Silence from the Study: Hans Blumenberg and His Non-Involvement in Post-War Germany
My fascination for Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) is fed by two different attitudes. On the one hand I enjoy his writing and think that his philosophical contributions are immense, on the other hand I have a very uneasy relationship with his politics broadly construed, with Blumenbergs choices as a renowned professor and citizen. In what follows I explore the tension between these two things, briefly accounting for my fascination as well as formulating my concerns. The result, I hope, pays tribute to a highly original philosopher who would have celebrated his centennial this year.
My interest in Blumenberg began in earnest when, me being more interested in Amodernity (in Latour) and Postmodernity, my professor suggested Hans Blumenbergs Legitimität der Neuzeit (Legitimacy of the modern age) to me in order to deepen my understanding of modernity. Wanting to do well, I set about reading the four-part seven-hundred page behemoth in which Blumenberg defends modernity as a legitimate epoch against those that advance the claim that "the modern world can for the most part be understood as a result of the securalization of christianity"., under which fall secularisation theses like: Technical advancement is nothing but innerworldly Salvation, work ethic is nothing the holy asceticism, even the archetype of the detective in detective stories is an secularised archangel. These are the kind of generalisations Blumenberg aims at in the Legitimität, ultimately concluding that the continuity between the middle ages and modernity is functional, but not substantive.
Unfortunately, the first book (and critical part) of Legitimität der Neuzeit is considerably harder to read than the rest, making it difficult to get into. The critique always seems slightly aimless and the main points obscure. This is mainly due to the fact that - as I learned later - the revised edition of Legitimität (which is the one more broadly available that also serves as a basis for the english translation from 1983) implicitly readjusts his critique to different secularization theorists. Namely, Blumenberg now targets Carl Schmitt Political Theology, with whom he exchanges a few letters after the war (from 1971 to 1978). Schmitt is quite an atypical exponent though, so there is a sort of Palimpsest effect going on where it feels like new criticisms are written over old ones. It is all quite illegible.
This, however, changes once we get to the second book (and with it the constructive argument). Eveything flows nicely and we are now confronted with another salient feature of Blumenberg - his uncanny erudition and a sort of old-fashioned tendency to take a topic and then see what philosophers said about it from Plato to Nietzsche. The second book explores how St. Augustine fashions a solution to the problem of evil against the gnostics that effectively urges us to accept that we are at the mercy of an absolute created world (a world that we cannot control, a world in which we cannot assert ourself). On this view, a theoretical interest in the world is irrational and St. Augustine condemns curiositas. The third book, however, examines the return of such interest in early modernity.
Over time, I learned to appreciate Blumenbergs style because it is a far cry from the Hemingwayian ideal permeating most of Analytical Philosophy. Like all German philosophers, his sentences are long, but Blumenberg stays understandable through well-thought out (even if complex) sentence structures. He has a gift for distilling concepts and constellations into images, that making grasping a lot of nuance easy and fun, even. The most important image for Legitimität probably being that of Petrarca, the not-yet-modern man, scaling Mont Ventoux out of curiosity about the natural world who then at the last second, at the peak, finds himself unable to enjoy the view and instead buries himself in the Confessiones to read the following and repent: "People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars. But in themselves they are uninterested." Blumenbergs gift for the image is, for me, another parallel between him and Michel Foucault – a comparison we will return to.
To return to the tome in our hand: In the fourth Book of Legitimität, there is a double page which starts with a short commentary on Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and ends with a sublime problem: Blumenberg agrees that there are ruptures in the history of ideas of the kind that Kuhn and others describe, but notes that even in order to understand them as ruptures, there must be a shared and continuous frame of reference in order to identify them as completely other to one another. Some continuity is required in every historical Erkenntnis, even if what we are grasping is a great Gestaltswitch (Blumenberg term to capture this implied minimum of continuity in the rupture Umbesetzung). What to do with it is a topic for another day, but the insight triggered a fascination not only for Blumenberg but for Philosophy of Historiography in general as well.
Blumenberg was born in Lübeck in 1920. In 1939, he was prevented from holding the Valedictorian speech in the prestigious Katharineum gymnasium due to his Halbjude status. The only universities where he was still able to study philosophy before eventually being banned were Catholic institutions in Paderborn and Frankfurt. Industrialist Heinrich Dräger protects Blumenberg by securing him status as an essential employee in his factory. Towards the end of the war, he was briefly detained in a Concentration Camp – once again only released on the insistence of Dräger. After the war, Blumenberg restarts and quickly finishes his studies, submitting a Dissertation in 1947. A Habilitation follows in 1950.
Blumenberg had little illusions about the state of post-war Germany, writing shortly before his death (1996!): “This country has remained scary to me, although I have rarely left it… . In this country nothing that made Hitler possible has vanished into thin air…”. In this context, it is little suprising that Blumenberg turned more and more to the life of a hermit, writing in his home office, cutting off all collaboration. This and some of his ideas – early humans feeling vulnerable in the steppes because of how easily they can now be seen – suggest how deeply entwined his personal trauma and his philosophy are. These are certainly mitigating circumstances in regards to Blumenbergs conduct (or better: non-conduct) in the young Federal Republic, which is what makes him such a difficult person to admire for me and which is what I wish to explain next. Although Blumenberg evidently saw the continuities between the Third Reich and the Bonn Republic, he rarely spoke out. I recently learned that he once demanded the removal of a pro-eugenics professor while at Kiel, but more well-known is his defence of Heidegger and Schmitt: He probably rightly criticizes the hypocrisy of (temporarily) expelling no one but these two from German academia while everyone else got to go on, but his intent is not to push for more thorough investigation: In word and deed, Blumenberg wants Heidegger and Schmitt back because they are good academics.
I think that what Blumenberg sets in motion in the fourth book of Legitimitäts is somewhat close to the historiographical developments of Michel Foucault between Les mots et les choses and Archéologie du savoir – Richard Rorty having already commented on a general affinity in 1983. This is interesting because their "public" personae seemingly contrast very heavily. Contrasting with the theoretician of a microphysics of power, Blumenberg at times seems to long for an academy far removed from such messes, a pure place, where only argument and erudition count (and where thus Heidegger and Schmitt are at home). Blumenbergs anti-essentialist philosophy can be read very progressively, but he is anything but. The threat to the new republic, for him, seems to come from the left, manly the student revolts of the 1960s. Blumenberg apparently also disliked Foucault.
A few years before the Revolts, in 1963, Blumenberg co-founds Poetik und Hermeneutik, an interdisciplinary research group in the humanities, which held a conference to a given topic approximately every two years, culminating in a large edited volume often published a few years later. Blumenberg soon distanced himself from the project for unclear reasons, but he helped create a project constitutive for the intellectual identity of the new Bundesrepublik. Its interdisciplinary nature did not preclude steep hierarchy and its transformative purpose did not lead to satisfactory an analysis of the recent past. Here, one of the most influential research groups of the Bonn Republic, is in line with the transformatory approach of the possibly most important ideology of the new West Germany: Liberal-Conservativism in the mould of, among others, Joachim Ritter (a profound influence on many participants). One notable way this cashes out is the dominant position the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) parties take up in post-war German politics.
Liberal-conservativism managed to lend some credibility to West Germany as a democratic nation not through a clean break with the past, but to strengthen new instutions to enable them to transform Germans into a democratic citizenry. In order to do so, it has to marginalize more far-right political positions, in Franz-Josef Strauss' dictum: To the right of the CDU/CSU, there can only be the wall. De facto (though not necessarily), this is accompanied by conspicuous silence. No reckoning with the Nazi Regime was necessary, the occupation forces were largely happy about keeping most of the highly qualified party members in their positions – for alleged fear of plunging the country into disarray. This was good for Ritter, officer of the Wehrmacht and member of the NSDAP since 1937. It was also good for Hans-Robert Jauss, another co-founder of Poetik und Hermeneutik, who had been rumoured to be an officer of the Waffen-SS since the late 1970s, a fact that was confirmed by Jauss himself in 1988. Ritter and Jauss are just two examples of the remarkable continuity of personell from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic. Additionally, the recet success of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), demonstrates quite clearly that the Strauss strategy has not worked out for long. Liberal conservativism miscalculated and failed.
I do not know how much Blumenberg was convinced of this strategy or how much he merely tolerated it, but if we see him as even a little bit associated with it, he should face some criticism for his poor judgement. I don't know if his withdrawal was, as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has suggested, a statement of dissent. I don't know if Blumenberg was afraid or traumatized, although he was clearly at a position of institutional power. Maybe I should take comfort in the fact that Blumenberg has always refused to be a victim in the interactions with his former party member colleagues. Surely, his being rescued by such card-carrying members has had a very strong impact. But it should not have counted for that much: Blumenberg's dissent should have been more vocal. I disagree with his non-handling of Germany's past for moral reasons, I disagree with his stance on Heidegger and Schmitt, I disagree with his general silence and seclusion. I think it is unbecoming of a philosopher.
I have an ambivalent relationship with Blumenberg, which neatly fits the tentativeness and ambiguity of his philosophy. I do, however, treasure the ambivalence and the ambiguity. There is a column I did not get my hands on to date called "Dies ist in Wirklichkeit nur jenes" – zur Typik zeitgeistgefälliger Theorien. I must imagine it as a scathing critique of enforced lucidity. Hans Blumenberg would have celebrated his 100th birthday on July 13 this year.
