Care Crosses the River (review)

The power given to humanity in paradise was the power to name, not to define. What mattered was to call the lion and that it came, and not to know what it was when it didn’t come. Whoever can call things by their names doesn’t need to comprehend them. . . . The tyranny of names is grounded in names having maintained an air of magic: to promise contact with what hasn’t been comprehended.

(63–64)

This provocative quote, which comes just shy of halfway through Hans Blumenberg’s, Care Crosses the River, might reasonably be taken as the hermeneutic key to the entire volume. Blumenberg’s intent seems to be the unveiling of our lack of comprehension central to our human finitude by leading an insurrection against “the tyranny of names.”

The reader conditioned to a more analytic approach to philosophy will most likely find Blumenberg infuriating and frustrating, and perhaps even incomprehensible, for there are no systematic, sustained arguments developed here, nor are there any direct or explicit attempts to comprehend (or help the reader comprehend) any of the things “named” throughout the volume. However, the reader whose background is in the so-called Continental tradition is not likely to have a significantly better interaction with the text, either. It is not just true that Blumenberg evades sustained and linear argumentation; he seems to be committed to a sort of obfuscation as a philosophical strategy for achieving clarity. Written, as the jacket notes suggest, in a style evocative of Montaigne’s Essais, or Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the book is structured according to six sections, only indirectly related to one another, each of which is comprised of anywhere from nine to thirteen meditations that make no obviously consistent attempt at continuity, except, perhaps, in their reliance on metaphor. Some of the vignettes are as brief as a handful of sentences, while others range over a few pages. Along the way, Blumenberg’s reflections traverse a variety of disciplines in addition to philosophy, including but not limited to literature, history, theology, and psychology.

The book reads, for the most part, almost as though Blumenberg has written it to himself, or perhaps to an old and dear friend, for whom, after many years of shared experience, simply gesturing toward ideas suffices to convey their richness and intent, without their full and clear articulation being required. Although there are resonances not only with Montaigne and Adorno, but also with such works as Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings, the passages in Care Crosses the River are not so much aphoristic—although there are some zingers to be found: “The price of reaching safety from gnawing doubt is extreme endangerment” (4); “one’s neighbor is the person whom one only by chance happens not to be” (48)—as they are like extended musings, the philosophical significance of which is rarely directly evident. Moreover, one suspects that Blumenberg is fully aware of the difficulty his manner of presentation gives the reader; he begins the volume, rather ironically, with a section entitled “Maritime Emergencies,” loosely organized around the idea of being shipwrecked at sea. Despite Paul Fleming’s praiseworthy translation, which, one senses, makes Blumenberg eminently more accessible than must be the case in the German original, Care Crosses the River is a challenging read. Even those who read Derrida and Heidegger with ease may find Blumenberg tough going. The prose is dense, compact, and shot through with innumerable subtle, obscure, often subtextual references, frequently expressed in an idiosyncratic manner that leaves the reader with only the thinnest thread of recognition, yet nevertheless it is still somehow rather enjoyable. Reading Blumenberg, one regularly senses at certain junctures in the text that an important point is being made, and yet the point remains obscured.

But perhaps the point, or at least one important point, is simply to signal the significance of these junctures, rather than to attempt to actually make or develop a point beyond this heightening of the reader’s awareness. When a book so consistently evades directly making points...