Blumenberg on History, Significance, and the Origin of Mythology

A Critique of the `Invisible Hand' Reduction

by John Davenport

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of Philosophy

University of Notre Dame

(Fall 1996 revision)

Introduction

Part I: Blumenberg's `Invisible Hand' Account

I. Substance vs Function

II. Blumenberg's `Evolutionary' Model

III. Structural Implications: Original `Positions'

IV. Cognitive Implications: Latent Functional Significance

V. Myth as Reduction of the Absolutism of Reality

VI. The Hidden Work of Myth

VII. The Darwinism of Words

VIII. The Rationality Shared by Mythos and Logos

IX. The `Invisible-Hand' Ideal

Part II: Significance and Transcendence

X. Transcendence and Imagination

XI. Dilthey on Imagination and Significance

XII. Significance as the `Figurative Synthesis' of the Lifeworld

XIII. Heidegger and Existential Significance

XIV. Blumenberg vs Heidegger

Part III: Towards a Critique of Blumenberg's Theory of Myth

XV. The Foundational Problem

XVI. Profane Significance: The Chthonic

XVII. The Paradoxical Meaning of the `Closed Circle'

XVIII. Blumenberg's Problem of Origin

XIX: The Inadequacy of Blumenberg's Account of Mythology

Myth: In modern myth studies and anthropology, "myth" usually refers to sacred myth, including cosmogonic and other origin myths, as well as "sacred" stories with cultic status concerning the gods, which (in most primary cultures) were known and recited by persons with special communal status and used in connection with sacred rituals with a central place in social regulation, and so on. "Myth" used in this technical sense is distinguished from heroic legend, national legends, "profane" stories and tales (such as "fairy tales"), and fables, as well as from all "high literature" with named authors, including epic poetry, drama, and mythographic collections. Blumenberg, however, uses the term "myth" much more loosely, without regard to these distinctions, to refer to any "mythic" or legendary story-component, including new and altered ones that appear in much later mythographic, poetic, and dramatic sources. I will generally follow his usage in this paper. When I mean "myth" in the technical sense, I will use "sacred myth."

Mythology: in most ethnographic and anthropological literature, this term is used synonymously with "sacred myth." But in the Wallace translation of Blumenberg, it is used to designate theories of myth, such as those that try to account for the contents of various myths through psychological interpretation, linguistic interpretation, sociological interpretation, and so on. In other words, "mythology" (in this translation) means roughly "mythography" in the modern sense defined below. Since this is a confusing usage, however, I will use terms such as "mythographic studies" to indicate theory of myth in the broadest sense. Thus, where the term "mythology" appears, except in quotations from Blumenberg, it refers to "myth" in the usual primary sense.

Mythography: In its classical usage, this term designates the work of ancient "mythographers" or compilers of stories, such as Hesiod, Apollodorus, and Ovid, who collected and wrote down orally transmitted myths and sacred stories as well as heroic legends, organized them into myth cycles, and often rationalized them with changes and interpolations. But more recently (as in William Doty's seminal study, Mythography), the term has been used to refer to "the study of myths and rituals" in the broadest sense, including the more systematic theories of mythology we are familiar with, such as those of Frazer, Freud, Malinowski, Durkheim, Jung, Propp and Levi-Strauss. This newer usage arose because modern "ethnographers" like the Brothers Grimm, Frazer, and Lang also theorized about the traditional materials they collected. Thus ethnography now includes the writing down, collection and the study of oral legends and tales, and (in connection with primary cultures), oral myths and sacred rituals as well. However, "Mythography" in Doty's broad sense refers to methodological reflection on the systematic hermeneutical approaches to myth advocated by ethnographers and others (such as psychologists, linguists, sociologists, and now, philosophers).

Mythogony: This is not a term found in mythographic theory, but is coined by Blumenberg to indicate the narrative quality of theories that propose to account for "the origin of myth." Thus is intended in a somewhat ironic or disparaging sense to indicate the difference between Blumenberg's theory of myth's function and a different kind of "theory" which seems to tell a kind of `origin myth' for the contents of various origin myths. The terms thus reflects Blumenberg's opinion that rival theories of the causes behind sacred myth, and myths of the in illu tempore in particular, are themselves like mythic narratives, and thus do not really get behind the mythic to its non-mythical sources.

In 1966, Hans Blumenberg began a minor revolution in the philosophy of history with the publication of his Die Legitimatät der Neuzeit (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age).⁽¹⁾ The ostensible aim of this massive work was to consolidate arguments in earlier articles in which Blumenberg had challenged Karl Löwith's famous critique of modern conceptions of progress as "secularizations" of religious eschatology. But the argument Blumenberg presented has implications of a more far-reaching kind: his real purpose was to criticize the very idea of "secularization" as a paradigm of explanation in the history of ideas.

In response to Löwith, Blumenberg offers a substantially different account of the origin of the notion of "progress" and the different forms it assumed during the early modern period. But again, the real aim of Blumenberg's analysis is not just to offer an alternative way to understand the emergence of modern ideas of human progress, enlightenment and improvement, but to put forward an entire paradigm of explanation for historical changes in ideas and culture--an explanatory paradigm that will provide a general alternative to `secularization' as a comprehensive view of history. This larger project extended into Blumenberg's next book, The Genesis of the Copernican World, and is completed in his monumental 1979 book, Arbeit am Mythos (Work on Myth).

Work on Myth is even more original and far-reaching than Blumenberg's previous works, both in its subject matter and hermeneutic approach. In this text, Blumenberg not only extends the approach to the philosophy of history developed in the earlier books, but grounds it an interpretation of mythology. He thereby brings philosophical hermeneutics directly to bear on themes in mythographic theory,⁽²⁾ while developing his own highly original interpretation of mythology and the continuing role of `the mythic' in the development of human religion, culture, art, and literature.

Work on Myth shows us that fundamental questions about the structure, intelligibility, and explanation of `history' in its widest Heideggerian sense --as the growth of the human lifeworld of meaning, institutions, rituals, and practices, through artistic monuments, traditions of idea and symbol, and also theories through which we understand ourselves-- ultimately converge with fundamental questions about the nature and significance of mythology in the dawn of human history.<sup>(3)</sup> Blumenberg's explicit acknowledgement of this connection is a remarkable achievement, which stands in the same general German Idealist tradition as Heidegger and Mircea Eliade. As Ernst Benz notes, writing of Schelling, "Academic philosophy, it is true, still takes little account of the problems raised by mythology and the philosophy of mythology."<sup>(4)</sup> Schelling's insight was to see the possible genetic relation between changes in myth form and inner alteration of `human spirit:' thus his work still contributes something entirely lacking in Freud's exclusively sexual reading of mythic figures, "namely, the historical factor, an awareness of the relation between the development of mythology and the history of mankind."⁽⁵⁾

In what follows, we will see how complex Blumenberg's own relation to Schelling is in this respect. On the one hand, Schelling prefigures Blumenberg in holding that the "mythogenesis" in which mythic significance originates is a displacement: "Man was removed from his original standpoint and only then did mythology come into being."⁽⁶⁾ But on the other, as we will see, Blumenberg opposes Schelling's thought that the content of mythology derives ultimately from any `revelation,' and insists that Schelling's own conception of man's `original standpoint' is an illegitimately mythological conception.

My goal in this essay is to offer a `Schellingian' reply along the same lines: Blumenberg's own characterization of the `original position' out of which myth grows is also already dependent on mythological meaning, since it is simply the profane inversion of Schelling's origin. This weakeness in Blumenberg's interpretation derives, in my estimation, from failing to go far enough in bridging the gap between philosophy and myth studies in his `philosophical mythography.' Blumenberg takes us in the right direction, but his own `exchange' with mythographic theory focuses mainly on ideas from thinkers like Cassier, Freud, Max Müller, Rudolph Otto, and the sociofunctionalists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Blumenberg does not engage the enormous developments in mythography and folklore from structural comparativists such as Carl Jung, Paul Radin, Vladamir Propp, and Claude Levi-Stauss to contemporary historians and critics such as Mircea Eliade, Joseph Fontenrose, G.S. Kirk, Wendy O'Flaherty, Alan Dundes, and Joseph Campbell, to name only a handful. Like Schelling, who in his time could not do better,⁽⁷⁾ Blumenberg focuses almost entirely on Greek mythology from Hesiod onwards, which is much too narrow a view to allow for any serious discussion of the far more expansive, advanced, and detailed analyses offered by different theories in modern comparative mythography. As I will argue, Blumenberg's perspective on myth is too `classical' to address ethnographic and mythographic theories of the contemporary period, which we might date from the birth of the Bollingen Foundation in 1942.

Blumenberg's project throughout this trilogy must be seen, then, in two parallel contexts: first, as a contribution to long-running debates in philosophy about the rational explanatio of history, including issues such as the role of the human sciences, human individuality and finitude, historical interpretation, artistic expression, tradition, and meaning; and second, as a philosophical reflection on related debates in anthropology and mythographic theory. As we will see, Blumenberg's own theory of historical development in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and Work on Myth owes a large debt to what could be called the "functionalist" tradition in anthropology and ethnography. Schelling was one of the progenitors of this movement. He wrote in his Philosophy of Mythology that myths and symbols were not simply invented, and have meaning as part of a process of consciousness lying beyond the intentions of their human creators: "Peoples and individuals are only instruments of this process, which they do not perceive as a whole, which they serve without understanding it."⁽⁸⁾ From the beginning of the 20th century, there arose several systematic explanations of mythology as instrumental for various sets of latent purposes, both social and psychological. Other important studies in that period, which favored explanation in terms of expressive purposes, included Feuerbach's theory of religion as a projection of humanity, Rudolph Otto's phenomenology of "the holy," and Ernst Cassier's account of man's "symbolic forms." This is the segment of debate on myth which Blumenberg addresses directly, because it includes the theorists whose work has had time to have an influence on philosophy. Blumenberg takes his stand with functionalism, and the expressive theories become foils against which Blumenberg develops his own ideas about the function of myth.

Together, mythographic theory before the 1950s and Blumenberg's project in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and provide the context for an analysis of Work on Myth. My aim in the first part of this paper is to explain Blumenberg's fairly complex interpretive model. I will begin by briefly reviewing (a) the model as it first emerged in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age; (b) structural questions its raises about the possibility of universal `functions' in history; and (c) its debts to "sociofunctionalism." On the basis of these analyses, we will be in a better position to understand (1) why Blumenberg extends his model to the question of mythology in the first place; (2) how the particular interpretation of mythology he offers fits with his overall explanatory account--which is ultimately a version "invisible hand" explanation; and (3) how Blumenberg's account of the further evolutionary development of human culture helps complete his model.

In the second part of the paper, I will explore a central aspect of Blumenberg's theory, namely his interpretation of mythological "significance." While this interpretation is inspired by sociofunctionalist theories of anthropology, with their emphasis on latent meanings, it also has more explicit ties both to Wilhelm Dilthey's poetics and to Martin Heidegger's analysis of man's existential relation to the "world" of meaning (in opposition to meaningless facticity). By arguing that mythology arose as a quasi-adaptive `response' to the meaninglessness that man originally encountered in his environment, Blumenberg is able to build several of Dilthey's and Heidegger's ideas into his own functional interpretation of the "significance" of myth. However, on the basis of this analysis, we can also see that Blumenberg's functionalist theory of myth commits him to relativize human "transcendence," creative imagination, and initiative in relation to the involuntary function that first makes a `world' of significance for man. It follows inevitably from the type of explanatory paradigm Blumenberg has developed that the "transcendent" side of human nature is fundamentally less "primordial" than the hostile reality which supposedly opposed human existence in its infancy.

In the third part of the paper, I will offer a series of criticisms of Blumenberg's theory by focusing on this fundamental asymmetry between the transcendent or imaginative side of myth and its alleged `latent function,' which according to Blumenberg is rooted in the alien terror of "reality." I will also argue that because Heidegger is unwilling to sanction any purely naturalistic derivation of human capacities for "understanding" and "projection," his analysis of Dasein retains a symmetry between the transcendent and factical sides of human existence--a symmetry which Blumenberg abandons. As a result, I will argue, Blumenberg's philosophical anthropology could in fact be challenged from a Heideggerian point of view.

On this basis, I will present three distinct but related criticisms of Blumenberg's theory. First, I argue on explicitly Heideggerian grounds that the conditions involved in Blumenberg's original "absolutism of reality" already imply some transcendental capacity for meaning as a precondition. Second, I argue that the "absolutism of reality" cannot stand outside and behind all mythic significance as its source, as Blumenberg intends, because this original experience is characterized entirely in terms of metaphors of the chthonic, which are constitutive of the mythological archetype of the profane. When the "profane" is understood in terms of the "chthonic," it becomes obvious that Blumenberg postulated original `state of nature' already contains the associations of the archetypally profane. If this is true, then Blumenberg's understanding of his initial situation is already mythic. Third, I will critique Blumenberg's attempt to distinguish his explanation of myth from what he terms "mythogonic" theories of myth. On close inspection, it appears that Blumenberg cannot make this distinction rigorous, which further reinforces the suspicion that his fundamental asymmetry between the function of myth and the significance of its contents is untenable.

I will conclude Part III of the book by arguing that these three problems undermine Blumenberg's interpretation of mythology in fundamental ways, as well as putting in jeopardy his attempt to rescue the modern idea of progress from Löwith's secularization critique. In the light of Blumenberg's apparent failure, it appears unlikely, in fact, that any state-of-nature theory would ever be able to entirely reduce mythology to a functional result of processes with purely naturalistic origins.

Part One: Blumenberg's `Invisible Hand' Account

I. Substance vs Function

In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Hans Blumenberg initially develops his own model for explaining epochal change in the history of ideas by inverting the "secularization" paradigm championed by Karl Löwith. However, Blumenberg's `corrective' is motivated not just by his immediate concern to refute Löwith, but by his sense that "propositions of the form `B is the secularized A'" have become so popular that the explanatory paradigm itself is taken for granted (LMA, p.4) He cites many examples in his first few chapters, such as: "The modern work ethic is secularized monastic asceticism; the world revolution is the secularized expectation of the end of the world" (ibid). Blumenberg is particularly worried by the "theological pathos" which Löwith's thesis unintentionally brought about--a pathos which in its most extreme form uses the secularization critique to justify "a spiritual anathema upon what has transpired in history since the Middle Ages" (LMA, p.3).

This has created the impression that at least one aim of Blumenberg's counterargument is to justify modern secular institutions against religious critiques revitalized by the secularization thesis.⁽⁹⁾ But at least at the outset, Blumenberg claims to separate forms of historical explanation from any evaluative judgments they might precipitate. He makes this distinction to secularization theories as well:

Bear in mind also that the use of the expression [i.e. secularization] no longer implies any clear judgment of value. Even one who deplores secularization as the decay of a former capacity for transcendence does so with hardly less resignation than someone who takes it as the triumph of the enlightenment (LMA, p.4).

We may, for example, agree that concepts in the modern doctrine of the state are to be explained as "'secularized theological concepts'" (LMA, p.14), while still entirely approving their secular form.⁽¹⁰⁾

Blumenberg tends to equivocate on this point, however, since in several other places he suggests that `secularization' accounts usually are meant to imply the "illegitimacy of the result of secularization" (LMA, p.18).

Blumenberg is not objecting, then, only to Löwith's thesis and its theological extensions, although "the idea of progress as a transformation of a providentially guided `story of salvation'" (LMA, p.5). remains his exemplar of a explanation-by-secularization. He is opposed to any historical arguments for a process of "secularization" that go "beyond the quantitative/descriptive" sense that includes, for example, discussion of how advances in state institutions and secular practices have replaced church institutions and religious practices. The objectionable secularization-arguments, on the other hand, are those which claim to explain the genesis of ideas, those "whose aim is the understanding of historical processes" (LMA, p.16). Blumenberg is careful to maintain this "difference between descriptive and explanatory uses" of `secularization' in historical accounts because his critique is aimed at the former (LMA, p.9).⁽¹¹⁾ and possibly also because his own theory refers to the possibility of acquiring ideas directly through simple empirical acquaintance.⁽¹²⁾

What characterizes secularization as an "explanatory claim, as opposed to the merely quantitative statement and description of conditions" (LMA, p.13) for Blumenberg, is the belief that historical change can be explained as the modification of "substances" that provide a continuity in the (noematic) content of changing ideas.⁽¹³⁾ It is this assumption of continuous substances in history that makes it possible to claim that some modern ideas have a hidden meaning that undercuts them, a content which is misunderstood in them: "The genuine substance that was secularized is `wrapped up in' what thus became worldly, and remains `wrapped up in it'" (LMA, p.17). For example, a modern conception of progress as the secularization of eschatology assumes that there is a religious idea-substance which remains self-identical when it is `secularized.' Hence Blumenberg says,

I do in fact regard the secularization theorem as a special case of historical substantialism insofar as theoretical success is made to depend on the establishment of constants in history (LMA, p.16).

It is this notion of constant idea-substances, as Blumenberg sees, that makes it possible for secularization analyses to act as undercutting critiques: they imply that the result of a `secularization' process is dependent on the original substance, which is its "condition of possibility" (LMA, p.17).⁽¹⁴⁾

Blumenberg's opposition to this "substantialism" and to the type of explanation it makes possible is the genesis of his alternative conception of historical development. Within his first chapter, he cites Hannah Arendt's thesis that modernity is defined by humanity's "alienation" from the world as evidence that a more complex model is needed: Arendt at least shows that "the `worldliness' of the modern age cannot be described as the recovery of a consciousness of reality that existed before the Christian epoch" (LMA, p.8). Thus the Renaissance was wrong in assuming that "the new concept of reality" forming in the modern age could be understood as "the original constitutive substance" of an older classical world-view "come back to light, undisguised" (LMA, p.8). This example illustrates the notion that identical idea-substances are not carried over from era to era in different forms, recovered, etc. This criticism, however, does not commit Blumenberg to a completely `historicist' conception of history as a series of epochs each with their own institutions and ideas, without any overall unity. Rather, against the preconception of "constants" which "bring a theoretical process to an end," (LMA, p.29) Blumenberg argues that the sought-for continuity can only be found on the level of the (noetic) forms or functions in which substantially non-identical contents appear.

We can see how this alternative is supposed to work by briefly considering Blumenberg's response to Löwith's analysis of modern ideas of progress as a secularization of eschatology. Blumenberg argues (1) that eschatology involves a transcendent event entirely heterogenous to historical time, whereas progress envisions immanent development within history (LMA, p.30); and (2) that eschatology is reduces all independent ethical standards to arbitrary divine voluntarism, whereas the enlightenment concept of progress provides both an assurance of historical development and a moral basis for critiquing secular time (LMA, p.31-32). Little weight can be given to these responses to Löwith, however, because as I have shown elsewhere, they depend on a reductive and one-sided misinterpretation of eschatological beliefs and their role in the history of political ideas.⁽¹⁵⁾ Part of Blumenberg's argument that progress cannot be a secularization of eschatology thus involves presupposing a caricature of eschatology that is tailored to contrast with the enlightenment ideal. The other part of the argument is more persuasive: Blumenberg shows demonstrates that several experiences beginning in the early modern age themselves presented examples of a `benign' kind of progress without utopian pretentions. For instance, "One such experience is the unity of methodologically regulated theory as a coherent entity developing independently of individuals and generations" (LMA, p.31). There are other examples with even less built-in theoretical content: for instance, the experience of a very simple kind of progress in astronomy "with the increased accuracy it gained as a result of the length of temporal distances" (LMA, p.30).

This might give the impression that Blumenberg's alternative is just a higher-order form of empiricism: a notion of progress free from religious content seems to be derived inductively from several types of experiences in which progress is easily observable. As Blumenberg suggests, benign progress becomes "the highest-level generalization" from these experiences (LMA, p.30-31), including not only those in science, but also the Renaissance experience of being able to create art perceived as having equal or greater "validity" with respect to classical models previously viewed as absolute.⁽¹⁶⁾

But in Part II of the Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg argues that this modest modern idea of "possible progress" not only emerged from new experiences--it emerged in response to a critical problem created "by the overriding emphasis in the late Middle Ages on the theme of divine omnipotence."⁽¹⁷⁾ When late medieval nominalism envisioned God's will as involving a capacity for free decision superior to any determining "reasons,"⁽¹⁸⁾ then "the finite world becomes totally contingent, no longer the embodiment of the full range of variety--the order--of what is possible."⁽¹⁹⁾ According to Blumenberg, this result created a need which the new idea of progress met by re-establishing the simple possibility of human "self-assertion against the uncertainty imposed on knowledge by the overwhelming heterogenous theological principle" (LMA, p.34). The concrete possibility of initiative-taking implied a real possibility of modest progress, without depending on divine providential will that was supposed to give an overarching meaning to history but could no longer fulfill this function.

Blumenberg alludes to this argument in his discussion of eschatology when he says "when the time had come for the emergence of the idea of progress, it was more nearly an aggregate of terror and dread" than of hope (LMA, p.31). This constitutes one of Blumenberg's alleged disanalogies between eschatology and progress, but it also has another point: to suggest the nature of the problem to which the new idea of progress responded. As Blumenberg says, "Where hope is to arise, it had to be set up and safeguarded as a new and original aggregate of this-worldly possibilities" against a divine eschatological power which had become utterly arbitrary (LMA, p.31).

In this example, we see how continuity from one epoch to the next is explained on the functional level, rather than by the identity of historical substances or contents. In Blumenberg's model of historical development, new conceptions arise to answer problems created in immediately antecedent periods. Innovations thus acquire a functional significance from solving the problems or questions in response to which they arose.

II. Blumenberg's `Evolutionary' Model

In his Work on Myth, Hans Blumenberg's explanation of mythology parallels his attempt in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age to account for modern conceptions of enlightenment and progress without recourse to Löwith's "secularizations" of religious concepts. Because the same basic pattern of explanation is employed in both works, there is a direct analogy to be drawn between the central arguments.

The late medieval problem of world contingency created by extreme dependence on a divine power whose will transcends all limits is strikingly similar to the intolerable `initial state' which Blumenberg hypothesizes in order to explain the functional genesis of mythology: In both cases, then, Blumenberg suggests that new ways of defining human potentials and conditions of existence arose in reaction to severe problems created in the directly antecedent historical context. In both cases, the new conception in effect `answers' a question that has arisen from a crisis in immediately prior conditions. In such a model, moreover, the innovative content is thus distinct from the formal role it first plays, and in time, the two may even be separable. As Robert Wallace acknowledges, this historical dynamic of problems-solutions provides the basis for "the distinction between content (or `substance' and function") that is central to Blumenberg's explanatory strategy in both books."⁽²⁰⁾

In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, the result of this distinction between form/function and content/substance is a general conception of historical change which is neither a "teleological" philosophy of necessary progress toward an ultimate utopian end, nor a "historicist" conception. On this model, as Wallace says, the "problems or questions" established in an earlier age do not simply vanish when crises have brought about great shifts in thinking and made new problems central.⁽²¹⁾ Rather, the problems central to previous ages can remain as "residual needs" for answers even after the ideas which originally served in the role of answering them have been eclipsed (LMA, p.65). Thus, in the medieval period, "theology created new positions in the framework of statements about the world and man" which could only be satisfied by appeal to "transcendent sources." As a result, in the early modern period,

What mainly occurred...should be described not as the transposition of authentically theological contents into secularized alienation from their origin but rather as the reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated (LMA, p.65).

Using this model, Blumenberg explains the more extreme humanist notions of "inevitable progress" which dominated Enlightenment philosophy of history, not as secularizations of eschatological ideas, but rather as the result of late attempts to answer the question which eschatological ideas had formerly satisfied. As Wallace summarizes Blumenberg's lengthy argument on this point:

..the legitimate modern idea of `possible progress' was distorted and largely discredited as a result of its being forced to "reoccupy" a "position" that was established by medieval Christianity (the position of an account of history as a whole).⁽²²⁾

Perhaps like Heidegger's Seinsfrage, this question of an embracing or complete meaning for history could no longer be answered by eschatology, and so the new idea of progres was drafted to fulfill this older function. Whatever we ultimately think of this ingenious alternative to Löwith's analysis, it shows that for Blumenberg, ideas initially generated in answer to one set of problems (and thus adapted to the role this set defines) can be `transferred' anachronistically to serve in other leftover roles or `positions'--such as the need for something which provides the meaning of "the totality of history" (LMA, p.48).⁽²³⁾ Functional positions thus operate at two distinct explanatory levels for Blumenberg: new problems arising from old contexts explain the derivation of new ideas, and the problems of older contexts explain why the contents of these new ideas may be distorted by being forced to play roles for which they are inappropriate.

The idea of `reoccupation' says nothing about the derivation of the newly installed element...what was laid hold of was the independently generated idea of progress, the authentic rationality of which was overextended in the process...The idea of progress is removed from its empirical foundation...and is forced to perform a function that was originally defined by a system that is alien to it (LMA, p.49, my italics).

It is the distinction between the two dynamic processes driven by functional positions, then, that allows Blumenberg to `invert' the picture created by secularization accounts. These two functional processes provide a way of accounting for continuity in history over epochal change in general,<sup>(24)</sup> and they suggest a `theory of error' to explain why secularization analyses seemed so attractive to people. As Blumenberg argues,

The only reason why `secularization' could ever have become so plausible as a mode of explanation of historical processes is that supposedly secularized ideas can in fact mostly be traced back to an identity in the historical process. Of course the identity, according to the thesis advocated here, is not one of contents but one of functions. In fact, it is possible for totally heterogenous contents to take on identical functions in specific positions in the system of man's interpretation of the world and of himself (LMA, p.64).

When we take this `function-substance' distinction together with the two dynamic processes Blumenberg explains through the genesis and persistence of functional positions, Blumenberg's model for development in the history of ideas might be described as `evolutionary' in a broad sense. Like evolutionary adaptions, new ideas arise as `solutions' to the problems that form their immediate context--problems that themselves arose out of internal crises in solutions to earlier problems, and so on. Along with this kind of development goes a "continuity of history across the epochal threshold" which "lies not in the permanence of ideal substances but rather in the inheritance of problems" (LMA, p.48). We receive from tradition the questions which played crucial roles in ages directly preceding our own. As a result, just as species will retain vestigial traces of organs (the appendix, miniature gill-spots etc.), in history, certain problems will continue to define "positions" that need to be "reoccupied" by potential answers "even when an epochal change dissolves the context in which they originated."⁽²⁵⁾

This analogy with evolutionary theory is not perfect, because there is nothing in biological evolution that corresponds very well to answers fit for one problem being misused to answer other problems--for even when biological adaptions arising from one set of circumstances are employed to meet new needs, there can be no such thing in natural selection as needs or pressures that `remain' after their immediate environmental cause is removed.<sup>(26)</sup> But the analogy is suggestive, in any case, when trying to grasp how Blumenberg's model avoids the teleological paradigm for historical development observed in Voltaire, Comte, Hegel, and Herder, while still offering an alternative to the `secularization' paradigm.⁽²⁷⁾

III. Structural Implications: Original `Positions'

Blumenberg's model and his account of how ideas can be forced into roles not suited for them has several important implications relevant for understanding his larger project in Work on Myth. First, we should note its similarity to Kant's argument in the Critique of Pure Reason that by its own internal logic the faculty of pure reason necessarily extends itself to concepts for which it can have no corresponding objects,⁽²⁸⁾ thereby creating "transcendental illusion" which "does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed by transcendental criticism."⁽²⁹⁾ Despite his promise to separate explanatory and evaluative judgments, in Blumenberg's own descriptions he cannot avoid implying the illegitimacy of functional `positions' which have persisted beyond the point of their original corresponding idea-substances: thus he speaks of "the excessive longevity of a system of questions that extends across a change of epochs" (LMA, p.65, my italics). He argues that "what drives reason to overextension" (as in cases such as "inevitable progress") is "its inability to shake off inherited questions" which it cannot possibly answer, since these questions originated in theology (LMA, p.48):

Modern reason, in the form of philosophy, accepted the challenge of the questions, both the great and the all too great, that were bequeathed to it (LMA, p.48).

Against Löwith, the implication is clearly that the solution to the excesses of secular humanism is not to `unsecularize' idea-substances from an earlier epoch, but to remove the pressure of the questions themselves, which are inappropriate anachronisms in the modern age.⁽³⁰⁾ At one point, Blumenberg goes so far as to suggest that when a question has continued beyond the time when "the credibility and general acceptance" of its original answers has dwindled due to internal inconsistencies, it may eventually "be possible to destroy the question itself critically" (LMA, p.66).

Blumenberg has moved away, then, from Kant's notion that certain transcendental ideals are the result of inevitable overextensions from which reason can never free itself. In his model, moreover, it appears (on first examination) that not only vestigial questions but all "functional positions" are historically contingent. Thus he argues, for example, that the process in Christianity which eventually led to the crisis in the late medieval period itself began when ideas indigenous to Christianity were forced to reoccupy the role that had been played by "the great cosmological speculations of Greek antiquity" (LMA, p.65). The model Blumenberg is developing in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age seems to imply that even the problems or questions created by an era will be rooted in previous "reoccupations" or crises in yet earlier periods. As he result, he concludes:

We are going to have to free ourselves from the idea that there is a firm canon of the `great questions' that throughout history and with an unchanging urgency have occupied human curiosity and motivated the pretension to world- and self-interpretation (LMA, p.65).

By saying this, Blumenberg sets himself against other theorists who have used great questions or `positional roles' to explain historical developments in ideas, but in ways that oppose historicism rather than strengthen it. Theorists following Husserl, in particular, have used the model of `great questions' or perennial problems to show that philosophical thought, at least in its purest form, can transcend the limitations of weltanshauung, both allowing us to understand the significance of ancient authors, and, more importantly, to see the very roots of reason. Thus Leo Strauss, the greatest exponent of this view, says of Aristotle:

...But whatever one might think of his answers, certainly the fundamental questions to which they are the answers are identical with the fundamental questions that are of immediate concern for us today. Realizing this, we realize at the same time that the epoch which regarded Aristotle's fundamental questions as obsolete completely lacked clarity about what the fundamental issues are.

Far from legitimizing the historicist inference, history seems rather to prove that all human thought, and certainly all philosophic thought, is concerned with the same fundamental themes or the same fundamental problems, and therefore that there exists an unchanging framework which persists in all changes of human knowledge of both facts and principles...If the fundamental problems persist in all historical change, human thought is capable of transcending its historical limitations or of grasping something trans-historical.⁽³¹⁾

Initially, Blumenberg's model of changing functional positions, or roles concepts are needed to fill, seems to be the historicist polar opposite of Strauss' theory of history. But on closer inspection, Blumenberg's objection to an absolutely fixed canon of fundamental questions of the kind Strauss posits does not necessarily commit him to assert the complete contingency of all functional positions. Blumenberg is too insightful to reintroduce simplistic historicism at the level of functions or `positions:' he knows that they cannot all be contingent or context-relative. The reason why there must be universal questions or ultimate functional roles in the history of culture is apparent from two questions prompted by the structure of Blumenberg's own theory.

First, unlike the metaphysical substances that once figured in cosmological arguments, human history seems to have a limited extension into the past. Even if we extend it (as we must) to include the very earliest forms of identifiably `human' activity that paleoanthropology reveals to us, there comes a point within the biological time-frame of homo sapiens where the first traces of what we recognize as "culture" cease, or at least fade off. There can be no infinite regression, then, in the derivation of functional `problems' from earlier crises in answers to yet earlier questions, and so on. At the beginning of the chain there must be a set of original problems and/or original idea-contents that are not derived from anything antecedent in "history" itself. These original `moments' must have non-cultural causes, either in entirely natural contingencies or in transcendent intervention. Any problems or functional `positions' present in this very first stage of culture seem to have a certain priority, if not perennial significance. Whether or not they continue foreover as Strauss says, original problems or original idea contents which give rise to problems (whichever came first), would certainly condition all later developments even on Blumenberg's complex model.

Second, whether or not there could be an infinite regression in "history," Blumenberg's model has to face the following question: what kind of historical development could remove our access to apparently transcendental ideas (such as eschatology), but not also remove the need which maintains the `positions' as `positions' after their time, as it were? On Blumenberg's model, some such imbalance in historical effects is required to account for very possibility of `forced reoccupations' of a religious position by inherently secular contents not suited to it. It is understandable how a crisis at the end of one era could provoke the rejection of ideas that had fulfilled crucial roles up to that point,<sup>(32)</sup> but why would the same crisis not also remove the sense of urgency surrounding the roles themselves--unless certain functional `roles' (certain "timeless questions") are essential to human reason and/or culture as such, in much the way Strauss thought all perennial problems are.⁽³³⁾

The lack of an adequate answer to this question puts Blumenberg's arguments against opponents such as Löwith and Strauss in danger. For example, to defend against the suspicion that secular modernity inevitably leads to distortive "secularizations" such as the belief in human-initiated utopian progress and `secular' eschatologies (in Marxism, fascism, etc.),<sup>(34)</sup> Blumenberg must hold that the question of "the meaning and pattern of world history as a whole" (as Wallace calls it) persists only contingently rather than necessarily. For if the question of the meaning of history--the question once answered by eschatology--really persists because it is linked to the very conditions in which human culture originated, and so remains unavoidable and unremovable by criticism, then the secularization model is right. Because secular modernity is in principle unable to answer this fundamental question with contents appealing to transcendence, and yet the `position' formed by this question is inexorable, it would be impossible in principle for the modern world ever to avoid forcing its supposedly `benign' notion of progress to play the apocalyptic "inevitable" progress.

It is for this reason that, as Wallace notes in his own analysis, Blumenberg presents ideas such as "inevitable progress" as "resulting from attempts to meet `needs' that are not rational, are not humanly universal.."<sup>(35)</sup> For if the functional position once held by eschatology is universal or perennial, then the only alternative to religious eschatology will be distortive reoccupation of the eschatological position. Thus Blumenberg's entire argument in defense of the modern age unravels if the `eschatological position' turns out to be essential to human culture, a fundamental component of historical consciousness itself.⁽³⁶⁾

But as we saw, the inevitability of some "humanly universal" functional positions is already implicit within Blumenberg's theory. Wallace should not just assume, then, that by separating the modern notion of progress from the `functional position' it has been forced to reoccupy, Blumenberg has adequately shown that the modern age can dispense with the eschatological position<sup>(37)</sup> as "not humanly universal." To demonstrate decisively that the `eschatological position' is not among the original and universal `positions,' but remains historically contingent, Blumenberg would have to show that the initial conditions which began series of historical changes explained by his model exclude eschatology. In place of this question of final or ultimate meaning, he must posit other `positions' as original and universal, and explain how the needs apparently satisfied by cosmogonic and eschatological myths are derivative from these.

By its own logic, then, the model Blumenberg develops in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age implies the point of departure for the more comprehensive theory developed in Work on Myth.⁽³⁸⁾ To begin the historical series, Blumenberg postulates the "limit-concept" of an original `problem' that did not itself arise out of any cultural solution to an earlier problem (WM, p.xviii). Mythology will then be the original `solution' to this first and most primordial `problem,' which Blumenberg calls "the absolutism of reality."

IV. Cognitive Implications: Latent Functional Significance

In describing the explanatory model which Blumenberg develops in his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, we have focused on how its basic concepts and dynamic processes together form an `evolutionary' account--an account which remains incomplete until Blumenberg eventually applies it to questions concerning the very origin of human culture. But to understand his answer to these questions, we also have to consider the cognitive side of his model, i.e. the way human consciousness of meanings are located and operate within different parts of it. Because in Blumenberg's explanatory model, ideas and cultural institutions in every epoch are always motivated and accompanied by inherited functional `positions,' they are always involved in layers of functional significance, not all of which may be immediately apparent.

In this respect, Blumenberg clearly comes out of a tradition of "functionalist" treatments of cultural institutions, including mythology, which was created by the pioneering work of anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and sociologists such as Emile Durkheim. As William Doty notes in his revealing discussion of "Sociofunctionalism," the key to their approach was to assume that the "real" meaning of myths and rituals is never transparent in their content, but can only be grasped in unacknowledged social and political purposes they serve, such as providing a social "charter" for society to justify its traditional hierarchies, producing communal solidarity and loyalty, supporting the society's highest values by expressing them in a projected transcendent realm, etc.⁽³⁹⁾ The same point is emphasized in a distinction noted by the philosopher of science Wesley Salmon in his discussion of functional explanation:

The influential sociologist R. K. Merton (1950, 1957) also advocates functional analysis in the study of human institutions. He distinguishes carefully between latent function and manifest function. The rain dance has the manifest function of bringing rainfall...it has the latent function, however, of promoting social cohesiveness in times of distress...In such cases, the latent function explains the survival of a practice that fails miserably to fulfill its manifest function.⁽⁴⁰⁾

We should recognize that Blumenberg's own explanation of myth is much broader than the kinds of accounts advanced by the earlier generation of "sociofunctionalists," whose arguments emphasized how the "individual meanings of myths and rituals" differ from one local context to another.⁽⁴¹⁾ Blumenberg, on the other hand, tries to explain what Wallace calls the one "ultimate human function of myth" (WM, p.xviii) in terms of the primordial and universal `context' that underlies all the functions of mythological narratives and rituals in more specific contexts. Nevertheless, from the beginning of Work on Myth, Blumenberg emphasizes the same critical distinction between the "content" of a myth (i.e. its "manifest function") and its "function" (in the latent sense). For example he argues:

The historical power of myth is not founded in the origins of its contents, in the zone from which it draws its materials and its stories, but rather in the fact that, in its procedure and its `form,' it is no longer something else (WM, p.16).

The idea is that the contents of even the earliest myths could only have their `manifest meanings' because man had already achieved some distance from the original context. It is only by virtue of an initial, invisible achievement that a "zone" of potentially meaningful materials can even exist--and it is this non-specific potential that is the hidden "significance" of myth's latent function. Thus the very existence of myth is the result of something else: myth is "already the manifestation of an overcoming, of a gaining of distance, of a moderation of bitter earnestness" (WM, p.16). In other words, the original state from which myth escapes--and towards which mythic "significance" in general points--cannot ever be fully represented, or made into manifest content, in any myth. That primordial context can only be inferred by a critical philosophy of history, extended to include what Blumenberg calls a "philosophical anthropology."

V. Myth as Reduction of the Absolutism of Reality

Blumenberg begins his interpretation of mythology by explaining this primordial context in terms of an anthropological set of conditions out of which all myth and other forms of human culture and institutions first began to develop. Blumenberg makes the highly significant point that his postulated primordial conditions, which he calls "the absolutism of reality," serve the same explanatory purpose in his theory as "an initial situation" or "old status naturalis" played in "philosophical theories of culture and state" (WM, p.3).

The absolutism of reality arose, roughly, when early humans were forced out of "the concealment of the primeval forest" to which they were biologically adapted, and into the caves and savannas where they faced the open horizon (WM, p.4). As proto-hunter-gatherer, Blumenberg hypothesizes, early man then faced a "sudden lack of adaption" in which only intelligence, the "capacity for foresight," and "anticipation" could allow him to survive. In facing the complete horizon of possibilities, man first experienced "lebensangst" or "existential anxiety" (WM, p.6), the "pure state of indefinite anticipation" (WM, p.4).⁽⁴²⁾ This "complete helplessness of the ego," which (in Freud's account) every child experiences in the face of the hostile power of an alien reality, "had to be reduced" by being split up and "rationalized into fears" of specific, identifiable factors or threats (WM, p.5). Man first invented myth and divinities as a response to this absolute need for a reduction of anxiety:

..man came close to not having control of the conditions of his existence, and what is more important, believed that he simply lacked control of them. It may have been earlier of later that he interpreted this circumstance of the superior power of what is in (in each case) `other' by assuming the existence of superior powers (WM, p.3-4).

By giving "names for the unnameable" (WM, p.5), by "setting up images against the abomination" (WM, p.10), myth served to distance the absolutism of reality and make its powers multiple and thus addressable. In this we see the functional significance of polytheism and a pantheon of gods:

The way in which [myth] pursued the reduction of the absolutism of reality was to distribute a block of opaque powerfulness, which stood over man and opposite him, among many powers that are played off against one another, or even cancel one another out (WM, p.13-14).

Thus, although myth can only represent the absolutism of reality as changed in some way (broken up, named, etc), very strong indications of that original condition are evident in myth. For example, the limited sphere of what is "taboo" replicates in a more controlled way "the overall tinge of an undefined unfriendliness that originally adhered to the world" (WM, p.14). In this reading, Blumenberg clearly uses the Freudian notion of psychic energy reduction through sublimation: by transferring its fearsome qualities to something else, the absolutism of reality can be reduced.

Blumenberg argues that we can see the functional significance of myth in the ways "Greek myth tried to concentrate the world's alienating quality into forms." (WM, p.14). For example, among the Gorgons, "who are descended from the sea, with its resistance to form...it is especially Medusa, with her look that kills by turning to stone, in whom unapproachability and intolerability have been most proverbially concentrated" (WM, p.15). Yet for all her forbidding power, Medusa's mortality and her defeat at the hands of Perseus shows "fear in its purest form but still as something that could be overcome" (WM, p.65).

This overcoming of the monstrous can be seen not only in this myth, but in the entire progression of Hesiod's Theogony and Greek myth in general. As Blumenberg often stresses, almost all the monsters of Greek myth derive from the terrible figures in the earlier generations of Hesiod's genealogy of the gods, such as Ouranos and Gaia (Heaven and Earth) who gave birth to the titans, cyclops, and giants;⁽⁴³⁾ Night who "bare hateful doom and black Fate and Death" and other horrors such as Woe and Strife;⁽⁴⁴⁾ and also Pontus "the fruitless deep with his raging swell," from whom Nereus and the Gorgons came.⁽⁴⁵⁾ But again, in the very fact that these powers are named, an "apotropiac accomplishment" of "work on myth" has already been registered (WM, p.15). As we see in Hesiod, "Myth itself tells the story of the origin of the first names from night, from earth, from chaos" (WM, p.38). Every subsequent overcoming of these original powers, every step away from the monstrous, is a further achievement of reduction. When "Aphrodite arises from the foam of the terrible castration of Uranus--that is like a metaphor for the accomplishment of myth itself" (WM, p.38).

The same accomplishment is evident more generally in the progression of the mythical genealogy as it moves away from original `totem' or animal forms of the gods (which lie in the background of the Homeric epithets), and mixed monstrous forms, towards gods and heroes who have a more human depiction in epic poetry. Myth allows man to be "at home in the world" by narrating the "change of forms in the direction of human ones between the night and chaos of the beginning," in the process of which "the world ceases to contain as many monsters" (WM, p.113). In Greek myth, in particular, the elimination of monsters by heroes follows the central "world decision that goes against the figures of terror," as represented in Zeus' defeat of the titans and "terrible earth-born Typhon, son of Tartarus and Gaea" (WM, p.66).

These examples give a sense of how Blumenberg interprets some basic features of myth in accordance with his reduction of the absolutism of reality model. However, to fully grasp Blumenberg's view of myth and its relevance in cultural history, as well as his criticism of other theories of myth, we must focus on his most fundamental point: namely, that myth could only function to reduce the absolutism of reality by hiding the fact that there ever was such an absolutism, and that myth arose as a response to it.

VI. The Hidden Work Of Myth

This assertion of myth's fundamental non-transparency in Blumenberg's functional analysis relates to his crucial distinction between "work on myth" as opposed to the "work of myth." Put roughly, the "work of myth" means its original function of reducing the absolutism of reality, a function which work on the developing content of myth increasingly hides and obscures. This explains the continuity Blumenberg sees from work on myth to early uses of theory. When Thales begins to use "theory" to deplete the power of "unfamiliar and uncanny phenomena" by predicting them, the irony is that his enterprise is only possible because of "the millenniums-long work of myth itself" (WM, p.26).

Thus "work on myth" must always presuppose some accomplishment in the "work of myth," because the latter begins in the "intentionality" which first achieves "the coordination of parts into a whole, of qualities into an object, of things into a world" (WM, p.21--my italics). As we saw, in Blumenberg's view this "integration" is first made evident in the "joining" of names into the coherence of genealogical relations (WM, p.39). Thus he says: "The fact that the world could be mastered is expressed early on by the effort to avoid leaving any gap in the totality of names" (WM, p.40). But even this genealogical totality through which myth converts "numinos indefiniteness into nominal definiteness" and makes "what is uncanny familiar and addressable" (WM, p.25) in principle refers back to the turning point where the absolutism of reality was opposed through the sheer act of interpreting it:

[In the absolutism of reality] we can only imagine the single absolute experience that exists: that of the superior power of the Other.

The Other is not yet by preference the other One. Only when the former is interpreted with the aid of the latter...does a world exegesis begins that involves man (WM, p.21-21).

This primordial act of interpretation which makes reality into a potentially meaningful unity is the essential "work of myth"--the establishment of myth's primordial function--which must be supposed before any specific mythical content or narrative can first be worked up or `worked on.' But traces of this original work of myth and the absolutism of reality with which it grapples reveal themselves in work on myth in various ways. For example, we see it in Hesiod's effort to produce a catalogue that would "avoid leaving any gap in the totality of names:"

..this already `literary' phenomenon still allows an initial state to show through, in which the namelessness of what was shapeless and the striving for words for what was unfamiliar were dominant....If one perceives in the background of the entire genealogy of the gods, the chaos, the gaping abyss, which is only employed as a place of derivation...then one sees figures and names form correlatively and gain clarity as they move away from it (WM, p.40-41).

This figure of Chaos, the first of Hesiod's four original/uncreated `gods,'⁽⁴⁶⁾ is as near as myth can come to expressing the ineffable condition in the absolutism of reality. As Blumenberg comments much later,

Chaos, in the language of the Theogony, is not yet the disordered mixed state of matter...Chaos is the pure metaphor of the gaping or yawning open of an abyss, which requires no localization, no description of its edges or depth, but is only the opaque space in which forms make their appearance (WM, p.127).

As Wallace points out, Blumenberg is drawing here on the etymology of , which "derives from the verb chainein, to yawn, gape, or open wide" (WM, p.145). The analogies between "chaos" in this sense and Blumenberg's idea of the `open horizon' in man's state of nature, and also with the later Heidegger's notion of the "clearing of Being," are already apparent.

Blumenberg mentions several other instances in which an earlier state closer to the absolutism of nature seems to show through in a myth that works to cover it over or overcome it. For example, the trial of Orestes which relates Athena to Attica and begins the genealogy of the "Attic state myth" is "above all an event that makes the work of myth pregnantly evident as the bringing to an end of something that is no longer supposed to exist" (WM, p.126--emphasis added). Blumenberg is apparently referring to the triumph of Athena's rule over the vengeful lust of the chorus of furies in the Eumenides, which symbolizes the replacement of justice based on blood-relation with justice by rule of law.⁽⁴⁷⁾

As Blumenberg notes, "the introduction of quasi-legal transactions into myth is characteristic of Zeus' epoch" (WM, p.125)--the epoch which Athena certainly represents, as opposed to the Furies, who are children of Night and "like no seed ever begotten, not seen ever by the gods as goddesses, nor yet stamped in the likeness of any human form."⁽⁴⁸⁾ Athena's victory over them is another Olympian triumph over the monstrous, but it also reveals what went before. We see the same process at work in myths like those of Idomeneus and Abraham, which mark the end human sacrifice: "Such myths, like the prevention of Abraham's obedience, are monuments to the final leaving behind of archaic rituals" (WM, p.119). In them, the explicit meaning which denies human sacrifice cannot entirely hide the latent functional meaning of ending a barbaric institution which really did exist beforehand, according to Blumenberg.

Given Blumenberg's interpretation of myth in terms of its latent "work" on the absolutism of reality, the elimination of monsters and the transition towards more human forms "must have to do with myth's function of producing distance from the quality of uncanniness" (WM, p.117). Using Blumenberg's terms strictly, however, we have to remember that as episodes in the content of myth, these developments constitute work on myth. As Blumenberg says, "even the earliest items of myth that are accessible to us are already products of work on myth" (WM, p.118), which also means that they have been conditioned by their reception over time.⁽⁴⁹⁾ In other words, the very form of myth, whatever the content, already constitutes a world at least at one remove from the absolutism of reality itself:

Myth represents a world of stories that localizes the hearer's standpoint in time in such a way that the fund of the monstrous and the unbearable recedes in relation to him (WM, p.117).

Properly speaking, then, the work of myth means just this first step away from the absolutism, the step by means of which the basic orientation or standpoint of all myth is attained. This orientation or mythic form, which is the `work of myth' itself in some sense `prior' to all actual mythic content whatsoever. Relative to this basic orientation in which we have a mythic world, the first "contents" of myths, as well as revisions of this content in subsequent mythic narratives and borrowings in later philosophy and literature, count as "work on myth." Work on myth has several successive stages (oral form, written form, `theoria' etc.) but the "work of myth" is always the virtual first stage that establishes the functional significance of all the rest.

Robert Wallace confirms this analysis when he comments that the "work of myth" refers to "the essential and original function and accomplishment of myth as such" (WM, p.112), which is the production of a `world' of significance. Thus when the originally unintelligible "is made accessible, in terms of its significance, by the telling of stories" (WM, p.6), the bare significance itself is what arises from the work of myth, or the function of myth at its most primordial level. Yet, like the "diffuse quality of the numinos" in Rudolph Otto's theory (WM, p.63), this latent significance of myth can only be `manifested'--that is, acquire content--in the "localized" framework of actual myths. As Blumenberg puts it, "Only work on myth--even if it is the work of finally reducing it--makes the work of myth manifest" (WM, p.118). This reminds us once again that the pure functional form of myth established by the `work of myth' remains virtual--it is an ideal limit concept.

To this extent, we see that Blumenberg does agree with the contextualism that was mentioned as typical of the sociofunctionalists. Although he posits a `virtual' level of significance arising out of a universal context, its ideal function only gets realized in the "work on myth" that occurs in sub-functions conditioned by the evolution of local cultural/social institutions. Thus Blumenberg has not in any way contradicted the earlier sociofunctionalists. Rather, he has extended their theory and refined it in his notion of the "Darwinism of words."

VII. The `Darwinism of Words'

Given this basic division between the `work of myth' as the establishment and continuance of a universal function, and the stages of "work on myth," Blumenberg goes on to consider in much greater detail how different kinds of transformations occur within work on myth as a whole--transformations in which idea-contents, rituals, and institutions are altered in accordance with the underlying function of further reducing the absolutism of reality. A brief review of his basic strategy in this portion of Work on Myth will show how Blumenberg links his interpretation of mythology with the model of historical development already given in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.

Blumenberg begins by considering the well-known fact that mythology has a "constancy..of core contents" (WM, p.) which have been retained over time. This phenomenon appears problematic for Blumenberg's argument in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age against explaining epochal changes in ideas by the `identity of idea-substances' (which secularization theory assumed). But with mythology, it is clear that Blumenberg cannot argue that absolutely no identical "contents" continue through history:<sup>(50)</sup> rather, he has to account for the continuance of "substances" such as mythic icons, theoretical ideas, and cultural institutions where these do persist over time, in a way compatible with his `evolutionary' substance-function model. What he must oppose is not the continuity of any contents whatsoever, but any attempt to explain such continuance by postulating a transcendental origin for these contents rather than a latent functional genesis. He writes:

Tylor spoke, in ethnology, of "survivals." But what causes survival? A model explanation of such phenomena is the explanation in terms of innate ideas. It does not return for the first time in depth psychology's notion of "archetypes," but already in Freud in the assertion of universal infantile experiences (WM, p.151).

Blumenberg's response is to postulate a radically different mechanism to explain the persistence of certain contents, both in mythology and in all later cultural history. The mechanism Blumenberg has in mind is `filtering' by reception: "materials" or whole "works" are "tendered by an author or a transmitter [bard] who seeks applause and reward at all costs, to an audience that is free to make any judgment and react any way" (WM, p.154). Although he recognizes that epic literature itself is a later stage which "already presupposes the long work of myth on the primary matter of the life-world" (WM, p.158), he does suggest that this reception-mechanism is clearly evinced in the case of "the rhapsodist of the early Greek epic...who offers pleasure and amusement, one who adapts himself with precision and flexibility to his audience and its desires" (WM, p.155).

The point of these examples is, however, is not so much the literal demand for pleasure and entertainment (which may be a later development) but to suggest how changes in contents can be driven entirely by demand-functions. The real "demand" driving the process, of course, is the hidden, never completely conscious demand for the reduction of the absolutism of reality: the rhapsodist's cosmogonies help in "conjuring up the stability of the world," and "the singer does not offer only amusement and diversions; he also offers some of the assurance and sanction that will one day be called cosmos" (WM, p.159-160). In postulating this mechanism, however, Blumenberg makes it even clearer that his philosophy of history is evolutionary in its most fundamental premises. The function governing "work on myth" as a whole is the "reduction" demand established in the first step into "culture," but the mechanism this function sets up is...

..to say it outright, a piece of Darwinism in the realm of words. It is a process of the kind that produces institutions and rituals having a durability that is incomprehensible in retrospect (WM, p.159).

On the basis of this radical theory, Blumenberg can then argue that the "iconic constancy" we observe in mythology from its earliest recorded forms⁽⁵¹⁾ onwards, which has motivated the archetypal interpretation of myth, is just a derivative result of centuries of `invisible' optimization in oral traditions between the introduction of mythic contents and their earliest commitment to writing:

...nonliterate prehistory must have enforced a more fine-textured and intensive testing of the reliable effectiveness of all ingredients [i.e. `contents'] than their whole subsequent history in the form of `literature'...could accomplish (WM, p.152).

Blumenberg is suggesting, in effect, that because the oral "superepoch" of human history is so much longer and even more selective than the written (WM, p.153), the iconic contents of earliest recorded mythology would be just those that had already turned out (by chance, if nothing else) to be able to perform the required function of reducing absolutism in many different circumstances of human life. In that case, their apparently "improbable survival all the way to the present" (WM, p.151 ) and their durable "independence of circumstances of place and epoch" (WM, p.149) are not surprising, and need not be explained by a doctrine of innate ideas or archetypes of the Jungian sort.

There are many objections that ought to be raised to Blumenberg's "Darwinian" explanation of the development of "iconic constants" in mythology, but their full discussion must be postponed at this point. Wallace is right in pointing out the novelty of Blumenberg's theory, but wrong when he asserts that "Scholars who study myth in oral cultures have not speculated much on any diachronic process by which its patterns may have developed" and adds that mythographic theories have presented mainly "static" pictures of mythology (WM, p.xxi). For most of the greatest scholars of mythology, this has not been the case.⁽⁵²⁾

Given his controversial `Darwinian' mythography, Blumenberg can reconcile the survival of certain "substances" or "institutions" in human history with the model he offered in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age: the contents that demonstrate this `resilience' will be just the ones that continue to successfully serve the one universal function underlying the development, effects, and reoccupations of all contingent `functional positions' throughout history. Thus Blumenberg's "Darwinism of words" theory is clearly more than just an explanation for the first stage in the development of mythic contents: it allows the dynamic processes at work in all later epochs, as new `questions' emerge and give impetus to new answers etc., to be understood as evolutionary processes at bottom, all driven by the same primordial function discovered in Work on Myth. The earlier model of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age is thus nested within Blumenberg's complete explanatory account: all human history of ideas, institutions, and culture is nested within the function of the "reduction of the absolutism of reality."

This implies, in turn, that the `latent functional significance' attributed to mythology must be extended to the entire realm of human history and culture. Later developments in human rationality, including epic literature, theory, and technology must all be understood as the result of the continuing selection process. And the figurative analogy between organic evolution and the dynamic processes of change in the history of ideas is ultimately justified because all of "history" and "culture" can be understood as the sublimated continuation of natural selection:

...the factors that conditioned the development that produced man were made superfluous and nonfunctional precisely by their evolutionary success. The organic system [i.e. the hominoid] resulting from the mechanism of evolution becomes `man' by evading the pressure of that mechanism by setting against it something like a phantom body. This is the sphere of his culture, his institutions--and also his myths (WM, p.163, my italics).

It is this `shadow body' of contents, including philosophical and religious idea schemes, technology, art etc., which now to the `evolving' in our place: "it is to these, rather than to their producer, that `the survival of the fittest' applies" (WM, p.163). According to this astounding theory, then, the whole of "history" in the human sense is really one massive `reoccupation' of the function of natural selection: in response to its `pressure,' instead of evolving, the hominoid became human by introducing cultural substances which would reoccupy the position he had held. The entire problem of reducing the absolutism of reality (and the "significance" it creates) then arises as the problem of maintaining and stabilizing that original switch.

These results are summarized in the accompanying Diagram A, which schematically portrays the relation among key components in Blumenberg's proposed interpretation of mythology and cultural institutions as a whole.

VIII. The Rationality Shared by Mythos and Logos

After presenting the basic elements in his theory of the "Darwinism of Words," Blumenberg goes on to claim that when the model presented in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age is taken in this modified and deepened form, we can see that there is an objective kind of progress in history: "history, whatever else it may be, is also a process of optimization" (WM, p.165); institutions which have survived for ages have a value which requires no rational justification, because their very survival can only be explained as evidence that they continue to perform the one hidden function of all cultural `contents' (WM, p.166). Thus, we might say, Blumenberg's modified theory claims to vindicate the very notion of a kind of non-teleological progress which he argued arose in the early modern age. The modern idea of progress that "extrapolates from a structure present in every moment to a future that is immanent in history" (LMA, p.30), which Blumenberg defended against charges of secularization, is now exemplified in the very pattern of cultural evolution itself.⁽⁵³⁾

This result in Work On Myth shows that Blumenberg really does intend to justify the "modern age" as the product of optimization: if his explanatory account of history is true, then ideas in the modern age must be serving the basic function of all culture in ways that medieval ideas no longer can, for a variety of reasons. This shows, I think, that the distinction between justification and explanation in philosophy of history cannot be maintained--despite arguments to the contrary from Blumenberg's defenders.

Consider, for example, David Ingram's argument against this interpretation of Blumenberg. Ingram argues that critics like Robert Pippin, who have asserted that Blumenberg is trying to legitimize the "modern age" and its belief in progress, totally misunderstand Blumenberg. In Ingram's view, Blumenberg's argument for "the necessity and irreversibility of an epochal transformation" which led to the modern age is not meant to validate or legitimate the modern age in any sense, since for Blumenberg, legitimacy itself is a historically constructed "juristic" concept which is simply out of place in historiography.⁽⁵⁴⁾ Hence, Ingram says, "the necessity of modern accomplishments" need not imply anything about their "preferability."⁽⁵⁵⁾ This view, which leads to a completely historicist reading of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, leaves Ingram surprised by Blumenberg's implication in Work on Myth that there is objective `progress' or development over the epochs in history.⁽⁵⁶⁾

To escape this difficulty, Ingram has to argue that for Blumenberg, "the existence of functional or adaptational universals" as in the perennial function of myth do not imply "any teleological fulfillment of an archaic cultural heritage".⁽⁵⁷⁾ But this ignores the fact that there is a long tradition in philosophy of legitimating outcomes precisely by this kind of explanation in terms of quasi-teleological process. Moreover, Blumenberg even says "The concept of the legitimacy of the modern age is not derived from the accomplishments of reason but from the necessity of those accomplishments" (LMA, p.99). Thus Blumenberg himself implies the inference from (functional-evolutionary) "necessity" to "legitimacy."

Thus the "Darwinism of Words" theory does attempt to vindicate the modern conception of progress as an accurate reflection of a dynamic actually immanent in history itself. But at the same time, Blumenberg's "Darwinism of Words" theory also implies an utter rejection of the extreme "rationalistic" component of the Enlightenment, which sought to destroy by criticism any institutions that lack discursive justification (WM, p.163-6).⁽⁵⁸⁾ On the basis of his evolutionary model, Blumenberg tries to show that his theory, like Hans-George Gadamer's critique of the Enlightenment,⁽⁵⁹⁾ provides a response to "the Enlightenment's agitation against myth as the exemplary compound of prejudices" (WM, p.163).

Points relevant to this argument are made throughout the early chapters of Work On Myth. Theoretical rationality itself is a product of philosophical ideas which functioned to further the reduction already achieved by mythology. By predicting and possibly even explaining events such as eclipses, earliest theories served the purpose of "depleting the power of unfamiliar and uncanny phenomena" (WM, p.26). Moreover, since it arises only at a later stage, theory itself is dependent on myth:

Theory is the better adapted mode of mastering the episodic tremenda of recurring world events" such as comets, earthquakes, etc. But leisure and dispassion in viewing the world, which theory presupposes, are already results of that millenniums-long work of myth itself which told of the monstrous as something that is far in the past...(WM, p.26, first set of italics mine).

Thus Blumenberg can argue, in apparent Gadamerian fashion, "That the course of things proceeded `from mythos to logos' is a dangerous misconstruction..." (WM, p.27). Since theoretical logos ultimately serves the same purpose as mythology, myth itself is vindicated as "rational:" "the antithesis between myth and reason is a late and a poor invention" of the Enlightenment, which "forgoes seeing the function of myth, in the overcoming of that archaic unfamiliarity of the world, as itself a rational function" (WM, p.48). In other words, by connecting theoretical rationality to the same function that produced myth, the "Darwinism of Words" theory makes sense of the enigmatic claim that "the boundary line between myth and logos is imaginary...myth itself is a piece of high-carat `work of logos'" (WM, p.12). Hence, after presenting this theory, Blumenberg can announce his reconciliation of modern rationality with mythology (and presumably with "traditional authority" in general): "...with regard to the effort--which spans all of human history--to overcome anxiety relating to what is unknown or even still unnamed, myth and enlightenment are allies..." (WM, p.163).

But there is something deceptive about the implied allegiance with Gadamer that runs throughout this argument. It lies in the fact that the kind of `rationality' which Blumenberg makes continuous between mythology and enlightenment science is latent functional rationality. And this is certainly not the kind of rationality Gadamer had in mind when he argued that there is no "unconditional antithesis between tradition and reason."<sup>(60)</sup> Rather, Gadamer envisioned forward movement in the history of ideas through logos itself: in the dialogical interchange of original individual thought and the cognitive content of traditionary texts, the view that turned out to be consciously more persuasive (in a sense that transcends any `methodological' standards) would prevail. Since this theory envisions contents in human thinking emerging directly from other contents, independently of all latent functions and mediated only by rational evaluation and thought, its attributes a kind of transcendence to reason which seems to be the very antithesis of Blumenberg's conception.

For Blumenberg's "Darwinism of Words" theory implies that human creative originality has almost no role in bringing about the `objective progress' for which it claims to have discovered the explanation. This was already evident in the implication that the very first mythic "contents" introduced in attempt to give concrete expression to man's primordial antipathetic reaction to the "absolutism of reality" could have been hit on virtually at random: the ones that remain gained their "significance" just because they were the minute fraction of possible contents that survived. Their validity and value is explained by their survival, rather than the other way around.

This principle extends to the whole realm of human institutions for Blumenberg. Imagination, by introducing novelties, has only an extremely small chance of producing something better than current institutions (WM, p.162-3), in the ultimately relevant sense of better. For established institutions and traditional practices must have survived because of their effectiveness in functions that in turn arose because they contribute to the concealed ultimate function of all culture: the reduction of absolutism. Blumenberg argues that this view is not a form of extreme conservatism (WM, p.163), but simply a reaction against rationalist calls for "critical destruction" of traditional institutions and correlate claims of "romanticism" for the productive powers of the imagination:

What we find empirically present--and not only in organic nature--distinguishes itself, in contrast to the imagination, by the wealth of unexpected material in its forms and modes of behavior. No imagination could have invented what ethnology and cultural anthropology have collected in the way of regulations of existence, world interpretations, forms of life, classifications, ornaments, and insignia. All of this is the product of a process of selection that has been at work for a long time, and in that respect, in this analogy to the mechanism of evolution, approaches the stupendous variety and convincingness of the forms of nature itself (WM, p.162).

As convincing as this may sound, however, two objections must be mentioned. First Blumenberg implies here that a philosophical anthropology or mythographic theory could only maintain a primordial role for creative originality in the history of ideas, if it attributed the entire variety of persisting contents and institutions to direct imaginative production. But this is false, since mythographical theories giving imagination an originary role could account for the same perceived variety of mythic contents in ways diametrically opposed to Blumenberg's theory, but without making human originality the direct producer of every outcome.

To outline just one example, the work of Carl Jung (and other mythographers such as Campbell and Eliade) point to the fact that essentially the same body of `iconic constants,' in expanding multiforms or varitations, appear in thousands of monuments dating much earlier than the appearance of written myths in their respective cultures. All the way back to cave paintings, the earliest megaliths, and the oldest surviving sculptures and artifacts, we find the same archetypal motifs, or at least similar paradigms which are recognizable in the development of different families of symbols. But in advancing the "Darwinism of Words" theory, Blumenberg has simply not considered anything other than surviving mythic narratives (and only Greek ones, at that). Perhaps he could respond to this objection by pushing back the period during which, by trial and error, thousands of different `contents' were tried out and winnowed down, but then his hypothesis would be harder to reconcile with the evidence. For the content-driven hypothesis of archetypal theory suggests that the process from the dawn of culture to the beginning of writing is the opposite of what this modified Blumenbergian hypothesis would suggest: rather than a selection among an abundance of contents, we start with a very small set of proto-archetypal motifs or `constants' (possibly even tracing back to a single superarchetype) that spread out into variant forms in time, being expressed in new material `vessels' paradigmatically suited to their role as these became available (different ones in environments etc.), combining through internal association in new variations, etc.⁽⁶¹⁾

I mention this alternative structuralist theory simply to point out that one should not assume Blumenberg really has the evidence on his side. More detailed investigations might well be able to prove that the contents of written sacred myths could not have been the optimized result of selection from an enormous earlier plethora of unrelated contents tried in oral tradition.

There is a second, related objection to Blumenberg's theory when it is extended to cultural history as a whole. The problem is that if anything like `natural selection' occurs in the history of ideas and institutions, then apparently in this process imagination would have to do what chance genetic variation does in the biological evolution of species. As we have already seen, in fact, Blumenberg does assume something like this in the human capacity to arrive at new `contents' based on empirical experience. However, this capacity is conditioned in certain crucial ways. First, experimentation with new possibilities can only take place in a context of historically persisting institutions establishing security: "Thus the selection of constants over long periods of time is, in fact, a condition of the possibility of running the risks of `trial and error' in parts of one's behavior" (WM, p.163).

But more fundamentally, the projection of new ideas is also conditioned by prior problems to which it responds, and ultimately by a function which by definition obscures itself from view. Thus even to the extent that human reason can project new contents, it never really creates whatever progress in the history of ideas may occur. Blumenberg's evolutionary `progress' in cultural history operates through ideas and reasoning, but the results are not caused by rational projection of them, or informed intention to realize these results, or rational approval of these results which chooses them deliberately over other possibilities. The results of the process do not in fact even have to be consciously presented, any more than the universal function which drives them, which is always hidden by the very process it causes: "the mechanism of selection is precisely such that, in its results, it does not provide the explanation for their usefulness in life, but rather, so as to shield its function...withholds that explanation..." (WM, p.166). In other words, as we saw previously, the reduction of absolutism `covers its own tracks.' The ultimate moving force in the history of ideas and institutions is external to the content (and hence the ideal validity) of these ideas and institutions: their fate is determined by their success in fulfilling a certain ultimate function that it essentially non-cognitive, since by definition it requires that both expressive awareness and cognitive evaluation be further and further removed from apprehension of it.

IX. The `Invisible Hand' Ideal

In sum, Blumenberg's complete account of the origin and history of culture through epochal changes can be regarded as a highly developed instance, in the philosophy of history, of what Robert Nozick has characterized as "invisible-hand" explanation. In his Anarchy, State, Utopia, Robert Nozick produces a catalogue of explanations in this genus, including examples from evolutionary theory, ecology, economics, and even Hayek's account of social cooperation.⁽⁶²⁾ Nozick comments:

There is a certain lovely quality to explanations of this sort. They show how some overall pattern or design, which one would have thought had to be produced an individual or group's successful attempt to realize the pattern, instead was produced or maintained by a process that in no way had the overall pattern or design `in mind.'⁽⁶³⁾

To Nozick, these kinds of "invisible hand" explanations are intrinsically superior because they "minimize the use of notions constituting the phenomena to be explained," and therefore function in a fashion approaching the ideal of "fundamental explanations," i.e. they explain a realm of phenomena almost entirely in terms from outside that realm.

In this light, it becomes clearer why Blumenberg considers his `absolutism of reality' analogous to the status naturalis of classical political theories, such as Hobbes's in particular. For as Nozick suggests in his own chapter entitled "Why State of Nature Theory," the ideal of rational explanation inherent in this type of theory is that of explaining the political fully "in terms of the non-political."⁽⁶⁴⁾ Surprisingly, Nozick claims that such theories are revealing (rather than distortive or harmful) even when they are wrong, although in a footnote he qualifies this: "it is plausible to think that an explanation of a realm must produce an underlying mechanism yielding the realm" if it is to be truly explanatory.⁽⁶⁵⁾

From the outset of his enterprise in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, it appears that Blumenberg's own substance-function distinction was motivated by this conception of explanatory success--which is itself a characteristic mark of `the modern age.' Nozick points out an important difference between invisible-hand accounts as "fundamental explanations," and the kind of explanation we find in conspiracy theories, which focus on strategies of deception:

We might call the opposite sort of explanation a "hidden-hand explanation." A hidden-hand explanation explains what looks to be merely a disconnected set of facts..as the product of an individual's or group's intentional design(s).⁽⁶⁶⁾

Interestingly, the secularization theories which Blumenberg set out to oppose seem to fit this description of hidden-hand explanation, at least in the sense that they attribute an intentionally produced hidden meaning to certain ideas in secular humanism, such as "inevitable progress."

However, we should realize that functional accounts of `instrumental' rationality<sup>(67)</sup> also generally attribute meanings that are `hidden'--but in the latent rather than intentional, strategic sense. This point is important, because Blumenberg sometimes gives the deceptive impression that he objects in principle to any "critical" discovery of hidden significance in an idea if it seems to undercut the understanding of the idea possessed by its adherents. Thus, for example, Blumenberg objects to Gadamer's claims that secularization analysis serves a useful hermeneutic purpose by discovering dimensions of meaning hidden within secular concepts such as inevitable progress. He dislikes the way in which a modern idea subjected to secularization critique "is revealed as a consciousness that is not transparent to itself in its substantial relations, a consciousness to which hermeneutics discloses a background"--a result which depends on the unjustifiable assumption that the secularized result is a "pseudomorph" or "inauthentic manifestation..of its original reality" (LMA, pp.17, 18).

But what Blumenberg really objects to in secularization accounts is not the attribution of non-transparent `hidden meaning' per se--for as we have seen, his own attributions of latent functional significance certainly achieve a similar result. Rather, what bothers Blumenberg is that secularization accounts do not attribute the kind of hidden meanings he approves of, namely latent functional meanings. An account of `A' as `B' secularized is really a version of hidden-hand explanation: it suggests that a cognitively present content `B' was intentionally disguised as (perverted into?) `A'. As our brief analysis suggests, in this case the "non-transparency" of the original substance is not complete: rather, the culture which takes B as A is always involved in a (hidden-hand) conspiracy for self-deception and so an authentic consciousness of the original substance is repressed in a kind of mauvaise foi, but not completely inaccessible. Ironically, then, the "non-transparency" of significances hidden from our cognitive contents can be complete on Blumenberg's theory in a way that it never can be in secularization theories.

Part Two: Significance and Transcendence

X. Transcendence and Imagination

Blumenberg's crucial distinction between manifest work on myth and the latent work of myth helps to show why Blumenberg's theory runs counter to certain conceptions of transcendence and imagination which took their inspiration ultimately from Judeo-Christian sources. Thus Blumenberg criticizes Cassier's enlightenment view of myth as fundamentally "pre-rational" (WM, p.xii), an interpretation attended by the mythopoeic notion that myths were simply created out of man's free imaginative expression. As Wallace points out, in a journal article Blumenberg criticizes Cassier

..for not trying to explain why the "symbolic forms" are posited, leaving us to assume instead that man, as animal symbolicum, simply expresses his `nature' in them, as his (apparently) free creations (WM, p.xiv).

In Blumenberg's model, strictly speaking, the work of myth cannot be understood as a free creation of man against the world. Rather, the latent function of mythic orientation is a primal adaption which is constitutive of man, first allowing him and his `world' of meanings to come into being: "man is always already on this side of the absolutism of reality" (WM, p.9). Thus a transition has to take place before we have "man" as an imaginative `symbol-maker' who forms mythic contents, and in this transition the function of myth as reduction of the hostile terror of reality is already set. Hence, when man begins symbolic creation, he is already working on myth:

..what remains is the setting up of images against the abomination--the maintenance of the subject, by means of the imagination, against the object that has not yet been made accessible (WM, p.10)

Thus in this interpretation of imaginative work, Blumenberg is clearly opposed to one tradition according to which "the power of generating images, the imagining of figures and histories" (WM, p.25-26) is an irreducible and spontaneous part of sovereign human agency, which reveals the divine aspect in human nature.⁽⁶⁸⁾ Rather, in Blumenberg's view, the "status naturalis" of the absolutism of reality is prior to the "mythical empowerment" and explains the functional reason why we need "wish, magic, and illusion" (pp.8-9) in the first place. "The absolutism of reality is opposed by the absolutism of images and wishes" (WM, p.8), but they are not equiprimordial, since the latter arises only on condition of the former.⁽⁶⁹⁾ As Wallace points out, this also puts Blumenberg in opposition to romanticism (WM, p.xxii), which shared and even extended the Enlightenment emphasis on individual human sovereignty, as well as the mythopoetic thesis, i.e. "the postulate--since Vico and Herder--of mankind's initial childlike poetry" (WM, p.61).

It should not be surprising that romanticism, with its emphasis on the imagination, shared the Enlightenment's notion of human transcendence and individual value. For it also shared the same "mythopoetic" view of human nature, according to which myth was an entirely unreflective, pre-rational form of expression. As Gadamer points out "the conquest of mythos by logos" is the fundamental schema of the philosophy of history that romanticism shares with the Enlightenment." Although romanticism values its idealized pastoral image of life close to nature over the Enlightenment's critical "freedom from `superstition',"

..the romantic reversal of the Enlightenment's criteria of value actually perpetuates the abstract contrast between myth and reason. All criticism of the Enlightenment now proceeds via this romantic mirror image of the Enlightenment.⁽⁷⁰⁾

As the influence of Kant on Coleridge attests, there are also complex links between the theory of "imagination" in Enlightenment philosophy and its crucial role in later romantic theories of artistic creativity.

The freedom of imaginative expression in Cassier's Kantian hermeneutics and in romanticism parallels the traditional Judeo-Christian dualism according to which the human "spirit" exists in some sense over against nature and allows individuals to act freely on the physical world. This notion of "spirit" in man ultimately derives from the Jewish doctrine that man is made in the "image" of the deity (Genesis 1, 26). It is original, spontaneous human creativity through which matter is `stamped' with form and meaning.

Notably, Blumenberg makes use of this familiar notion of `stamping' in his own analysis of significance, but he has to invert the traditional meaning of the metaphor to make it fit with his own theory. Thus he associates "pregnance" with Burkhardt's "royal right of the imprinted form" (WM, p.69), but he does not allow that these imprintings of significance are the result of active transcendence marking, signing, sealing (or appropriating) some substrate. Rather, he reverses Rothaker's analysis, and says: "Time does not wear away instances of pregnance; it brings things out in them--though we may not add that these things were in them all along" (WM, 69). This, of course, is a reference to his "Darwinism of Words" theory: through its selection process, the substrate is `eroded' and the `imprint' thus emerges out in the shape of what remains. In other words, significance or the `imprint' emerges through an invisible-hand process, rather than by creative initiative.

This is a very strained effort to change the meaning of the `stamping' metaphor, however. The problem is, under no plausible intepretation can an `imprinted image' or `stamped mark' be thought of as something that emerges through an unconscious process. This is rather the very paradigm of the active will, the assertion which `im-presses,' leaves its mark, stakes out its claim. Setting a seal as a sign of claim (Song of Songs: 8; 6) is the most primordial notion of active appropriation which we have in cultural history. As evidence of this, witness the fact that seal-script is the earliest (and most archetypal) form of `writing' in every culture.⁽⁷¹⁾ Even Nietzsche understands "coining" meaning in agreement with the active interpretation, against Blumenberg.

Martin Heidegger reaches the same conclusion in Being and Time when he points out that "the idea of `transcendence'--that man is something that reaches beyond himself--is rooted in Christian dogmatics."<sup>(72)</sup> As Heidegger sees, this notion of the transcendence of the free creative spirit originates from one of two primordial sources in our "traditional anthropology" of human nature. The first is the Greek notion of man as "animal rationale," and the second is the origin myth of man in Genesis, as summed up in the words: "'fasiamus hominem ad imaginem nostram et similitudinem'"<sup>(73)</sup>--"And God said: `Let us make man in our image, after our likeness'." This imago dei is the spirit, the divine "breath" or pneuma with which God makes "Adam," whose very name means "clay" or "mud."⁽⁷⁴⁾ In this action we have the archetype of transcendental work on inanimate nature, a `stamping' which makes a living image, thus spontaneously creating something new by forming raw material. And since man is made in the image of the creator, he is free and exercises a finite version of the same creative power in his capacity for making new forms and new images.⁽⁷⁵⁾

Blumenberg relates this Judeo-Christian notion of spiritual or imaginative self-assertion to the psychological idea of projection: man is "the creature who covers up the lack of reliability of his world by projecting images" (WM, p.8). Spirit is the figure for this projective capacity. Thus for Feuerbach, "divinity is nothing but man's self-projection into heaven" (WM, p.28). Blumenberg holds that this is an appropriate interpretation for the "God of monotheism" (WM, p.28) but not for the gods of Greek myth, because

the relation of `being made in the image of...' is recognizably different from the beautiful anthropomorphousness, with its invitation to artistic embodiment, of the Olympian gods. In them there is always a remainder of the originally foreign element (WM, p.29).

Their "foreign element" is the trace of the terrible hostility, the inhuman horror which has been "reduced" as the gods have been made successively more human. For this reason, Blumenberg asserts that myths are anthropomorphic but not anthropocentric: "while the function of myth does depend on its figures becoming anthropomorphic, the whole accent is on their having become anthropmorphic" (WM, p.135). In other words, in the Greek gods the latent meaning of myth still shows through. It is this ultimate functional meaning which is blocked from view if we start with man's supposedly transcendent symbol-making power as the origin of myths, and ignore what lies behind it.

But if imagination and all work on myth only begin their activities within a framework already defined by the latent function of myth, how does distancing from the absolutism of reality first generate this context in which mythic "meanings" and contents become possible? To provide an alternative to the enlightenment and romantic approaches, Blumenberg develops his own theory which equates this context with a notion of general "significance" drawn from the work of Wilhelm Dilthey and Martin Heidegger.

XI. Dilthey on Imagination and Significance

Blumenberg introduces the idea of significance to explain the unique attraction of myth as opposed to what is offered by "theoretical, dogmatic, and mystical ways" of viewing things (WM, p.67). In contrast to these other modes, what myth provides "can be designated by the term significance, taken from Dilthey" (WM, p.67). "Significance" in Blumenberg's sense means roughly the quality of being meaningful, but in no particular articulable way. For example, he notes that "improbable distinctly marked forms become indications of meaningfulness" just because the appearance of such things through physical processes seems unlikely (WM, p.74). In this example, we already see the way in which this general meaningfulness stands out against brute nature. In this sense, significance arises out of

..the suggestion that what is apparently meaningless contains meaningfulness. It does not have to take as much shape as the question, What does that mean? It already means, without any `what' (WM, p.75).

This felt quality of meaningfulness before any specific interpretation or specification is what Blumenberg calls pregnance. Thus significance includes:

..everything that possesses `pregnance' as opposed to indifference....As with the aesthetic object, part of the definition of significance is the way it emerges from the diffuse surrounding field of probabilites. History, like life, works against the tendency of a situation to be increasingly determined by probability, against the `death instinct' (WM, p.69).

Just as life emerges from inanimate matter, "significance" emerges in the improbable as opposed to automatic probabilities, and it opposes the return to meaningless determinism. Obviously, "preganance" is even more literally associated with life as opposed to death. Like the pregnant life-producing womb, in history "pregnance is resistance to factors that efface, that promote diffusion; resistance especially to time." (WM, p.69).

On Blumenberg's account, significance and its pregnant sense of meaning are associated with life precisely because they are in tension with the absolutism of reality. Unlike timeless and placeless Platonic ideas, "the characteristic differentiation of mythical `significances' stands out as a structuring that is opposed to the intolerable indifference of space and time" (WM, p.97). By giving "outlines to the homogeneous flow of time" (WM, p.99) myth can oppose the "insecurity and lack of confidence" produced by "the unfathomability of time" (WM, p.99). But we have to remember that in Blumenberg's model, significance (or the mythic orientation in general) is not something directly created and applied to nature by the independent power of human agency. Rather, significance is again the result that arises in the first reduction of the absolutism of reality:

Significance is generated not only by intensification but also by power depletion...as the moderation of something intolerable, the conversion of something unnerving into a source of forward pressure (WM, p.75).

Consequently, in Blumenberg's view, there must be something passive or involuntary in the origin of significance.

Blumenberg's connections between "significance" and "life" are evidently inspired by Wilhelm Dilthey's treatment of these themes in his aesthetic writings. Like Blumenberg, Dilthey relates "significance" to the connectedness of life that precedes and conditions all poetic creativity. In his 1887 work on The Imagination of the Poet, Dilthey comments on Shakespeare's Hamlet: "But at least one thing is clear, namely that the lived experience of the poet and its unnerving symbols constitute a dramatic core that cannot be expressed in any proposition."⁽⁷⁶⁾ Such symbols arising out of lived experience are pregnant with an inexpressible meaning precisely because they make us sense a deep connectedness in life: "everything comes together in the graphic, felt unity of the deepest life-experiences, and that is precisely the significance of poetry."⁽⁷⁷⁾ Significance is thus related to the unity of lived experience which first makes a lifeworld, a "nexus" that is the medium for meaningful relations. We see this again in Dilthey's later essay on Goethe and the Poetic Imagination, where he argues that poetry aims to show the "life-value" of things, i.e. their intrinsic value in relation to life, as opposed to their instrumental values as means to conceivable ends:

But life-values are related on the basis of the totality of life itself, and these relations give meaning to persons, things, situations, and events. Thus the poet addresses himself to what is significant."⁽⁷⁸⁾

The contrast here is very similar to Blumenberg's distinction between the contents of myth and its latent functional significance. The relations the poet wishes to express as his contents are first constituted as "significant" by their place in the unified whole of life, the lifeworld.

For Dilthey, as with the romantics who preceeded him in the 19th century, "significance" is related to the creativity of poetic imagination as well as to the lifeworld on which the poet draws. But at this point we must be aware of a crucial distinction between two kinds of imagination, a distinction Dilthey explicitly made in his later works on poetry:

From the function of the imagination in the world of daily life I now distinguish that productive activity of imagination through which a second world distinct from that of our practical activity is formed...this imagination deliberately fashions such a second world whenever someone strives to liberate himself from the bonds of reality.⁽⁷⁹⁾

This poetic "secondary world" is created by a productive kind of imagination, which can project possibilities that go beyond the "everyday" lifeworld, as in utopian thought. The lifeworld, on the other hand, is a original "milieu" in which

..each thing, or each person receives a particular force and coloring from its relations to my life. The finitude of existence, bounded by birth and death and restricted by the pressure of reality, awakens in me the longing for something enduring, changeless, and withdrawn from the pressure of things..⁽⁸⁰⁾

It is crucial to see that in this description, the lifeworld is already a world of meaning for me, but it is characterized by the finitude of existence as well. On the other hand, the productive imagination which forms the poetic world transcends these limits inherent in the lifeworld. As Dilthey comments in a discussion of naturalism, this imaginative capacity to create a new unity held together by a pivotal "point of impression" is limited only by "those conditions which result from the total order of reality within which the freely created image is possible.⁽⁸¹⁾ This creative kind of imagination which "transports the reader into a sphere of freedom"⁽⁸²⁾ carries the connotations of transcendence in the sense of "autonomy."

This connection between Dilthey's notion of the "productive imagination" and transcendence in the sense I have called Judeo-Christian is evinced throughout his aesthetic writings. For example, in his "Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics," Dilthey comments that "German transcendental philosophy rediscovered the creative capacity of human nature in all domains," an intuition which he traces through Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and so on (p.202-3). In "The Imagination of the Poet," he notes that "Goethe and his contemporaries shared Rousseau's faith in the autonomy of the person and his overall capacities" (p.148). The same notion underlies even more "romantic" conceptions, such as Schiller's. Thus in his "Goethe and the Poetic Imagination," Dilthey comments that

The idealism of freedom, which Schiller adopted from Kant, merely served to elucidate Schiller's great inner experience, in which his noble nature became aware of its dignity and sovereignty through conflict with the world (p.251-2).

But in Dilthey's view, this transcendent form of imagination is also governed in two ways. First, it has its own internal logic based on something like innate ideas. Anticipating Freud and Jung's later analyses of unconscious patterns and archetypes, Dilthey writes:

There exist stable lawful relations between inner states and outer images which manifest themselves in dreams and insanity...comparative considerations show that our psychological nature provides the basis for a sphere of natural symbols found in dreams and insanity, as well as for those found in language, myth, and poetry.⁽⁸³⁾

But secondly, these natural symbols are not just unconscious or innate ideas: the "lawful relations" mentioned here are bridging principles that link the "inner states to images contained in the nucleus of lived experience."⁽⁸⁴⁾ In other words, the typical patterns and archetypal symbols of poetic imagination are the result of the imagination working on tropes and images that already have a connection to feeling and significance in lived experience, the lifeworld realm. For example, a "motif" arises when "the significance of a life-relationship is apprehended in the material of reality through the poetic process." Notice that in this model, a life-relationship must already be pregnant with potential meaning before it can be apprehended and transformed through the poetic imagination, in which "the dark ground of lived experience is illuminated, or its significance is at least made partly transparent."⁽⁸⁵⁾

In this dialectical model of motif and symbol formation, the `productive' imagination is a kind of "spirit:" "What we call `motifs' are actually phenomena of the human spirit."⁽⁸⁶⁾ But it is clear from our examples that the poetic imagination is inevitably dependent on the lifeworld in which certain relations are already significant and awaiting poetic illuminating or articulation.

The limits of poetic imagination manifest themselves in the way the poet's formative power is rooted in his material...

A powerful tragedy is produced when poetic creativity confronts external states of affairs, reports, stories etc., as inexorable reality. The imagination then strives to give unity, inwardness, and meaning to this reality. To the extent that the recalcitrance of the factical proves invincible, the plot and the characters manifest a special kind of illusion and efficacy.⁽⁸⁷⁾

In other words, the unifying power of the productive imagination cannot completely fuse its materials into a secondary world, because it remains tied to the reality of life to and the significance which is already there in lived experience, awaiting expression. This explains one of Dilthey's comments in his later work on Goethe:

Lived relations govern the poetic imagination and come to expression in it, just as they have already influenced the perceptions of the poet. Here, involuntary and imperceptible processes prevail...This is the point at which the connection between lived experience and imagination in the poet begins to reveal itself. The poetic world is there before any particular event inspires the poet with the conception of a work and before he writes down its first line.⁽⁸⁸⁾

Again, the world of pregnant significance is "already there" for the poet before the productive imagination begins its work. Poetry can articulate specific relations that arouse strong feelings and freely transform natural images, because the lifeworld is already a potentially "meaningful" whole before this poetic process begins. As Dilthey says, lived experience is "the reality that manifests itself immediately, that we are reflexively aware of in its entirety, that is not given and not thought."⁽⁸⁹⁾

XII. Significance as the `Figurative Synthesis' of the Lifeworld

The foregoing analysis points to the intermediate position of the lifeworld (or unity of "lived experience") and its "significance." It is more than what is merely given, but precedes the application of thought-concepts; it is susceptible to meaning because it is unified, but it preceeds the creative activity through which the productive imagination freely works on it. This in turn explains Dilthey's reason for distinguishing the everyday imagination that "is inseperable from the whole psychic nexus" from the "productive imagination" of (mytho)poetic creativity. Evidently, on Dilthey's model, the "imagination of the world of daily life" must be a passive kind of imagination that synthesizes the pre-poetic unity of the lifeworld, as opposed to the active imagination that "produces a world distinct from experienced reality."⁽⁹⁰⁾

At this point, it is readily apparent that Blumenberg's analysis of myth parallels Dilthey's theory of significance and imagination in several ways. Dilthey's "productive imagination" is analogous to Blumenberg's notion of work on myth through man's capacity to project images. The "lifeworld" prior to the poetic process, however, is analogous to Blumenberg's world of pregnant significance that first arises from the very function or form of myth, i.e. the work of myth against the absolutism of reality. As Blumenberg says, just "to have a world" is already "the result of an art" (WM, p.7). The "art" that first creates the web of significance within which mythic contents are `worked' is Dilthey's passive or everyday imagination, which gives unity to lived experience.

In addition, the pregnant "significance" of the mythic "world" plays the same intermediate role in Blumenberg's theory as lifeworld significance plays in Dilthey's aesthetic analysis. Given that it is an ideal or virtual limit-point, as we saw earlier, pure or non-specific "significance" prior to mythic contents could be thought of as an intermediate threshhold between what I have called the "latent functional meaning" of myth and the "manifest meanings" (or expressed contents) of myths. Within the mythic world of significance, the contents and manifest meanings of mythology first become possible, but the phenomenon of "significance" itself is founded on the absolutism of reality. This non-specific "significance," which is felt as the pure potential for meaning, is also distinct from the latent functional "meaning" of myth, i.e. myth's role as a reduction of the absolutism of reality. Significance is the result of the reduction function (or the internal perspective reduction generates) but as Blumenberg says, "without this `prehistory,' the function of what is significant remains uncomprehended, though present" (WM, p.110). The very function or role of myth, which a theoretical `prehistory' describes, is covered over and prevented from becoming evident precisely by the mythic world of pregnant significance to which it gives rise:

The entire need for significance is based on the indifference of space and of time....Myth doesn't even let indifferences arise. Significance makes possible a `density' that excludes empty spaces and empty times" (WM, p.96).

Blumenberg's notion that "significance" arises especially out of repression of the indifference of space and time is important, because it points back to the Kantian origins of "significance" as a principle of mediation. In Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, space and time are the pure forms of sensible intuition in general.⁽⁹¹⁾ But the concepts of the understanding are only able to apply to the spatial manifold of sensible perception and the temporal manifold of apperception because those manifolds are first unified by what Kant calls the "figurative synthesis." Because this "synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuition" give