Work on Myth
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"What came about through the combination of leaving the shrinking rain forest for the savanna and settling in caves was a combination of the meeting of new requirements for performance in obtaining food outside the living places and the old advantage of undisturbed reproduction and rearing of the next generation, with its prolonged need for learning, now in the protection of housing that was easy to close off from the outside."--p.4 Citations in Work on Myth: “They could not put the determining divine principle at sufficient distance from themselves; the whole pantheon was only a means by which the determining forces could be kept at a distance from man’s earthly being, so that human lungs could have air.” --Kafka to Max Brod, August 7, 1920 “Hundreds of river names are woven into the text. I think it moves.” --Joyce on Anna Livia Plurabelle to Harriet Shaw Weaver, October 28, 1927 “Ah, les vieilles questions, les vieilles réponses, il n‘y a que ça!” --Beckett, Fin de partie “The river delegates its fear of the sea to many arms.” --Helmut Lamprecht, Delta "Last night I dreamed about Freud. What does that mean?" --Stanisław Jerzy Lec |
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Work on Myth (1979, Arbeit am Mythos) is a book by Hans Blumenberg.
Guided by Arnold Gehlen's view (in Der Mensch) of man as a frail and finite being in need of certain auxiliary ideas in order to face the "absolutism of reality" and its overwhelming power, increasingly underlined the anthropological background of his ideas: he treated myth and metaphor as a functional equivalent to the distancing, orientational and relieving value of institutions as understood by Gehlen. This context is of decisive importance for Blumenberg's idea of absolute metaphors. Whereas metaphors originally were a means of illustrating the reality of an issue, giving form to understanding, they were later to tend towards a separate existence, in the sciences as elsewhere. This phenomenon may range from the attempt to fully explicate the metaphor while losing sight of its illustrative function, to the experience of becoming immersed in metaphors influencing the seeming logicality of conclusions. The idea of 'absolute metaphors' turns out to be of decisive importance for the ideas of a culture, such as the metaphor of light as truth in Neo-Platonism, to be found in the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The critical history of concepts may thus serve the depotentiation of metaphorical power. Blumenberg did, however, also warn his readers not to confound the critical deconstruction of myth with the programmatical belief in the overcoming of any mythology. Reflecting his studies of Husserl, Blumenberg's work concludes that in the last resort our potential scientific enlightenment finds its own subjective and anthropological limit in the fact that we are constantly falling back upon the imagery of our contemplations.
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