Abstract
When Hans Blumenberg published Work on Myth (1979), he was criticized on the basis that even though he engaged with Ernst Cassirer and others who had written on the twentieth century’s political myths, he himself did not talk about political myths at all. That is true, but nor is he concerned with any of myth’s other subspecies. He does write about political myth, but elsewhere: in “Moses the Egyptian”, for instance, he says that while myths in general are about self-preservation, the function of political myth is to provide states with a foundation, and thus a source of legitimacy. He does this through a provocative account of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, asking whether Eichmann himself may be seen as part of modern Israel’s founding myth.
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Notes
- 1.
Angus Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (New York: Routledge, 2015), 2.
- 2.
By drawing our attention to the original meaning of myth that is “word, speech” and the secondary meanings, “public speech” and also “dialogue, conversation” or “tale, narration”, Bottici points out that no dichotomy of mythos versus logos existed in the ancient Greek sources, and that such a dichotomy is a “later interpretation of the modern rationality in search of its origins”. She writes, “By the time of the composition of the Homeric poems – a time that most interpreters place around the eight century BC, the semantic area of the Homeric mythos corresponded to the area that would later be covered by the term logos” (Chiara Bottici, A Philosophy of Political Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 21.
- 3.
Bottici, Political Myth, 116.
- 4.
Here Blumenberg was probably influenced by Arnold Gehlen’s idea of human being as a deficient being (Mängelwesen): “human beings are not naturally assigned to a specific environment and are, therefore, incomplete beings in comparison with other animals. Due to their incomplete nature, they must undergo a process of disciplining” (Bottici, Political Myth, 120–121).
- 5.
Robert Bringhurst, Everywhere Being is Dancing (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), 64.
- 6.
Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 129.
- 7.
Blumenberg also refers to Simmel while examining the idea of significance. He quotes a passage from Simmel’s Die Philosophie des Geldes: “Objects are not difficult to acquire because they are valuable, but we call those objects valuable that resist our desire to possess then. Since the desire encounters resistance and frustration, the objects gain a significance that would never have been attributed to them by an unchecked will” (WM , 67).
- 8.
Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 20.
- 9.
Ibid., 20.
- 10.
Ibid., 139.
- 11.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford; California: Stanford University Press, 2002), xviii.
- 12.
Ibid., 11.
- 13.
Ibid., 6.
- 14.
Robert Wallace, Introduction to LMA, xvii.
- 15.
Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 17.
- 16.
Peter J. Albano, “The cogito, human self-assertion, and the modern world,” Philosophy Today 44, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 187.
- 17.
Laurence Dickey, “Blumenberg and Secularization: ‘Self-Assertion’ and the Problem of Self-Realizing Teleology in History,” New German Critique, No. 41 (Spring - Summer, 1987): 153.
- 18.
Hans Blumenberg, Rigorism of Truth: ‘Moses the Egyptian’ and Other Writings on Freud and Arendt, trans. Joe Paul Kroll (Ithaca: London: Cornell University Press, 2018), 5.
- 19.
Ibid., 2.
- 20.
Ibid., 2.
- 21.
Ibid., 3.
- 22.
Ibid., 3.
- 23.
Ibid., 1.
- 24.
Ibid., 40.
- 25.
Ibid., 8.
- 26.
Ibid., 45.
- 27.
Ibid., 10.
- 28.
Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 1977), 227.
- 29.
Ibid., 236.
- 30.
Ibid., 236.
- 31.
Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship” in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Shocken Books, 2003), 18.
- 32.
Blumenberg, Rigorism of Truth, 11. My emphasis.
- 33.
Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 20.
- 34.
Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 279.
- 35.
Ibid., 278.
- 36.
Erich Auerbach, “Figura” in Scenes from the drama of European Literature (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–78.
- 37.
Ibid., 29.
- 38.
Ibid., 30.
- 39.
Ibid., 30.
- 40.
Nicholls draws our attention to Blumenberg’s response to Götz Müller’s review of Work on Myth in which he accuses Blumenberg of neglecting political myths. Blumenberg, in his response, claims that indeed there is a missing chapter in the published book, which was present in the manuscript and which he decided not to publish. He further says: “It was called: Stalingrad as mythical consequence. It cost me more work than most of the other things in the book. This is how the conclusion came to be left in the air” (quoted in Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 203). Nicholls says that there is no such text as “Stalingrad as mythical consequence” in Blumenberg’s Nachlass, but there is a text which elaborately discusses the mythical dimensions of Hitler’s decision to invade Stalingrad, and the title of this text is “Präfiguration: Napoleon und Hitler/Napoleon und Alexander”.
- 41.
Hans Blumenberg, Präfiguration: Arbeit am politischen Mythos (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), 9.
- 42.
Ibid., 10.
- 43.
Ibid., 10.
- 44.
Ibid., 23–24.
- 45.
Ibid., 38.
- 46.
Blumenberg, Rigorism of Truth, 46.
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Turner, Z.T. (2020). Political Legitimacy and Founding Myths. In: Bielik-Robson, A., Whistler, D. (eds) Interrogating Modernity. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_6
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