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VI Organic and Mechanical Background Metaphorics Metaphorics can also be in play where exclusively terminological propositions appear , but where these cannot be understood in their higher-order semantic unity without taking into account the guiding idea from which they are induced and ‘read off’. Statements referring to data of observation presuppose that what is intended can, in each case, be brought to mind only within the parameters of a descriptive typology: the reports that will one day be transmitted to us by the first voyagers to the moon may well require us to engage in a more thorough study of American or Russian geography if we are to grasp the selective typicality of these reports, corresponding to the eyewitnesses’ (anticipated) background.1 Faced with an artificial structure of speculative statements, the interpretation will only ‘dawn’ on us once we have succeeded in entering into the author’s imaginative horizon and reconstructing his ‘translation’. What preserves genuine thinkers from the crabbed 1. [Paradigms was published nine years before the first moon landing. Blumenberg’s fascination with the implications of space travel for human self-understanding, jocularly conveyed in his application to university authorities for seed funding to establish a new discipline called “astronoetics,” is most fully in evidence in the posthumously published volume Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997).] Organic and Mechanical Background Metaphorics 63 scholasticism of their imitators and successors is that they keep their ‘systems’ in vital orientation, whereas academic routine uproots concepts and suspends them in an idiosyncratic atomism. In undertaking an interpretive reconstruction, we will succeed in reviving such translations, which we propose to call ‘background metaphorics ’, only within the parameters of a certain typology, and this is most likely to occur where a prior decision between opposed kinds of metaphors—between organic and mechanical guiding ideas, for example—has been made. It is not just language that thinks ahead of us and ‘backs us up’, as it were, in our view of the world; we are determined even more compellingly by the supply of images available for selection and the images we select, which ‘channel’ what can offer itself for experience in the first place. Therein would lie the significance of a metaphorological systematics , on the possibility of which, however, I will refrain from speculating here. In his book “The Americans,” Geoffrey Gorer claims that European metaphors are organic whereas American metaphors are mechanical.2 Whether the observation is accurate need not concern us here; what interests me instead is the methodological import of the attempt to trace stylistic differences of a way of life3 back to a layer of elementary ideas that always shows itself most clearly where the ‘supply of images’ has been tapped. Yet before we rush to identify, in this antithesis of organic and mechanical metaphors, at least one subdivision of a secure metaphorological ‘systematics’, we should ask ourselves to what extent this dualism reflects our own, historically conditioned perspective. When, for example, we come across the term machina (or one of its cognates: machine, macchina, and so forth) in a historical text, it can be very difficult for us to avoid superimposing our modern understanding of what a ‘machine’ is on the far less specific content signified by the older word. When, moreover, we first encounter the expression machina mundi in an author like Lucretius, our initial association seems to have been fully confirmed. But machina is a ‘machine’ only in part and among other things. It refers more broadly to a contrivance that is both complex and purposeful, without that purpose being immediately transparent to the untrained eye; likewise to an occurrence of this kind: a cunning maneuver or ‘machination’, a deceitful trick, a startling effect. Machines in the narrower sense (for transporting goods or laying siege) fall into this category by virtue of their ability to astonish the unknowing spectator; that is why the expression has accrued so much of its history in the theater, where the effect on the spectator is no longer incidental. So far as I am aware, there is no precedent in Greek for the composite term machina mundi. Indeed, it is difficult to see how ‘cosmos’ could be assimilated to this semantic field: as machina, the world is ‘artfully contrived’ rather than ‘cosmic’, and the expression machina mundi pertains to a theology which either—as in Lucretius—is directed against the Stoic metaphysics 2. [Geoffrey Gorer, The Americans: A Study in National Character (London: The Cresset Press, 1948), 116.] 3. [English in...

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