable limit.98
See discussion in Franz Josef Wetz, “Abscheid ohne Widersehen: Die Endgültigkeit des Verschwin-
97
dens,” in Die Kunst des Überlebens, 42–47. Wetz tends to read these passages pessimistically, which is not
surprising because the immense burden placed on human beings by modern conditions. Another way
to read this is that Blumenberg is soberly appraising the challenge and the choice is ours.
I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions for revision.
98

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Hans Blumenberg’s

Vida Pavesich is Lecturer in Philosophy at California State University, East Bay.

Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 3 (2008) 421–48

Harper & Row, 1962).

“Davos,” 202 / GA 3, 287.

“Davos,” 202 / GA 3, 288.

Heidegger, KPM, 162 / GA 3, 231.

KPM, 192 / GA 3, 273.

“Davos,” 202 / GA 3, 288.

“Davos,” 203 / GA 3, 289.

“Davos,” 201 (emphasis added) / GA 3, 286.

Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, 208.

max scheler and helmuth plessner:

arnold gehlen: the creature of deficiencies

Ibid., 54, 68.

am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 181–83.

hans blumenberg: the terminus a quo

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 76.

blumenberg’s definition of human existence:

WM, 9 / AM, 15.

WM, 3–4 / AM, 9–10.

From Blumenberg’s perspective, Heidegger has ignored how Dasein’s “prehistory”

WM, 110 / AM, 125.

J. M. Fritzman, “Blumenberg and the Rationality of Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 10 (1992): 423–35.

Adams, “Metaphors for Mankind,” 161.

not being in the world.

Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 135.

“AC,” 440 / “AR,” 296.

Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 142.

If stimulus and response are “originally” bracketed together in the “prehuman

WM, 21 / AM, 28.

WM, 167 / AM, 185.

WM, 8 / AM, 14.

WM, 7 / AM, 13.

WM, 6 / AM, 12.

“AC,” 456 / “AR,” 312.

“AC,” 456 / “AR,” 312

self-assertion and the human

“AC,” 454 / “AR,” 309.

“AC,” 440 / “AR,” 296.

“AC,” 446 / “AR,” 302.

Blumenberg, “Ist eine philosophische Ethik gegenwärtig möglich?”, in Studium Generale 6

(1953), 174, 180–81.

limit concepts and metaphorics

Blumenberg, “Ernst Cassirer’s gedenkend,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 85 (1974): 456–63;

repr. in Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981).

WM, 100 / AM, 113.

Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth, 2.

For Blumenberg, reason constitutes a paradox. Reason is an adaptation in response to a bio-

objectivity and rationality

of Chicago Press, 1979), 63, 66–67.

WM, 166 / AM, 183–84.

WM, 26 / AM, 33.

anthropocentrism and “anthrocenteredness”

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