The Homelessness of Being: Heidegger and the Meaning of Existence
The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre
Reviewed by: Tyler Perkins (Gannon University)
The Burden and Dignity of Possibility: On Riccardo Pugliese’s The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre
Introduction
If the Socratic prescription for living well is to “let no day pass without discussing goodness and […] that life without this sort of examination is not worth living,” then, as Riccardo Pugliese suggests in The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre, the existentialist counterpart might read: let no day pass without choosing oneself — and that a life without this sort of choice is not worth living (Plato 1993, p. 23). But how is one able to choose? What choices are available? What is the self that one must choose? And how does this make life worth living? What kind of failure results from failing to choose?
These are the animating questions of Pugliese’s concise and provocative volume. The book is neatly divided into two parts: the first investigates “the relationship between freedom and possibility in Kierkegaard,” while the second “dwells on the idea of freedom as condemnation as it was conceived by the philosopher who most radicalized its scope: Jean-Paul Sartre” (Pugliese 2023, pp. 1–2). At first glance, the book appears to offer a familiar exegetical pairing of two major existentialists. Yet Andrea Tagliapietra’s preface signals a more ambitious aim: a reorientation of existentialism around the category of possibility, challenging the long-standing ontological priority given to actuality and essence in Western metaphysics.
Pugliese develops two intertwined arguments: first, that existentialist thought uniquely subverts the classical dichotomy between possibility and reality, treating possibility not as mere potentiality or lack, but as an ontologically rich mode of being. Second, that this ontological shift has significant ethical consequences — particularly for the question of how to live. His reinterpretation of Kierkegaard and Sartre thus serves not only to clarify their positions, but to advance a broader philosophical proposal: that the self must be understood through the lens of possibility, and that a life lived well is one that takes up this burden with lucidity.
In what follows, I first summarize the major claims and structure of the book, then assess its interpretive and philosophical contributions. I conclude by reflecting on the ethical and phenomenological implications of reading existentialism as a meditation on the dizziness — and dignity — of possibility.
Possibility and Selfhood in Kierkegaard
The first half of the book offers a reading of Kierkegaard centered on the ontological and ethical role of possibility. Drawing primarily on Either/Or and The Sickness unto Death, he presents Kierkegaard as a thinker who defines the self through exposure to what might be—and what might be chosen.
Using Kierkegaard, Pugliese argues that possibility provides the ontological basis for human existence itself. Prior to realizing any one possibility—to choosing, that is—one is at the zero-point of existence, as a nothingness (at least in that moment). Possibility here is framed as “permanent indecision, the unstable balance between opposing alternatives that present themselves in the face of any given possibility” (Pugliese 2023, p. 2). This zero-point is more than a fork in the road (does one go down one path or the other?), Pugliese quotes Kierkegaard’s Diario, where he compares the experience of possibility to being caught at “an intersection of ways that radiate in all directions” and at which one is compelled to turn down several (albeit incompatible) roads at once. What’s more, the existential condition of possibility is not overcome by the act of choosing. Pugliese claims that Kierkegaard’s remark “implies that from choice there is no escape,” this, it seems, is because one transgresses the zero-point only to arrive back at it (Pugliese 2023, p. 3).
The Aesthetic and the Ethical
Choosing isn’t merely one option among others in the face of possibility. Because human existence is defined by possibility, choosing is necessary. To be sure, echoing Kierkegaard, Pugliese describes choice as “an ineradicable component of our persona […] the individual is not what he is but what he chooses to be […] even the renunciation of choice is a choice, albeit a type of choice by which man renounces himself” (Pugliese 2023, p. 3).
Thus, the first dilemma at the heart of Pugliese’s existentialist ethic is not between choosing and not choosing—not choosing, he tells us, is itself a choice. Instead, it’s between renunciation and commitment; between, in Kierkegaardian terms, the aesthetic stage and the ethical stage.
When in the aesthetic stage, one lives according to the motto carpe horam (seize the hour!), immersed in a world of immediate, external goods. The aesthete is “one who grounds himself and the meaning of his life on external agents (e.g., wealth), or independent from one’s own will (such as beauty, health, talent, or intelligence)” (Pugliese 2023, p. 6). While Pugliese notes structural similarities between Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage and later existentialist notions such as Heidegger’s thrownness or Sartre’s facticity, he does not address whether he interprets it as a normative program, or on a more descriptive register. However, since Pugliese claims that modern ethics after Kierkegaard emphasizes transformation, growth, and development, his argument appears to carry an implicit normative force. Readers should be aware, however, that this is not the only — or even the dominant — interpretation of Kierkegaard’s stages.
By contrast, one passes from the aesthetic to the ethical stage “by assuming full responsibility for his own freedom, commits himself to a task to which he remains faithful,” and “embraces the repetition that the aesthete has shunned” (Pugliese 2023, p. 4). This review will cover Pugliese’s treatment of the ethical stage in a later section. For now, the question is, where is the tipping point between the aesthetic and the ethical? Answer: Despair.
Despair as the culmination of the aesthetic life
In Either/Or, Kierkegaard examines the existential condition of despair through the figure of Judge Wilhelm — a representative of the ethical stage who offers a sustained critique of aesthetic life. As Pugliese emphasizes, despair marks “the first, inescapable step toward the ethical stage,” because it is in despair — a crisis that is, paradoxically, “deeply and intensely coveted” — that the self first becomes aware of itself as something to be chosen (Pugliese 2023, p. 14). This reflective awareness is the defining feature of the despairing aesthete, who “becomes aware of himself, of his own freedom, and of the possibilities that this awareness entails” (Pugliese 2023, p. 15).
This moment of critical self-awareness brings existential clarity to the aesthete; it is the recognition that they have “tied the very purpose of their life to transient, finite, and fleeting things and feelings. The despairing aesthete’s perspective reveals “the futility of everything and its ephemeral character” (Pugliese 2023, p. 10). With the futility of their vanity in full view, the despairing aesthete has no reason to continue their pursuit of meaning and purpose in immediate and external goods. But how can this despair be distinguished from mere dissatisfaction—from the boredom or weariness that follows exhausting one’s options for pleasure? As Pugliese puts it, the despairing aesthete, having exhausted even their own fantasies, now “marches irrevocably toward the abyss” (Pugliese 2023, p. 11).
In the end, Pugliese presents the despairing aesthete as a kind of tragic seer—someone who has penetrated the illusion of aesthetic meaning and now lives with the naked awareness of its futility. This is not the despair of ignorance, but of insight. The cost of this lucidity, however, is paralysis: with all values dissolved, no action seems justifiable. Judge Wilhelm’s ethical challenge, then, is not to negate despair but to embrace it—to “choose despair” as the first step toward becoming a true self. In framing despair this way, Pugliese gives it a paradoxical dignity: it is not merely a dead end, but the beginning of responsibility.
Choice of self as foundational to ethical existence
According to Pugliese, the ethical life begins when one recognizes that freedom is not simply given but must be grasped. This means choosing not merely between options but choosing to become a self in the fullest existential sense. It is “a great original choice that determines the horizon of [their] existence, namely, the choice to choose” (Pugliese 2023, p. 13). The critical self-consciousness one gains through despair “will lead [them] to a condition of complete transparency and lucidity, which existentialists call authenticity” (Pugliese 2023, p. 15).
In chapter 3, “The Choice of Self,” Pugliese follows Kierkegaard in describing ethical selfhood as a movement through three existential moments: (1) Self-recognition as absolute freedom – “I can do anything.” (2) Self-recognition as a necessity, based on one’s history and conditioning – “I am constrained by my facticity.” (3) Self-recognition in one’s eternal worth through repentance – a synthesis of (1) and (2) yielding a stable identity. This sequence does not imply resolution or closure. Rather, it marks the conditions under which a stable identity emerges.
For Pugliese, this existential choice represents the minimal condition for authenticity. It does not guarantee ethical fulfillment, but it opens the horizon in which commitment, responsibility, and selfhood become possible. In this sense, the ethical is the willingness to relate to oneself through an enduring commitment to continual self-perfection.
The threefold structure of ethical selfhood in Pugliese’s reading highlights the paradox at the heart of existential subjectivity. One must come to terms with being a synthesis of opposing forces: freedom and necessity, transcendence and facticity. The pain of despair reveals the self as absolutely free. Yet in the second moment, the individual “clashes against the limits of his contingency and discovers that he has a history, and that this history is indivisibly interwoven with the histories of other men, bound to become a single, collective history” (Pugliese 2023, p. 18). It is precisely this finitude, when confronted freely, that makes ethical selfhood possible. In Kierkegaard’s terms, the final synthesis arrives not in denial of either pole, but in a kind of existential reconciliation: the choice to affirm both freedom and necessity in the act of becoming oneself.
Pugliese argues that the moment of self-recognition as a necessity adds an extra dimension to the existential weight of responsibility. One is not only responsible for who they freely choose to become, but also for the nexus of background conditions—historical, social, and personal—that have shaped their becoming. Repentance is the existential structure through which individuals redeem themselves in their “entirety and complexity” (Pugliese 2023, p. 19). Repentance, for Pugliese, is not merely a reconciliation of contradictions within the self. It is existentially significant because it marks the culmination of ethical selfhood — the moment at which one becomes answerable to something both immanent and transcendent. Quoting Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Pugliese formulates the effect of repentance as a kind of mystical rebirth, whereby “the self chooses itself or rather receives itself,” and “Man does not become different from what he was before, he just becomes himself; consciousness gathers, and he is himself” (Kierkegaard 1843, quoted in Pugliese 2023, p. 19).
Pugliese began by comparing the aesthete’s predicament to being adrift in an open and indeterminate sea of possibility, one who is content with the amusement of considering, but never realizing any of the possibilities that lay before them—a kind of infinite existential procrastination. The ethical individual has been emboldened by their critical self-awareness to resolutely and passionately choose. Yet neither clarity nor resolve can shield the ethical individual from what Pugliese calls the “painful and melancholic irreconcilability between opposite life paths,” a suffering felt most acutely in the sacrifice possibility at the altar of actuality (Pugliese 2023, p. 23).
Sartre and Freedom as Condemnation
In the arc of Pugliese’s text, Kierkegaard lays down the premises for some of the philosophical conclusions he wishes to draw out of his engagement with Sartre and 20th-century existentialism. However, while Kierkegaard provides much of the philosophical foundation for more recent existentialist philosophies, Pugliese is careful to distinguish Kierkegaard’s proto-existentialism from the kind of philosophy that was done as a response to the “feeling of desolation and estrangement from life” and “the idea of the individual as a clearly distinct entity opposed to society as a whole” (Pugliese 2023, p. 28). Chapter 4, “Existentialism and the Birth of the Modern Era,” gives a relatively straightforward and uncontroversial account of the cultural, philosophical, and political changes that took shape between the mid-19th to early-20th centuries in Europe.
The Age of Anxiety (1918-1939) upended almost every aspect of humanity’s philosophical self-understanding. Important for the development of existentialism is the “process of rationalization that will dismantle all the theological or metaphysical premises on which universal value judgments had previously been based,” as well as “the positivist illusion that such ideals can be objectively grounded in historical or social facts and their development,” and humanity’s loss of its “central position in the universe,” all adding up to a general feeling of “bewilderment and loneliness” (Pugliese 2023, pp. 26-7).
In Chapter 5, “Human Existence,” Pugliese begins to develop existentialism as a philosophical response to the spiritual and cultural crisis of the Age of Anxiety. To do so, he situates 20th-century existentialism against the backdrop of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology. Hegel, in Phenomenology of Spirit, distinguishes between the natural, biological dimension of the human being and the rational, self-conscious capacity that defines human subjectivity. For Pugliese, this model is not embraced by existentialism so much as reworked: the existentialist inherits Hegel’s emphasis on self-consciousness and negation, but without the metaphysical assurances of a reconciled totality or final synthesis.
If Kierkegaard demonstrates that human beings have the freedom to transform themselves, to choose to give themselves purpose by making a passionate commitment to themselves, then Hegel offers the structural resources to explain how such transformation is ontologically possible. Existentialists inherit the notion that human beings are split between their immediate impulses and the reflective distance afforded by self-consciousness. For Sartre, whom Pugliese take up in the second half of the book, this struggle is reframed as a fundamental tension between existence and essence.[1] It is from within this tension that Sartre articulates his claim that being-for-itself (i.e., consciousness) negates and transcends being-in-itself (the natural, biological dimension). By denying one’s immediate impulses, “a crack, a fissure, a nothingness is introduced within the fullness of being by human existence” (Pugliese 2023, p. 33). Against the backdrop of the Age of Anxiety, Sartre offers not a return to metaphysical certainty, but a redemption of human dignity. Humanity may no longer receive purpose from God or the state but retain the capacity to give it to itself.
However, that capacity is not exercised unconsciously; it “occurs through the precise decision on the part of the individual to interact with it in order to modify it and give it the desired direction actively, in the course of one’s life” (Pugliese 2023, p. 33). Pugliese thus shows that beginning from ontology rather than ethics still leads us back to a reflection on freedom. It is because human beings are ontologically structured to define themselves in relation to their circumstances that “human existence implies that each of our actions contributes to the overall shaping of our life in its entirety.” One imagines that Sartre would go a step further because for him, action does not merely shape a life, it constitutes essence. Thus, Pugliese returns to and reinforces the grounding thesis of the text: human existence is characterized by possibility, “openness to all,” and that man is “free to choose what he wants to become” (Pugliese 2023, p. 38).
In Chapter 6, “Transcendence and Freedom,” Pugliese extends the ontological significance of possibility into the domains of epistemology and perception. He traces how existentialists inherit and revise Kant’s critical philosophy, particularly the claim that “the world we experience on a daily basis is merely the projection of our way of thinking and perceiving reality” (Pugliese 2023, p. 43). While Sartre may accept a version of this “projection thesis,” he breaks from the Kantian framework by rejecting the idea that perception is conditioned by universal categories shared by all. For the existentialist, it is not transcendental structures but the “free and individual choice, unique and unrepeatable because it is different for each person, which determines the appearance of the world” (Pugliese 2023, p. 44). In this way, Pugliese shows that possibility is not only the ground of ethical life but also of perception itself — the very way the world is given to consciousness.
Freedom and the Demand for Meaning
20th-century existentialism, shaped by the cultural disorientation of the Age of Anxiety, reinterprets Kierkegaard’s ethical demand through the concept of authenticity, emphasizing how important it is to choose oneself. For thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre, the greatest threat to selfhood is not merely the pursuit of pleasure, but the pull of conformity—the pressure to define oneself through the gaze and expectations of others. As Pugliese puts it, communal life “creates alienation and detachment from oneself” under the sway of what he calls “the dictatorship of one” (Pugliese 2023, p. 47). This phrase names the subtle but pervasive temptation to submit to prevailing norms and social routines, effacing difference in the process.
Existentialist thinkers from Nietzsche to Sartre have long warned against the leveling effects of normalization. However, while Pugliese rightly emphasizes their shared resistance to the herd, he glosses over the significant differences in their positions—particularly Nietzsche’s explicitly prescriptive ideal of self-overcoming, in contrast to the more descriptive and phenomenological approaches found in Heidegger and Sartre. This omission risks flattening the conceptual terrain that existentialism traverses in its effort to think authenticity under modern conditions. It is true that one ought to strive to live passionately and authentically, but taken to its radical extreme, this demand risks isolating the individual from the shared fabric of social life. Authenticity, in this register, becomes not just a struggle against conformity, but a potential estrangement from others altogether. The text seems to arrive at a more nuanced position in spite of the omission, which acknowledges that these philosophers “invite us, as individuals, to not adhere uncritically to a particular school of thought, challenging us to think about things autonomously, inwardly, and silently, and to arrive at a final decision using our critical consciousness” (Pugliese 2023, p. 52).
In the final chapter, “Freedom as Destiny,” Pugliese reorients the existential notion of freedom away from abstraction and toward situated commitment. Freedom, he argues, is not a blank slate, but a task that must be worked out within the irreducible constraints of one’s historical, cultural, and personal situation. In this sense, destiny does not oppose freedom but names the terrain through which it must move. Drawing on Sartre’s later reflections, Pugliese shows that the highest form of freedom is not flight from one’s conditions, but the capacity to assume them lucidly and transform them meaningfully. This closing gesture also recalls Kierkegaard’s emphasis on repetition, showing that the ethical life is not simply an escape from despair or an assertion of novelty, but a return to one’s existence with renewed commitment. By ending here, Pugliese reinforces his central thesis: that existentialism, far from a philosophy of despair, is a sustained meditation on the dignity and difficulty of becoming a self through possibility.
Conclusion
The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre is both an accessible introduction to key existentialist thinkers and a philosophically ambitious proposal in its own right. Pugliese’s central claim—that possibility is not merely a psychological horizon but the ontological condition of freedom and selfhood—offers a compelling thread that runs from Kierkegaard’s stages of life through Sartre’s ontology of negation and responsibility. The book succeeds in showing how existentialism responds to the modern loss of metaphysical grounding not with despair, but with an ethic of lucidity and self-commitment. At times, its interpretive scope risks smoothing over significant differences between thinkers, particularly in its treatment of authenticity and the pressure of social conformity. Yet Pugliese’s clarity of exposition and structural elegance allow the philosophical force of the existentialist tradition to come through. For readers interested in the ethical and ontological stakes of freedom—not just as a cultural idea, but as an existential task—this volume offers a valuable and thoughtful guide.
Bibliography:
Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters. Edited by Edith Hamilton. 16. print. Bollingen Series 71. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Pugliese, Riccardo. The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2023. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-38138-6.
[1] It’s not clear if Pugliese wants to say that, for Sartre, essence and givenness are one and the same. When Sartre famously claims that “existence precedes essence” in Existentialism is a Humanism, essence is not meant to stand in for the concept of facticity, or one’s situation that they may take a stand on.
Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart. Aufsätze zu Wert und Sinn
Reviewed by: Giulia Spagnolli (University of Padua)
In the field of ethics, reflecting on values is of utmost importance. This reflection gains significance due to the complexity of the multicultural environment in which humanity operates today, characterized by diverse value systems and the varying dominance of specific values across different times and cultures. Moritz von Kalckreuth notes that while the topic of values may seem ‘exotic’ today, it was quite popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, due to the belief that it could introduce a scientific aspect to discussions on meaning and normative evaluations. Within this context, Nicolai Hartmann stands out as one of the few prominent value theorists in German philosophy, and his writings presented here, also embody an existentialist spirit typical of the era. In Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart. Aufsätze zu Wert und Sinn, von Kalckreuth presents a thematically arranged collection of essays by Hartmann, written between 1924 and 1929, all centered on the question of value. The first part of the anthology is specifically devoted to the concept of value, encompassing both moral and aesthetic dimensions, while the second part explores phenomena that cannot be fully explained through purely axiological considerations. These writings serve as a valuable complement to the already remarkable moral treatises found in Hartmann’s major works (Ethik and Das Problem des gesitigen Seins). Published in 1926, Ethik, as von Kalckreuth observes, follows two primary lines of argumentation. Firstly, it examines how values are apprehended, their ontological nature, and provides a detailed account of value phenomena, a topic deeply explored in the second volume (Moral Values). Secondly, it addresses the actions that serve as the practical counterpart to the ideality of values, through which values are actualized by the moral subject. In Das Problem des geistigen Seins, the study on values is situated within a cultural-historical framework, where morality is portrayed as a domain of the objective spirit, facilitating interaction among individuals. That said, Hartmann’s theory of values is deeply intertwined with the intellectual debates of the past century and is part of a broader philosophical endeavor aimed at revitalizing ontology by incorporating insights from other fields of knowledge, striving to establish a shared ontological foundation. It would be therefore incorrect to assume that Hartmann’s axiological theory is confined solely to his 1926 Ethik. As evidenced by his correspondence with Heinz Heimsoeth, Hartmann had already developed several theoretical principles underpinning his moral reflections, before the First World War. This assumption is plausible, given that the overarching structure of Hartmann’s philosophy is evident even in his early works. In particular, Hartmann’s axiology takes its starting point in the Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, where he lays out the gnoseological and ontological conditions of his theory of values, showing that the latter cannot prescind from ontology; indeed, reflection on moral phenomena is part of it as “a regional ontology, an investigation of the ontological structure of the person in its complexity as a multi-layered entity”[1]. As von Kalckreuth highlights, amidst the diverse voices shaping the debate on the question of values—such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Max Scheler, and Max Weber, among others—Hartmann, with his approach, seeks to unify philosophical research on values, which is otherwise marked by a tendency toward one-sidedness. If Ethik—which today’s reception is limited to—is not regarded as the sole text for understanding Hartmann’s axiological framework, the significance of von Kalckreuth’s collection emerges as a valuable contribution to the study of the philosophy of value.
At this point, it may be helpful to outline the themes and questions that Hartmann engages with in the realm of a philosophy of values, where the solutions he developed continue to serve as essential reference points for axiological reflection. To better understand Hartmann’s stance within the debate of his time, it is interesting to examine his first essay, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, which, despite its brevity, serves as a highly insightful declaration of his intentions and methodology. In it, Hartmann underscores that, despite the variety of existing doctrines, the issue of values has matured into a distinct philosophical problem that should not be conflated with the question of purposes. Additionally, there are key issues that no philosophy of value can overlook: the notion that life is rich with value, the call to honor the values inherent in the world, and the duty to actualize them—these latter two principles delineate the entire domain of ethics. Starting with the essence of the values, Hartmann identifies a series of issues, that are explored and addressed in this anthology. In the axiological theories developed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, questions surrounding pluralism and relativism of values took center stage. Hartmann directly challenges Nietzsche, who, by highlighting the variety of values and advocating for their transvaluation, rendered pluralism and ontology incompatible. Pluralism plays a central role in Hartmann’s reflections and stems from his unique phenomenological approach, which emphasizes a maximum focus on the given data and a minimum of metaphysics, rejecting any form of unilateral Standpünktlichkeit. This perspective also applies to values, as seen in Ethik, published nearly contemporaneously with Weber’s concept of a ‘polytheism of values’, which, at its core, arises from similar needs to those of the philosopher from Riga. Hartmann’s theory of values can be seen as addressing the questions left unresolved by Nietzsche. He manages to mantain an ontological framework while embracing the pluralism of values, driven by the ‘tension toward the universal’, that defines his philosophical inquiry. In this respect, his approach might be referred to as an ‘ontology of values’.
Hartmann’s original theses engage with and confront tradition, and Nietzsche is not the only interlocutor in this collection. In Kants Metaphysik der Sitten und die Ethik unserer Tage, Hartmann aims to place his reflections within the broader context of the ‘Material Ethics of Value’, a framework pioneered by Max Scheler where Hartmann himself emerges as a prominent figure. This theory can be seen as a synthesis, combining Nietzsche’s discovery of the multiplicity of values with Kant’s apriorism and the author repeatedly highlights its innovative nature, emphasizing how it resolves several aporias, that earlier moral theories failed to tackle. In this essay, Hartmann underscores particularly the capacity of the Material Ethics of Value to handle the diversity of good—something that has become fundamental since Nietzsche. He acknowledges that while our preferences for accessing values may shift, there are laws that remain applicable a priori. This discussion unfolds, as the title suggests, in the context of a comparison with Kantian Ethics. Demonstrating a more accommodating stance toward the philosopher of Königsberg than many of his contemporaries, Hartmann acknowledges Kant’s achievement in addressing the ethical problem through the lens of apriorism. However, he critiques this perspective, which identifies the explanatory principle of moral phenomena as an intrinsic tendency of the subject, arguing that it succumbs to the subjectivism that deeply taints modern philosophy. The Hartmannian solution lies in rejecting the subjective origin of moral phenomena; this is achieved by affirming the existence of an “ideal realm of being, to which values intrinsically belong”. These values are apprehended a priori as “autonomous entities within this realm, entirely independent of ‘experience’”[2]. Hartmann’s perspective closely aligns with that of Scheler, who criticized the formalism and intellectualism of Kantian Ethics. To move beyond intellectualism, both Scheler and Hartmann recognize the presence of an axiological sentiment (Wertgefühl), which serves as the primary locus of the givenness of values. This sentiment, inherent in every human decision, represents the true essence of moral phenomena. Regarding Kantian formalism, Hartmann, while resonating with Scheler, states: “Values themselves do not inherently possess the nature of laws or imperatives […] in relation to the subject, but rather exist as material and objective entities, although not as real ones”[3]. This is why ethics, building on Kantian apriorism, must evolve into a Material Ethics of Values. It is clear then, that Scheler’s remarkable contribution lies in revealing the existence of material and objective entities whose value is evident a priori. According to Hartmann, this discovery paves the way for an expansive field of inquiry into ethical apriorism, which had previously been insufficiently explored. Furthermore, it reveals that Kantian Ethics and Material Value Ethics fundamentally share the same trajectory.
Closely related to the issue of value pluralism is another crucial problem: reconciling the ‘ideal self-existence’ of values with relativism (an aspect, the second, that Nietzsche’s philosophy brought starkly into focus). As Hartmann observes in Vom Wesen sittlicher Forderungen, the flaw in nearly all moral systems throughout history prior to Nietzsche, lies in their tendency to elevate a specific value as an absolute good in itself. In contrast, it is essential to illuminate the relativity of values. What, then, is the source of this relativity? The questionable nature of values arises from their inability to independently determine human will. They exist autonomously, separate from their actual realization, and in relation to reality, they present only a demand—a call to what ought to be. The ideal nature of values necessitates a moment of mediation between ideality and reality, between moral experience and axiological objectivity. Here, personal being assumes a pivotal role as the mediator between the ideal realm of values and the realities that define world events and human existence. This being has the ability to bring ideal demands into the world and, within its capabilities, transform what already exists; it is entrusted with the responsibility of being a co-creator of the world. Thus, the issue of relativism can be reinterpreted as follows: it is not the values themselves, in their essence, that change, but rather their validity in relation to the moral subject and the axiological consciousness. This consciousness is distinct from theoretical consciousness and does not follow a linear progression of development. At the individual level, value blindness, or Wertblindheit, which leads to favoring one value while disregarding others, results from a significant limitation of the axiological consciousness. The latter is gripped by the value and, in a way, compelled to respond to it. Each value tends to dominate individuals, often overshadowing other values—a phenomenon particularly pronounced in history, where a ‘one-sided ethos’ periodically prevails. Hartmann successfully bridges the intrinsic nature of values with relativism, through the concept of validity. Here, what emerges is a dynamic and adaptable validity, intrinsically tied to circumstances and aligned with evolving ways of life[4]. The moral demands that shape our lives and guide our will are intrinsically tied to real relationships and the lived world, rather than being mere flatus vocis. As Hartmann elaborates in the essay, these demands arise where instincts fail humanity; unlike animals, humans are not naturally equipped with the skills necessary for survival. Instead, they find themselves entangled in an “infinite chain of situations”[5], compelled to make free decisions at every turn. Only in these moments, do humans become truly capable of action. In contrast to the traditional systematic error, which separates what is given from what is ideally required, Hartmann’s proposed middle path—linking moral demands to real-world structures—finds an ally in Aristotle’s doctrine of situation types as presented in the Nicomachean Ethics.
In Die Wertdimensionen der Nickomachischen Ethik, Hartmann engages in a historical and systematic analysis of Aristotle’s theory of virtue, juxtaposing it with contemporary philosophy of value. He challenges “the notion that ethics of virtue merely involves advocating outdated virtues and applying them case-by-case”[6]. In light of Nietzsche’s concept of a multiplicity of values—contrasting with the unity proposed by Platonic and Kantian philosophies—the ancient doctrine of the multiplicity of virtues has regained significance. Aristotle focused on a value that is valid and recognizable to human beings. For him, the nature of value was defined by the structure of being in different areas of life, reflecting the natural link between value and reality. Aristotle did not entirely discard Plato’s concept of innate ideas of virtues or their autonomy. Instead, he illustrated their connection to the actual structures of human life. It is then the responsibility of individuals to determine how to navigate various situations, and it is the nature of these specific human contexts that dictates the range of possible behaviors associated with each virtue. The Aristotelian theory of value, aligning with the Hartmannian thesis and the Greek ideal of mesotes, addresses ethical relativism. Values are neither purely subjective nor unyieldingly absolute; they are influenced by the framework of human existence and the historical contexts that guide their development. The strength of this essay lies in its effort to tackle an unresolved question posed by Aristotle: “How can one identify the appropriate balance between the incorrect extremes, and what means does an individual possess in their life to ensure that their actions align with the ideal?”[7]. According to Hartmann, the sense of value identified by the phänomenologischen Wertphilosophie[8] serves as an example of orientation within various areas of existence and life, as it allows one to experience a value as either positive or negative.
Hartmann revisits the relationship between reality and ideality also in his 1938 writing, Zeitlichkeit und Substantialität. In this text, he only apparently departs from the axiological theme, in order to clarify the nature of values. The philosopher examines the history of Western thought, particularly its persistent quest to identify something permanent amidst the passage of time. From Parmenides to Plato, through Christianity, to Kant and beyond, time has been seen as destructive, leading to a preference for immutability. The highest values and meaning have often been connected to eternity. Hartmann emphasizes rather a real and ephemeral dimension of them, which has a “more important role than the ideal values that remain merely schematic”[9]. This raises the question of how to understand the definition of values as ‘ideal essences’ that Hartmann offers in Ethics. Hartmann’s acknowledgment of values as ideal entities does not suggest an evasion from reality; like all ideal beings, values maintain a connection with the real world. Specifically, they serve not only as ‘principles of the ideal ethical sphere’ but also as ‘principles of the actual sphere’ and of the ‘practical sphere’[10]. The ethos of humanity is characterized by actions rather than being merely an ideal product. Therefore, the existence of values cannot be reduced to ‘mere essence’; as principles of ethos, their essence transcends the realm of ideal existence and integrates into the changing world of ethical acts. However, the challenge against the populär metaphysischer Substanzbegriff is not limited to values alone; it encompasses the entirety of existence, including personal and ethical beings in their spiritual dimensions. It is relevant, in this context, to connect the 1938 essay with Hartmann’s innovative considerations presented in Philosophie der Natur. Here, the philosopher examines how relative permanence manifests in reality, going beyond the notion of absolute duration. Hartmann differentiates between the concepts of subsistence (Subsistenz) and consistency (Konsistenz), as strategies of relative permanence employed by natural entities. Subsistence represents a static category predominant at the lower levels of natural existence, particularly concerning phenomena related to matter, the preservation of motion, and forms of energy—where inertia and mechanistic organization of formal entities dominate. In contrast, consistency is observed only at the most advanced levels of organic existence and is characterized as a dynamic concept. Because of this trait, living organisms do not rely on a static foundation but persist as procedural forms and are maintained by continuous reaffirmation activities, which enable them to change while preserving their identity. The permanence of the self and the moral person is seen as a specific form of consistency: “Das Ich ist nicht Substanz, aber er hat Konstanz im Wandel seiner Zustände, Akte und Inhalte”[11]. Within the framework provided by the ontology of nature, personal identity consists of two elements: a center of reaffirmation and time. At each moment of our lives, we are a present self that reaffirms its identity in relation to a set of past selves. In the non-spatial dimension of inner experience, the self can detach from any material element and achieve a higher level of freedom—moral freedom—by deciding the extent to which the present self should remain faithful to the past self. The personal being is not only capable of understanding the vast array of values and realizing them but also uniquely possesses free will, which distinguishes it from other entities. Without freedom, which is the fundamental premise of any ethical system, values would remain unexpressed and unrealized. Therefore, freedom is an essential attribute of the person, who acts as a mediator between values and reality. Hartmann identifies this uniquely human ability to attribute meaning to reality as an expression of human distinctiveness, dignity, and nobility. In this context, although humans may be physically insignificant in the vast universe, their impact is immense. They serve as vehicles “of a higher principle, creators of a reality which possesses significance and value (Schöpfer eines Sinn- und Wertvollen in der Wirklichkeit)”[12], and as mediators of the highest values in the world.
In Sinngebung und Sinnerfüllung, Hartmann highlights the complex relationship between metaphysical issues of meaning and value, reflecting the existentialist ethos of his time. By providing a comprehensive historical overview of the concept of meaning, Hartmann illustrates how humanity’s relentless search for meaning has driven individuals to transcend empirical boundaries, ultimately surpassing limits of comprehension and making any attempt to fully grasp or understand it unattainable. Hartmann suggests that value does not lie in a primary unit but in the ‘ontologically secondary’, within what is given. This sense of value emerges in the world through epigenesis rather than stemming from foundational principles. In this context, man is inherently tardy because, if meaning existed independently within the world, it could not belong to him. Therefore, humanity carries a profound responsibility, which is intertwined with the capacity to impart meaning. Consequently, a new metaphysics must emerge from the remnants of the old, reinstating mankind’s rightful claim to the world. To support this assertion, the author examines the philosophy of history. Contrary to Hegel’s rational and purposeful interpretation of history, individuals find their place in it through moments of senselessness and randomness. Despite these limitations, humans ascribe meaning to history, which is the process by which humanity unfolds its essence and achieves fulfillment through human actions. As von Kalckreuth states: “This gives an idea of how man’s creative role should be understood”[13]. In emphasizing the originality and significance of the philosophy of values and the paradigm shift it introduces, Hartmann contends that this approach would uncover a new dimension. The realization of meaning hinges on values, and society’s role is to achieve this through active individual participation.
The anthology edited by Von Kalckreuth, concludes with a discussion that focuses on value and individuality. Hartmann’s speech at the Primer Congreso Nacional de Filosofía in Mendoza, titled Das Ethos der Persönlichkeit, begins by distinguishing between person and personality. Personality, specifically the value of personality, is what makes individuals unique. It is an irreplaceable trait that contrasts with the concept of personhood, which is shared by all individuals who possess consciousness, the ability to think, ethical sense, and free will. The anthology’s proposal of this speech is noteworthy, as it seeks to revisit the concept of personality as discussed in Ethik. The origin of the value of personality can be attributed to Hartmann’s awareness of the limitations of the category of person; this category, as previously said, identifies human beings as mediators between the realm of values and reality. However, it seems overly broad and fails to capture individual uniqueness, while the concept of personality refers to what is “exceptional and unique in a person”[14]. Persönlichkeit differs from other values as it presents a normative instance applicable only to specific individuals, involving the personal synthesis each person makes of various values. Although personality possesses an ideal nature independent of the degree of achievement, this value is different from one individual to another. Its content does not apply uniformly to everyone; therefore, personality cannot be defined as universal. Strictly speaking, there is no concept of ‘personality in general’; rather, it is more accurate to speak of ‘values of personality’. Hartmann faces the paradox that values associated with various personalities (which as ideal entities should be universal) are distinguished by their individuality. The philosopher’s solution emphasizes that the value of personality is both ‘subjectively universal’—meaning it applies to every individual capable of understanding values—and ‘objectively universal’—because the uniqueness of the value of personality lies not in the ideal nature of the value itself, but in its connection to reality. Ultimately, this value is not inherently individual but can be defined as such since it pertains to the person. This represents the “extreme case of the concretion and individualization of valuational matter”[15]. In Das Ethos der Persönlichkeit, Hartmann revisits the subject, indicating dissatisfaction with the solution he had proposed. Reaffirming the almost inscrutability of a concept that, nonetheless, cannot be unrecognized as true, the author states: “Where there is value, which is not common but which is only of an individual, it is difficult to say. However that it exists […] is not debatable”[16]. From Hartmann’s perspective, personality values are considered moral values that are indispensable and supreme as they elevate the autonomous character of individuals. In light of this view, Hartmann suggests a significant revision (Umkehrung) of Kant’s categorical imperative, highlighting the importance of respecting individual personalities. Moreover, the value of personality presents a challenge regarding our modes of knowledge; in this context, referring to an intuitive cognitive mode, as we do with other values, is not appropriate. The value of personality, due to its individuality, stands apart from other values and complicates its aprioric knowledge; it is more sensed than learned, yet in every situation, it emerges as an intuitive guide for our feelings and actions[17]. Hartmann’s focus on the value of personality stems therefore from his deep commitment to the individual as the cornerstone of ethics. By highlighting each person’s unique and distinctive nature, Hartmann aims to move away from an impersonal ethical framework. He argues that individuality is fundamental in establishing the significance of this value and underscores its importance to the extent that he regards it as the supreme moral value and the core of moral life.
In conclusion, it is pertinent to examine the significance of von Kalckreuth’s editorial selection and how it fits into the ongoing philosophical discourse on values. The anthology revitalizes reflections on the theory of values, which remains highly relevant in an era characterized by widespread reevaluation and significant transformations. The path outlined by the editor effectively highlights the dual aspects of Hartmann’s axiological theory. On one hand, this theory accounts for the historical and cultural dimensions of value, wherein the individual contributes meaning within the flow of a non-teleologically ordered history. On the other hand, it does not overlook what defines a person’s uniqueness, namely the Persönlichkeit. Additionally, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart. Aufsätze zu Wert und Sinn addresses and even enhances key issues in the axiological debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where it tackles unresolved aporias from Nietzschean reflection, which Hartmann engaged with. Specifically, it explores the relationship between pluralism, relativism, freedom, and the ideality of value, as well as the nature of moral demands and the position of personal beings in relation to the cosmos of values. Within the framework of his Material Ethics of Values, Hartmann successfully conveys an ideal of values coexisting with their multiplicity and reinterprets the apparent relativism of values concerning their relativity to individual and historical axiological consciousness. Consequently, the philosopher upholds personal freedom—a fundamental prerequisite of ethics—realized through the capacity to actualize values and associated with the ability to impart meaning to the world. Focusing now specifically on today’s debate on values and phenomena associated with them, the importance of von Kalckreuth’s collection can be emphasized, based on some key points. Unlike contemporary literature, which often fails to precisely differentiate values, it is essential to specify which normative phenomena are considered values to avoid an ‘inflationary concept of value’[18]. In Anglo-Saxon discussions, it is generally accepted that moral values exist, but the question remains whether other types of values also exist, and if so, what they are. Von Kalckreuth also identifies a common approach in contemporary contributions on values, which often conceptualizes values based on the model of moral values. In this regard, Hartmann’s reflections are significant, as he outlines a system of various types of values, which is extensively discussed in the second volume of Ethics, titled Moral Values. A further point emphasized by the editor is that today’s philosophical thinking often lacks a comprehensive cultural, social, and historical frame. While social contexts are acknowledged as important, individual value concepts are frequently analyzed without incorporating cultural perspectives, treating value as a standalone aspect of the individual. Hartmann’s theory, however, suggests that values are connected to historical change and cultural diversity, that “our experience of value occurs within the objective spirit and is therefore influenced by socio-cultural factors”[19]. A third issue, highlighted by von Kalckreuth, regarding which Hartmannian’s reflections are pertinent in contemporary debate, pertains to the disciplinary classification of the theory of value. The author argues that it is limiting to categorize it solely as metaethics (as is commonly done today), and asserts that Hartmann’s axiology clarifies the broader scope of this theory. Through an analysis of Hartmann’s insights into the differentiation among various types of values, on the inclusion of a socio-cultural reference context for their emergence and on individual phenomena, it becomes evident that there exists “a much broader conception of the philosophy of value, which addresses fundamental issues in ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy”[20], encompassing philosophical, cultural, and historical considerations. All things said, Von Kalckreuth’s work integrates Hartmann’s theory of values into contemporary discussions, illuminating its unique and original aspects. Hartmann’s strength lies in his ability to act as a mediator rather than positioning himself as an ‘elitist of values’. He demonstrates a commitment to intellectual honesty and an openness to the complexities of reality, which is a hallmark of his philosophical approach that prioritizes Problemdenken. Within this framework, his theory of value should be regarded, as von Kalckreuth notes, as a crucial reference point for any discourse on values.
[1]C. Scognamiglio, LA PERSONA. Etica e ontologia nella filosofia di Nicolai Hartmann, ebook version.
[2]N. Hartmann, Ethics, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1932, p. 165.
[3]Ivi, p. 179.
[4]See N. Hartmann, Ontologia dei valori, edited by Giuseppe D’Anna, Morcelliana, Brescia 2011, p. 43.
[5]M. von Kalckreuth, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, cit., p.68.
[6]Ivi, p. 31.
[7]Ivi, p. 32.
[8]Ibidem.
[9]Ivi, p. 39.
[10]See N. Hartmann, Ethics, pp. 232-241.
[11]N. Hartmann, Philosophie der Natur. Abriss der speziellen Kategorienlehre, De Gruyter, Berlin 1950, p. 311.
[12]N. Hartmann, Ethics, cit., p. 243.
[13]M. von Kalckreuth, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, cit., p. 36.
[14]Ivi, p. 263.
[15]N. Hartmann, Ethics, cit., p. 349.
[16]M. von Kalckreuth, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, cit., p. 271.
[17]See P. Martinetti, «La filosofia morale di Nicolai Hartmann», in Rivista di Filosofia ANNO XXVI, Fratelli Bocca Editore, Milano 1935, pp. 1-46, here p. 18.
[18]M. von Kalckreuth, Das Wertproblem in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, cit., p. 42.
[19]Ivi, p. 45.
[20]Ivi, p. 46.
Emmanuel Levinas: Essays on Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Jewish Thought
Supplements to The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Volume: 40
Brill
2025
Hardback
Predication and Genesis: Metaphysics as Fundamental Heuristic after Schelling's The Ages of the World
New Perspectives in Ontology
Edinburgh University Press
2024
Hardback
184
Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung zur Krisis der philosophischen Grundlagen der Neuzeit
Reviewed by: Pierre-Adrien Marciset,
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
Part II: Insights into the Historical Morphology of Ontological Distance
Part III: Objectivity and Independence as Terms of Ontological Distance
Part IV: The Finitude of Thought
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.
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