Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg's Theory of Myth by Angus Nicholls (review)

This book provides a deeply researched introduction to Hans Blumenberg's theory of myth, largely by highlighting the influence of well-known and forgotten thinkers on Blumenberg's thought. In its historiographical detail, it reads almost like a work of Blumenberg's own hand—a self-reflexivity the author acknowledges in the prologue's title, "A Story about the Telling of Stories" (1). Chapters 1–4 are the most historical-documentary. They are a wonderful resource for readers unfamiliar with Blumenberg since much of this material summarizes current Blumenberg scholarship. Experienced Blumenberg readers will also find new insights from these chapters. Chapter 4, for instance, discusses Blumenberg's admiration for anthropologist Paul Alsberg's imaginative visions in his theory of Köperausschaltung, humanity's ever growing ability to engage its surroundings across physical distances, first with long-range weapons, later with concepts (111–16).

Chapter 5, on the reception history of Prometheus myths, prepares the ground for the ambitious argumentation of Chapter 6, on Blumenberg's theory of mythic reception events through the example of Goethe's self-fashioning as a Promethean writer. Chapter 7 and 8 are equally ambitious. They respond to Götz Müller's criticism that Work on Myth does not discuss "the dangerous proliferation of modern myths." Nicholls presents "political polytheism" as Blumenberg's answer to Schmitt's political theology (200, 210–15). Nicholls then explicates Blumenberg's unpublished diagnosis of Hitler's narcissistic mythology (238, also see Präfiguration). Hitler's delusions negate Blumenberg's ideal by denying the checks and balances found in the polytheistic division of powers.

Blumenberg is challenging to read because he conducts theory through examples, implicitly reducing the theory to a description of the examples. For instance, Höhlenausgänge (Cave Exits), the last major work Blumenberg published during his lifetime, enlists "leaving the cave" as a myth of emerging human civilization, but gives little theorization of myth or metaphor. Instead we learn about the pathos of intellectual history and about the pathos of caves. If analysis does not drive the last nail into the coffin of myth, as jokes can be explained to death, Blumenberg uses narrative to persuade us that cavernous spaces affect us emotionally because they are, always already, an effective metaphor for human emergence.

Myth and the Human Sciences carries Blumenberg scholarship forward by extracting a well-situated theory of myth from Blumenberg's work. In chapter six, it explains how myth and "absolute metaphor" often serve the same function for Blumenberg, whose arguments in Work on Myth present a more robust version of those introduced in Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Blumenberg proposes that myths survive through a "cultural selection" process, whose adaptive products are as stable as those of natural selection in biology (171). Nicholls articulates the problem with Blumenberg's evolutionary claims about "mythologems"—Nicholls' useful coinage to describe the images and very short narratives that seem, like insects, to achieve their unusual durability through their minute structures. Nicholls outlines the implicit hypotheses behind Blumenberg's claims: 1) "a high degree of accuracy" pertains when transmitting core "mythologems," 2) texts are adequate vehicles of mythologems, 3) they can vary without necessarily losing their specific functionality, like genes, 4) historical contexts exert analogous pressure to adapt on mythologems as environmental contexts do on genes. While exploring this analogy may seem frivolous since Blumenberg rarely insists on it (and his commentators prefer to focus on his technological analogies), it would provide the most coherent, systematic analogy for making sense of Blumenberg's work. Nicholls deflates the force of Blumenberg's analogy by showing that even theorists who develop notions of stable cultural data ("memes"), such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have run into these problems and all but retracted their theories (171–72).

Blumenberg criticism too often foregoes close reading in favor of supplying the broader claims absent in Blumenberg's text. Chapter six offers a faithful close reading of Blumenberg's engagement with...