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Hans Blumenberg - Work on Myth (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

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Book:
Work on Myth (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)
Author:
Hans Blumenberg
Publisher:
The MIT Press
Genre:
Books / Religion
Year:
1988
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In this rich examination of how we inherit and transform myths, Hans Blumenberg continues his study of the philosophical roots of the modern world. Work on Myth is in five parts. The first two analyze the characteristics of myth and the stages in the Wests work on myth, including long discussions of such authors as Freud, Joyce, Cassirer, and Val?ry. The latter three parts present a comprehensive account of the history of the Prometheus myth, from Hesiod and Aeschylus to Gide and Kafka. This section includes a detailed analysis of Goethes lifelong confrontation with the Prometheus myth, which is a unique synthesis of psychobiography and history of ideas.Hans Blumenberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of M??nster. Work on Myth is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

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Page 1

PART I
ARCHAIC DIVISION OF POWERS

Page 10

were nothing but names and addressees of helplessness. It was theological absolutismwithout its mitigations in the institutions for the administration of gracethat made the Middle Ages look dark when seen in retrospect after the modern age's act of foundation. Even Goethe scarcely wanted to believe Romanticism's first revisions of this historical self-consciousness and of the image of the prehistory that went with it. On April 21, 1831, he writes in his diary: "... in the centuries when man found nothing outside himself but abomination, he had to be happy that he was sent back into himself, so that in place of the objects, which had been taken from him, he could create phantoms.... "

What the viewer found entirely missing in the rediscovered Gothic art was contemplation of nature, and consequently any trace of the metaphysics that corresponds to thatof pantheism. But the polytheism that Goethe sees in an attenuated form even in the gallery of the saints is a way of bridging over the difficulty of being unable to be a pantheist in these centuries, in the absence of contemplation of nature, but being unable to do without 'phantoms.' According to the note, the objects had been "taken from" this late 'primitive world' that preceded Goethe's ownone only needs to substitute for this way of putting it the idea that they hadn't been gained yet at all, to make it possible to apply the train of thought to any early epoch of man that hasn't been provided for yet. What remains is the setting up of images against the abominationthe maintenance of the subject, by means of its imagination, against the object that has not been made accessible. What it is then possible to establish is not the presence of any fragment of theory, however small, but rather the extent to which theory is unnecessaryignoring the effort with which the aesthetic metaphysician, late in the day, undertakes to make it unnecessary again.

The contradiction that seems to enter the construct of the archaic concept of reality hereabsolutism of reality on the one hand, omnipotence of ideas on the otheris repeated in the description of dreams. Dreaming is pure impotence with respect to the content of the dream, the complete bypassing of the subject and of his disposition over himself, in the midst of his images, together with an extreme disposition to anxiety; but at the same time it is the pure dominion of wishes, which makes waking up the epitome of disappointment, however the censors may be constituted under which the psychic mechanism is then placed. To fly in one's dreamsNietzsche's formula

Page 100

past times that already make up our past. Here, of course, nothing happens par ordre de Mufti ['according to orders']. There is an antinomy between what we need from history and what we find in history, an antinomy that we cannot master, because it is only a part of the constitutive antinomy of wishes and realities. In the wish structure of time, beginnings and ends play the most important role. What we need from history 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. As a result of its motivation in the life-world, historiography also works against the indifference of time. That is why it cannot abandon the concept of epochs, however often its right to that concept is disputed. But the more it puts to work its technique of compacting, allocating roles, dating, dividing up and describing conditions, the less it avoids the suspicion of producing nominal artifacts in the service of the methodical processing of the material. The mythical mode of thought works toward evidentness in the articulation of time; it is able to do this because no one ever asks for its chronology. Besides beginnings and ends it has the free use of simultaneity and prefiguration, imitative execution and the recurrence of the same.

The dogmatic mode of thought has to assert the irrelevance of time for its definitions, but it cannot entirely reject manifestness in the articulation of time. Christianity brought mythical and historical means close to one another in this way by means of the most effective device in the articulation of time: the fixing of an absolute temporal pole and point of reference for chronology. It is the extreme reduced form of a multiple articulation such as was regenerated again and again in chiliastic speculations. The dogmatic model of time is the correlate of the ubiquitous representation of the saving events by means of the sacramental cult. The one event is named toward which time, in fulfilling itself, runs, and from which it unexpectedly expands into the interval of grace. The meting out of that interval turns out to be so generous that it has to be measured. The result is that it can never depart so far from its point of reference that the memory of that point is lost in and with time.

How far the early Christian period still was from harmonizing the need for pregnance in history with the requirement of historical definiteness can be observed in the gospel author's carelessness in dating

Page 101

the birth of the Savior. Luke was not much concerned about the incompatibility of the dates that were easily accessible to his contemporarieson the one hand, from the census of Quirinius, and on the other hand from the end of Herod's reignbecause, by somewhat neglecting that inconsistency, he could give a plausible explanation for the locations of Jesus' birth and of the progress of his childhood.35Much more important to him than securing the historical point in time against chronological objections was his concern to make connections with the important reference points that were authenticated in the Old Testament. The birth in Bethlehem, in spite of the family's being originally from Nazareth, was indispensable for Jesus' descent from David, and the repetition of the great Old Testament movements between the Nile and the Jordan was the most imposing way of elevating this childhood story.

At the beginning of the fourth century the founder of the historiography of the Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, has a view of the initiating date of the story of salvation that accentuates an entirely different aspect. His view has become solicitous about state policy, about the preservation of the world. His dating takes on a relationship to the form of governance of the Imperium Romanum [Roman Empire]. Erik Peterson has shown the importance, for the self-understanding of politics in the age of the caesars, of Christianity's offer to set the unity of the new God alongside the unity of the empire and the ruler.36In that case, for one looking back from the time of Constantine, the assignment of Jesus' birth to the point in time in which Judea, after the removal of the last Herodian, Archelaus, had become a Roman province, had to become significant. The integration of the empire should also have taken place in the area from which salvation had comeat the same moment that a meaning for history, as yet unknown to the surrounding world, was coming to pass. Such establishment of simultaneity is a favorite way of bringing about mythical significance. When Eusebius accepts chronological difficulties with the biblical text as the price of this simultaneity, he decides in favor of a different mode of thought from the one that would have given anything not to introduce more doubtful questions into the dating of Jesus' birth than the text of Luke already raised for concerned or mocking contemporaries.

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