Hans Blumenbergs Multiple Modernities A

8/16/2019 Hans Blumenbergs Multiple Modernities A

1/22

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vger20

Download by: [University of Texas Libraries] Date: 19 September 2015, At: 07:28

The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory

ISSN: 0016-8890 (Print) 1930-6962 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vger20

Hans Blumenberg's Multiple Modernities: ASpinozist Supplement to Legitimacy of the ModernAge

Tracie Matysik

To cite this article: Tracie Matysik (2015) Hans Blumenberg's Multiple Modernities: A Spinozist

Supplement to Legitimacy of the Modern Age, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture,Theory, 90:1, 21-41, DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2014.973356

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2014.973356

Published online: 02 Apr 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 139

View related articles

View Crossmark data

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/00168890.2014.973356&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2015-04-02http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/00168890.2014.973356&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2015-04-02http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/00168890.2014.973356http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/00168890.2014.973356http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=vger20&page=instructionshttp://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=vger20&page=instructionshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2014.973356http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/00168890.2014.973356http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vger20http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vger20


2/22

The Germanic Review, 90: 21–41, 2015

Copyright c Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0016-8890 print / 1930-6962 online

DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2014.973356

Hans Blumenberg’s Multiple Modernities:A Spinozist Supplement to Legitimacy of the Modern Age

Tracie Matysik

This essay focuses on a little-known essay by Hans Blumenberg on self-preservation

and inertia, which the author reads as a supplement to his more famous Legitimacy of

the Modern Age. She maintains that the Spinozist emphasis in the supplement offers an

open conception of reason, one that is to be found in Legitimacy but is not emphasized

there. Using the more open concept found in the supplement to read Legitimacy anew,

she is able to situate it as a critical response to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of

Enlightenment and the latter’s argument about the inherent proclivity of reason to seek

domination. She further situates this critical approach by Blumenberg in dialogue with

more recent theoretical discussions that have highlighted problematic assumptions about

the nature of secular subjectivity and secular reason.

Keywords: Theodor Adorno, Hans Blumenberg, Max Horkeimer, self-preservation,

Baruch Spinoza

If advocates of the secular long advertised it as “value neutral,” a position of tolerance,

theorists more recently have been interested in its “content,” the values that surreptitiously

fill its various formations.1 Of particular concern to critical theorists in their efforts to map that

content has been the matter of self, subjectivity, and agency. Concerns about citizenship and

the secular public sphere proliferate, as do those about secularity and intimacy, sexuality, and

1Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, “Introduction,” in Rethinking

Secularism, ed. Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and Van Antwerpen (New York: Oxford University Press,

2011), 5. Important examples include Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,

2007); Michael Warner, Jonathan Van Antwerpen, Craig Calhoun, eds., Varieties of Secularism in a

Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and

Its Critics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, eds.,

Political Theologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).

21


3/22

22 THE GERMANIC REVIEW VOLUME 90, NUMBER 1 / 2015

personal comportment. With urgent matters of individual and collective freedoms at stake,

questions abound regarding the affective makeup of secularism and its subjects, both the

bodily and intellectual activity of its practitioners: Does the promotion of secularity actually

privilege rationality over emotions? Or does the secular favor certain emotions over others?

And what kind of sociality and social emotions does the secular enable—one of emotionalattachment between individuals, or one of atomization?

Chief among the ideas recently interrogated is the implicit valorization of the secular

subject as rational and autonomous. Charles Taylor, for instance, has described the modern,

secular world as one featuring the “buffered” self—a self that recognizes his or her individual

belief system as one among many. These “buffered selves” are in contrast with what he calls

“porous” selves, individuals so integrated into a particular belief system that they have no

capacity for reflection on it.2 Important for Taylor is the fact that “buffered” selves can

reasonably come together and entertain their differences; there is no need to banish religion

from the public and secular sphere.3 Others have been more critical of the supposed rational

and autonomous or “buffered” self, seeking to expose the power structures that sustain

it and the social and ideological violence its myth helps to perpetuate. Authors such as

Wendy Brown, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Michel de Certeau have sought to illuminate

assumptions in realms such as scholarship, activism, medicine, and law about a certain

kind of liberal, rational subject as the norm against which other types of subjectivities are

measured.4 Yet whether in celebration or in critique, theorists of the secular seem to agree

that its dominant discourse relies on this concept of a free subject, one who chooses for or

against a religion, for or against a set of moral and emotional options. The content of the

choices seems to matter less than the very idea of the existence of an autonomous and rational

subject as agent.

In what follows, I want to return to a theorist of the secular from an earlier genera-

tion, namely the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, who, I suggest, has something tooffer the present discussion, namely a provocative challenge to the model of the rational

and autonomous subject as the model secular agent. Blumenberg is probably best known

for his monumental Legitimacy of the Modern Age, a book first published in 1966, revised

2Taylor, A Secular Age, 37–42.3Hent de Vries speaks of the post-secular, in at least one of its meanings, in complementary terms,

in which a self-understood “secular” state recognizes the ongoing necessary presence of one or more

religious communities in its realm. In “Introduction,” de Vries and Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies,

3. See also the discussion between Jürgen Habermas and Taylor in Eduardo Mendieta, Jonathan Van

Antwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, eds., The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2011), 15–69.4Wendy Brown, “Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians,” in

de Vries and Sullivan, Political Theologies, 298–317. See also Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion:

Tolerancein theAge of Identity andEmpire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 2006); Additional

examples include Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2003); Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press,

2007); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2012), xii, 1–39; Michel de Certeau, Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael

Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).


4/22

MATYSIK HANS BLUMENBERG’S MULTIPLE MODERNITIES 23

and expanded in 1971, and translated into English in 1983. In this work, he established his

“reoccupation” thesis—that is, the idea that modern thought had evolved out of medieval

theology and, consequently, often utilized the external forms of its predecessor while mean-

ingfully transforming the content . In his terminology, the external forms may bear some

resemblances to their medieval precursors, but they have been “reoccupied” by modernconcerns and thus need to be taken on their own terms. Blumenberg’s motivation was to

defend elements of European rational–philosophical and scientific thought against prevalent

secularization theses that found modern concepts to be often unacknowledged repetitions

of theological categories. One target was the philosopher Karl Löwith, for instance, who

had examined in his Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy

of History (1949) modern philosophical notions of progress, finding their underlying struc-

tures to be indebted to Christian eschatology.5 Likewise, Blumenberg referenced as a good

example Carl Schmitt’s famous claim from his 1922 Political Theology that “all significant

concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”6 Blumen-

berg’s concern in Legitimacy was to counter the seeming delegitimation of modern thought

that these conceptions of secularization had implied. Insisting on neither radical break nor

simple continuity or repetition between the medieval and modern eras, Blumenberg had set

out to demonstrate the “legitimate” terms in which modern thought confronted inherited

questions while providing answers relevant to new ways of thinking.

In his effort to map out key features of modern European thought, Blumenberg struck

on the concept of self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung) as a central feature of the modern rational

worldview, where self-assertion refers to “an existential program, according to which man

posits his existence in a historical situation and indicates to himself how he is going to

deal with the reality surrounding him and what use he will make of the possibilities that

are open to him.”7 Interestingly, however, in a largely overlooked follow-up essay of 1969,

Blumenberg identified self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung) as the quintessential feature of modern rationality.8 The term is clearly related to self-assertion, and yet it is at once more

primary and more diffuse than its conceptual neighbor.9 At stake in the early-modern rise

5Hans Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1983), 27–29; Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy

of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).6Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans George Schwab

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36.7Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 138.8Hans Blumenberg, “Selbsterhaltung und Beharrung: Zur Konstitution der neuzeitlichen Rationalität,”

Akademie der Wissenschaften der Literatur: Abhandlungen der Geistes- und SozialwissenschaftlichenKlasse 11 (1969): 335–383, citation to 337; reproduced in Hans Ebeling, ed., Subjektivit ̈ at und Selb-

sterhaltung: Beitr ̈ age zur Diagnose der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976); available in

English translation as “Self-Preservation and Inertia: On the Constitution of Modern Rationality,” in

Contemporary German Philosophy, Vol. 3, ed. Darrel E. Christensen, Manfred Riederl, Robert Spae-

mann, Reiner Wiehl, and Wolfgang Wieland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,

1983), 209–256. References in this essay pertain to the original 1969 version of the text.9A sustained discussion can be found in Hans Ebeling, Selbsterhaltung und Selbstbewusstsein: zur

Analytik von Freiheit und Tod (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1979).


5/22


of the notion of self-preservation was the simple and simultaneously monumental shift from

a world that is seen to be both created and held together by a God to a world in which the

burden of preservation falls on itself and on individual things in it. Focusing on the related but

different implications of self-assertion and self-preservation, I want to suggest that the essay

on self-preservation stands in a provocative and supplementary relationship to Legitimacy,offering an interpretive opening. That is, I want to suggest that Blumenberg’s treatment of

self-preservation and of the specifically Spinozist meaning he gave to it opens up a non-

anthropocentric category of rationality right next to the very anthropocentric category of

self-assertion. Moreover, I want to explore how the non-anthropocentric dimensions of self-

preservation trouble any easy connection between the modernity that Blumenberg wanted

to defend and the liberal, autonomous subject that his focus on self-assertion might seem to

imply.

The essay that follows thus has two aims. First, it seeks to situate historically Blumen-

berg’s essay on self-preservation both in reference to his own Legitimacy and in reference

to his potential interlocutors. It has often been observed that Blumenberg’s works rarely

confronted head-on the contemporary political concerns they were addressing, hiding their

polemics instead behind dense philosophical and academic language.10 Blumenberg’s article

on “Self-Preservation and Inertia” is no exception. While Blumenberg’s article reads as a

highly academic enterprise, his contemporaries were quick to see that he was intervening

in an ongoing political debate about the meaning of subjectivity, affect, and rationality in

modern life generally and in the aftermath of National Socialism more specifically. My

reading of the essay as responding to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of

Enlightenment seeks to bring out the implicit political–theoretical intervention.

Second, the essay will conclude with brief reflections on Blumenberg’s possible con-

tributions to more recent theorizations of the secular. To be sure, Blumenberg’s stated interest

in the topic was strictly philosophical. He was not concerned with whether or not specificpopulations exhibited a decline in religious belief or practice; nor was he particularly inter-

ested in whether or not religion had retreated from the public square or separation of church

and state had occurred in specific settings. However, strictly confined to philosophy, he was

very much interested in the content of modern thought—eschewing the term “secular” itself.

That is, he examined the presuppositions that modern thought has held regarding reason,

affect, inquiry, and the formations of the self. I want to suggest that the juxtaposition of

self-preservation and self-assertion opens up his writing to an argument about the possibility

of multiple and competing tendencies in modern rationality and the possibility of multiple

forms of sociality and emotions associated with the secular and rational subject.

10See, for instance, Elizabeth Brient, The Immanence of the Infinite: Hans Blumenberg and the Thresh-

old to Modernity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 6; Anna Wertz, “The

Genesis of Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” PhD Dissertation, University of Cali-

fornia, Berkeley, 2003, 6; Brad Tabas, “Blumenberg, Politics, Anthropology,” Telos 158 (Spring 2012):

135.


6/22


BLUMENBERG ON SELF-PRESERVATION

It pays to begin with a brief overview of Blumenberg’s argument in “Self-Preservation and

Inertia” and the place he accorded Spinoza in his narrative. On the surface, Blumenberg would

seem to have been directing his polemic against the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey,

who had situated Spinoza as part of the neo-Stoic revival in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries. Indeed, Dilthey had identified Spinoza as that revival’s most rationalist–universalist

representative and as perhaps the purest inheritor of the Stoic concept of self-preservation.11

Blumenberg, however, found the premise flawed, as it failed to recognize the discursive

effects of the intervening medieval era on the concept of self-preservation. The Stoics, he

explained, had understood preservation in terms of a “determined canonical form” of the

world. That is, they were concerned with how the world and its individual entities hold

themselves together, the world itself centered against a vacuum or empty space beyond its

contours, and individual entities performing a comparable form of self-centering.12 In this

framework, the Stoics understood self-preservation to be preservation in alignment with that

predetermined form of nature. Conversely, Blumenberg maintained, medieval theologianshad moved beyond the problematic of empty space and natural form. They were interested

rather in the contingency of the world, its existence altogether, or “the idea of something

coming from nothing and being sustained only through the will of god.” Accordingly, they

were most concerned about “the dependence of the world on its creator.” 13 In short, medieval

theology had made the question of preservation a “transitive” question about the divinity that

both produces and holds the world together.14

When Spinoza seemed to resuscitate the Stoic paradigm by returning to immanence

and taking existence for granted, Blumenberg argued, he was responding to the medieval

problematic and not to the Stoic one. In responding to the medieval problematic, he main-

tained, Spinoza was interested primarily in eliminating the unreliable transcendent God upon

whose will the original and continued existence of the world depended. As a result, the

extraordinary feature of Spinoza’s concept of self-preservation was that it was bound neither

to the canonical form of nature that the Stoics advocated nor to the teleology and contin-

gency of the medieval-Christian paradigm. Blumenberg thus saw the absolute importance

of Spinoza’s concept of self-preservation to lie in its radical break from all teleology—from

all sense of natural form or divine will. Moreover, this break from teleology held both for

Spinoza’s nature, or God, as well as for the individual entities in the world. Rather than

aligning themselves with nature—a stance Blumenberg associated with Stoicism—Spinozist

11Wilhelm Dilthey, “Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation,”

in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey, Vol. II, 10th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,

1977), 285.12Blumenberg, “Selbsterhaltung und Beharrung,” 352.13Ibid., 353.14Ibid., 373.


7/22


things in the world simply strive to persist; and the sum of all things striving to persist makes

up a nature that endures without form or telos.15

But what difference does it make whether self-preservation functions in terms of an

ordered or non-ordered—in Blumenberg’s terms, teleological or non-teleological—nature?

What are the implications for the content of the concept? According to Blumenberg, theStoics operated with an organic model of self-preservation, in which it made sense to “speak

of ‘forces”’ and to “equate nature with force of conservation.” 16 Most significantly, for

Blumenberg, this organic model of self-preservation allows for internal contradictions within

the individual entity. The fundamental ethical law in its earliest Stoic formulation by Zeno,

according to Blumenberg, was “to live according to one’s nature.”17 However, the Stoic canon

quickly rewrote the command as “to live in accordance with nature.”18 In this canonized

reformulation lay the possible conflict, as it implied “a determinate ‘nature,’ or . . . insertion

in the nature”19 —and hence the possibility that one might conceivably have to choose

between living in accordance with one’s own nature and in accordance with the nature and its

particular form. Moreover, it may even be necessary, according to this second formulation, to

sacrifice one’s own nature in order to align with the nature. To be sure, for the Stoics, it was

assumed that living in accordance with one’s nature was usually in coincidence with living in

accordance with nature altogether. Yet the fact that the Stoics would allow for suicide when

necessity demanded it might speak to Blumenberg’s point.20

Conversely, Blumenberg maintained that non-contradiction (Widerspruchsfreiheit )

characterizes the modern concept of self-preservation. If the concept was first artic-

ulated by Hobbes, Blumenberg claimed, it was elaborated more philosophically and

consistently—“abstractly”—by Spinoza: “What Spinoza accomplished for this concept’s

history lay above all in the highest level of abstraction that he gave to the principle of

self-preservation beyond its organic-metaphorical tradition and its ethical as well as political

applicability.” Further, he added, “In his abstract generalization, the law of self-preservationno longer has anything to do with a particular form, with an organic drive, with a psychical

effort in itself. It lost that teleological implication.”21 Blumenberg insisted that this con-

ception of self-preservation as necessarily free from contradiction should be understood as

mechanistic, metaphorically in line with Newton’s conception of inertia. It is a principle that

sets in automatically, always reigns, and can never be compromised.22

15Ibid., 371–372. A similar reading can be found in Firmin DeBrabander, Spinoza and the Stoics:

Power, Politics, and the Passions (London: Continuum, 2007), 11–12. See also Moira Gatens and

Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 2002).16Blumenberg, “Selbsterhaltung und Beharrung,” 345.

17Ibid., 349.18See Stobaeus 2.75,11, in Section 63 of A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Blumenberg, “Selbsterhaltung und Beharrung, 349.19Ibid., 349.20See commentary by Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 428–429.21Blumenberg, “Selbsterhaltung und Beharrung,” 371.22Ibid., 373. Hans Ebeling concurs on the importance of non-contradiction, claiming also that Spinoza

resolved a fundamental contradiction in Hobbes’s theory, in Ebeling, Selbsterhaltung und Selbstbe-

wusstsein, 49–53.


8/22


Here Blumenberg’s critique of a fellow theorist of self-preservation may help to clarify

his position. Robert Spaemann, a Catholic philosopher and contemporary of Blumenberg, also

saw the concept of self-preservation as a quintessential expression of modern thought, and

he, too, found its best expression in Spinoza. But Spaemann emphasized in his interpretation

an “inversion of the teleology” between existence and activity. Seeking to put emphasis onactivity rather than on the pre-established existence of an entity, Spaemann maintained, “the

thing doesn’t grow into being active, but rather activity for its sake has for its exclusive goal

the preservation of that which already is.”23 Yet for Blumenberg, if Spaemann’s shift to a

focus on activity was promising, it still failed to grasp the radicality of Spinoza’s approach

to self-preservation. In Spaemann’s interpretation, activity always aims toward a given self,

whereas in Blumenberg’s interpretation, the essence of self-preservation is the activity itself,

untethered to a pregiven self.24

SELF-PRESERVATION AND SELF-ASSERTION

On the surface, this article on Spinoza and self-preservation would seem to repeat the basic

premises of Legitimacy. In this case, Blumenberg demonstrated how the category of self-

preservation, which had been used in earlier formations, had been “reoccupied” by modern

concerns and thus had taken on new meaning. Yet the content of the concept stands in a

provocative relationship to the term emphasized in Legitimacy, namely “self-assertion.” It

pays thus to sort out the relationship between the two terms.

In Legitimacy, Blumenberg suggested that the rise of human self-assertion was part

of a “second overcoming of Gnosticism.”25 Medieval theology, he maintained, had hit a

stumbling block in its assertion of an omnipotent creator-God: in short, if God is creator

and savior, how does one explain bad things in the world? Why would the God who would

save the world have also created evil in it?26

Augustine had provided the first but ultimatelyunsuccessful overcoming when he ascribed to humanity the origin of evil.27 But Augustine’s

solution ultimately began to fray as the certainty of creation and its preservation came into

question. In this instance, the “bad” in the world no longer pertained to moral evil so much

as it did to the “‘facticity’ of reality.”28 In this new condition, Blumenberg explained, “man

appears not to be ‘taken into consideration,”’ that is, the world cannot be assumed to be

made with humans and their salvation in mind. Rather, humans are on their own to preserve

themselves, like all other beings in the world. The “bad” then becomes that which threatens

23Robert Spaemann, “Bürgerliche Ethik und nichtteleologische Ontologie,” in Ebeling, Subjektivit ̈ at und Selbsterhaltung, 80.

24Blumenberg, “Selbsterhaltung,” 335–336.25On Blumenberg and Gnosticism, see Benjamin Lazier, “Overcoming Gnosticism: Hans Jonas, Hans

Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy of the Natural World,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 4 (2004):

619–637.26Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 128–129.27Ibid., 133.28Ibid., 138.


9/22


humans’ existence, and human “self-assertion” is the response. In this context, human self-

assertion seeks to impose an interpretation on the chaos of nature that emerges when no divine

purpose and no privileged position for humanity can be presupposed. Science is one product

of self-assertion, but it is not the only product. Art, too, might be a form of self-assertion.

Crucial for Blumenberg is the “technique” itself, or the practice by which humans assertthemselves over and against the natural world.29

Even as self-assertion is closely tied to self-preservation, a striking contrast emerges

between the two in Blumenberg’s account. Here a brief detour through Spinoza’s under-

standing of self-preservation is in order. In his Ethics, Spinoza speaks of the conatus as that

“with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being” and as “the actual essence of

the thing itself.”30 Or, in other words, the essence of all things is their endeavor to persist.

Importantly, the description pertains to all things: to animate and inanimate, sentient and

nonsentient alike.31 Thus when Blumenberg insisted on the “mechanical” as opposed to “or-

ganic” nature of Spinoza’s self-preservation, he was speaking to the fact that it pertains to a

state of being or circumstance and thus holds as much for a chair or a rock or a constellation

as it does for a human being or an animal or a tree. No self-awareness is necessary for the

principle of self-preservation, no “inclination” or “impulse.”32 Moreover, as these examples

suggest, the nature of a “thing” that strives to persist can be both multiple and partial. That

which endeavors to persist may be a unity made of parts or a whole that partakes in larger

unities.33 Etienne Balibar has suggested the helpful notion of “transindividuality” to speak

to Spinoza’s ontology, where the individual entity evolves out of a “preindividual” condition

and is open to further differentiations.34

Finally, in the human domain in particular, Spinoza explains, self-preservation is best

pursued in cooperation between similar entities; rationality leads one to cooperation. At

a simple level, this premise pertains to political organization, the combining of individual

powers in one stronger unity.35

At a subtler and more pervasive level, however, it also pertainsto affective social bonds. In Spinoza’s philosophy, emotions are directly related to power:

they are “the affections of the body by which the body’s power of activity is increased

or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of those affections.”36 In other

29Ibid., 141–142.30Proposition 7, Part III of Baruch Spinoza, “Ethics,” in Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael Morgan,

trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 283.31In Michael Della Rocca’s words, “everything in the world plays by the same rules.” In Spinoza

(London: Routledge, 2008), 5. On Spinoza’s “naturalism,” see Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics

of Renaturalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

32Blumenberg, “Selbsterhaltung,” 371.33On the nature of bodies, see Proposition 13, Part II of Spinoza, “Ethics,” 251–255.34Etienne Balibar, Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality: A Lecture Delivered in Rijns-

burg on May 15, 1993, at http://www.ciepfc.fr/spip.php?article236 (accessed July 31, 2014). See also

Aurelia Armstrong, “Autonomy and the Relational Individual: Spinoza and Feminism,” in Feminist

Interpretations of Baruch Spinoza, ed. Moira Gatens (University Park: Pennsylvania State University

Press, 2009), 43–64.35Scholium, Proposition 18 and Proposition 35, Part IV of Spinoza, “Ethics,” 331, 337–338.36Definition 3, Part III, Spinoza, “Ethics,” 278.


10/22


words, emotions are increases or decreases in the individual’s power to exist and thrive, to be

active. Positive emotions enhance power or the striving to persist, while negative emotions

detract. Importantly, emotions are also mimetic; that is, the emotions of one affect those of

another.37 Thus one’s capacity for self-preservation, one’s power, is enhanced through the

positive emotions and increased power of another. Importantly, and as a result, the rationallogic of self-preservation in this framework does not presuppose competition or antagonistic

relations, nor does it presuppose atomistic individualism.38

When Blumenberg identified Spinoza’s concept of self-preservation as the foundation

of modern rationality, it could conceivably be said that he was identifying a counter-logic

to self-assertion, one that undergirds the latter but also calls the latter into question. If self-

assertion is a quintessentially humanist effort, self-preservation tends to decenter humanity.

As Blumenberg noted in Legitimacy, the category pertains to all entities and speaks to a nature

that is indifferent to the human: “The modern age has regarded self-preservation (conservatio

sui) as a fundamental category of everything in existence and has found this borne out all

the way from the principle of inertia in physics to the biological structure of drives and

the laws of state building.”39 If the “self” in self-assertion comes to look like the liberal,

rational self asserting its autonomy, the “self” in self-preservation has no such pretension.

It is not “free,” nor is it decidedly human. Moreover, in Legitimacy, Blumenberg mentioned

another component of self-preservation that is consistent with Spinoza’s thought, namely

its regenerative and transformative potential. In reference to Giordano Bruno, Blumenberg

spoke of “the idea of metabolism as the way in which organisms preserve themselves

through change,” noting that “the identity of form that is preserved in that process is only the

foreground, phenomenal aspect of the turnover of matter that is possible and taking place in

it.”40 With an emphasis on the conatus as activity rather than as a thing, self-preservation is

open to the dynamism of interaction and change rather than reaction and sameness. If self-

assertion situates humanity over and against nature, self-preservation emphasizes a humanityembedded in and dependent on nature, humans transforming and being transformed by the

nature of which they are a part.

With these ideas about self-preservation in mind, it is possible to reflect on its pos-

sible implications for Blumenberg’s argument in Legitimacy. First and foremost, the added

emphasis on self-preservation offers something of a corrective to any overly humanist inter-

pretation of Blumenberg’s Legitimacy and his critique of the secularization thesis.41 To be

sure, Blumenberg wrote at times in seemingly favorable terms about progress in conjunction

37Propositions 19–34, Part III of Spinoza, “Ethics,” 289–296.38Propositions 36–37, Part IV of Spinoza, “Ethics,” 338–341. A good discussion is Aurelia Armstrong,

“Natural and Unnatural Communities: Spinoza Beyond Hobbes,” British Journal for the History of

Philosophy 17, no. 2 (2009): 279–305. See also Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, 5,

40–42.39Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 143.40Ibid., 588.41See, for example, Martin Jay, “The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,” History and Theory 24, no. 2

(1985): 194.


11/22


with modern science and human self-assertion.42 Yet he simultaneously lamented the mech-

anization of social existence, the means by which science and technology take on a life of

their own, breaking loose from concerns such as emotional reward.43 One could say, using

the distinctions Blumenberg offered, that self-assertion aligns with science and technology

in both its human emancipatory and social-mechanization senses, while self-preservation asthe other key principle of modern rationality, recalls the human back to nature, re-embeds

humanity in nature.44

HISTORICAL INTERVENTIONS

The interpretation I am forwarding here situates Blumenberg in a line of critics concerned

about the rise of modern technology and related mechanization of social existence. Carl

Schmitt, himself a critic of the mechanization of state and society, charged Blumenberg

with failing to acknowledge Max Weber in particular as an important interlocutor.45 Indeed,

Weber’s narrative of secularization as the displacement of the religious by a rationalist and

calculating capitalist ethos would seem to be an obvious, if relatively untreated, target of

Blumenberg’s critique of the secularization thesis, as would be the seeming inescapability of

such rationalist mechanization as a necessary product of modernity. According to my reading

of Blumenberg, however, there is no inevitability to mechanization, no inescapability from

its iron reach. The production of human forms of knowledge that align with self-assertion

are always open to question from a counter-logic of rationality that resists such human

self-assertion or the distinctiveness of humanity altogether.

Attending to Blumenberg’s stance toward the mechanization of modern life, others

have suggested additional implicit or missed conversations with Edmund Husserl, Hannah

Arendt, Martin Heidegger, to name just a few.46 To the list I want to add Horkheimer and

Adorno—unnamed targets in Blumenberg’s writing but targets quickly recognized by con-temporaries nonetheless. Just a few years after Blumenberg’s publication of the essay on

42See, for instance, Lawrence Dickey, “Blumenberg and Secularization: ‘Self-Assertion’ and the Prob-

lem of Self-Realizing Teleology in History,” New German Critique 41 (1987): 151–165.43Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 230–232, 239–240.44Charles Turner offered a reading of Blumenberg’s idea of “infinite progress” that resonates with my

argument, seeing “infinite progress” as both infinite pursuit and self-limitation. The key difference is

that for Turner the project remains an explicitly humanist one that derives from human skills, while I

see the dynamic as one between humanist self-assertion and retreat from that sense of human power.

See Turner, “Liberalism and the Limits of Science: Weber and Blumenberg,” History of the HumanSciences 6, no. 4 (1993): 57–79.

45Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of any Political Theology, trans. Michael

Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Malden, MA: Polity, 2008), 119.46See, for example, Charles Turner, “Liberalism and the Limits of Science: Weber and Blumenberg,”

History of the Human Sciences 6, no. 4 (1993): 57–79; Elizabeth Brient, “Hans Blumenberg and Hannah

Arendt on the ‘Unworldly Worldliness’ of the Modern Age,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 3

(2000): 513–530; Vida Pavesich, “Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger

and Cassirer,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46, no. 3 (2008): 421–448.


12/22


Spinoza and self-preservation, Hans Ebeling included it in a collected volume titled Subjec-

tivity and Self-Preservation: Contributions to the Diagnosis of the Modern. In his introduction

to the volume, Ebeling made a case for inquiry into the matter of self-preservation as the

necessary prerequisite for the modern preoccupation with subjectivity and its formation. 47

“Without recourse to the basic meaning of self-preservation,” he asserted, “it is not possibleto determine which concept of the “subject” a modern theory of subjectivity appropriates.”48

He also noted that the contributions to the volume were not without “therapeutic ambition,”

namely that they sought to produce a “reasonable discussion of self-preservation,” espe-

cially in light of the “corruption” that a social-Darwinist interpretation of the concept had

induced.49 Moreover, in his preface, he identified Horkheimer’s essay on reason and self-

preservation—and the connection the latter made between self-preservation and fascism—as

the real impetus not only for Blumenberg’s essay but also for an entire string of essays

on the concept.50 It is helpful thus to examine Horkheimer’s contribution in order to place

Blumenberg’s seemingly academic enterprise in its “therapeutic” context.

Horkheimer wrote his article on self-preservation, “The End of Reason,” in the winter

of 1941/1942. In the essay, he presented the concept of self-preservation as a foundational

principle of modernity, containing at once its emancipatory potential and its destructive

tendency. Reason in all of its forms, he claimed, had been mobilized fundamentally in the

service of self-preservation. But reason in the service of self-preservation is also easily

inverted, such that, at times, “the individual has to do violence to himself and learn that

the life of the whole is the necessary precondition of his own.”51 That is, according to

Horkheimer, reason derived from self-preservation compels the individual to submit his or

her own interest to the well-being of the whole, as participation in the whole promises the

best possible chance to endure. Fascism, Horkheimer concluded, simply forces the modern

concept of self-preservation to reach its intrinsic potential—that is, its full inversion to the

point of the complete effacement of the self: “This self-preservation may even call for thedeath of the individual which is to be preserved. Sacrifice can be rational when it becomes

necessary to defend the state’s power which is alone capable of guaranteeing the existence

of those whose sacrifice it demands.”52 Such an inversion can happen, he explained, only

because the rational logic of self-preservation rose together with modern intellectual forms

that separate thinking from the thing, rational consideration of an object from concern for

the object, and value judgments from science and rationalism. Accordingly, in the logic of

47Hans Ebeling, “Einleitung: Das neuere Prinzip der Selbsterhaltung und seine Bedeutung f ̈ur die

Theorie der Subjektivität,” in Ebeling,Subjektivit ̈ at und Selbsterhaltung, 9.

48Ibid., 9.49Ebeling, “Vorbemerkung,” in Ebeling,Subjektivit ̈ at und Selbsterhaltung, 7.50Ibid., 7. A statement on the inside cover is particularly direct regarding the connection: “Subjektivität

ist wesentlich Theorie einer sich selbst erhaltenden Subjektivität. Der Gegenwart ist vor allem deren

sozialdarwinistische Korrumpierung vertraut geworden. Die rücksichtslose Variation der Selbsterehal-

tung hat M. Horkheimer noch auf dem Höhepunkt des deutschen Faschismus abgehandelt und ihren

Zusammenhang mit der frühbürgerlichen Welt angezeigt.”51Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences 9 (1941): 369.52Ibid., 372.


13/22


modern mass society, technical, industrial, and political forms contain no internal checks that

might prevent elimination or sacrifice of the very self or individual that was once supposed

to have made the decision for subjection to the whole.53

If “The End of Reason” was Horkheimer’s most concise statement about self-

preservation and its proclivity to inversion, Horkheimer’s collaboration with Theodor Adornoin Dialectic of Enlightenment provided a more elaborate—and more famous—presentation

of the problem. This work was, in a fashion, a fairly obvious target for Blumenberg’s larger

critique of secularization narratives and arguments that delegitimize modernity, even if he

did not name it. In the jointly authored book, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote about “myth”

(which, for them, included religion) and “Enlightenment” as categories that begin in oppo-

sition to one another but ultimately give way to the other. Enlightenment, in their usage,

subjects all myth to critique. However, Enlightenment also bears a strong resemblance to

myth, in that both anthropocentric myth and rational Enlightenment thought aim to assert

order in the world and to dominate it.54 Ultimately, Enlightenment, which has no braking

mechanism for its mode of incessant critique, comes to see itself as myth, as a form of

“animistic magic.”55 In this sense, Horkheimer and Adorno seemed to be offering precisely

the kind of secularization narrative that Blumenberg had sought to expose in Legitimacy, one

in which a singular framework (or historical “substance,” in his terms) provides a continuum

between intellectual eras, such that modern thought becomes primarily a displaced repetition

of that which it claims to be succeeding.

However, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s account, Enlightenment does much more than

just repeat the logic of myth; rather, it has a totalizing, self-alienating, self-dominating

tendency that far exceeds anything a mythical framework could accomplish. In this instance,

and relevant to my inquiry, Horkheimer and Adorno echoed the logic of Horkheimer’s “The

End of Reason” that self-preservation is a central concept of the Enlightenment. Here they

present the inversion of self-preservation as taking place in the mutually reinforcing realmsof thought, technology, industrial production, and bourgeois moral life. These overlapping

realms combine at once to produce and de-individuate the autonomous modern subject. Just

as industrial production alienates the laborer from himself or herself, even as participation

in the labor force is necessary for the laborer to reproduce his or her existence, so, too, does

conceptual thinking annihilate boththe thinking subject and the actual objectof contemplation

in the act of representation: “In the bourgeois economy, the social work of each individual is

mediated by the principle of self,” they wrote:

53For commentary on Horkheimer and self-preservation, see Peter M. R. Stirk, Max Horkheimer: A New Interpretation (Lanham, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1992), 167–169. For further background, see also

John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2011).54The relationship of myth to Enlightenment is explored throughout “The Concept of Enlightenment”

and “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of En-

lightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1–62.55Ibid., 7.


14/22


for some, this labor is supposed to yield increased capital, for others the strength

for extra work. But the more heavily the process of self-preservation is based

on the bourgeois division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of

individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and

soul. Enlightened thinking has an answer for this, too: finally, the transcendentalsubject of knowledge, as the last reminder of subjectivity, is itself seemingly

abolished and replaced by the operations of the automatic mechanisms of order,

which therefore all run smoothly.56

Most relevant for present purposes, they identified the quintessential expression of

this formal-rational type of self-preservation that requires even as it effaces individuation

in the writings of none other than Spinoza, whose notion of the conatus “contains the true

maxim of all Western civilization, in which the religious and philosophical differences of

the bourgeoisie are laid to rest.”57 On the surface, there seems to be an alignment with

Blumenberg, at least in the identification of Spinoza as the quintessential theorist of self-

preservation. However, it is at this point that the real differences begin to emerge.

If self-preservation takes on new forms—and new forms of inversion—in the era of

the Enlightenment, its continuity across the ages results, for Horkheimer and Adorno, from

its ultimate derivation from carnal necessity—a point that suggests how little control humans

actually have over their use of rationality and its consequences. If in the early chapters of

Dialectic of Enlightenment , Horkheimer and Adorno emphasized the rational Enlightenment

logic through which self-preservation works, such that the self asserts itself in and subjects

itself to reason, in the chapter on “Elements of Antisemitism,” they highlighted the organic,

drive-based origin of consciousness. Sense impressions themselves, they explained, are “a

legacy of animal prehistory, a mechanism for purposes of defense and obtaining food,

an extension of the readiness for combat with which higher species reacted actively orpassively to movements, regardless of the intentions of the object.”58 Under the impulse of

the original drive for self-preservation, sense impressions evolved into a highly elaborate,

rational function capable of complex distinctions “between outer and inner, the possibility of

detachment and of identification, self-consciousness and conscience.”59 Even science itself

and “the fixed universal order,” the authors wrote, are ultimately “the unconscious product of

the animal tool in the struggle for existence—it is the automatic projection.”60 Reason is not

just a means to contemplate avenues for self-preservation; it is itself a product of the drive

for the same.

For neither Horkheimer nor Adorno was this association of reason with an organic

struggle for self-preservation a one-time observation. Horkheimer, in a follow-up essay on

the “Instinct of Self-Preservation,” returned to the thesis he had elaborated in 1941, namely

the idea that self-preservation might compel the sacrifice of the individual in the interest

56Ibid., 23.57Ibid., 23.58Ibid., 154.59Ibid., 155.60Ibid.


15/22


of a social whole. Now, however, he explained that it was a drive for self-preservation that

provided the evolutionary grounds for the slippage between the individual and the species.

Here he took issue with Sigmund Freud on the primacy of the libidinal drives as something

that serve first and foremost the preservational interests of the individual:

The derivativesof the partial drives as he calledthem, narcissism, avarice and am-

bition, lust for power and cruelty, are just as much transformations and fixations

of phases of self-preservation which is innate in the species and transformable in

the individual. The transformability of sexuality shows that the individual exists

to reproduce the species. He can give up his own life because he is no natural

end, and he can posit himself as absolute because he does not count.61

Albeit with a slightly different orientation, Adorno, too, would write in his Negative Dialectics

that reason serves as a tool for the drive for self-preservation; it is a “psychological force

split off” from nature proper, he claimed. This reason, however, that stands now as if

autonomous is, in fact, always tied to nature. To forget the natural drives that gave rise to

reason, he warned, turns reason into “self-preservation running wild” and causes it to regress

to nature.62 Important for both Horkheimer and Adorno, despite the different directions in

which they pursued the category of self-preservation, was the idea that reason as its product

does not possess the autonomy it presumes for itself, tied as it is to somatic origins.

Several aspects of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s arguments stand out when seen in

light of Blumenberg’s essay, beginning with a very different notion of what the “self” in

self-preservation implies. Although Horkheimer and Adorno, like Blumenberg, identified

Spinoza as the quintessential theorist of self-preservation, they attached a very different

meaning to the attribution. Immediately upon identifying him as said theorist, they added

that “the self which, after the methodical extirpation of all natural traces as mythological,was no longer supposed to be either a body or blood or a soul or even a natural ego but was

sublimated into a transcendental or logical subject, formed the reference point of reason, the

legislating authority of action.”63 It is unclear whether Horkheimer and Adorno were actually

aligning Spinoza himself, the preeminent thinker of immanence, with a conception of the

transcendental subject or whether they were just suggesting a potential developmental lineage

from his thought to that of someone like Kant, with the latter’s emphasis on transcendental

cognition and ethical freedom. In either case, the “self” of self-preservation for Horkheimer

and Adorno pertained explicitly to the human, rational self, while for Blumenberg—following

Spinoza more literally—self-preservation did not presuppose a human reference, let alone

61Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 167.62Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983), 289. For

commentary, see Deborah Cook, “Staying Alive: Adorno and Habermas on Self-Preservation Under

Late Capitalism,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society 18, no. 3 (2006):

433–447, esp. 437; also Deborah Cook, “Influences and Impact,” in Adorno: Key Concepts, ed. Deborah

Cook (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 28–30; Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 1998), 31–33, 83–85.63Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment , 23.


16/22


a transcendental self. Like his predecessors, Blumenberg associated self-preservation with

nature, but unlike them he allowed for a kind of rationality to exist within that nature rather

than just as a response to and reaction against it.

Here it may be useful to reflect on the work that Blumenberg’s differentiation between

self-preservation and self-assertion does in this context. For him, self-assertion and not self-preservation speaks to the desire for domination, the human effort to create order where none

exists. Likewise, while self-assertion in Blumenberg’s use carries a humanist-emancipatory

connotation, it may also allow for the kind of inversion that Horkheimer and Adorno asso-

ciated with Enlightenment reason. As Blumenberg noted, science in particular—and with it

the notion of progress—arose as a primary technique of self-assertion, but as the sciences

and related technologies advanced, they quickly exceeded the intellectual capacities of any

one individual. Ultimately lost was not only a one-time necessary association between the-

oretical curiosity and the pursuit of happiness but also the ability of any one individual or

even groups of individuals to intervene in scientific and technological developments.64 Yet

where Horkheimer and Adorno identified the category of self-preservation with this ten-

dency toward inversion, Blumenberg associated with self-preservation a different potential

for modern rationality. In other words, by distinguishing between self-preservation and self-

assertion, Blumenberg might be read as suggesting an unfortunate conflation of terminology

in Dialectic of Enlightenment , one that absorbs all possibilities of human rationality into one

destructive form.

At this point, the relevance of Blumenberg’s insistence that Spinoza’s self-preservation

is not “organic” or drive-oriented—or, in Ebeling’s terms, that it need not be thought in

terms of Social Darwinism—comes into focus as well. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the

concept of self-preservation redounds always to a striving for domination: to dominate

nature or be dominated by nature. When Blumenberg, however, emphasized the inherently

non-teleological character of Spinoza’s self-preservation, he was insisting on a categorythat cannot be reduced to “organic” or “drive-based” orientations, including a drive toward

domination or antagonism. To be sure, domination is one possible manifestation of the

rationality of self-preservation, but it is not absolute. Rather, as already discussed, because

Spinoza’s self-preservation on which Blumenberg was drawing need not start with atomized

individuals, it allows for cooperative interactions and combinations between entities that

are themselves parts of other wholes.65 In light of the reading of Blumenberg that I am

offering here, Horkheimer and Adorno could be seen not only to be confining their analysis

of modernity to just one form of rationality when they reduced self-preservation to a drive

for domination, but they were also inserting a teleology where one did not belong.

On this last point about the antagonistic versus collaborative character of self-

preservation, a final observation regarding Spinoza’s conception of the state of nature may

shed light on the political potential of Blumenberg’s argument. It is well known that Spinoza’s

64Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 230–232.65Propositions 36–37, Part IV of Spinoza, “Ethics,” 338–341.


17/22


political philosophy was heavily indebted to that of Thomas Hobbes. Yet the differences be-

tween the two began with their approaches to the idea of a social contract.66 Hobbes had laid

out in his Leviathan the famous narrative in which individuals come together to form a social

contract as a response to a more originary state of nature, a warring condition of all against

all and in which each seeks domination of another.67

When forming that social contract,individuals transfer their rights to a sovereign who stands outside of the contract and consol-

idates power in himself. In return for the transfer of their natural rights, members of the civil

order receive civil rights and social protection.68 On the surface, Spinoza’s narrative would

seem to echo Hobbes’s, albeit with important, if subtle, distinctions. As Spinoza himself

noted, “the difference between Hobbes and myself . . . consists in this, that I always preserve

the natural right in its entirety.”69 That is, like Hobbes, Spinoza began with a transformation

from a state of nature to a civil order, but in this case individuals never leave behind the state

of nature entirely. Or, in other words, they are not alienated from their natural right. In his

Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza explained that “Nobody can so completely transfer

to another all his right, and consequently his power, as to cease to be a human being, nor will

there ever be a sovereign power that can do all it pleases.”70 In this formulation, at least a bit

of nature always persists into the civil arena, which itself exists fundamentally to serve the

freedom of the populace. Even more explicit as a departure from Hobbes is the formulation

Spinoza offered in his Political Treatise. In that posthumously published work, the social

contract falls away altogether, as does the transfer of right. Civil right and natural right exist

side by side, if in tension, as do civil society and the state of nature. 71

An important correlate to the fluidity between civil order and the state of nature is

the social and emotional potential of each. Hobbes’s description of life in the state of nature

is famous: it is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Atomized individuals all seek to

acquire domination over the next.72 Socially affirming emotions can thrive in this account

only in the civil state. Conversely, for Spinoza, the emotional lines between the state of natureand the civil state necessarily blur. As noted above, he understood emotions to be inherently

mimetic, such that an individual is affected by the emotions of a neighbor. If one promise of a

civil state is a framework that enhances the possibilities of positive emotions for all, socially

66There is much written on Hobbes and Spinoza. Particularly helpful comparative accounts include

Aurelia Armstrong, “Natural and Unnatural Communities,” 279–305; Susan James, Spinoza on Philos-

ophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise (New York: Oxford, 2012), 233–260;

Alexandre Matheron, “The Theoretical Function of Democracy in Hobbes and Spinoza,” trans. Ted

Stolze, in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1997), 207–247.

67Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin, 1985), 184–186.68Ibid., 227–228, 263–264.69Baruch Spinoza, “Letter to Jarig Jelles,” in Spinoza: Complete Works, 891–892.70Baruch Spinoza, “Theological-Political Treatise,” in Spinoza: Complete Works, 536.71See especially Chapters 2 and 3 of Baruch Spinoza, “Political Treatise,” in Spinoza: Complete Works,

682–695. A good discussion on the non-contractual nature of Spinoza’s social theory is Willi Goetschel,

Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, Heine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004),

66–81.72Hobbes, Leviathan, 185. See also Armstrong, “Natural and Unnatural Communities,” 281.


18/22


affirming emotions and actions can also exist in the state of nature. For him, sociality is a

natural condition as much as it is a civil condition.73

While Horkheimer and Adorno named Spinoza the quintessential thinker of modern

rationality, it may be the case that the more antagonistic and war-like conception of nature in

Hobbes’s thought better suited their needs.74

In his own work, Blumenberg did not sharplydistinguish between Hobbes and Spinoza, yet he did privilege Spinoza as the more consistent

theorist of the term.75 Moreover, in the revised version of Legitimacy—and in a rare instance

of directly engaging the political implications of his thought—he strenuously opposed the

Hobbesianism of Carl Schmitt in ways consistent with the argument I have been making here.

Blumenberg had been involved in a sustained conversation with Schmitt ever since the 1969

publication of Legitimacy, a discussion focused especially on the meaning of “legitimacy” and

its relationship to religious and inherited forms of sovereignty. 76 In reference to Hobbes—or,

to Schmitt’s version of Hobbes—Blumenberg objected most strenuously to the absoluteness

of the power of decision the sovereign is said to hold in the wake of the social contract.

“For Hobbes,” Blumenberg wrote, “the contract of subjection can never be one that is

yet to be sealed but is only one that is inferred to have gone before.”77 For Schmitt, that

absoluteness was supposed to derive from the fundamental life-and-death fear associated

with existence outside the social contract, a terror that founded the political and justified

absolute subjection of members of the civil state. Not incidentally, in one of his more

sustained studies of Hobbes, and in one of his more explicitly anti-Semitic outbursts, Schmitt

lamented in particular the “barely visible crack” that “a liberal Jew”—Spinoza—would open

up in the Hobbesian edifice, creating an “inroad of modern liberalism.”78 For Schmitt, this

opening would ultimately debase the absoluteness of the notion of sovereignty, allowing the

state to become “depoliticized” and to degenerate into a technocratic machine.79

While Schmitt came to the problems of self-preservation and subjection from a very

different angle than Horkheimer and Adorno, Blumenberg’s own stance offered a consistent

73Good discussions include Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, 34–42; and Armstrong,

“Natural and Unnatural Communities,” 279–305.74Interestingly, Ebeling describes Hobbes’s notion of self-preservation as inclined to contradiction or

inversion because of the fundamental antagonism he presupposes between individuals and, with it, the

idea that self-preservation is an instinct driven by the flight from death. Ebeling, Selbsterhaltung und

Selbstbewusstsein, 47.75Blumenberg, “Selbsterhaltung,” 371.76The correspondence between Blumenberg and Schmitt is collected in Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt

Briefwechsel, ed. Alexander Schmitz and Marcel Lepper (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2007).

77Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 98.78Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, trans. George Schwab and E.

Hilfstein (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 56.79A provocative counterargument that maintains closer proximity between Spinoza and the young

Carl Schmitt is Rene Koekkoek, “Carl Schmitt and the Challenge of Spinoza’s Pantheism between the

World Wars,” Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 2 (2014): 333–357. Also insightful is Miguel Vatter,

“Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza: On the Relation between Political Theology

and Liberalism,” New Centennial Review 4, no. 3 (2004): 161–214; Michael Rosenthal, “Spinoza and

the Crisis of Liberalism in Weimar Germany,” Hebraic Political Studies 3, no. 1 (2008): 94–112.


19/22


response to both. In keeping with a Spinozist conception of the fluidity between the state of

nature and the civil state, as well as the non-absoluteness of the latter, Blumenberg wrote in

the second edition of Legitimacy about the “voluntarism” of the social contract. If in Schmitt’s

Hobbes the decision has always already been made, the sovereign always already established

and legitimized, and absolute subjection always already presupposed, Blumenberg’s notionof voluntarism requires that the contract of subjection never be absolute, never be definitively

presupposed. Thus Blumenberg claimed that “decisionism derives its relation to legitimacy

from the negation of voluntarism—because voluntarism is, as it were, the institutionalized

instability of absolute power, while decisionism ‘lives’ from the fact that the ‘decisions’

have always already been made . . . .”80 From another perspective, one close to Spinoza, one

could say that the state of nature is never so hostile, never so terrifying that it must be

definitively excluded from civil life. Or, rather, self-preservation presupposes the persistence

of natural right in the civil sphere, such that subjection is never conceived of as so absolute

that it precludes resistance to and revision of the social order. Again, in this context, self-

preservation emerges as consistent with nature and also as a counterpoint to a logic of

domination. Blumenberg’s nature may be indifferent to humans, but it does not prescribe

hostility or antagonism, and it need not be absolutely feared.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Spinoza usually surfaces in discussions of the secular for one of a handful of standard reasons.

He may surface for his seemingly liberal endorsement of the separation of church and state

and the right to individual freedom of religious conscience, or for his complex theorization

of the relationship between religion and philosophy.81 Alternatively, in his equation of God

with nature or his statement that “man is a God to man,” he has been hailed as offering an

immanent religion appropriate to modernity.82

Such an interpretation was especially prevalentin nineteenth-century readings.83 Blumenberg’s appropriation, however, situated Spinoza in

a slightly different light. Most urgently, Blumenberg used Spinoza to articulate a radically

anti-teleological dimension of European philosophical modernity. In this modernity there is

no necessary logic of domination, no necessary development toward instrumental rationality.

Moreover, there is no necessary form that the modern subject, the modern self, necessarily

takes, no necessary atomization and competition.

This last point should be emphasized, as it sheds a slightly new light on Blumenberg’s

potential contribution to discussions of secularism and modernity. I began this essay with

80Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 98.81See, for instance, Steven Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Warren Montag (New

York: Verso, 2008).82Spinoza, Ethics, Scholium, Paragraph 35, Part IV, 338.83See, for instance, Berthold Auerbach, Spinoza: Ein historischer Roman (Stuttgart: Scheible, 1837);

Moses Hess, Heilige Geschichte der Menschheit, von einem J ̈ unger Spinoza’s (Stuttgart: Hallberger’sche

Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1837).


20/22


a reflection on recent literature that ties secularism to the privileging of a rational and au-

tonomous subject. Here Blumenberg might be seen to be offering a philosophical critique

that resonates with elements of that literature. Talal Asad, for instance, has sought to do a

genealogy of secularism in order to uncover both the multiple origins of the modern secular

(including the non-European origins) and the contingent developments that together consol-idated the myth of rational autonomy in secular modernity. 84 Similarly, Wendy Brown has

been concerned not only with excavating the workings of power in secular claims regard-

ing subjective rational autonomy; she has done so with the aim to uncover the submerged

alternatives latent within secular modernity. With the dual logics of self-preservation and

self-assertion, Blumenberg could be seen to be offering a complementary argument from a

strictly philosophical viewpoint, one that exposes a somewhat submerged potential in secular

modernity that was obscured by postwar critiques of the Enlightenment.

To an extent, Blumenberg’s focus on modern self-assertion in Legitimacy might situate

him well within a more limited framework that simply defends the liberal individualism and

rational autonomy. My argument, however, is that his brief turn to Spinoza in a follow-up

essay created an opening for a different interpretation, one that adheres to philosophical

modernity as marked by a kind of rationality but not by subjective autonomy. To clarify the

position, I want to close with a quick look at Jane Bennett’s discussion of Blumenberg in her

book, The Enchantment of Modern Life.

Bennett provocatively refers to Blumenberg as a theorist of “disenchantment without

regret,” one who fully recognizes the departure of a religious framework from modern thought

but one who views this departure stoically, embracing the rationalist–scientific immanent

framework of modernity. Quite interestingly, however, the larger aim of Bennett’s work is

to articulate an approach to modernity that draws on the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Felix

Guattari, and other vitalists to decenter the human by situating humans as integrated into

material composites. She does so in order to understand the forms of modern “enchantment”available in the immanent, material world. On this front, she finds especially useful in

Blumenberg’s work his discussion of Epicurus. Blumenberg had observed the rise of interest

in the ancient atomist as a factor in the rise of the modern mindset. In his telling, the

Epicurean revival provided an inroad to study the predictable “material substratum of the

world as something meaningful in itself, and consequently as a potentiality open to man’s

rational disposition.”85 Bennett, however, laments that’s Blumenberg’s narrative seems to

expel the wonder from Epicureanism, its emphasis not just on the predictable nature of

matter but also on its unpredictable “swerves.” Where Blumenberg understands atomism

as fostering “an attitude of affective indifference toward matter,” Bennett finds in it “the

resources for a view of matter as wondrous, for a materialism that is enchanting without

being teleological or purposive.”86

In response to Bennett, it is possible to begin to cobble together what is especially in-

teresting about Blumenberg’s project, the potential that the Spinozist supplement in particular

84Asad, Formations of the Secular , 14, 16–17.85Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 151.86Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2001), 73.


21/22


22/22

Documents

Hans Blumenbergs Multiple Modernities A