(1961)
If the University of Gießen is able to rebuild its philosophical faculty, as we may now confidently hope, then this appears to us as a process of normalization, as a step toward a full restitution of its status as a university.1
But also beyond that, there is something unique and symptomatic about this process, if we see it against the backdrop of our intellectual and institutional history. From the bosom of the predecessor of our philosophical faculty, namely, the old Faculty of the Arts, the natural sciences have developed since the end of the Middle Ages. The ceaseless desire of philosophy to ask questions had nourished them and made their first major achievements possible through its logical and methodical foundation. Yet at the end of this path stands the full independence of the scientific disciplines, and even, in positivism, their brusque turning away from all philosophical premises and conclusions. What is unique about the restitution process at Gießen, which we hope to be witnessing, is that this genetic procedure appears in reverse: this university that was dominated mostly by the natural sciences because of its almost deadly capitis damnatio [capital punishment] is restoring itself from the autonomy of its own will and despite the pressure to expand within existing faculties by resurrecting the philosophical faculty. I think I am able to see very well that here a necessity has imposed itself that arose out of the particular situation at Gießen. A university is no conglomerate of disciplines and faculties but has its own vibrant economy of specialization and interdependence, of the solitude within and the exchange between its areas.
I have tried to prepare some thoughts on what the university can expect from the constitution of its philosophical faculty, or, more specifically, what it can expect from philosophy.
The task that falls to philosophy within the association of academic fields can be traced back to its function in the spiritual economy of humans in general. The countless definitions that have been given for philosophy’s achievements in its history have a basic formula at their core: philosophy is the emerging consciousness of humans about themselves. This may sound highly abstract and speculative, but it gets at something elemental. Humans try to conceive of themselves through the incentives, conditionalities, and possibilities that are “vital” and active in their lives. They become aware of what they are by bringing to language their own case before themselves. Whether philosophy is essentially practiced as intellectual history, as epistemology, as anthropology or ontology, as ethics, or as formal logic—in the end, each is just a variation of a homogeneous teleology: what is human is impelled toward language and what has not yet become, or could not yet become language, is dark, unresolved, compulsive, or automatic. The emergence of language is a process of humanization, which is true as well and in particular for the sciences and their theoretical behavior.
Only in language is the fateful incongruence of action and consciousness reconciled, which becomes more and more decisive for our current situation. Machines can help us to skip levels of consciousness, and we often have to respond to the overexertion of objective demand by automatizing ourselves—for example, by using formulas that we do not fully grasp. Thus, our consciousness is “bypassed” by a set of behaviors and actions that result from the inherent laws of our areas of life, which are objectivized and have become autonomous, and are constantly forcing themselves on us. From the conditions and necessities of circumstances immediately result achievements to master the physical world. In itself this is not yet a moral problem, but rather the prelude to any moral problem. We have to know what we are doing to be able to ask ourselves whether it is also what we ought to be doing. The connection between what we know and what we ought to do has become more complicated than Socrates was originally able to see.
We constantly adopt forms of action, obvious ways of behaving, or allegedly plausible things, all of which announce themselves to us as mere “demands of the day.” That we have a “history” means, after all, that we do not have to repeatedly and in all matters begin afresh, if that were even possible. However, our desire to understand our history and ourselves in that history also means that we should not submit to what is given and blindly accept our conditionalities but, rather, we must bring them to language. The sciences too employ “devices” [Vorrichtungen] of behavior, namely, in the form of their methods. When a scientist sets to work, he adopts a whole stock of methods from his discipline, and his pursuit of knowledge always already precedes his understanding of them: he is capable of doing more than he knows and is able to account for. This is likely a fundamental experience of any scientific career. However, it means that science is technology for a large part, even before it becomes applied science and goes on to yield more technology.
It is, after all, not as Descartes had imagined when he wrote his Discourse on Method, which gained him the reputation as the founder of the modern age and its scientific spirit. Descartes wanted a comprehensible method that was in principle transparent to anybody and that was meant to precede and standardize any practice of knowledge. This method was supposed to establish and secure science not only as the mastery of things but also as man’s complete self-possession; in the end, theory and morality were supposed to merge into one, and through this unity, vouchsafe human self-fulfillment and existential happiness. Even though for Descartes and his time humans were no longer at home in the middle of the universe or at nature’s core of meaning, they were postulated all the more vehemently as the meaningful basis for understanding nature and the entirety of the sciences. Here, we find a difference between the total notion of nature on the one hand and the purpose assigned to the totality of understanding nature on the other—a distinction that would later turn out to be highly significant. It is here that “world picture” [Weltbild] and “world model” [Weltmodell] were separated for the first time, or more precisely, it is here that their fundamental difference becomes visible at all.
I should clarify the two concepts. As “world model” I define the total notion of empirical reality, which depends on the current state of the natural sciences and takes the entirety of their statements into account. I call “world picture” that embodiment of reality through which and in which humans recognize themselves, orient their judgments and the goals of their actions, measure their possibilities and necessities, and devise their essential needs. The world picture has “practical power,” as Kant would have put it.2
Within the world model designed by Descartes, it had to be denied that the mechanism of all world processes had anything to do with the purpose of human existence. The body-automaton, which had been synchronized with the ego cogito [thinking I] in an enigmatic way that would go on to torment the modern age, had nothing to do with human self-consciousness. In this world mechanism, the human could only discover itself as a decoy, though still remaining at the center of Descartes’s “world picture.” Only recent scholarship has learned to see that the founder of the modern world model, which maintained its validity up to Kant and Laplace and beyond, had retained a medieval, humanistic, and anthropocentric world picture. It directly determined what science could mean for Descartes and what ends he had to assign it in the scheme of his method. Science had the function of serving humans. Yet it delivered inhumane models, ideas of nature that ruthlessly alienated humans and estranged them from themselves. All inconsistencies of Cartesian and modern philosophy have their origin in this ambivalence. Yet still, humans, random products of vortices of matter in the world model, found in the world picture expressions of and clues to a meaning exceeding the physical realm. For that reason, the knowledge of nature had to turn directly into human fulfillments and salubrities. Therefore, the final products of all theoretical knowledge were medicine and morality. One could also say the world model was an “organ” of the world picture, if this expression is permitted. Since its humane function had already implied the human place in nature, the world model did not have to state anything about it and could only go on to confirm it through its expected achievements. The world picture contained the interpretation and, as it were, the “instruction manual” for all world models imaginable. But at the same time, this meant that within this world model no sufficient insight could ever be gained into what human cognitive abilities implied for the human being itself. Freed from this justificatory context, science was not able to know on its own terms what it was doing. It was an easy task to assign philosophy its place and power in this framework: it steadily nourished and supplied scientific activity with a conscious sense of purpose, which was contained in the world picture.
Up to now, however, I have merely been evoking a historical circumstance.
Does its “doctrine” also apply to the contemporary or any status of the sciences? If that were true, philosophical questions would have only to return to the origins in history—would have only to regain the initial meaning of this intellectual process—to fulfill their task of bringing to consciousness the meaning that is alive, albeit hidden, in our scientific conduct.
But as regrettable as it may be for the self-evaluation of philosophy in our present, the diagnosis does not allow for this type of tried and tested therapy. Philosophy cannot simply function as the “good memory” of the sciences, as their memoria, storing their original meaning ready for retrieval. We must instead accept that history essentially has its reality in separating the functions from their origins and innervations. “History” means that causes effective in the origin do not govern what is in the process of becoming and what has already become. Meaning is no constant in history. The sphere of our actions separates itself from our motivations to act, and a change of purpose exists that autonomously regulates itself and cannot be mastered by merely conserving or restoring original senses of purpose. History is an irreversible nexus of events. Exactly for this reason, everything hinges on the fact that we comprehend and bring to language what we are factually doing.
It is a bald observation that in our current reality the function of the sciences no longer has anything in common with the motivations of their early modern origins. Science has become autonomous. It generates the necessities and principles of its own progress. And if science is indeed something like a meaningful whole—the university as an institution rests on this conviction—then it does not receive this meaning from a sphere of meaning behind or above it, but continuously creates, awakens, and maintains this meaning from within the vitality of its own actions.
These considerations allow me now to define this issue more accurately: the “autonomy” of science means that the correlation of world model and world picture is ruptured. This sounds like a “historical accident”—like a fracture brought about from the outside. But in fact, it was the “world model” that occupied the position of the “world picture” and it is still in the process of consuming the remaining substance of the world picture’s stock. That something like a faith in science can exist at all is a result of science no longer being conditioned by any belief in a world picture.
This issue becomes tangible for the first time in the manner in which the Copernican system (while having only a very limited scope as a world model) took on the role of a world picture determining consciousness. As a theoretical statement presented by Copernicus in 1543, it did not contain anything about humans and their position in the world. That humans still looked to this model to find pictorial orientation for their self-assurance in the cosmos reveals the change in meaning of this mainly theoretical construct.
Newton’s universe of mechanical gravitation soon became the guiding schema for those who in fact had reason neither to find nor to seek anything there, namely, for the moralists and moral philosophers. One has only to think of Voltaire. All of this helps to frame the historically momentous phenomenon of philosophers starting to glance over the shoulders of naturalists so that the former might glean basic metaphysical principles from the models of the latter. It is curious that philosophy begins to project the role slipping from its grasp onto the natural sciences. Here, one may quickly conclude that this was the failure of philosophy: that it no longer coined world pictures that were originally and recognizably its own, nor resolutely resisted the draining of the existing inventory of world pictures. Instead, one might suppose, philosophy was fascinated by the exact sciences and, though in a different form of language, withdrew from the realm of intuitiveness and thus from any eidetically concise conceivability, leaving vacant the “position” governing the power of world pictures. It is only to be expected, then, that philosophy has been constantly called to convey to us once again a world picture of a striking and compelling bindingness. The way in which our current intellectual situation might be called susceptible to worldviews and dogmatisms is undoubtedly a result of the vacant function of the world picture. Speculating on the frustration felt at the loss of meaning, an abundance of substitutes has realized that this potential can be occupied almost at random and has begun to exploit it.
At this point, I might be stating an unsettling point: philosophy will not put forth a new world picture in the future, or any such attempt is bound to fail. This may sadden us, because it is a tremendous loss of meaning for a great tradition. But would it be exactly “philosophical” to evade a truth for that reason?
This thesis demands justification. First of all, the circumstances of how the world picture was lost require a more accurate description. When I said above that in the modern age the world model had taken the position of the world picture, this sounds like an illegitimate claim of rights, or a usurpation. And indeed, it has been stated more than once that the natural sciences of the modern age have destroyed the status and the bindingness of world pictures.
This, however, is wrong. The predicative capability of the world model entered into the continuing loss of the power of the world picture, only furthering what it was itself too impotent to engender. What disempowered the world pictures was the acute new experience of their plurality, an experience that was immediately transformed into historical reflection and critique. The idea that what is valid “beyond the mountains” must be the opposite of what seems certain and obvious on this side, as Montaigne first expressed it, illustrates the fundamental experience from which the historicization of the world picture emerged.3 This experience caused its powerlessness, which ultimately became bearable only in its aesthetic version. I need only remind you of the implications that the genres of the travel report and the utopian travel novel had for the spirit of the Enlightenment. No element of the obvious remained untouched and was not turned into a contingent historical and geographical fact if seen from a world picture’s differently real or fictitious perspective. The historical knowledge about the power of world pictures that accumulated here already meant their disempowerment and is an undeniable reason for the futility of any attempt at their rehabilitation. Taking the ground of validity from under the world pictures was therefore the very specific achievement of the attitude we today call that of the “humanities” [geisteswissenschaftlich].
The disintegration of the world picture’s function by way of critique and its reoccupation through the world model demonstrate an intimate collaboration between the historical and the scientific attitude. But might this be the type of commonality we could recommend for the universitas litterarum [comprehensive university] of today? I would like to answer such a question firmly in the negative. And I would like to go even further by saying that the rehabilitation of the world picture is a demand that philosophy should forgo at all costs and neither should the natural sciences give in to the temptation of replacing the world picture by world models.
Of course, it is correct that world pictures have had a very positive function in the history of human consciousness. It was necessary that humans were not constantly and directly confronted with their eccentric place in nature whose meaning was always precarious. In this regard, imaginative horizons could have a shielding effect and keep internal matters protected. One only has to think of what the world picture of magic, the cosmos picture in antiquity, or the ordo idea in the Middle Ages meant in this regard. It is, however, not at all surprising that world pictures with very different contents, such as that of magic and that of the stoic pronoia [care; forethought], could have equivalent meaning for consciousness.
Yet we must understand the positivity of world pictures as being subject to certain conditions. The most important one can be formulated by saying that the function of the world picture is essentially monistic. A “world picture” does not accept any other world pictures besides itself; already the plural formulation “worlds” or “world pictures” is a language artifact from the age of historical reflection, a piece of a philosophy of philosophy. Only the unchallenged validity of a world picture within a homogeneous intellectual sphere contains both the ideality and the tolerance that allows one to be humane in it, keeping intact at the same time the innervating balance between comprehensibility and strangeness, between giving reasons and giving norms.
In contrast, the simultaneity of a pluralism of world pictures that has now become tangible causes this tension to subside into historical reflection and relativization. The humanities, in the widest sense, are the presentation and externalization of the world pictures’ pluralism. They make worlds accessible and comprehensible for us, but at the same time take away our ability to adopt one of these worlds obviously and unquestionably as our own. In the fading away of world pictures—in the perfection of their verbal and hermeneutical transmission—only one faceless world remains as a formal horizon of all translatability, which despite its unity can no longer be enhanced to the monism of a single world picture. History makes no returns.
It is on the level of a dualism of world pictures that the world pictures’ function becomes negative. Here, their tension reverts into the opposite extreme and increases to the point of terror and to the intolerance of codified dogmatisms. At the same time, the exclusivity and animosity of the competing world pictures is all the more charged with affect, the smaller and subtler the differences between them are. The mortal enmity between early Christianity and Gnosticism may serve as an example. Equally, in the present day, the increased tensions between East and West are closely related to the fading of real structural differences. Here, however, another important factor comes into play: beneath the competing world pictures, interests stemming from rather less rarefied spheres interpose themselves imperceptibly. World pictures are becoming pretexts under which interests are advanced. This type of substitution is implied when one speaks of world pictures as ideologies. Discovering the possibility of the abuse of world pictures as ideological instruments—even when what is at stake is not the historically primal idea but its secondary instrumentalization—has ultimately discredited the pictorialization [Verbildlichung] of the world and made it an impossible philosophical task.
At the same time, this impossibility passes judgment on those world models that have taken on the status of world pictures and are fulfilling their function pseudomorphically. Their dubiousness lies in the fact that transforming theoretical conceptions of totality into pragmatic principles will remain indifferent against idealization or ideologization, that is, against the capacity to lead or the potential of being tempted. In a world like ours, any intellectual substance has to be saved from being manipulated.
Darwin’s theoretical model of the kingdom of organisms and the place of humans in its developmental mechanics was only a partial continuation and elaboration of the mechanistic world model as such. Seen as a theoretical statement, it contained nothing about how humans have to understand themselves, what they were allowed to do, and what they ought to do. Yet once translated into a “world picture,” from which it seemed the answers to these questions could be read, it turned into a blatant biologism with truly fateful consequences.
Something similar is true for the history of materialism. According to its origin and inner logic, it is a statement of an epistemological economy. It makes statements about the conditions of the possibility of scientific objects, namely, that exact research can only reach as far as it can be furnished with quantifiable substrates. This is a world model that has to exactly define what it is supposed to achieve and cannot achieve anything beyond its so defined explanatory value. This world model is dogmatized by materialism: it is a hypostatized theory of science of a specific historical stage. Yet out of this solidification, it attempts to represent a theory of humans and their actions, to reduce—in a word—the law of nature and the law of history to one and the same root, and to be a “world picture,” in all its bindingness, for general human behavior. No doubt the “mind” [Geist] can exercise rule inside forms such as these and need not bemoan its impotence.
What I meant when I cautioned against the return of world pictures as a dangerous illusion has perhaps become clearer now. Definite consequences may now be drawn for the problem of the commonality of the sciences within the universitas litterarum that I pointed to at the beginning. Such commonality of the sciences cannot be realized by blurring their borders, or by encroaching on or borrowing from each other. The university does not present itself as a potpourri of its disciplines but rather through the full presence of the guiding idea of science, which shines through the vitality and awareness of each discipline’s knowledge practice. And yet philosophy cannot and must not be the schoolmaster of other disciplines. Nor can it be their rear guard, reveling in syntheses. For philosophy does not transcend science outwardly but inwardly. It does not invent the idea of scientific rigor but rather brings this idea to language in each stage of its self-development. The danger inherent in the closed technical terminologies of the sciences is that they seem to have already fulfilled their exactitude in their formal structure and therefore also pretend to have solved the task of their “scientificity.” However, the true rigor of a science lies in the congruence between the definition of its expected achievements and the results it produces. Not to state more than we can know—this is much more difficult to realize than the enthusiastic observer of science might at first imagine. Scientific insights are provisional statements to which the reservation of having to prove themselves is constantly applied; if they stabilize into pictures, this reservation is endangered, weakened, made latent, and soon to be forgotten.
It is not the essential and primary point of science to be in command of the matters and powers of the world, and to take possession of them (in fact, this is the point of technology, which is both applied science and the source of scientific problems), but rather to keep our notion of the world at the disposal and under the command of theoretical responsibility. If historical subject matters are at the center when philosophy is taught at universities, if students are laboriously introduced to long-abandoned systemic constructions, the goal is not to convey to them just another bit of knowledge, but to make transparent the critical approach to systems in general. Whoever has learned to find their way into the labyrinth of a system—whoever truly has studied it—can also find his way out of every system, however he might have gotten into it. This person, in other words, has become resistant to seduction.
Today, we may be lacking a positively articulated notion of education, but one thing can nonetheless be maintained: education consists quite essentially of such resistance to temptation. After our own historical experience, it appears to me that this is quite a lot and very positive indeed, and that we should be doing a great deal to fulfill it.
Certainly the loss of world pictures is a painful amputation, as humans have the ineradicable need to demand answers to their ultimate and all-enveloping questions. But especially if this is the case, philosophy has to radically deny humans any obedience to their needs through the coming-to-language of scientific consciousness. Here, a point seems to have been reached at which the much-lamented schism between the natural sciences and the humanities no longer exists. On the day of its anniversary celebration, I would sincerely like to wish the Justus Liebig University that in its further development this may be and remain the Archimedean point of a deeply rooted commonality between its faculties and disciplines, between their work in research and in teaching.
Translated by Florian Fuchs
Originally published as “Weltbilder und Weltmodelle,” Nachrichten der Gießener Hochschulgesellschaft 30: 67–75; from Hans Blumenberg, Schriften zur Technik, ed. Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), 126–137.
1. [In 1960, Blumenberg became professor of philosophy in Gießen. The University of Gießen, founded in 1607, was reduced to the status of a polytechnic after World War II. It did not become a full university again until 1957, and this process of reconstitution is what Blumenberg refers to here.]
2. [Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A 569/B 597.]
3. [Michel de Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” in The Complete Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 437.]