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The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory
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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
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The Germanic Review, 90: 21–41, 2015
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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
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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).
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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