Hans Blumenberg und die Phänomenologie

The phenomenology of time-consciousness marks one of the high points of Blumenberg’s philosophy; the issue is broached in Lifetime and World Time (1986), on the one hand, and in the posthumously published works Description of Man (2006), Theory of the Life-World and Phenomenological Writings (2018), on the other hand. Setting out from Blumenberg’s critical analysis of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, this article endeavors to reconstruct and interpret the most important aspects of Blumenberg’s own descriptions of the structures of time-consciousness. Special attention is paid to the concept of “presence” in Husserl’s lectures, whose metaphysical premises Blumenberg addresses, and to the concept of “recollection” (Erinnerung).

How can historical change be thought, in a very concrete way? How do we philosophically arrive at concepts that represent this change and at the same time grant reliability in an idealistic sense? This means that idealities must endure in the course of history and at the same time grant the possibility of historical change. If the problem of historicity is addressed in this way, a theory of history has to mediate between statics and dynamics. It has to grant both the stability and dynamics that are needed to ‘transport’ thoughts across generations and epochs. As I intend to show, Hans Blumenberg’s concept of historicity is based on these assumptions. The article starts from a transcendental account of the lifeworld and links it to Edmund Husserl’s Urstiftung in order to illustrate how historicity and historical change can be conceptualized philosophically.

Blumenberg has sometimes described his work as a phenomenology of history. The connection between history and phenomenology is particularly striking in the context of Blumenberg’s contributions to the philosophy of technology. In the course of his analysis of Husserl’s Krisis, Blumenberg develops, as my contribution aims to show, a conception of history in which complete technologization leads to a perfected lifeworld. Blumenberg formulates this partly explicitly within the framework of a three-stage model of history, but there are also implicit insights in Blumenberg’s texts that seem to work with such a structuring of history.

This paper reads Blumenberg’s posthumously published study Die nackte Wahrheit as a book left unfinished because a major, if not central, chapter was still pending: a chapter on Husserl’s metaphor of a dress of ideas (“Ideenkleid”) that veils the lifeworld. Arguing that Blumenberg aimed at a phenomenological foundation for his metaphorology based on his critique and inversion of the Husserlian concept of lifeworld, the article reveals resulting tensions between Blumenberg’s late and early theoretical approaches to a theory of metaphor that sought, but did not find, a solution in his own theory of lifeworld, which remained unfinished as well.

Blumenberg’s preoccupation with Husserl aimed at the anthropological implications of the latter’s transcendental phenomenology. The paper addresses some connections in Blumenberg’s posthumous Beschreibung des Menschen (Description of Man), in particular the nexus between body/embodiment, lifeworld, and intersubjectivity, to critically assess a few of his claims. The paper concludes by turning to two key concepts for Blumenberg’s anthropological transformation of Husserl’s phenomenology: self-preservation and reflection.

This article compares Sartre’s and Blumenberg’s theoretical approaches to the phenomena of shame and human attention, especially with reference to Sartre’s ontological and Blumenberg’s anthropological notion of visibility. In Sartre’s ontological view, our visibility as such gives rise to shame whereas Blumenberg maintains that this phenomenon can be adequately dealt with only with respect to specific (and contingent) anthropological conditions. Consequently, Blumenberg’s post-phenomenological philosophy of human visibility does not proceed any longer ‘back to the things themselves’. Instead, it draws on anthropological descriptions of what it means to become visible in our mundane existence. In this respect, everything depends on our attention and on our attention to attention as such.