Abstract
Hans Blumenberg posits that humans resorted to thinking as a tool to make up for a catastrophic loss of their natural instincts. Human creatures lost their natural place as part of a natural world and as natural creatures when they accidently wandered from their habitat in the enclosed forests into the open grasslands, and thus became displaced. This displacement was the end of their natural existence and as an instinctual part of an enclosing biosphere. This heralded the beginning of human existence as social, in which the creatures depended on one another to survive their common natural loss, and in which shared ideas as a “wishing” tool of self-protection started to play a central role.
In the first of two related articles, “Hans Blumenberg se filosofiese antropologie” (Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology), the cataclysmic event that caused the said loss and having to come to terms with it is discussed in some depth. This, the second article, discusses how knowledge thereafter developed prehistorically and historically – after its anthropological beginnings in response to an overwhelming unfriendly reality that became obvious to the self-conscious creature. The development of knowledge and thought that then took place constitutes an evolutionary process that corroborates the existential prompts that caused knowledge to exist in the first place.
The need to legitimise life as a consciousness was a contingency to deal with after having been bereft of a natural niche. But these historical legitimisations on which the fragile human creature based its existence through the medium of thought and wishes were subject to intense instability throughout history, due to the fact that humans were continually subjected to new experiences that unravelled their reigning protective social conceptions. They continually had to adapt their thought systems in order to achieve closure of meaning, again and again.
According to Blumenberg, the history of thought is metaphorological and systematic in nature. These are the two main characteristics of the evolution of thought. The kind of thinking that is my focus in this article is broad-based social-system thinking, the kind of knowledge that determines the course of history. There are other kinds of thinking as well, such as aesthetic thinking, but the metaphorological and systematic are basic to the human construction of all knowledge.
Looking back, we see that the evolution of thought delivered various epochs in European history, and each epoch is retrospectively identifiable by an own conception of what constitutes reality. It has to be said that the construction of such past “reality concepts” (Wirklichkeitsbegriffe) is made possible only through the modern human’s ability to think phenomenologically – being “inside” his own time and “outside”. Each reality concept was a system of existential logic marking an epoch. These are existential logics that by all indications differed from epoch to epoch. The Modern Age and its later iteration, late modernity, constitute two of the most recent reality concepts, which are both discussed in the article.
Blumenberg’s critique of secularisation as an understanding of history is a corner peg of this article’s argument. As an explanation of how ideas develop diachronically in time, Blumenberg’s newly proposed grid of functionality has radical implications for former essentialist understandings of history, especially of secularisation. The understanding found in secularisation sees the history of ideas as the passing on of essences subject to change. The core of the idea is passed on. In this understanding, ideas undergo changes but in essence stay the same. By contrast, Blumenberg’s model of functionality discards the idea of surviving essences, even though the names of ideas might stay the same through time. He posits that knowledge systems change their function in accordance with the needs of new time frames. These functions change because subsidiary ideas in the system are unknowingly replaced by other ideas – in a process of systematic reoccupation. The move away from essence to reoccupation has significant implications for understanding history and for ontological self-explanation.
Blumenberg’s focus is on European modernity, but it is a focus that has implications for historical studies outside of European history as well. Knowledge of Blumenberg’s model offers structural pointers for other ontologies – ones that might still be constructing their macro-historical self-understanding.
Cognisance of Blumenberg’s underpinnings of how knowledge systems come into being and develop – in the case of Europe, into modernity – might aid incipient modernities or hampered ontologies with historical self-construction. This would include bringing to bear the metaphorological nature of all knowledge, the deep-historical transmission of ideas and stories, and the systematic nature of historical transmissions, and how reoccupation and functionality rather than essence govern the development of ideas in diachronic time. The purpose of this article – as my own extrapolation from Blumenberg’s historical model of reoccupation – is implicit: to provide a comparative backdrop for alternative modernity studies, showing the laborious but motivated links between ideas in dynamic hermeneutic movement in an emblematic history. Alternative modernity studies themselves are not the subject here.
Blumenberg depicts the default position of human states historically as one of cautiousness and conservatism – one that puts survival of the species first. But it is a disposition that might inadvertently also hamper survival, especially in the case of ontologies in close proximity and in conflict. This article reapplies Blumenbergian thought, and implicitly argues that it could be helpful to humankind’s first purpose, survival of the species, if the anthropologically founded common structures and evolutionary patterns of all knowledge systems – as posited by Blumenberg – can be brought to bear in a structural historical understanding of ontologies in conflict, and especially of new ontologies still formatting their historical course. In this way survival of the species can be put first while also enabling various and multiple conflicting ontologies to reach self-explanation.
The article traces the historical trajectory of ideas that were central to the long history of what later would become known as the modern European context – from Antiquity to the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, and into late modernity, taking into account the changeover of reality frames of the different ages. We look at why reality frames change and how. It happened in a way that stressed continuity (in order to soothe the ever-anxious human being), while all the while “smuggling in” radical discontinuities. This relationship, between continuity and discontinuity, is the mark of reoccupation.
The role that historical transmission would have played in the case of indigenous ideas might be seen as likely having had a similar structure, and would necessarily be foregrounded by Blumenberg’s thesis of reoccupation. But at the same time reoccupation would stress the likely difference between any current reality frame and frames in the past, despite the fact that we can construct the past by approximation. Thus reoccupation as a model might be able to promote more refined relationships among current antagonists on the shared knowledge of the long suffering that goes into producing any history. This in turn could position antagonists in contested situations to be more conciliatory and accommodating towards one another. Moreover, reoccupation points to ways for new modernities to relate to Western influence in other than a binary struggle with the “coloniser” (in which one side vanquishes the other), and suggests ways of appropriation that do not necessarily mean capitulation of the own.
Keywords: Aristotle; Augustine; Hans Blumenberg; Giordano Bruno; Copernicus; cosmology; Darwinism; Epicurus; eschatology; essentialism; evolution; functionality; Martin Heidegger; Karl Löwith; metaphorical; Middle Ages; modernity; mythos/myth; mythology; Friedrich Nietzsche; ontology; phenomenology; science; secularisation; theory