Review Essay: Laughter From the Lifeworld: Hans Blumenberg's Theory of Nonconceptuality

Abstract

Hans Blumenberg is best known as the author of weighty studies on The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966), The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975) and Work on Myth (1979), all three of which were made available to an anglophone audience in the 1980s thanks to the herculean labours of translator Robert M. Wallace. Readers of those works, dazzled by their erudition and daunted by their sheer bulk, could be forgiven for classifying them as idiosyncratic, wide-ranging contributions to the discipline of intellectual history or Begriffsgeschichte, particularly as it often proved difficult when reading them to disentangle the author's own positions from his closely argued and demanding engagements with texts from the Western philosophical, scientific, theological and literary traditions. Since his death in 1996, however, a clearer understanding and appreciation of his philosophical legacy has begun to emerge. This process has been facilitated by a steady stream of publications from the archives, culminating in the release in 2006 of his major work of philosophical anthropology, Beschreibung des Menschen (Description of Man). Just as important, a number of early texts that were long out of print or difficult to obtain have been reissued in recent years. These texts -Blumenberg's first book, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie

Denying the international

“…As absolute metaphors, they are crucial in making sense of an otherwise unintelligible world. Rather than equipping us with a ready-made toolkit for applied metaphor studies, Blumenberg provides us with a conceptual sensitivity for dealing with phenomena that tend to resist conceptual grasp (see Savage 2008;Ifergan 2020), and it is the latter dimension which is particularly instructive with regard to the international. The international may not be a metaphor, but it quickly gives rise to characteristic metaphorical imaginations such as the balance of power or polarity.…”