THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY

BOOK REVIEW

Xander Kirke. Hans Blumenberg: Myth and Significance in Modern Politics. Cham:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 124 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-02532-8.

Immediately upon its publication in 1979, Work on Myth1 by German philosopher Hans
Blumenberg (1920–1996) provoked fierce discussion in German academia. Written in
Blumenberg’s circuitous, meandering style, rich in both erudition and allusive irony, it was
quickly drawn into the debate on postmodernity and anti-rationalism that raged in the nine-
teen-eighties. Apparently contradicting his 1966 Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg
painted modernity not as a triumph of rationalism – as a movement from mythos to logos –
but instead argued for the persistence of mythical alongside conceptual thought due to the
specific world-relation of humans: Confronted with the “absolutism of reality,” human
beings need ways to create distance, orientation, consolation, and security. For Blumenberg,
this is achieved through a layer of cultural “significances” made from names, concepts,
metaphors, and indeed myths and stories.
Work on Myth never touched upon what, for a survivor of the Third Reich like Blumenberg
himself, must have been an urgent topic: the role of myth in politics, particularly in the rise of
National Socialism – behind which Ernst Cassirer already in his 1946 Myth of the State identi-
fied mythical thought as a driving force. Decades after Blumenberg’s death, the publication of
Pr€afiguration (2014)2 – a chapter that in the end did not make it into Work on Myth – finally
disclosed Blumenberg’s interpretation of Hitler as following an almost magical belief in the sig-
nificance of past events as a guide for the future. In 2015, a brief essay Blumenberg wrote about
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann book came to light, in which he accused her of ignoring the trial’s
function as a mythical foundation for the state of Israel.3
It may have been Blumenberg’s failure to address the political elephant in the room that
kept Work on Myth from finding an anglophone audience when it was translated in 1985,
but when it did, the absent political dimension curiously became its reception’s main focus:
Chiara Bottici’s 2007 A Philosophy of Political Myth investigated both the danger and the
necessity of mythical thinking in politics,4 and she chose Blumenberg as her main interlocu-
tor. Following Bottici’s book, Work on Myth quickly became a central text for the rekindled
interest in the notion of political myth. In 2015, Angus Nicholls’s Myth and the Human
Sciences offered a comprehensive interpretation of Blumenberg’s theory of myth that could
now also refer to Pr€afiguration, and that serves as the only available English-language intro-
duction to Blumenberg’s thought as a whole.5
Unfortunately, Xander Kirke’s Hans Blumenberg: Myth and Significance in Modern Politics
neither adds much to the discussion of political myth, nor does it expand our understanding
of Blumenberg. Kirke’s stated aim is to offer an introduction to Blumenberg’s thought on
myth in a political context, and as a mere introduction, the book suffices. However, not

1
Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979). English as: Hans Blumenberg, Work on
Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).
2
Hans Blumenberg, Pr€afiguration: Arbeit am politischen Mythos, ed. Felix Heidenreich and Angus Nicholls (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2014).
3 €
Hans Blumenberg, Rigorismus der Wahrheit: “Moses der Agypter” und weitere Texte zu Freud und Arendt, ed. Ahlrich
Meyer (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015). English as: Hans Blumenberg, Rigorism of Truth: “Moses the Egyptian” and Other
Writings on Freud and Arendt, trans. Joe Paul Kroll (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).
4
Chiara Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
5
Angus Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (New York: Routledge, 2015). For a
critique of some shortcomings of Nicholls’s book, see my review in Germanic Review 90, no. 4 (2015): 358–370.
2 BOOK REVIEW

only does it lack original research, but the simplifications Kirke undertakes are ill-suited to
the complexities of Blumenberg’s corpus. This is already evident at the start of his book,
where Kirke hurries through some central concepts – metaphorology, secularization, and the
life-world (16–27) – ignoring their dependence on the contexts in which they are employed
in Blumenberg’s work. Instead of providing such contexts, Kirke relies on summarizing
standard insights from recent Blumenberg scholarship and theories of myth one finds in
more detail in Bottici or Nicholls. Apart from that, Kirke’s own interpretative additions are
relatively slim:
First, Kirke insists on seeing Blumenberg not only in the context of philosophical anthro-
pology – the German current of thought that includes thinkers like Arnold Gehlen or
Helmuth Plessner, and to which Blumenberg counted himself in the latter half of his career
– but also as standing in an existentialist lineage that includes Kierkegaard and Heidegger,
which deals primarily with Angst as a basic human condition. Kirke understands
Blumenberg’s notion of keeping the “absolutism of reality” as dependent on the idea that
Angst (objectless anxiety) must constantly be resolved into Furcht (object-specific fear) –
something myth can provide. Indeed, the focus on Angst makes good sense in the context of
political theory, where the concept of fear has played a central role from Thomas Hobbes to
Judith Shklar. But Kirke makes surprisingly little of it, and his discussion of Hobbes
exhausts itself in the observation that Blumenberg is not a contractualist, which was never at
issue in the first place.
Second, Kirke connects the concept of “process” to the discussion of myth. That
Blumenberg’s notion of myth is not substantialist but functional – not about the content of
myths but about the work they perform in organizing human world experience – has
frequently been remarked. Kirke repeats this idea but adds the opposition substantialist v.
processual, arguing that Blumenberg’s theory of myth may be understood as a “process-rela-
tional philosophy” in the lineage of Bergson-Dewey-Whitehead (and Heidegger, as he adds)
(96). Pitting process against substance helps, Kirke argues, to understand how myths con-
tinue their existence in radically changed guises while retaining a base constancy – myths
are processes, not things. If this is indeed Kirke’s main insight, it is unclear why he needs
the process-ontological baggage at all if the same argument can be (and has been) put for-
ward by focusing on functional continuity. What is more problematic is that process ontolo-
gies actively undercut the anthropological assumptions Blumenberg makes that have to
contain a modicum of substantialism (“the human being”). And while there are good rea-
sons to believe that Blumenberg remained ambivalent about a strong anthropological sub-
stantialism, Kirke does not discuss this topic further, just as he forgoes fleshing out his
anthropology by discussing the major, posthumously published Beschreibung des Menschen.6
He does acknowledge Blumenberg’s ambiguous normative position toward political myth –
while Pr€afiguration argues for a separation of politics and myth, Rigorism forcefully advo-
cates its unbroken necessity – but Kirke’s insistence on process does little to resolve the ten-
sion. Likewise, his conclusion “that myth is relational” and “cannot occur within a social
vacuum” (99) is mostly a result of grouping Blumenberg with process philosophy than
something Kirke can show in Work on Myth itself. A more realistic picture is Felix
Heidenreich’s, who quite rightly called Blumenberg a “subject-philosopher,” to the extent
that he ignored the sphere of society (and relationality) completely.7
Because Kirke focuses on the theory of political myth, it would be unfair to criticize his
concentration on Work on Myth and the few related texts; but it is worth pointing out that

6
Hans Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen, ed. Manfred Sommer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).
Felix Heidenreich, “Political Aspects in Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophy,” Aurora 27, no. 41 (2015): 521–37.
7
 THE GERMANIC REVIEW: LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY 3

Blumenberg’s political theory has much more to offer than often quixotic ruminations on
mythical thought. Kirke’s conclusion that Work on Myth is “an argument for moderate pol-
itical conservatism” (104), a plea for stability over radical change, finds its counter-position
in reading, with Denis Trierweiler and others, Legitimacy of the Modern Age as a decidedly
liberal attack on the political right embodied by Heidegger, Schmitt, and J€ unger.8 Indeed,
this turn from liberal to conservative is the great Kehre in Blumenberg’s work.9 It happens
around May 1968, and deserves more attention than Kirke has to spare. Blumenberg pub-
lished only one essay during his lifetime that is specifically dedicated to political theory, in
1969 at that.10 It is astonishing that Kirke mentions it only in passing and only by way of
citing Nicholls, but it is this essay that suggests a theory of politics as speech acts and, most
interestingly, speech that supplants action. Blumenberg’s political thought does not exhaust
itself with myth, but finds a liberal precursor in his theory of rhetoric, a philosophy of
speaking so as not having to act.
Kirke’s very readable but often simplifying account of Blumenberg’s ideas about political
myth ignores such subtleties of his thought. As a brief introduction the book is useful, but
for anyone truly interested in either Blumenberg’s work or political myth as a whole, it
should quickly be succeeded by the more substantial discussions of Nicholls,
Heidenreich, or Bottici.

Hannes Bajohr
University of Basel
hbajohr@gmail.com

# 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2020.1766264

8
E.g. Denis Trierweiler, “Georges Sorel et Carl Schmitt: D’une theorie politique du mythe a l’autre,” in Carl Schmitt, ou
le mythe du politique, ed. Yves Charles Zarka (Paris: PUF, 2009).
9
This Kehre is also the reason that J€ urgen Habermas can align himself with the liberal, progressivist Legitimacy while
strongly distancing himself from the more traditionalist Work on Myth. See J€ urgen Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der
Philosophie, vol. 1. (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019), 64-68.
10
Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Staatstheorie,” Schweizer Monatshefte 48, no. 2 (1969): 121–46. English as:
Hans Blumenberg, “The Concept of Reality and the Theory of the State,” in History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans
Blumenberg Reader, ed. Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2020), 83–116.