Hans Blumenberg: The Threat to Theoretical Curiosity

Edmund Husserl

"counter to powerful interests"

(Image from The Husserl Page)

Many of my recent posts have spent an apparently inordinate amount of time delving into the so-called 'trial' of theoretical curiosity, that historical process by which the evaluation of curiosity changed from Antiquity's more or less neutral attitude through the Medieval period's condemnation of it as a vice to Modernity's extolling of it as a virtue.

If Hans Blumenberg is correct in the argument that he puts forth in his Legitimacy tome, then the Modern age emerged not as a secularization of the Medieval world, if one means by that expression that the Modern age simply appropriated Medieval concepts as its own in the same way that the Protestant states secularized the Catholic monasteries by confiscating their lands, their treasures, and their libraries. Rather, Modernity arose as something radically new, namely, through the self-assertion of mankind's right to unbounded curiosity as a existential necessity in the late Medieval period's nominalist construal of an indifferent cosmos and a hostile deity.

The 'trial' of theoretical curiosity might seem long over by now, possibly even of historical interest only, and such might have appeared the case in the early 60s, when Blumenberg's ideas were developing. As such, his study might have been seen as of theoretical interest alone, an investigation into an obscure issue long past, research that only a curious scholar would engage in. Perhaps so. Among scholars, at any rate, Blumenberg's work was recognized as original, even 'world-historical' in its far-reaching implications, but the issue seemingly remained an academic one.

Arguably, Blumenberg himself thought so at the time of his writing, for he noted:

Our situation is not that of the beginning of the modern age, however distinguishable by "specific transactions" that beginning may be. Is the problem of making a beginning still our problem? Jürgen Mittelstrass has answered this question by giving his concept of "'reflected' curiosity" as a specifically heterogeneous function that I would like to characterize as that of an already iterated 'reflection': What set the modern age's curiosity in motion no longer needs -- in its self-accelerated, immanently propelled motion -- rehabilitation and restitution of its primary energy; it has become indifferent to the new, as such, on account of its experience of the latter's inevitability, which may even constitute for it a burden to be endured, and instead it is all the more sensitive to the direction that belongs to the motion that is thus stimulated, sensitive to the question of where it is headed. (Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 235)

Still, Blumenberg knew better, knew from his own life -- interrupted at around age 20 by World War II -- the threat that powerful interests could oppose to curiosity:

In this [current] situation [of theoretical ease], anyone at all who "defends man's interest in what, so to speak, does not concern him" seems anachronistic -- unless perhaps this were once again an act of defending theoretical curiosity in circumstances where it was supposed to interest itself only in material that did not run counter to powerful interests. Even in the categorization of theory as a derivative attitude subordinate to the radical of "care," there is a possibility, if not a necessity, of requiring the interest in theory to legitimate itself once again by demonstrating a contemporary and relevant, or even an authoritatively prescribed, "care" as its source. Scarcely a decade after theory, as mere gaping at what is 'present at hand,' had been, if not yet despised, still portrayed as a stale recapitulation of the content of living involvements, it was the greatness of the solitary, aged Edmund Husserl, academically exiled and silenced, that he held fast to the resolution to engage in theory as the initial act of European humanity and as a corrective for its most terrible deviation, and that he required of it a rigorous consistency, which is still, or once again, felt to be objectionable. Hermann Lübbe has described as the characteristic mark of this philosophizing, especially in the late works, the "rationalism of theory's interest in what is without interest": "The existential problem of a scholar who in his old age was forbidden to set foot in the place where he carried on his research and teaching never shows through, and even the back of the official notice that informed him of this prohibition was covered by Husserl with philosophical notes. That is a case of 'carrying on' whose dignity equals that of the sentence, 'Noli turbare circulos meos' [Don't disturb my circles]." (Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pp. 235-236)

In a note to this text, the translator Robert Wallace explains the obscure allusion as "[a] remark reportedly made by Archimedes to Roman soldiers who, after conquering his city, Syracuse, were on the point of killing him" (p. 241, n. a). According to this tradition, Archimedes was busily working on problems of geometry, following the path that his theoretical curiosity was leading, all but oblivious to the dire events transpiring around him, and was simply requesting that no one disturb his work ("μή μου τούς κύκλους τάραττε").

In reality, of course, Archimedes was a practical man dedicated to the defense of his city and occupied in applying his theoretical expertise in geometry to his city's defense. According to Lucian of Samosata, Archimedes used a series of mirrors arranged parabolically to focus sunlight upon Roman ships and cause them to burst into flames before they could attack. Whether this story is true or not, it does recall the sort of role that Archimedes played as an advisor to the military on the use of scientific and technical knowledge for defensive purposes, and his work on improving the catapult could be applied not merely to defensive purposes but also to offensive aims.

Nevertheless, Blumenberg's point remains. Conditions are not always favorable to the open-ended questions posed by curious scholars. The obscure reference above to "theory [being despised] . . . as mere gaping at what is 'present at hand'" alludes to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, which Blumenberg implicitly criticizes for denigrating theory as a "mere gaping" at things "present at hand" that the active man would grasp. That active man Martin Heidegger who joined the Nazi Party and turned against his Jewish teacher Edmund Husserl was the very same man who conveyed to Husserl the Nazi directive that he was no longer permitted to use the library at Alfred Ludwigs University, in Freiburg, the place where he had conducted much of his research.

His curiosity was verboten.

For that malady, Europe required the treatment of radical surgery, and one might think the West cured, secure in a world now safe for theoretical curiosity, but I question whether or not this safety is so secure, for, arguably, we face again the resurgence of theological absolutism, only this time of a more implacable sort than the late Medieval Christian nominalist kind.

Perhaps a new defense is required...

Hans Blumenberg: Augustine's Voluntarist God

Papal Keys

One for reason,

one for voluntarism?

(Image from Papal See Site)

According to Hans Blumenberg, Augustine enters into a discussion of miracles and the regularity of nature and emphasizes God's role in disrupting nature's 'regularity' because "he fears a lawfulness to which appeal can be made, which would give legitimacy to the human inquisitive drive and would leave behind it on account of its insistence on rationality, only a restricted acknowledgment of God's free will" (Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, page 320).

Augustine notes a report in the work Roman Genealogy, by Marcus Terentius Varro (BC 116-27), and Blumenberg summarizes Augustine's use of Varro's report:

[A]n account is given of an alteration in the color, size, shape, and path of the planet Venus in the early epoch of the kings, a unique phenomenon never observed before or after. This testimony is cited in order to show the possibility of a natural object at a particular point in time exhibiting behavior different from what it had been seen to exhibit at all other times and what had been held to be its essential nature. From such a beginning, he could quite well have gone on to explain the unusualness of the phenomenon as subjective, in accordance with the formula that the miracle contradicts not nature but merely the nature that is known to us. This would have meant a broadening, but not an alteration, of the 'cosmos' concept: The regularity of nature would have been assumed as not indeed universally verifiable but still pregiven in principle. But Augustine does not hold to this line, and it was to have incalculable consequences for the history of Christian theology that he feared involvement in the cognitive pretension and in the exclusion of voluntarism more than he sought rationality. "So great an author as Varro," Augustine writes, "would certainly not have called this a portent had it not seemed to be contrary to nature. For we say that all portents are contrary to nature; but they are not so. For how is that contrary to nature that happens by the will of God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing? A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature but contrary to what we know as nature."

So far he seems to have succeeded in reconciling to some extent the rationality of the cosmos and the volitional nature of the biblical God. But evidently this result does not satisfy Augustine's theological zeal, and consequently he forces the concept of law and the metaphor of the ruler into an antithesis that is certainly unexpected after what has just been said: "What is there so arranged by the Author of the nature of heaven and earth as the exactly ordered course of the stars? What is there established by laws to sure and so inflexible? And yet, when it pleased Him Who with sovereignty and supreme power regulates all He has created, a star conspicuous among the rest by its size and splendor changed its color, size, form, and, most wonderful of all, the order and law of its course!" It is not evident at first glance why Augustine goes further here than is required by his premise of the subjectivity of 'miracles' in nature. But on closer inspection it turns out that the train of thought contains a point directed against curiositas: Augustine believes that he has found the meaning of God's forcible intervention in the lawfulness of nature in the fact that it breaks through and frustrates the presumptuous claim of scientific exactitude to know the laws of nature and with their help to predetermine events... (Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pages 320-321).

On this point, Blumenberg observes wryly that "Only the sovereign act of intervention, putting in question all claims to theoretical 'exactiness' (inerrabilis computatio), is seen as the point of the story" (Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 321). He then adds some elaboration:

Nature is not set free as the final authority and embodiment of everything dependable, on which the human relation to reality can be based. The conflict between the idea of the cosmos and voluntarism is decided for the Middle Ages, and at the same time those premises are designated, by implication, whose secural had to become necessary in order to constitute an idea of science that was to make the absolute dependability of nature a condition of human self-assertion (Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pages 321-322).

Here, Blumenberg alludes to an irony unintended by Augustine, namely, that the latter's emphasis upon theological voluntarism implied what would be necessary for overcoming that voluntarism -- and in that ironic sense contributed to the emergence of science in early Modernity.

Although Pope Benedict XVI, in his Regensberg address, contrasted the theological voluntarism of Islam's Allah with the more rational concept of God in Christianity, while acknowledging that such voluntarism was also present as a Nominalist 'episode' in the development of Christian theology, from Blumenberg's discussion of Augustine, we see that the problem posed by theological voluntarism runs deeper in Christianity.

Moreover, Augustine is no peripheral theologian like Ibn Hazm but a major figure who has left his mark on all succeeding Western Christian theology, whether Catholic or Protestant, and Augustine's oscillation between a rational and a voluntarist God suggests that the Hellenization of Christianity was less synthesis and more unstable coalition.