Author: Phenomenological Reviews

The historicity of consciousness and the horizon of its thought

“His habilitation thesis is undoubtedly a step that sheds light on Blumenberg’s career…” Helmut Mayer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

 “He was [after all] the exemplary ascetic who had earned his lion. Working night after night, Blumenberg told himself proudly, the thanks had now come in the form of the lion.” Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Blumenberg (2011, Seagull Press 2017, for the English edition, p. 6)

I thank warmly Robert Savage for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review, without which the review would not have reached such a degree of precision and clarity.

“Enjoy only with caution”

Hans Blumenberg (born July 13, 1920 and died March 28, 1996) could, despite everything, still be considered an “invisible” philosopher today, justifying the adjective with which Christoph Rüter’s documentary film refers to him (Hans Blumenberg – Der unsichtbare Philosoph, 2018). The German philosopher did not give interviews and did not allow himself to be photographed, nourishing, according to his current detractors, a certain staging of the reception of his texts, in particular those that are still inaccessible and have long remained so even for the German-speaking readership. This posthumously edited version of Die ontologische Distanz is the text edited by Nicola Zambon that Blumenberg presented in 1950 for his Habilitation thesis, accompanied by an “appendix” (“Anhang“, attachment) of the earlier versions, i.e. the one he proposed in 1949, immediately after his doctoral thesis, defended in 1948.

            This text belongs to the beginnings of Blumenberg’s production, corresponding to an important stage, in my opinion, in the anthropological practice of phenomenology – I will return to this. This anteriority, in relation to the works written later and which had a significant impact, could push potential readers to consider it as “outdated” insofar as it would be a “scaffolding”, a stage in the path of Blumenberg’s thought which could, in hindsight, be considered negligible. This is the premise often accepted by current research on Blumenberg. Indeed, since on the one hand Blumenberg himself did not authorize the publication (he wrote that he left it to his heirs to do what they wanted with it, decorating the manuscript with a drawing of a bottle of poiso labelled “enjoy only with caution”), and since on the other hand Blumenberg would go beyond some of the ideas proposed in Die ontologische Distanz while not following up on others, it would perhaps be fraudulent, from the point of view of the coherence of the philosopher’s thought, to resort to the elements of this text and perhaps even to speak of it.

            The German edition of Die ontologische Distanz nevertheless responds to certain works of contemporary phenomenology, such as the reflections of the French phenomenologist Renaud Barbaras (Introduction à une phénoménique de la vie, Vrin, 2012, for example) who poses in particular the need to return to the idea of ​​the correlational a priori raised in Ideas’s §49, according to which “between consciousness and reality there is a real abyss of meaning” (Hua III/1, § 49), on which Blumenberg comes frontally in Part. II, §3, notably pp. 73-75. This is how Blumenberg tackled the problem of what separates philosophizing from life, and the question of the possibility of existence in the subjectivity of successive beings.

            Certainly, I find in Die ontologische Distanz the first stirrings rather than the foundations of notions that I will see better and more extensively defended elsewhere in Blumenberg’s work – for example what will become the critique of the acme of history in theology in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, or again the critique of phenomenology that was deployed in several lost or transformed manuscripts, some sections of which ultimately constitute entire chapters of Beschreibung des Menschen. But I also find sketches which, even if better specified elsewhere, remain decisive from the point of view of the history of philosophy, and even from the point of view of the history of historical science, by shedding new light on the problems which he approached (this is the case for the whole question of the possibility of the self-assertion of reason, see second part, “§7 Die Selbstbehauptung der Vernunft for der Gewißheitsfrage”, pp. 113-126). To take yet another example, I find already in the defense version of Die ontologische Distanz the idea of ​​the “valences” of paradigmatic epochs which, from the idea of ​​a “morphology of ontological distance” become after 1961 the arguments of a “concept of reality” which he will study under various approaches, and on several occasions, under the first prism of a “consciousness of reality”. I’m thinking here of an article from 1964, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel” (in: History, Metaphors, Fables, A Hans Blumenberg Reader, « Signale », Cornell University Press, 2020 for the English edition).

            Blumenberg abandoned many of his book projects, quickly tiring of the considerations related to the publication of his works and perhaps preferring to devote himself to writing, thus accumulating manuscripts in the drawers of his archives. Given this inclination, leaving aside or devaluing manuscripts that were not carried through to publication does not seem necessarily essential to us. If the young Blumenberg (thirty years old in 1950) later presented in more accomplished forms what he wrote by trial and error, in the heat of research, this does not seem to us to justify the elimination or reduction of these ideas, whether we assume that he returned to them later with a more mature and firmer eye or, conversely, that he preferred not to exploit the valences thus opened but left them in a state of a suspension. The extreme vitality of these twenty-six paragraphs spread over four parts  warrants their being given serious consideration, even if this vitality certainly sometimes suffers from confusion, contradictions, unfulfilled promises (notably in the fourth part), or breaks in the rhythm and the demonstration. As the “Habilitation dispute” attests (see below), Blumenberg perhaps also suffered from not having yet managed to find his own voice, sometimes ventriloquizing Heidegger at the same time as confronting him.

            I am convinced that if Blumenberg had wanted to simply to disown the work he had begun in the manuscript of Die ontologische Distanz, then he would not have isolated his text and allowed it to join his archives; to those who would justify this by sentimentality, I should defend myself by showing that some of Blumenberg’s great ideas are already, confusedly or not, expressed in this manuscript. Reading this text today perhaps allows us to understand the lineaments of a thought which was already emerging itself in his doctoral thesis (Hans Blumenberg, Beiträge zum Problem der Ursprünglichkeit der mittelalterlich-scholastischen Ontologie, Frankfurt, Verlag Suhrkamp, ​​2020). It therefore makes sense to approach this text today “with caution”, keeping in mind this reserve, that of the reasonable prudence that Blumenberg maintained with regard to the treatment of this text and which resisted until the end, both in the mind of its author and in the letter of his work. One of the major terms of the whole philosophy of Hans Blumenberg could well be that of the “horizon” – historical, of meaning, phenomenological, of consciousness, cultural, technical, etc. In this respect, Die ontologische Distanz could well be the “horizon” that forms both the starting point and the perspective of Hans Blumenberg’s philosophy.

            The rigor of Die ontologische Distanz

The publication of Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung zur Krisis der philosophischen Grundlagen der Neuzeit in 2022 seems to us to be decisive for understanding the substance of Blumenberg’s overall work. It is also an opportunity for us to expose the homogeneity of a work always already contained in embryo in the Habilitation. To try to bring it together in a formula, this text deals with the phenomenological connection of the subject to the world through the structure of performance that is consciousness – consciousness of something, in accordance with Husserl’s identification of the connection of consciousness to the world. All of Blumenberg’s intellectual singularity is announced from this formidable ambition of the Habilitation.

            Hans Blumenberg’s first project aimed at nothing less than the restitution of philosophical “rigor” and anticipates the aims of his entire philosophy. Thanks to this first text, practically “genetic”, arriving immediately after his thesis on medieval ontology, the tools are now assembled that allow us to consider the system as a whole, by demonstrating the rigor of its logic, its outcomes and the necessity that presides over all the ramifications that were sometimes considered to have been scattered and disordered. However, it is possible today to discern the centers of gravity of this work. Jürgen Goldstein already named some of them in 2020, to which I can now add others thanks to the posthumous publications that have taken place since: “The central aspects of his philosophy require presentation in their respective context: the self-preservation of reason, the absolutism of reality, the phenomenology of history, for example.” (Jürgen Goldstein, Hans Blumenberg, Ein philosophisches Portrait, Berlin, Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2020, p. 11) I would add: genetic phenomenology; that is to say ontology and its conditions of possibility, the reflection on being in the wake of Aristotle as it was first pursued by Husserl, then defended by Blumenberg in Husserl against Heidegger while nevertheless integrating certain Heideggerian notions – without forgetting Landgrebe, whose Phänomenologie und Metaphysik (1949) is an essential text for Blumenberg — and especially for the Blumenber of the Habilitation thesis.

            The German term Strenge, rigor, is the keystone of one of the three versions of the subtitle of the Habilitation, as Nicola Zambon testifies on the first page of the afterword (Nicola Zambon, “Nachwort des Herausgebers”, p. 349). The central question of philosophical “rigor” is grasped by Blumenberg as having been the point on which the Cartesian project stumbled, justifying Husserl’s resumption of that project (see on this subject the introduction to Paradigms for a Metaphorology which opens precisely with the recognition of this unresolved debt in the history of philosophy), and the failure, in Husserl’s own eyes, of what he concentrates in the formula of the “universality of the coincidence of language and thought” (Husserl, Formal Logic and Transcendental Logic, Halle, 1929, p. 22, here expanding the Husserlian idea of ​​§49 of the Ideas). This is how Blumenberg justifies in his introduction the perspective of this “investigation” that he is conducting on this subject, in his Habilitation thesis:

This breakthrough through traditional ontology does not take place in the claim of methodological freedom, in the name of a new attitude towards thought. Rather, it can be characterized as the persistence of a historical situation until it is interpreted. This situation represents the critical turning point that the understanding of being in modern times has taken as a whole. The turning point is succinctly marked by the crisis of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, from which Martin Heidegger’s thought emerges. The presentation, classification and interpretation of this crisis constitute the main theme of the investigation. (Blumenberg, p. 11, which he extended p. 51 in the problematization of the historical context of the performance of intentionality)

Therefore, the gesture of the Habilitation proposed to restore through the “rigor” of the homogeneity of phenomenology, thanks to which the crisis irremediably separating the subject from the world of objects would be resolved. It is with the study of the conditions of mediation of the distance of this separation, as a source of ontogenesis, that the Habilitation is concerned; that is to say, Die ontologische Distanz aims to explain what is expressed in the phenomenon of ontological distance, but also to describe the mode of this expression.

            I will therefore discuss this work as if I was progressing on the cartography of the future complete philosophical work, naming different points of his radiancy’s philosophic activity, in order to underline its dynamic arcs (the famous “metakinetics of being” thanks to the work of which “the realities in which we live replace being“, Zambon, p. 372) and show their radiation from the focus that would have been Die ontologische Distanz. What could be considered as the problem of the distance of the subject from the world would be what would stand between the conscious activity of the interiority of the subject on the one hand and its consciousness of the world on the other, the latter understood here in the sense of the subject’s “consciousness cast” on the world. It seems to us that this denomination of “ontological distance” designates, simultaneously with this first problem, the ontological activity required by the need to connect with the world, which is active in and made active by the subject.

            For Blumenberg, and this is yet another justification of the relationship by “radiation” and “concretions” that I was talking about, the entire history of the world of thought is a succession of manifestations of this “metakinetics of thought as a whole” (Blumenberg, p. 18) that springs from an internal and fundamental encounter between two regimes of the activity of the mind. Later, after the publication of his book on metaphorology in 1960, Blumenberg would be more radical and would integrate into the Husserlian concept of the lifeworld the importance of the role of aesthetics in ontogenetic activity, through a “return” to the contributions of Ernst Cassirer. Thus when the support of ontogenetic certainty of the paradigmatic era wavers, the ontological distance comes into action:

Aristotelian scholasticism arises from the need for a scientific theology in an intellectual environment that wants to be convinced. It is an articulation of ontological distance that is no longer understood only in terms of possibility, but has its own objective horizon, in which there is a search and a doubt, a discussion of positions, an affection and a rejection. (Blumenberg, pp. 104-105)

Here, at the heart of the exercise of ontological distance, the reader can already grasp the terminology that would not be fully deployed until about ten years later. We also see the spirit, but also the letter, of a paradigm shift that is systematically identified in The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975, 1987, MIT Press for the English edition), but also in the first edition of the book published in 1966, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (3rd ed. 1997, 1985, MIT Press for the English edition). All this contributes to a demonstrable homogeneity.

As a metakinesis of historical horizons — and in anticipation of the dynamics of repositioning that Blumenberg introduces in Die Legitimität der Neuzeit and that will be refined in the Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt — it is appropriate to examine why distance has taken the forms that it has. The analysis amounts to affirming that the Cartesian configuration of distance — the contraposition between subject and object — is a historical form, which means at the same time that it is only a historical form (among many others possible). The historical modes of distance were possibilities, they were neither destiny nor chance, but: contingency. The crisis of modern times was therefore not a necessity. The Cartesian understanding of the subject and the object that gave rise to the crisis was not inevitable, nor natural, but was in turn a contingent historical constellation whose evidence must be questioned in order to find a way out of the diagnosed epochal impasse. (Zambon, p. 355)

Zambon seems to support here this idea of ​​a shift from the “history of being” to what I could establish as a “history of the paradigmatics of being” that would ultimately be consummated. However, writing it this way would run the risk of mixing up what is announced by the Habilitation and what would only be methodically materialized later on. However, it should not be overlooked that the Habilitation is a work of a man in his late twenties, and as such contains the entire extremely rich intuitive arsenal of intuitions that he would spend the next forty years developing. It seems to us that, beyond the effective radicalization of his break with Heidegger, Blumenberg never changed his trajectory, even assimilating Heidegger over time.

            Hans Blumenberg constructed his entire work in perfect metaphorological adequacy with what he wanted to demonstrate (Goldstein, 2020, p. 28), always illustrating the object in the theorization of a demonstration which is homogeneous with the other perspectives of its theory. But this is not so much an irony, or a paradox, as the very mode of synthetic understanding by which we must always read Blumenberg if we want to understand him: we must read by accepting that erudition, and education with it, is a horizon, and not an arsenal (or not only).

            The content (the product) and the container (the production space, the work space, Arbeit) of his system overlap and coincide. Another of Blumenberg’s monumental works, Work on Myth (1979, 1985, MIT Press for the English edition), follows an identical pattern: it is a work on myth as what is on the author’s loom, but at the same time it is a study of the ways of working on myth, of the conditions of possibility and necessity of its production. The work of Die ontologische Distanz now available is the focus from which the other works can be understood as the materializations (Blumenberg uses the metaphor of “onion skins” in Die nackte Wahrheit, 2020) of the formal conditions of which Die ontologische Distanz was or would have been the archistructure and the turn from which Blumenberg rose to another dimension of philosophy. In other words, the Habilitation seems to us to have been the germ of a decisive stage in the genesis of the progression of what, thanks to it, we understand today as the crisis of the subject. In the same way, for the subject, the internal formal phenomenon of ontological distance is the focus from which the other aspects of its capacity to be a subject can be understood and interpreted – I will return this again below.

            The ontological crisis as a sine qua non condition for the possibility of the subject’s cognition

Since Die ontologische Distanz, or soon after, Blumenberg’s philosophy can consider that the very notion of crisis is intrinsic to the subject. Just as truth is the metaphor of the infinite aim of knowledge by the human being, and not its essentialization, the crisis would thus be the phenomenological experience that is at the very foundation of the conditions of possibility of what, particularly since Freud, is covered by the terminology of the different states of consciousness. Die ontologische Distanz, as already written, announces in our sense that of which Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960, 2010, Cornell University Press for the English edition) are the practical case and the illustration, if not even that of which they are the demonstration of the efficiency and the progress. The balance sheet of the internal crisis of any subject is both production and product of what is formally manifested in the two simultaneous regimes of the activity of the mind, and constitutes the plurality of the conditions of possibility of what is called the world of thought. These two regimes of the activity of the mind, conceptual and “nonconceptual”, are materialized in the thought of Hans Blumenberg in several works and in particular in his Theorie der Unbegrifflichkreit (Theorie der Unbegrifflichkreit, Aus dem Nachlaß herausgegeben und mit einem Nachwort von Anselm Haverkamp, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007, 2019).

            What philosophical content does Die ontologische Distanz proposes? It already started from the principle of ambivalence, still foreign to Blumenberg in 1948: contrary to the idea of ​​a progression of history that would be linear and progressive, on the Hegelian model, and in which humanity would have passed, in the eyes of Cassirer for example, from the age of substance to that of the understanding of function, it is for Blumenberg two simultaneous aptitudes that are both expressed in the regimes of the activity of the mind and that the need of each era pushes the subject to invest or not according to the paradigmatic prevalence. From this perspective, substance and function correspond not to two historical stages of the mind, but to two paradigmatic modalities (Blumenberg evokes “potentiality” in the sense of Aristotelian ontology, p. 137) of the mode of relation of the subject to the world, in language, in science, or in myth. The past, writes Blumenberg,

is “decided” from all possible pasts, which are always causally present: for example as literature, as vocabulary, philosophical doctrines, museum objects, etc. (Blumenberg, p. 138)

It is therefore a revolution in the relationship to history that is announced: no longer a history of being, but a history of “paradigmatic eras” reproducing and themselves culturally while producing the conditions of possibility of the subject’s self-constitution.

            In other words, individuals who establish themselves in the distance that separates them from the world of objects as transcendental subjects proceed from an epochal focus that polarizes the mediation of this distance, from the tools that are available. They do not follow a historical progression dependent on their relationship to belief or their relationship to science, they depend on the availability of tools that allow them to react to the internal crisis, and which leads them to organize themselves by instituting the conditions of possibility of ontogenesis as it is established in the epochal paradigm as resolution of the distance to the world. Because the transcendental subject is above all the process of the affirmation of its own autonomy in its use of the principle of determinability, this would be a phenomenology that wants to be existential (or existential) – the influences of Landgrebe, Freud but also Heidegger himself on Blumenberg are known. The subject, for Blumenberg (but not yet explicitly in the Habilitation), is capable of returning to the conditions of materialization of its own principle of determinability, starting from this fundamental crisis of which he identifies the work (and not the origin) in the quantitative differential of the regimes of the synthetic activity a priori of the cognition.

            From then on, this “ambivalence” (a term that is not already present in the paths pursued during the Habilitation, despite several titles exposing an ambivalence, such as §1 of the second part) is expressed as a paradigm, or as a principle, of a simultaneous double tension external to each individual in his relationship to the world, and internal to each individual in the relationship of his faculties between them, between finitude and imagination, and which materializes on the phenomenological level in the use of his own process of determinability as a transcendental subject through the historical availabilities in each era.

            The formal content of the text

In addition to the philosophers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Blumenberg’s doctrinal trajectory crosses several of the philosophical edifices that are contemporary with him. The borrowings that he makes from them and the critical props with which he modifies them are, however, often the occasion for a questioning of the foundations of their structures, sometimes without having named them. This is his obsession with the « paradigm” (see his 1971 article: “Paradigma, grammatisch”, in op. cit., 2001). What can thus pass for an infinite heterodoxy (to Husserl, Heidegger and Landgrebe himself, to cite the names that are most often found, but one could add Cassirer, Kant, Thomas Aquinas or Plotinus), or for a dispersion whose center one could not locate, would exacerbate a certain annoyance, a fortiori in the event of disagreements on the conclusions or the practicality of the concepts deployed. His writings on phenomenology (from 1981 to 1988, edited by Nicola Zambon) and his writings on literature (from 1945 to 1958, edited by Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler) are known, both of which were published by Suhrkamp. By its proliferation, which nevertheless designates a center of gravity, certainly invisible to those who approach it without conjectures on the horizon, Blumenberg irritates.

            And still! The elements considered by Blumenberg in Die ontologische Distanz find their vein in the diffusion of everything that touches on ontology: both from the point of view of ontogenesis as production and at the same time from the idea of ​​ontogenesis as product. In doing so, he reflects both on the expression of the morphology of ontological distance in the ambivalence between mythos and logos (II §1) which contains in its seminal state what is in 1971 the surer gesture of “Wirklichkeitsbergiff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos”, then also instructs a part of The Readability of the World (1981, Cornell University Press, 2022 for the English edition), as well as on the form that the exteriority of the guarantee of reason can take (II §7), as well as on history as an investment of ontological valences (III §1), but it is unthinkable to render exhaustively the content of the list of “historical-philosophical practical cases” which constitute the four parts of this text. Here and there, each paragraph could and should be discussed in order to be ideally presented; here is a loosely translated list which allows us to grasp the dynamics at work in the text:

Part I: Explanation and development of the problem of distance

• 1. The questioning of the scientific character of philosophy
• 2. The origin of the scientific self-interpretation of philosophy
• 3. The decisive ontological character of the scientific concept of certainty
• 4. The radicalization of the scientific concept of certainty in phenomenology
• 5. The problem of the distance of the phenomenological reduction
• 6. The inversion of the Cartesian-phenomenological approach

Part II: Insights into the Historical Morphology of Ontological Distance

• 1. “Mythos” and “Logos”
• 2. The Socratic Situation and the Logos
• 3. The Metaphysical Definition of Theoretical Distance
• 4. The Disempowerment of the Cosmic Logos
• 5. Seeing and Hearing
• 6. The Double Truth and the Origin of the Crisis of Certainties
• 7. The Self-Assertion of Reason in the Face of the Question of Certainty
• 8. The Decisive Ontological Character of the Enlightenment and the Awakening of the Historical Sense

Part III: Objectivity and Independence as Terms of Ontological Distance

• 1. Historical Past and Historical Present
• 2. The Original Form of the Philosophical Question
• 3. The Genesis of Historical Consciousness as the Original Formation of Objects
• 4. World and Object
• 5. The World as Intellectual Achievement
• 6. The Foundations of the Phenomenological World of Science in Its Problems of Originality
• 7. The Yield of the Phenomenological Concept of “Horizon” for the Theme of the “World”.
• 8. The Passive Genesis of the World Horizon

Part IV: The Finitude of Thought

• 1. The Infinite Project of Phenomenology as a Claim to Historical Impartiality
• 2. The Collapse of the Universal Familiarity Structure of the World
• 3. The Destruction of the Ontological Foundations of the Project of Infinite Certainty
• 4. The Reduction of the Forgetting of Being and the New Thought of Being

The editorial content of the 2022 work therefore includes the 1950 version, which is the one used for the defense and is spread over 276 pages (9-285), the framework of which I have just outlined, but it also contains the first, more concentrated version from 1949, containing 56 pages (287-249) including the bibliography, as an “attachment” to the 1950 manuscript. This is the file established by Blumenberg himself on the cover of which he had drawn a skull, thereby ensuring highly toxic, pirated or at least poisoned content – ​​hence the “caution” I was talking about earlier.

            Let us write it again with the help of this new argument: when consulting this skeleton, it’s possible to see clearly how, later, Blumenberg’s philosophy was able to envelop and integrate into pre-existing concerns the position of a philosopher of myth and culture such as Ernst Cassirer. Similarly, I could envisage what was already preparing the philosopher from Lübeck for the position that is his own regarding the Davos quarrel opposing Cassirer to Heidegger, notably on the level of the destination of the human being with regard to his finitude: as a source or as an impasse – even announcing, in fact, his response to the positions taken by Wittgenstein and Russell on this subject, and ultimately his position regarding the outcomes of the “cleavage” that fractured philosophy between continental philosophy and analytic philosophy.

            Some would say that Blumenberg is involved in too many quarrels, wants to lead too many struggles simultaneously on the same front, and these titles give a paradoxical insight into the rigorous homogeneity of his approach, which radiates from the problem of ontological distance, that is, as I have already written, from the phenomenological connection of the subject to the world through the performance structure that is consciousness — consciousness of something, in accordance with Husserl’s identification of the connection of consciousness to the world. It should not be forgotten that the 1950 text of Die ontologische Distanz is not a testament but, on the contrary, a burst frozen in its energy, some of whose repercussions are only subsequently dealt with. Systematizing the idea of ​​a “thought of crisis”, Blumenberg even went, late in life (that is to say, not directly in the text which concerns us here), to the limit of the functionality of the activity of thinking.

            The Habilitation Quarrel

As early as 1949, Blumenberg was ready to submit the text of his habilitation thesis. One of the three jurors, Walter Bröcker, wrote the equivalent of a completely devastating preliminary jury report on the 1949 version. It is possible that Bröcker simply did not find the question posed by Blumenberg relevant, nor did he find a sensible solution to the problem he claimed to provide. There is no real explanation other than the speculations of commentators who do not allow us to understand this conflict, apart from, perhaps, a certain defense of the orthodoxy of Heidegger’s reading.^[1]

            As Zambon writes, Bröcker’s exact motives are still unknown today, but it seems that the third assessor, whose name and the content of his intervention are still unknown to this day, ultimately “saved” Blumenberg (Zambon, p. 367). In any case, the candidate experienced the content of this preliminary report as a casus belli, and Nicola Zambon speaks of a “slap in the face” in the afterword. Blumenberg considered this preliminary report as a personal attack, aimed either at the Catholic tradition of his intellectual training, or at the heterodoxy of his Heideggerian reading, or even at the divergence of Heidegger’s reading of Husserl on the one hand, whose doctoral student Bröcker was until 1928, and those of Husserl read by Landgrebe on the other hand. Thus, rather than hearing it as a questioning of a possible immaturity of all or part of the doctrinal positions of this demonstration that would become the Habilitation, Blumenberg made it a personal matter, over which he sometimes put Landgrebe in a situation of emotional blackmail. Simultaneously and because he had no choice, intellectually speaking, Blumenberg took up the manuscript in its entirety to the point of “completely reorganizing [it]” (Zambon, p. 368). With his other “fathers”, the same Bröcker would validate the text of the Habilitation in its definitive form in 1950.

            In addition to a certain tendency towards exaggeration or dramatic and definitive statements—which his mentor mostly appeases—one must therefore take into account Blumenberg’s resentment towards what could have been the objective reality of his environment. At this stage, any researcher who is particularly invested in his work and identifies with the success of his ideas can only feel boundless empathy for the Blumenberg who was just thirty years old. However, without this failure, without what he experienced as the humiliation of his first Habilitation project, “because of its majestic pretensions, to measure modernity by the horizon and its crisis” (p. 372), Nicola Zambon suggests that Blumenberg might never have written his major works—which can perhaps pass for belated responses to some of the lapidary remarks in Bröcker’s provisional report.

            Perhaps, for archaeological reasons, readers should go back to his doctoral thesis to understand the extent to which the germ of what would later happen was to be found in his entire work, but I believe at this stage that the work of reworking the text of the Habilitation, after the failure of the first (too hasty) submission, between 1948 and 1950, truly “determined” the direction that Blumenberg would take in his entire philosophical stance. For example, I find in the Contribution (his doctoral thesis) the famous intuition, later taken up and systematically deployed, of the “paradigmatic epochs”, which Blumenberg will associate with the materializations of that by which the history of consciousness treats the test of ontological distance, and which recalls certain elements of the posture of the still Privatdozent Heidegger, and accessible in his courses of the winter semester 1921-1922, published in English under the title Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, Initiation into Phenomenological Research (Indiana University Press, 2001) – edition whose German version was precisely directed by Walter Bröcker (1902-1992) and his wife Käte Oltmanns, both former students of Heidegger. The content of the relationship between paradigmatic eras under the pen of Heidegge corresponds to what Blumenberg develops here for exemple in III, §1, pp. 135-149, “Historische Vergangenheit und geschichtliche Gegenwart” (Volume 61 of the Complete Works of Heidegger, 1985). Going in the same direction as this first Heidegger, the very history of consciousness becomes for Blumenberg a historicity of the modes of resolution of the ontological distance throughout the succession of paradigmatic epochs, investing the “potential” of yet-unconscious influences. Blumenberg then has to distance himself from Heidegger in his own eyes and he chooses to defend Husserl – although Husserl’s name does not appear in the final title.

            The project of a reflection mixing metaphysics and phenomenology

Ultimately, he attempted to propose nothing less than a reflection extending the Krisis of the subject, as identified by Husserl, in his Habilitation thesis. To quote the presentation on the publishing house’s website:

[…] a monumental project that seeks nothing less than to measure the philosophical horizon of modernity against a backdrop of crisis. Although Die ontologische Distanz does not entirely live up to this claim, the combination of historical-philosophical interests and the phenomenological method of the study lays the foundations on which Blumenberg’s major research on the history of consciousness would flourish in the following decades to come.

Indeed, I observe the ramifications of the continuation of Die ontologische Distanz taken as a construction site in the publications that occurred between 1950 and 1996 — and even beyond due to a very intense posthumous editorial activity. The Husserlian transcendental subject (then increasingly Kantian, as Blumenberg progressed) has a reserve of resources to institute the choices that he will make in the course of his principle of determinability (Die Sorge geht über den Fluß, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987): and to describe the subject himself (Beschreibung des Menschen) and to describe the readability of the world (Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, ); this reserve materializing in the possibility of resorting to the elements constituting the history of culture. The management of the internal crisis, fundamental to any subject conscious of the availability of the principle of determinability, makes culture the destination and the origin of the uses that the subject will make of it^[2]: culture is the container of all the frozen traces of the historicization of reactions to the fundamental economy of fear (Schrecken) that all human beings experience. These frozen forms are available in culture and can be seized by subsequent generations for their management of this same internal crisis, similar in motive and reason, but dissimilar in historical influence. The conditions of possibility of the subject establish, in this new configuration of the morphology of ontological distance, a new concept of reality, establishing the conditions of the shift from one “epochal paradigm”, or “paradigmatic epoch” to another (for example pp. 135-137). In the dynamic balance between “ritual texts” (texts that establish a paradigmatic era) and the “poeticization” of these texts, ontological distance is the primordial paradigm of the activity from which the possibility of the self-decomposition of the historicization of the subject progresses.

            This primordial, incontestable paradigm is therefore manifested in the mediation by which the subject resolves the distance to the world (of factuality, of finitude) and is expressed at the level of the subject in the quantitative distance between the two regimes of the activity of the mind: the regime of the logico-formal, already identified by Kant, and the regime of intuitions, the hypothesis of which we have put forward elsewhere, under the name of an “aesthetico-formal regime” (Marciset, op. cit., 2023). In other words, and to attach it to the Heideggerian trajectory of the history of being, just as being conscious always depends with Husserl on a consciousness of something, like an activity carried out on an object, being always means being in the world, and this is the meaning of the syntagm Dasein. So that these are two different and complementary ways of speaking of one and the same structure of performance, which the doxa calls consciousness or being: by being (there, in the world) or by consciousness (of the object, of the world).

            For Die ontologische Distanz, read through the lens of Blumenberg’s later work, being might not be the depository of an essence or a truth, but the focus of a permanent enactment of the conditions of possibility of the structure of performance at the foundation of the possibility of the transcendental subject which actualizes, since the inclusion of the principle of crisis at the very heart of its faculties, the valences of the current paradigmatic epoch and state of permanent mutability. The crisis is thus neither a promise nor a threat but the agent of the ontological dynamic and the guarantee of the perseverance of consciousness as an activity — whether one chooses, at this stage, to support this activity in an understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason as proposed by the neo-Kantians, on the side of theories of knowledge, or whether one seeks, as Heidegger does, the restitution of the historicity of Dasein. Husserlian indifference or Heideggerian anxiety, it doesn’t matter: the history of consciousness is always one historical morphology (a punctual being, one of its events) of ontological distance, which is the activity of what it is to be in the world.

            There is no simplification in a return to essentialization in Blumenberg’s theory: it is not a question of considering that his theory, however functional it may be, would rest on the idea of ​​a “truth” of human nature and this is precisely what pushes Blumenberg towards Cassirer and simultaneously leads him to keep a certain distance from him^[3]. No more than there would be a “truth” of the modes of application of Kantian theories, in Blumenberg’s prism, there is no ameliorative conception of the history of the mind. The superposition of the exteriority of the model as it can be theorized with the internal economy of the subject is due to a constructivist product and is not concerned with a destination or a prefiguration of what happens in history (Blumenberg, Präfiguration, Frankfurt, Surkhamp Verlag, 2014). In other words, Blumenberg’s theory is a theory of the “paradigmatic epoch” presiding over the metakinetic portion of the period thus presented, much more than a “history of being ».

            Conclusion

What is the ontological distance that Hans Blumenberg deals with in his habilitation thesis? Two things, both of which arise from the relationship between the distance of the subject and the world, and from the conditions of possibility of materialization and polarization of this distance. It is in this distance, for Blumenberg, that the historicity of science is established. The first of these two implications concerns the repercussions of the evolution of this distance throughout history (the question of historicity being at the center of the problem, depending on whether the notion is considered as a phenomenon or as a cause) and then joins Husserl. “”For Husserl,”” writes Blumenberg, “method” is rather “the organon by which the scientific spirit frees itself from the contingency and finiteness of the researching individuals and escapes from the constraints of factual historical existence” (Blumenberg, p. 248). “The infinite implication of the phenomenological method, which here represents modern science, banishes humans from philosophical thought. It contains the functionalization of the individual and his sacrifice for a task indifferent to man and his finitude.” (Zambon, p. 358)

            The second links the metakinetics of the subject, or practical being (Die Zweckmäßigkeit des Dasein) taken as a paradigmatic epoch (paradigmatische Epoche), to this problem and reinjects — or attempts to reinject — the method specific to phenomenology into the study of historicity, leading to a restoration of the history of being (Seinsgeschichte), but this time, against any risk of essentialization and through the historically metakinetic mobility of the subject.

            I find here the motif of the homogeneity of the work of the “invisible” philosopher. Blumenberg’s inspiration for his Habilitation thesis comes from a phenomenological generalization of the specific work that occupied him in his thesis and related to the problem of the crisis of the subject in modern European sciences. Thus, returning to the common conception of scholasticism on the ontological level, not “only [as] mediation and [as] passage for the heritage of Antiquity”, but also having a “distinct and original contribution of its own” (Blumenberg, Beiträge, 2020, p. 24), he begins to perceive the shifts of epochs as signs of the metakinetic activity of being, thereby opposing Heidegger’s understanding of the history of being. History is a manifestation of the metakinetics of being, and not the direct relationship of being to history, and it is the status of the distance of being to history, through the mediation of this metakinetics, which constitutes the originality of Blumenberg’s phenomenological (and de facto anthropological) posture.

^[1] Nicola Zambon, “Nachwort des Herausgebers” in op. cit., 2022, pp. 366-367 and p. 370. It seems that the only argument that is still alive today concerns the lack of recourse to texts that are not strictly derived from Husserl, and which could imply different readings of Kant, as well as the Habilitation’s supposed failure to resolve anything genuine. For a more exhaustive exposition of the quarrel, see Rüdiger Zill, Der absolute Leser. Hans Blumenberg: Eine intellektuelle Biographie, Berlin, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020, pp. 146-156.

^[2] Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos,” (1971) in op. cit., 2001; already outlined in op. cit., 2022, pp. 61-66, II, §1. “Mythos” and “Logos.”

^[3] Read about this in Haverkamp, ​​op. cit., Paradigm, 2017, pp. 53-56.