Abstract
A philosophical anthropology is a macro-historical inquiry into why the early human creature differentiated itself from other animals in becoming able to conceive ways of thinking and representation. In macro-time the development of thinking as a tool led to humans’ becoming cultural and social beings over a wide front. In the field of inquiry called philosophical anthropology the philosopher Hans Blumenberg takes centre stage – drawing on thinkers such as Arnold Gehlen, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger – for positing a unique founding scenario for humans. This founding scenario explains why the human creature came to withdraw from nature – a withdrawal that happened through the gradual creation of a bulwark of conceived defences against nature. The withdrawal constituted a “situational leap” for humans and transformed the early creature from a failed natural creature into a social one.
Blumenberg posed the question why the early creature started to think as a central question – because nothing in nature happens without a reason. By doing so he created a fundamental schism between the natural realm on the one hand and the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), which contains the humans’ experience of themselves as beings, called Dasein, on the other hand. Lebenswelt and Dasein are the fundamental concepts in the philosophy of Heidegger. Thinking, Blumenberg posits, was a response to a life-threatening situation, experienced as a catastrophe by the early creatures, which occurred because they had wandered from the natural, enclosed habitats they had occupied in the rainforests, into open grasslands. This migration could have happened by accident, or because some members of the species wanted to escape the pressure of natural selection in the enclosed habitat, or because of a calamity like climate change.
Blumenberg built on Heidegger’s concept of a prehistorical world the choices of ontological orientation of which cannot be known from a latter-day perspective. He then inserts his all-important rupture. His postulation of a catastrophe as the beginning of the human being as a systematically thinking creature constitutes a critique of the “naturalness” (givenness) of Heidegger’s Dasein, and demands a function for Dasein in the light of no such need or function’s having existed for other animals.
The background of his reasoning alludes to the clash between Heidegger and Cassirer (at Dovos 1928–32), in which Heidegger called for the idea of a meta-ontology, imagined from a hypothetical terminus a quo (beginning point) of ontological subjectivity, and thereby rejecting Cassirer’s idea of a symbolic language that could be retrospectively constructed and applied to all humankind. Heidegger postulated an “ontic space” for the human being’s beginning not filled by any presumed content – because resorting to that would amount to making assumptions based on the philosopher’s own lifeworld, which is a contingent point of late historical arrival (terminus ad quem) that cannot speak for the myriad possibilities of the terminus a quo. Blumenberg likewise did not assume any content for the ontic orientation of the early human (which must remain essentially unknown), except for positing a “minimal pre-ontic situation” in which an intense primal fear (Höchspannung) in reaction to “the absolutism of reality” greeted humans in their newly disinherited state. This is the rupture he introduces into Heidegger’s model. It was a situation that then kickstarted an orientation of “world-openness” in the early being, a state of alertness and super-adaptability, in which the adoption of imagination as a practical tool gradually starts to reign supreme in putting distance between the human and the abysmal state of its having lost its natural habitat. In as far as Blumenberg uses a narrative to illustrate this primal situation one might talk of a metaphorical sketch, one that I describe with a (well-known) metaphor of my own: the loss of Eden. The use of metaphor by Blumenberg, and by me (following suit), stresses the phenomenological nature of Blumenberg’s understanding of his own inquiry as well as the nature of the early human’s construction of reality.
The human being now created imagined authorities, known as gods, to give a shape to the primal angst, because shapes could be understood and thus lessened the existential anxiety. Shapes could be manipulated while shapeless anxiety left the human adrift. Soon all kinds of other “naming” narratives followed. This brings the article to Blumenberg’s fundamental anthropological concept of rhetoric. This is Blumenberg’s term for the whole bulwark that the early humans (and the ones to follow) set up between themselves and the threats of reality. Blumenberg argues that the system of rhetoric could be said to rest on the principle of insufficient reason: Reality has the shape of a provisional argument. It is not difficult to see that the provisional argument shape is also the pattern of most thinking endeavours of the human – religion, culture, historiography, art, right up to the structure of modern theory. Blumenberg also refers to the rhetorical bulwark as the “Darwinism of words”, and it includes all the conventions and institutions of culture in all of human history.
The article looks at important critiques of Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology. If the driving force behind such a bulwark is self-protection as the human’s most basic goal, then the systemic presupposition would be one of extreme conservativeness, argued Jacob Taubes. This brings a question mark to Blumenberg’s model as a morally dynamic project, not that it disproves the model itself. It is a question mark that would likely be shared by many practitioners of Critical Theory, and Blumenberg’s scheme could be seen as being vulnerable to the criticism of being disinclined to allow fundamental moral changes. However, I agree with some prominent defenders of Blumenberg that because the primal driving force of the rhetorical bulwark is self-protection, and also because its supreme hallmark is morality (as the means of collective self-protection), the human is likely to be far more open to a world of challenges – including moral ones – if the crises loom large enough. After all, the human being had already accomplished the greatest possible feat of all, namely the situational leap out of nature, using his Weltöffenheit to cross over to the protective cohesion of the social.
In fact, so I argue, the rhetorical bulwark presupposes a non-negotiable centrality for the social and the moral. The human is now part of an alternative evolution, set up by himself against the evolution of nature. In this alternative evolution the human’s liberation of the body from the harsh constraints of nature is cardinal, and it is a liberation that can be achieved only in full dependence on other humans. The attaining of liberation for the human being from reality is the primal as well as the latter-day goal of all culture and can, for instance, be seen in a reliance on modern technology. Technology frees up the body, in yet one more example of a forged “prosthesis”, being an extra “limb” that increases the distance between the body and the absolutism of reality.
Blumenberg’s anthropological model has definite implications for morality. And the most important one is that arguments about what is “natural” when it comes to lifestyle and cultural choices appear manifestly false for a species who long ago already traded the natural for the artificiality of the social.
Finally, the article looks at some art products, art being a prime example of the human’s rhetorical bulwark. In art the phenomenological nature of all human tools, which include language and pictures, appears most clearly.
Keywords: anthropology; Hans Blumenberg; evolution; existential anxiety; Sigmund Freud; Martin Heidegger; homo pictor; metaphorical; mythical; phenomenology; reason; rhetoric/rhetorical; symbolic; transcendence/transcendental