Excursus I
Against Hans Blumenberg’s Political Poly-Theology
. . . the scene transformed during the 1960s—including the renewal of a militant critique of society and the Enlightened tradition mobilized on all fronts, including an anti-authoritarian movement, a new beginning for the avant-garde in the fine arts, and an aesthetically inspired counter-culture [brought everything to life] that the conservative critics believed to be dead. Theorists like Ritter and Forsthoff had just reconciled on the grounds that cultural modernity had come to a standstill. Whereas American liberals at the time had to find new arguments for an unprecedented situation, German neoconservatives had a comparatively easy task. To combat anything contrary to their theory as the machinations of an enemy within, they could get their ammunition from the argumentative power of their teachers. Regarding those unwanted phenomena rocking the foundations of a merely postulated compromise, they only had to name the agents who had instigated a cultural revolution. This turn to the practical and the polemical explains why German neoconservatives could walk on well-trodden paths and in terms of theory never had to offer anything remotely new. The only thing new is perhaps the type of the professor who remains standing strong at the front of the semantic civil war.
—Jürgen Habermas, “Die Kulturkritik der Neokonservativen in den USA und in der Bundesrepublik,” 1982
If you were familiar only with the Blumenberg of the Legitimacy of Modernity (1966) or Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology II (1970), you would probably find it hard to see how there could be a question about any political theology in Blumenberg, especially since Schmitt was right to attribute to Blumenberg the attempt to “scientifically put to rest every Political Theology.”331 In the second edition of his Legitimacy, Blumenberg maintained his position, and he extended his negation of any and every Political Theology to include the “New,” “Revolutionary ‘Political Theology’” which Schmitt had introduced in the dispute with him332: “Political Christology.”333
As late as 1974 Blumenberg still insisted that “the experiment of absolute instances” had been “run through”: “If it is no longer credible that the decision between good and evil is made in history . . . then the suggestion of the state of exception as the normality of the political is lost.”334 But five years later Blumenberg seems less confident, and seeks to counter Political Christology with a Political Poly-Theology meant to escape Schmitt’s definition of the political once and for all.335
The formula for this poly-theology is “nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse,” and hence it stands at the center of the “Work on Myth,”336 although it is likely Schmitt had drawn Blumenberg’s attention to it; for Schmitt, the formula trades under a “political-Christological” label.337 Moreover, Blumenberg knows very well that at the beginning of the development towards Goethe’s “monstrous words,”338 “nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse,” stands Goethe’s fragment Prometheus, that is, an also stasiological339 and hence Christological text. Indeed, the myth that Blumenberg wants to work off is that of Prometheus. If he cannot finish myth as such, then at least he wants to bring to an end one myth:340 the Promethean myth. And this desire has political reasons. For Blumenberg, as for (the later) Goethe, the myth of Prometheus is still the “modern–sansculotte” myth of the Revolution.341
The young Marx, who wanted to include Prometheus as “the noblest saint and martyr” in an imaginary “philosophical calendar,”342 confirmed this for Blumenberg, and Ernst Bloch almost challenged him with the rhetorical question: “Are all myths, including the one of Prometheus, in need of demythologization?”343 Where Bloch wants to save at least this one myth, Blumenberg wants to destroy this one in particular; even though he does not explicitly mention Bloch, nor Karl Kerényi’s “Prometheus” study. In the 1950s this study had pointed out the Gnostic rather than Greek essence of the young Goethe’s “Prometheus,”344 and to Aischylos’ Prometheus it had attributed the “position on the human counter-pole to the world of the gods,” which “in non-Greek mythologies is held by a divine primordial man”:345 the Gnostic “Anthropos.”
In the same context Kerényi highlights the merciless enmity between Prometheus, the “god hated by the god,” and the gods’ father Zeus, which goes as far as the Aischylean-Pindarian salvific thought of overthrowing this “world-god.”346 In Greek it remained a “thought, ” but crucially here Blumenberg does not take it any further. Instead, in the wake of the later Goethe he seeks a defusion, even harmonization of the enmity between Prometheus and Zeus in a “pluralist” pantheon, which hardly existed in this form during antiquity. But we will follow Blumenberg step by step, setting off once again from the young Goethe’s Prometheus.
If functionally Prometheus is to be identified with Lucifer—“Both are bringers of light in disobedience against the ruling god”347—then this identification has to be understood as “political-theological” or “political-christological,” as the words “disobedience” and “ruling” already suggest; but above all Goethe’s later projection of Prometheus onto Napoleon does this,348 since he, Napoleon, had wanted to put politics in the place of God (or rather fate), “and he had wanted to put himself in its place”:349 a counter-god in a quite literal, that is, individual sense.
Napoleon, who had inspired Goethe to write these monstrous words, may have only temporarily been the god who could be rivaled only by another god, but Goethe clearly saw that a generation had grown in the 1813 German Campaign according to which—in order to please them—he would have had to become a member of a Jacobin club.350 Napoleon not only put it in words, but he was also the first to have made them felt all over the continent: that the fate of lives is determined by political acts. Just at the moment of the Eckermann conversation, when for one last time he settled the score with Young Germany, Goethe remembered what Napoleon had told him in Erfurt, and what, despite the experiences after Jena, he could hardly have accepted: “ . . . now politics is fate.”351
By agreeing with Napoleon, Goethe just before his death acknowledges, though reluctantly, that the tendency of Young Germany is that of the times. And—this is crucial here—Goethe realizes more than ever that a dualistic interpretation of these monstrous words is the more historically powerful one, though in his view it is pernicious. Or to refer to Goethe’s literary life story: Young Germany continues to believe in a general sense that Prometheus is, importantly, the son of Zeus, as the Goethe of the Sturm und Drang had believed in his dramatic fragment352—“out of ignorance of the genuine myth.”353 But this relationship was not only suggested by Aeschylus, it was also fruitful in so far as it Christologically qualified Goethe’s earlier promethy [Promethie], and not just the monstrous, heretical words. Blumenberg refers explicitly to Schmitt’s relevant explanations in the afterword of Political Theology II, in concreto his finding of a dramatic fragment by Lenz,354 and he judges: “‘Here as much as there’, in Lenz’s ‘Catherina of Siena’ as much as in Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’, the talk is ‘of two gods’, ‘of the dualism, arduously prevented in the history of Christian dogma, of the creator and the redeemer, the demiurge and the human god, the binding father and the releasing son.”355
I cannot go further into the difficulties of orthodox Christology in late antiquity here.356 But “by virtue of the idealist postulate of autonomy,” “the sonship inevitably” turns into “enmity,”357 as Blumenberg also notes down, and with this he comes to speak of Schmitt’s Concept of the Political: precisely its foundation of Christology in Marcion’s way; a “stasiological” one, that is: revolutionary and hence “Political Christology,” which Schmitt also called “New Political Theology” in the afterword to Political Theology II dedicated to the dispute with Blumenberg. In reference to this dispute one can state, also according to Blumenberg: Goethe’s “Prometheus” is “Political Christology,” and certainly so when this “drama of the artist”358 is read politically—which is what it has been proven to be apt for—and for the Goethe of 1819–20 it was bound to be so.
In terms of the history of religion, the fact that Goethe’s “Prometheus” has to be Christologically qualified, and that the monstrous words may be thus qualified, entails Christianization, no matter how “heretical” it may be. Blumenberg correctly notes (and once again in agreement with Schmitt): “Metaphysical dualism is not the threat that arises from the reduction of polytheism; rather, it results from the self-splitting of a monotheism that cannot cope with the problem of justifying its God in defense against the accusation of a world that is inadequate to the concept of him.”359
Lenz, in the crucial passage of his “Catharina,” “evidently” only drew on “Aeschylus’ deus contra deum in the Coephori,” but there the words only “signified the conflict of the gods of state law with the gods of familial ties . . . , a constellation . . . of historical succession in the generations of gods.” In other words, “gods against gods” in this context is “the principle . . . of genealogies of myth, the contrast of the above and below in it.”360 It is the one unifying principle of the many gods, whose numbers alone prevent dualism, and even more so prevent the monotheism that conditions them. He almost advertises polytheism, and he does so with political intent, in the same way that he condemned and fought monotheism because of the absolutism and the political dualism inherent in it.361
To return to Goethe’s monstrous words: Blumenberg himself does not exclude the possibility of the Schmittian, that is Christological, or rather dualist reading of the “nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse,” but he insists that Goethe actually intended or at least favored the polytheist-pantheist reading. And Blumenberg’s reasons for this interpretation are convincing, independently of the fact that he shares Goethe’s opinion. His thesis in view of the position in “Poetry and Truth” that ends the use of the monstrous words is that:
“Only the whole universe can stand up against a demonic-divine nature” such as Napoleon, a nature “which has the power to overcome each single power within this universe. The universe is the absolute that cannot be shaken in its reign by what is happening to it.” Precisely “from this perspective it becomes clear how the ‘monstrous words’ are about equivalences, which are typically possible only in a pantheon of a pagan kind, but which at the same time can be trumped with the idea of limit which introduces Spinoza’s Absolute like a singular force into the mythical context.362
It is precisely this “singular” force that is mythical, that is “demonic”;363 the universe, which the ancients called “cosmos,” is merely primus et summus inter pares deos, so to speak. In any case, in terms of political theology, their plurality is the crucial object of fascination for Blumenberg. And the fact that the monstrous words imply many gods already follows from the lowercase initial letter of “deus” and the indefinite article it demands.364 Only Blumenberg translates “nemo contra deum nisi ipse” correctly: “Against a god only a god.”365 It does not necessarily exclude other receptions, but—seen from Goethe’s later viewpoint—would prove them to be heretical. What is already important for Goethe in “Pandora” and what stands in emphatic contradiction to the early “Prometheus” is “a pantheon, an organ of the separation of powers—in Goethe’s newly favored word of ‘balance’.”366 To further indicate this point, all in the spirit of Blumenberg’s “metaphorics” (which are “essential”): Goethe strives for a pantheon to create a “balance of power.” It says explicitly in Riemer’s diary entry, dated around 16 May 1807, that is, shortly after Jena and Auerstädt: “A god, then, can only be balanced by a god. The force has to delimit itself—that is absurd. It is only delimited by yet another power. This specified being cannot delimit itself, but rather the whole that specializes thus delimits itself; but not the singular itself.”367
Blumenberg is right to interpret biographically; such thinking, later condensed into the monstrous words, signifies Goethe’s “relinquishment of the Promethean through the idea of balance,” which in that same year would find its poetic expression in the “Pandora.”368 The subject here is “the mythical principle of the separation of powers. But also [. . .] the pantheist possibility of reconciliation, which regards each singular being and then every specific power as a specification of the whole that delimits itself by realizing itself. Spinozism is not replaced by polytheism, but tied to an aesthetic and historical presentation.”369 But maybe—in the wake of “Spinozism”—pluralism’s conflicts are also defused and it is obliged to collectivity?
Blumenberg writes: “Gods, because there are many of them, have competencies distributed among them, in a system of their strengths and weaknesses. Since originally they are forces and powers, like forces and powers they are unlimited by their nature, that is unless other forces and powers delimit them.”370 But Blumenberg also writes, wholly referring to the “competencies”: “The world is created so divinely that each one in his place, in his time weighs equally against (balances) everything else.”371 And does this not sound a little too static, even ringing of class stratification—perhaps coming from a general tendency of pluralism towards organicism? “Theologically,” Blumenberg at least explains: “The secret potential of Spinozism still shimmering through Goethe’s fourth part of ‘Poetry and Truth’ is that it allows for speaking about gods, in so far as they are ‘appearances,’ as is everything else in relation to the identity of the final substance.”372
It is fundamental—and Blumenberg does not mention this whatsoever—that Goethe was not least a social organicist, be it in the manner of the old estates (as in Elective Affinities), or in a “modern” state–capitalist manner (as in the “Journeyman Years”), and he always was so in an authoritarian way; and especially so where (in the “Journeyman Years”) he advocates an “authoritarian liberalism.”373 It is a mistake to assume that this last is only an effect of the “crisis (of liberalism).” Since Hobbes, its father, this is its very principle: economic freedom by virtue of state compulsion. Of course, in late capitalism, securing “economic liberalism” through authoritarianism becomes unavoidable—even in spite of the bourgeoisie; at least an unfettered economic liberalism like national economist F.A. von Hayek’s. I’m specifically mentioning von Hayek, because Odo Marquard affirmatively refers to von Hayek in his essay “Political Polytheism—also a Political Theology.”374 This is the same Marquard who in his “Praise of Polytheism” had deplored—in the manner of the old estates—the replacement of “freedoms” by “‘the’ freedom.”375
Marquard’s attitude towards the class-state may or may not have been so. But there can be no doubt that he was a dedicated proponent of really existing pluralism. And this is problematic enough, because real pluralism, which is always privileged and ordered, objectively tends towards corporatism. Marquard, who has heeded the large-scale studies of “neo-corporatism” in political science,376 in the “Praise of Polytheism,” and not just in his “Political Polytheism” leaves no doubt that he is interested in polytheism as pluralism. Hence he explicates what Blumenberg only implies.377 Marquard is Blumenberg’s exoteric in matters of political poly-theology.378
Its basic assumption—as noted earlier in the “Praise of Polytheism”—is this: “The modern state of aggregation of polytheism is the political separation of powers: it is enlightened polytheism. It begins not only in Montesquieu, in Locke, or in Aristotle. It begins earlier, in polytheism: as the separation of powers in the Absolute by the pluralism of the gods.”379 I am countering this, and so I am also contradicting Blumenberg: the Homeric gods are oligarchs equal to the Greek lords, who are waging a war of (self-)destruction. Polytheism is an “oligotheism,” and because of that they can be sure to meet their fateful twilight [Dämmerung]. Only one question remains in theologicis and in politicis: whether it is the hour of the heno- and mono-poly, or of the commune; the hour of Caesar or the “Kingdom”—“of freedom.” If you will, the seeds of the religio-political end of antiquity380 are already sown in Hesiod: both his Pandory and his Promethy are “examples ‘ad maiorem Jovis gloriam.’”381
To stay in the present: as political poly-theologians, Blumenberg and Marquard, unlike the political mono-theologians Carl Schmitt and Rüdiger Altmann, cannot see that in reality pluralism has long become integralism (or rather: corporatism). The Schmitt School, by contrast, possesses strong realism about power, which still does not prevent their critique of ideology from being limited.
The Schmittians too do not see that the integralism they are establishing382 is a direct preliminary stage of monopolism. That requires a dualist theory of class struggle, which only those can develop whom Schmitt has denounced as “New Political Theologians,” namely “Political Christologians”; that is, “stasiologists,” in the fight against whom Schmitt, Blumenberg, and Marquard are united.
Nonetheless, in 1970 Schmitt acknowledged that “the structural, core problem of the Gnostic dualism between the god of creation and the god of redemption . . . is immanently given in every world in need of change and renewal, inescapably and ineradicably.” He says: “The lord of a world in need of change, that is, a misconceived world, and the liberator, the creator of a transformed, new world cannot be good friends. They are, so to speak, enemies by definition.”383
After a delay of nine years, Blumenberg partly joined Schmitt in this view, but in doing so he also acknowledged—and with this I aim to bring my essay full circle—that the “Gnostic recidivism”384 had proven to be more powerful than he had been prepared to accept in 1966. His “Work on Myth” then is also work on gnosis, which has become Blumenberg’s metaphor of revolution after it had been Eric Voegelin’s long before 1966. Not least against Voegelin’s thesis that “modernity . . . had better be called the Gnostic age”385 Blumenberg had tried to demonstrate its “legitimacy.” Now, at the beginning of the 1980s, he agrees in principle with this fellow student of F. A. von Hayek386 and ideologue of the “Ordered Society”:387 in the fight against “the Neo-Manichaeism of the established philosophy of history,” as the exoteric Marquard had been defining the “Gnostic recidivism” of “counter-modernity” since 1977.388
This is what Blumenberg’s controversy with Voegelin has shrunk to: what the latter has called “modernity” [Neuzeit] gets called “counter-modernity,” but he fights it as decisively as Voegelin did—although I do not want to underplay the contrary religious-political starting points of the two. Following Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Catholic Prometheus critique,389 Voegelin excommunicates Prometheus as a committed theist, while Blumenberg’s analysis of Gnosis is presented as anti-theistic. Marquard has reduced it to the memorable formula: “Nihil contra Deum nisi plures dei.”390
Because for Marquard the negative principle, “that criticism,” began with the Jewish god,391 this god himself is Prometheus and has to be dethroned by the old gods, just like Prometheus has to be thrown into Tartarus by Blumenberg. One should not underestimate such a consistent anti-Judaism,392 but it is crucial that it is synchronically and politically motivated. Its subject is criticism, respice utopia, from whose spirit supposedly not only the French Revolution has sprung.393
Despite all the secularization theories suggesting continuity, the philosophy of religion analyzed here should not be taken as too religious-philosophical. It is, to use an expression Blumenberg aimed at Carl Schmitt, “theology as politics”394—so it follows with regard to the monstrous words: “Nemo contra hominem nisi homo ipse,”395 or then indeed: “Now politics is fate.” Nonetheless, Blumenberg, Marquard, Schmitt, and Voegelin all affirm “fate”; if not everywhere as the “rival of God’s omnipotence,” then as the “fabrication”396 of a second nature. “The renunciation of all criticism and the idolatry of nature”397 converge, as Walter Benjamin noted in his essay “Elective Affinities.” Blumenberg does not mention him, neither does he mention the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, even though the turn to polytheist myth398 targets that contemporary critique of myth.
This last was, as is known, motivated by anti-fascism. But today anti-fascism is suspect—a suspicion that extends even to those who diagnose fascism . . . even to the point that it is supposed to be the fault of the diagnosticians themselves, i.e., the “critics.”399 For the neo-conservatives the year 1933 is no longer the annus horribilis in German history, but 1968.400 My thesis is that Blumenberg, under the long-term effects of this traumatic “finishing with every political theology,” moved on to constitute a Political Poly-Theology.
The “trend reversal” is a counter-revolt that grows into a colossal counter-revolution, already having confirmed the ambitions of the “cultural revolution.” Undeniably he relates himself to the classic, to Metternich’s restoration; central for Blumenberg’s argument in Work on Myth is this passage from Goethe’s letter dated 11 May 1820 to Zelter: The early Prometheus “would be very welcome, as a gospel, to our revolutionary youth, and the High Commissions of Berlin and Mainz might make a grim face at my youthful caprices.”401
331. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder Politischen Theologie, (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1970), 124.
332. Cf. Hans Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung: Erweiterte und überarbeitete Neuausgabe von “Die Legitimität der Neuzeit,” erster und zweiter Teil (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 103–18; as well as Richard Faber, “Von der Erledigung jeder Politischen Theologie zur Konstitution Politischer Polytheologie,” in Der Fürst dieser Welt: Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, edited by Jacob Taubes (Munich: Fink, 1983), 85ff.
333. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 123–24.
334. Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung, 105.
335. Cf. Faber, op. cit., Ch. 3.
336. Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979).
337. Cf. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 123.
338. Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 31.
339. Cf. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 116 ff.
340. Cf. Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 679ff.
341. Blumenberg quotes from Goethe’s letter to Seebeck dated 30 December 1819; cf. Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 460.
342. Cf. Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 633.
343. Ernst Bloch, essay in the Hessischer Rundfunk, 5 June 1966.
344. Karl Kerényi, Prometheus: die menschliche Existenz in griechischer Deutung (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1959), 23.
345. Ibid., 67.
346. Ibid., 111.
347. Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 493.
348. Cf. ibid., 486 and 493.
349. Ibid., 486; Cf. also 511 and 529–31.
350. Cf. ibid., 527.
351. Cf. ibid., 526.
352. Cf. ibid., 498.
353. Ibid., 578.
354. Cf. C. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 123.
355. Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 581.
356. Cf. ibid., 599ff.
357. Ibid., 602.
358. Ibid., 580.
359. Ibid., 625–26.
360. Ibid., 580.
361. Cf. Faber, op. cit., chs. 1 and 2.
362. Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 569.
363. Cf. also Faber, “Parkleben: Zur sozialen Idyllik Goethes,” in Goethes Wahlverwandschaften: Kritische Modelle und Diskursanalyses zum Mythos Literatur, edited by Norbert W. Bolz (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1981), 100–104.
364. Cf. Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 441.
365. Ibid., 431.
366. Ibid., 553.
367. Cf. ibid., 573.
368. Ibid., 574.
369. Ibid., 575; cf. also 583–84.
370 Ibid., 597.
371. Ibid., 576.
372. Ibid., 598.
373. Cf. Faber, “Parkleben,” 91–144.
374. Odo Marquard, “Politischer Polytheismus–auch eine politische Theologie,” in Der Fürst dieser Welt, edited by Jacob Taubes, 82.
375. Odo Marquard, “Lob des Polytheismus: Über Monomythie und Polymythie,” in Philosophie und Mythos. Ein Kolloquium, edited by Hans Poser (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), 47.
376. I only mention U. von Alemann, ed., Neokorporatismus (Frankfurt: Campus-Verlag, 1981).
377. Conversely Blumenberg extensively explained why O. Marquard’s motto “Nihil contra Deum nisi plures Dei,” which he put at the top of the presentation version of “Politischer Polytheismus,” makes one feel philological and hence Goethean.
378. In a later presentation “Das gnostische Rezidiv als Gegenneuzeit: Ultrakurztheorem in lockerem Anschluß an Blumenberg” it says more generally: “To understand Blumenberg means to shorten him, at the risk of reduction: the ‘divine lengths’ of his books need to be made receivable for those who only have antennae for devilish shortness,” in Gnosis und Politik, edited by Jacob Taubes (Munich: Fink, 1984).
379. Marquard, “Lob des Polytheismus,” 53–54.
380. Cf. Faber, Die Verkündigung Vergils: Reich—Kirche—Staat. Zur Kritik der “Politischen Theologie” (Hildesheim: Olms, 1975), chapter I, 2.
381. P. Barié, “Prometheus und die Folgen: Strukturale und ethnologische Aspekte einer mythischen Erzählung,” Der altsprachliche Unterricht 6 (1982), 26.
382. Cf. Faber, Die Verkündigung Vergils, ch. II, 9ff.
383. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 120–21.
384. Blumenberg, Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), 78.
385. Eric Voegelin in: Philosophische Rundschau I (1953–54), 43.
386. Cf. Margit von Mises, Ludwig von Mises: Der Mensch und sein Werk (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1981), 261 and 266.
387. Cf. Gert Schäfer, “Leitlinien stabilitätskonformen Verhaltens: Entwicklungspersepktiven und Gewaltpotentiale rationalisierter Herrschaftsinteressen,” in Der CDU-Staat 2. Analysen zur Verfassungswirklichkeit der Bundesrepublik, edited by Gert Schäfer and Carl Nedelmann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 425–60, especially 447–53.
388. Odo Marquard, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen: Philosophische Studien (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 57; see now also Marquard, “Theodizee, Geschichtsphilosophie, Gnosis,” in Spiegel und Gleichnis: Festschrift für J. Taubes (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1983), 166.
389. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prometheus: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Idealismus (Heidelberg: F.H. Kerle, 1947).
390. Motto of the presentation version of “Politischer Polytheismus . . .”
391. Odo Marquard, “Exile der Heiterkeit,” in Das Komische, edited by Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1976), 146.
392. Cf. Jacob Taubes, “Zur Konjunktur des Polytheismus,” in Mythos und Moderne: Begriff und Bild einer Rekonstruktion, edited by Karl-Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 457–70, especially 469. With this critique, for the time being, Taubes had closed the circle he himself had opened in 1947 with his dissertation Abendländische Eschatologie. Under its impression Voegelin came to his thesis on Gnosis, against which Blumenberg’s 1966 Legitimacy of the Modern Age polemicized. Not least against this was directed Carl Schmitt’s Politische Theologie II, dated 1970, to which Blumenberg then replied in 1974 and 1979. Taubes polemicizes against Blumenberg’s and Marquard’s “Enlightened polytheism” of the years 1979–82.
393. Cf. Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), as well as Odo Marquard, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen, 39–66.
394. Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung, 113.
395. Cf. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 126.
396. Marquard, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen, 67.
397. Walter Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandschaften,” in: Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), vol. I, 1, 149.
398. Cf. Jacob Taubes, “Wende zum Mythos,” Merkur 11 (1982), 1122–28.
399. I am referring to several presentations given at an academic congress on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the national–socialist “Seizure of Power” in January 1983 in Berlin.
400. Cf. also Helmut Dubiel, “Neue alte Politik: Falsche Antworten auf richtige Fragen—der neokonservative Salto mortale,” Freibeuter 18 (1983), 45–63, esp. 50–63.
401. Goethe cited after Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos, 460.