Hans Blumenberg’s work is characterized by a seemingly insatiable predilection for anecdotes — about Thales and Pyrrhus, Goethe and Fontane, Husserl and Wittgenstein, Polgar and Jünger. This essay explores the theoretical status of anecdotes by juxtaposing Carl Linnaeus’s Nemesis Divina with Blumenberg’s Care Crosses the River, both read alongside Aristotle’s notion of exemplarity and Joel Fineman’s delineation of the anecdote as the literary-historical form for expressing contingency. As a mode of thought at the nexus of literature and experience, anecdotes immediately (...) pose the question of evidence. Even if true, an anecdote opens the issue of whether it is the exception or the norm, whether it only speaks for itself or assumes exemplary force, and what such exemplarity might mean. By juxtaposing two theorists qua anecdotists — Carl Linnaeus and Hans Blumenberg — this essay aims to show the inextricable relation between anecdote and example, and thus between anecdote and rhetoric, a counterpart and supplement to the poetics of metaphor within what one can call with Blumenberg a theory of nonconceptuality. (shrink)

ExcerptThis special issue of Telos focusing on the work of the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg aims to reinvigorate the critical engagement with his work in the English-speaking world by casting a new light on his thought and its fundamental concerns. The American reception of Blumenberg reached an initial high point in the late 1980s and 1990s with Robert M. Wallace's remarkable translation of three monumental volumes: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983), Work on Myth (1985), and The Genesis of (...) the Copernican World (1987). This reception often (though not exclusively) focused on the questions prompted by Blumenberg's contributions to…. (shrink)

ExcerptPrecisely a definition like Wittgenstein's, “The world is everything that is the case,” …is about the least interesting thing that can be said about the world … Hans Blumenberg1Thinking, for Hans Blumenberg, is everything but normal.As flippant as this may sound, the non-normality of thought is central to Blumenberg's work and in particular to the nexus of the lifeworld and his theory of nonconceptuality. Blumenberg's claim that, in his exact words, “not thinking is thoroughly normal”2 can be found in the (...) posthumously published study given the agonistic title Theory of the Lifeworld (2010, Theorie…. (shrink)

In this collection of short meditations on various topics, Hans Blumenberg eschews academic ponderousness and writes in a genre evocative of Montaigne's _Essais_, Walter Benjamin's _Denkbilder_, or Adorno's _Minima Moralia_. Drawing upon an intellectual tradition that ranges from Aesop to Wittgenstein and from medieval theology to astrophysics, he works as a detective of ideas scouring the periphery of intellectual and philosophical history for clues—metaphors, gestures, anecdotes—essential to grasping human finitude. Images of shipwrecks, attempts at ordering the world, and questions of (...) foundations are traced through the work of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Simmel, Husserl, Thomas Mann, and others. The book's reflections culminate in a rereading of the fable "Care Crosses the River" that lies at the center of Heidegger's analysis of Dasein in which the fable's elided Gnostic center is recovered: Care creates the human in its own image, as a reflection of its narcissism. At stake throughout are two inextricable elements of Blumenberg's thought: a theory of nonconceptuality as essential to philosophizing and an exploration of culture understood as humanity's unceasing attempts to relieve itself of the weight of the absolutism of reality. (shrink)