Schriften zur Literatur, 1945–1958 by Hans Blumenberg (review)

Philosophers who pay attention to literature remain an anomaly in much of Anglophone philosophy, with the exception of Anglophones who devote themselves to Continental philosophy. Analytic philosophy animates itself these days mainly via parasitical relationships with neuroscience, artificial intelligence, biology, and political science. In places like New Brunswick and Miami, a few philosophers continue to beat their heads against the plaster over conundrums in propositional logic. In Europe, literature and philosophy live together, inform one another—and this collection of Blumenberg's writings about literature in the post–World War II era confirms that what look like two disciplines are, for many European intellectuals, more akin to the three-in-one of the Christian Trinity.

Blumenberg's own trinity—priest, philosopher, artist—emerges in his consideration of G. K. Chesterton in this collection, which includes Blumenberg's 1954 birthday present for Chesterton's eightieth, a commentary on Chesterton as a "counter-model" (Gegenmodell), a philosophically clarifying contrast to the works and Weltanschauung of G. B. Shaw. In the context of his Catholicism, Blumenberg probably could not help but be attracted to Chesterton, as Slavoj Žižek has been, and to Chesterton's use of criminal cases to underscore the ambiguity of grace between reason and unreason, faith and nonbelief. The young Blumenberg took to heart Chesterton's sentence, "It seems to me that the problems of the modern world are too complicated to be treated otherwise than in a simple way." Chesterton's call to reduce the number of scruples in order to live simply appeals to Blumenberg, though he warns us that Chesterton's Father Brown stories only "seem" simple. Achieving the simplicity that Father Brown models is not so easy. Still, it must be pursued, according to Blumenberg, who posits that Chesterton is convinced that God and simplicity always have something to do with one another.

This rich collection calls for prolonged study. The range of literary figures whom Blumenberg read shows that he was years ahead of some philosophers—such as Iris Murdoch, Robert Pippin, Martha Nussbaum, and Stanley Cavell—with more name recognition in the Anglophone philosophical community for assigning philosophical importance to writers like Beckett, Proust, and Henry James. The specific range is from Paul Claudel to Jules Verne, with Faulkner, C. S. Lewis, Evelyn Waugh, Robbe-Grillet, Ernst Jünger, Kafka, Thomas Wolfe, Dostoevsky, and Hans Fallada in between. Likely no one will be surprised that the table of contents has not a single essay about a woman writer. Along similar lines, Blumenberg scholars still need to work out the meaning of his fascination with Jünger and Hans Carossa, figures who are too völkisch for comfort.