Work on Myth Hans Blumenberg translated by Robert M. Wallace The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought Thomas McCarthy, general editor Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective if Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy the Modern Age Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth if Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development Critical Theory Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships if Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age Science Jiirgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles if Jiirgen Habennas, editor, Observations on ~The Spiritual Situation the Age" if Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics Historical Time if Claus Offe, Contradictions the Welfare State if Helmut Peukert, Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology Communicative Action if Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy Right Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and Structuralist of Theories History if Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber Work on Myth This translation copyright © 1985 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This work originally appeared in Gennan as Arbeit am Mythos, © 1979 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Federal Republic of Germany. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means {including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval} without pennission in writing from the publisher. Publication of this volume has been aided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This book was set in Baskerville by The MIT Press Computergraphics Department and printed and bound by Halliday Lithograph in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Blumenberg, Hans. Work on myth. {Studies in contemporary Gennan social thought} Translation of: Arbeit am Mythos. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. History-Philosophy. 2. Civilization-Philosophy. 3. Myth. I. Title. II. Series. DI6.8.B63131985 901 85-118 ISBN 0-262-02215-X Contents .. Translator's Introduction Vll Part I Archaic Division of Powers 1 After the Absolutism of Reality 3 2 The Name Breaks into the Chaos of the Unnamed 34 3 'Significance' 59 4 Procedural Regulations 113 Part II Stories Become History 1 The Distortion of Temporal Perspective 149 2 Fundamental Myths and Art Myths 174 3 Myths and Dogmas 215 4 To Bring Myth to an End 263 Part III The Theft of Fire Ceases to Be Sacrilege 1 The Reception of the Sources Produces the Sources of 299 the Reception 2 Sophists and Cynics: Antithetical Aspects' of the 328 Prometheus Material 3 Return from Existential Groundlessness 350 4 Aesthetic Brightening Up 377 Part IV Against a God, Only a God Introduction 399 1 "Priming Powder for an Explosion" 403 2 A Conflict between Gods 430 3 Prometheus Becomes Napoleon, Napoleon Prometheus 465 4 Ways of Reading the "Extraordinary Saying" 523 Part V The Titan in His Century 1 Passage through the Philosophy of History 561 2 On the Rock of Mute Solitude Again 595 3 To Bring to an End, If Not Myth, Then at Least One 627 Myth Notes 639 Name Index 679 Translator's Introduction 1. Our Antithetical Attitudes to Myth In Work on Myth Hans Blumenberg addresses a question that has bothered European thinkers since at least the late seventeenth century, namely, why, with the triumphant advance of secular, scientific ra tionality, have the old myths not simply evaporated into thin air?rt How is it that they have maintained and even increased their hold on (at least) our literary imaginations?The Enlightenment in general followed Descartes in categorizing myths among the "prejudices" that had to swept away in order to make room for the methodical ~be development and application of scientific knowledge. Romanticism, particularly in Germany, reacted against this jettisoning of tradition, and against the unsatisfYing incompleteness and tentativeness of science, by calling either for a "new mythology" or (more often) for a return to our old, inherited myths. An appreciation and employment of mythical themes, which could (with some effort) be interpreted as indicating the possible return of an encompassing mythical world view, had in fact been evident even in the midst of the "scientific revolution" of the seventeenth century-witness writers like Racine and Milton and this has continued right into the twentieth century, with Joyce, Valery, Kafka, Thomas Mann, and many others. But theorists are still not sure what to make of it. Our usual interpretations of science, whether rationalist, empiricist, positivist, or vvhatever, are all still very much in the Enlightenment tradition, and ilnply a role for Inyth in the modem age which is restricted exclusively to the aesthetic ilnagi- Vlll Translator's Introduction nation and is assumed to have no bearing on the preeminent role of scientific rationality in our serious, practical lives. On the other hand, those who concern themselves extensively with myth, such as literary scholars, anthropologists, and psychologists, often tend toward the other, Romantic extreme-interpreting myth's modem survival as evidence of its being, in one way or another, inherent in human nature and even, given its seemingly greater antiquity and ubiquity, of its being more fundamental to human nature than our ("surface") rationality. Blumenberg undertakes precisely to overcome this antithesis, to extract the truth from the Enlightenment and from Romanticism by showing that scientific rationality and ongoing "work" on our inherited myths are not only not incompatible but are both indispensable aspects of the comprehensive effort that makes human existence possible. 2. A Non-Romantic Alternative to the Enlightenment's Conception of the Relation between Rationality and Myth: The Overcoming of the Absolutism of Reality The last German philosopher to address these questions at length was Ernst Cassirer. Cassirer was a leading heir of Kant, whose philosophy b can be seen as the culmination (in the realm of theory) of the Enlight enment; but Cassirer's wide reading in the Romantic writers and in ethnology, his reading of Freud, and finally his agonizing observation of the role played by "myths" (of the "Fuhrer" and the "master race," for example) in Nazism led him to treat the subject more seriously and more systematically than any philosopher had done before him. With his theory of "symbolic forms," he tried to do justice to myth's internal coherence and power by giving it a status equal to that of knowledge, language, art, and religion, as a fundamental human activity and construction that could not be dismissed (in the eighteenth-century manner) as mere fable, mental cobwebs, or "prejudice." While Blumenberg honors Cassirer's work on this problem (as on others), he has one fundamental criticism of Cassirer's theory: That c he did not manage to overcome the unstated assumption that once science emerges, myth, despite its supposedly autonomous dignity as a "symbolic form," is fundamentally obsolete; that once the step "from mythos to logos" has been taken, it can only be perverse to, as it were, tum back. If the relation of myth to science is conceived in this IX Translator's Introduction way-as it probably is by most of us who are neither programmatic Romantics nor specialized students of myth-then (a) the "primitive" people for whom myth is still a living reality have to be seen as being largely, if not entirely, deprived of an essential symbolic form (logos, or science), one that is preferable to the distinctive one that they do enjoy; (b) the mythical patterns that Freud discovered in the unconscious are, at most, relics of a (personal and perhaps historical) childhood that we have left behind us; (c) the role of myth in modem literature is, at most, that of an object of aesthetic experience, having no bearing on the practical business of life; and (d) Nazism's relation to myth is that of an incomprehensible reversion, the reversion before which Cassirer, in The Myth of the State, stood aghast. Is this the only rational way to interpret these phenomena? Is there any alternative to Cassirer's Enlightenment schema of the replacement of myth by science, other than a Romantic synthesis of the two, which would amount to a denial of the autonomy of science as a "symbolic form" (thus casting doubt on the Romantics' commitment to ration ality)? Blumenberg proposes that instead of always interpreting myth in terms of what it (supposedly) came before-its terminus ad quem, science, the arrival of which appears to make it obsolete-we should try interpreting it in terms of its terminus a quo, its point of departure. That point of departure is the problem that myth seeks to solve, which is the source of its real (and lasting) importance, regardless of what (if anything) comes 'after' it.-::- What is that problem? Blumenberg calls it the "absolutism of reality." This phrase designates a situation in which "man comes close to not having control of the conditions of his existence and, what is more important, believes that he simply lacks control of them. This is to "<I be understood as a "limit concept," which, while it may never have been fully realized, is a necessary extrapolation, a "limiting case" that makes sense of what we do observe in myth and in the rest of human history. In particular, it is consistent, Blumenberg says, with cun-ent theories of the origin of man - of what happened when our ancestors adopted an upright, bipedal posture; were displaced from the sheltering ·::Throughout this book, single quotation marks have been lIsed exclusively as 'scare quotes,' to draw attention to special uses of terms or to emphasize (as ill this case) the problematic status, in the discussion, of the concepts referred to by the words in question. The only exception to this mle is a quotation within a quotation (i.e., within a set of double quotes), which requires single quotation marks for contrast.