Philosopher Hans Blumenberg: Reading time as a lifetime
Photo:Private collection Bettina Blumenberg / Suhrkamp
Some believe that philosophy should create clarity. It should enable insights that sort of put your thinking in order and, in the end, facilitate action or even life. For this group of readers, the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, born 100 years ago in Lübeck and now featured in two biographies, is not a good address. Anyone who reads his books can hardly take any of them home. Instead, he made the experience that reading time can be understood as a lifetime that is spent in amazement and pleasure, but which can hardly be used. The riddle inherent in their titles - "Shipwreck with a spectator", "The worry goes over the river" - will never be solved. It is more likely to spread. Even the "work on the myth", as a major work published in 1979 is called, did not erode this. Rather, she created a new one, namely the author Hans Blumenberg.
Who was this man who didn't fit into a template and didn't leave one behind? The colleague Odo Marquard, like Blumenberg a gifted aphorist, characterized Blumenberg's books as "fat problem detective stories". The fundamental problem: the conditionedness of thinking. Made clear: Why do the majority of us now take it for granted that an angry God does not send us the coronavirus as a punishment for carefree lifestyle? That the sun doesn't revolve around the earth? Or that curiosity is something productive and generally good? How do paradigms of thought and mentalities detach - and how can you still read authors who formed their understanding of themselves and the world centuries or millennia ago, under a sky that was literally differently populated?
In problem history neighborhood
On the one hand, these questions are philosophical-historical, but Blumenberg does not proceed like a historian, but rather like the essayist Michel de Montaigne. He had quotes from his beloved authors carved into the beams of his think tank; Blumenberg had card boxes that collected around 30,000 excerpts like their own notes. Without prejudice to any chronology, he brings authors such as Jean Paul, Arthur Schopenhauer and the apostle Johannes into conversation with one another, "in problem-historical neighborhood", as his biographer Jürgen Goldstein calls it.
Goldstein's "philosophical portrait" - the subtitle of the book - is an excellent introduction to Blumenberg's work, which achieves the impossible: to a certain extent to stop a ceaseless movement without taking away what is alive. For Blumenberg, thinking meant: taking detours. The shortest path between two points seems to be the most sensible way to get there. But what is gained in the process, or: What has you not seen on this path?
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Title: Hans Blumenberg: A Philosophical Portrait
Editor: Matthes & Seitz Berlin
Number of pages: 624
Author: Goldstein, Jürgen
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Product reviews are purely editorial and independent. Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase. More information hereGoldsteinstill knew his hero. He was a student assistant in Münster, where Blumenberg held his last professorship. In his portrait the respect for the philosopher's imperative to be inaccessible appears, which, the older he got, more and more relentlessly withdrew from personal encounters. In an anecdote by Odo Marquard, who passed away in 2015, which Goldstein passed on, the situation was brought to the fore: During a telephone appointment at a fixed hour, Marquard let five minutes pass by, "a little academic quarter", not out of negligence but out of politeness he rang the doorbell of the retired colleague. In order to then receive the notification from one of Blumenberg's sons that the appointment has now passed and that the father now has no more time.
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Title: The absolute reader: Hans Blumenberg. An intellectual biography
Publisher: Suhrkamp Verlag
Number of pages: 816
Author: Zill, Rüdiger
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Product reviews are purely editorial and independent. Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase. More information hereThe fact that the academic friendship did not break because of this speaks for Marquard's admiring long-suffering, but also for Blumenberg's aura, who apparently used rather than harmed intolerance and brittleness.
It is probably no coincidence that the biographer Rüdiger Zill, who never met Blumenberg, approaches the person who died 24 years ago with less scruples. From his research, which includes letters and documents from the estate, the image of a thinker emerges who completed the last creative period in "cheerful bitterness"; highly concentrated, remote from the world and at the same time wide awake when it comes to questions about the importance of one's own actions.
"This country has remained scary to me"
A letter to his publisher Joachim Unseld shows the self-confidence of the author and how he parried what he thought was unreasonable: "Dear Mr. Unseld," it says here, "I would like to thank you for the table talk given to me. I always like to listen to you whatever turns you take. Now you've decided to find me "sensitive" after being "greedy for money" for more than a decade - just as long as there was an audience for it decided who must be to blame when things don't go well. "
It is by no means Zill's project to make the unapproachable approachable as the "mimosa" for which he was considered by some colleagues. On the contrary, one of the most impressive aspects of his polished study is how he describes the fate of the German Blumenberg - and its possible consequences.
The "half-Jew" Hans Blumenberg survived the last few weeks until the end of the war in hiding after he had previously had to do forced labor in the Zerbst camp in Saxony-Anhalt. Three of his aunts were murdered in the extermination camp. "This country has remained uncanny to me," he said in 1968, when the question of who was on which side - and had been 30 years earlier - generated social pressure. He would determine for himself who was to be forgiven for his entire life. "I didn't want to be what I didn't need to be: the Last Judgment."
Even after reading both books, Blumenberg remains a productive puzzle. Not nevertheless, but also because of this, it is an incredible gain in life to read it.
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