This book deals with the function of myth in societies throughout history. It relies heavily on the Homeric epics, as well as depicting how the pantheon of Greek gods has been passed down through western culture. There are long expositions into the various treatments of the myths of Faust and Prometheus, including Goethe’s treatments of both. As well, there is a digression into Goethe’s affinity for Napoleon, a recollection of their mythic meeting at Erfurt, and, finally, Goethe’s mythologizing of Napoleon as a modern day Prometheus. Finally, Blumenberg concludes his book by contrasting how the Enlightenment and Romantic philosophers dealt with myth and, in particular, Prometheus.
Blumenberg begins with a description of the beginnings of myth. “That events were interpreted as actions is, according to Nietzsche’s formulation, the distinguishing mark of all mythologies…. Urgently and early on, the interest was certainly in the existence of powers that one could appeal to, that could be turned away from or toward one, that were capable of being influenced in every sense, and they were also (to a degree) dependable.” He continues on the function of myth, “The antithesis between myth and reason is a late and a poor invention, because it forgoes seeing the function of myth, in the overcoming of that archaic unfamiliarity of the world, as itself a rational function…. One of the arguments of Romanticism was that the truth could not and should not be as young as the Enlightenment had undertaken to present it as being.” Goethe suggests, “In the centuries when man found nothing outside himself but abomination, he had to be happy that he was sent back into himself, so that in place of objects, which had been taken from him, he could create phantoms.”
Ernst Cassirer was concerned with how the symbols of myth preceded science. “For Cassirer the most important concept is one that is remote from the actual terminologies of philosophy and consequently is able to transcend their history—the concept of symbol. The theory of the symbolic forms allows one for the first time to correlate the expressive means of myth with those of science, but in the historically irreversible relationship and with the unrelinquishable presupposition of science as the terminus ad quem [goal toward which the process is directed]. Myth is made obsolete by what comes after it; science cannot be made obsolete…. Myth moves into a position that has a functional value of its own only in relation to a totality that counts.” For modern man, myth was just a stepping stone to a “realer” truth. Cassirer relates, “What distinguishes mythical time from historical time is that for mythical time there is an absolute past, which neither requires nor is susceptible of any further explanation.”
Myth is next contrasted with Christian dogma. “Negligence in constructing chronology is one of the things that are inexcusable in dogmatic observance. The compensation that observance furnishes in return for this is that the ‘history’ it regulates is from the beginning a history of man, which is preceded by nothing except the mere preparation of the world for his entrance. He stands at the focus of God's actions, and everything depends on God's behavior in relation to man exclusively. Consequently the [comprehensive] history of histories must possess continuous identity, reliable chronology and genealogy, localization and dating. This produces an entirely different pathos from what can be characteristic of myth. In myth there is no chronology, there are only sequences…. Although myth refuses, and must refuse, to provide explanations, it does ‘produce’ another life stabilizing quality: the inadmissibility of the arbitrary, the elimination of caprice.”
Blumenberg suggests Christianity was most successful when it combined elements of dogma and story. “Christianity, unexpectedly and contrary to its antecedents, went halfway to meet this pressure and enriched the invisible One with elements of a perceptual and narrative character. True, it did not need to go back to animal physiognomies again in order to prevail over the Hellenistic world; but for more than a millennium it created combinations of dogma and image, of concept and perceptivity, of abstraction and narrative…. Satan, in the Christian tradition is, like Proteus, a figure that exaggerates the mythical repertory, summing up all the means that can be employed against a theological authority characterized by reliability and commitment to man…. He represents the opposite of dogma’s substantial realism. In the figure of Satan, myth has become the subversion of the world of faith that is disciplined by dogma.”
Blumenberg now goes searching for the fundamental, if not the original, myth. “Attempts have repeatedly been made to reduce the diverse myths of our culture circle and of others to a fundamental myth [Grundmythos] and then to establish the latter as the ‘radical’ that underlies unfoldings and enrichments…. The radical myth does not have to be the initial myth…. The myth that is varied and transformed by its receptions, in the forms in which it is related to (and has the power of being related to) history, deserves to be made a subject of study if only because such a study also takes in the historical situations and needs that were affected by the myth and were disposed to ‘work’ on it…. The fundamental myth is not what was pre-given, but rather what remains visible in the end, what was able to satisfy the receptions and expectations.”
Now comes philosophy on the scene to contrast against both myth and Christian dogma. “Philosophy, in opposition to myth, brought into the world above all restless inquiry, and proclaimed its ‘rationality’ in the fact that it did not shrink from any further question or from any logical consequence of possible answers. Dogma restricted itself to ordering a halt to the pleasure taken in questioning by those who transgress boundaries, and marking out the minimum of what cannot be relinquished…. Myth lets inquiry run up against the rampart of its images and stories…. This fragment of a myth takes only the single step from the life-world to the unusual, and then the story is over. He who asks “Why?” is himself at fault if he is annoyed by the answer. He has violated the rules of the game of the mythical world…. Dogma refuses such offers, because it commands one to believe its God to be capable of anything.”
Blumenberg now arrives at the Enlightenment and the questions posed by modernity. “The abyss and the hermit—they are the metaphors of nihilism, the images of the modern age’s failure in the face of a question that it posed for the first time in this nakedness and for which it had forbidden itself every dogmatic and every mythical answer: the question of the reason for being.” Schopenhauer proposes the final myth of reincarnation. “The standard [Normierung] that a ‘final myth’ has to satisfy was, if I see it correctly, first laid down by Schopenhauer. For him the myth of the transmigration of souls is the epitome of a story that comes as close to philosophical truth as any story that could be devised…. Wherein does this quality of the myth of reincarnations consist? In contrast to Nietzsche’s idea of recurrence, it does not make the world return to what it once was, repeating its passages eternally, without change. Instead, the subject returns to its world, not as something that is eternally the same, but rather, according to the measure of what it can expect, it returns into the form of existence of which it is able to make itself worthy.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing asks, “But why should not every individual man have been present more than once in this world? Do I bring away so much from one visit that it is perhaps not worth the trouble of coming again? And what then have I to lose? Is not the whole of eternity mine?”
In modernity, for the first time, myth is unpacked and perhaps seen as myth—myth as purpose. Johann Herder suggests, “The harsh mythology of the Greeks, from the earliest times, should not be employed by us except in a mild and human way.” He expands that the elements contained within ancient Greek myth are “such a rich material for the cultivation of a spiritual meaning in their figures that they seem to cry to us: ‘Use the fire that Prometheus brought you, for yourselves! Let it shine brighter and more beautifully, for it is the flame of the forever continuing cultivation [Bildung] of man.’” Finally, Herder concludes that modern man is at his pinnacle, “when he puts the noblest, perhaps also the most natural meaning into them [myth], the cultivation and further cultivation of the human race to every kind of culture; the striving of the divine spirit in man toward the awakening of all of his powers.” Heinrich Heine says of pantheism, “[it is] the reinstatement of man in his divine privileges.” Jean Paul quips, “Gods can play, but God is serious.” Goethe chimes in, “For myself, I cannot be satisfied, given the multiple tendencies of mode of thought; as a poet and artist I am a polytheist, but as an investigator of nature I am a pantheist, and I am the one just as firmly as the other. If I have need of a God for my personhood, as a moral man, then that has already been taken care of, too.”
After going into detail on Goethe’s interpretation of the Faust myth and his “heretical” ode to Prometheus, Blumenberg has quite a long digression into the epigraph to the fourth volume of Goethe’s autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which was published posthumously. It states, “Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse [No one (can stand) against a god unless he is a god himself].” Blumenberg parses out, “The saying here is neither purely monotheistic (by describing a counterposition, against God, as illusory), nor exclusively polytheistic either (by setting up one god against another), but rather has a pantheistic implication: Only the entire universe can prevail against a demonic-divine nature, which is able to overpower every individual power within this universe. The universe is the absolute, which cannot be shaken, in its power, by what occurs within it.” Goethe often described Napoleon as a demonic power let loose upon the world. The epigraph, it is posited, is a reference to the two men's meeting at Erfurt, where Goethe looked the Emperor square in the eyes.
Blumenberg discusses the Christian concept of the Trinity and how it was a response to Gnostic and Manichaean concepts of dualism. “In it's historical function, the Christian dogma of the Trinity was, after all, intended as a means of barring the way to dualism, by reducing the impact of the bifurcation of the divinity that the production of the Son brings with it, by means of a third agency that the two cooperate in generating, and binding that bifurcation to the origin, without retracting it or destroying its meaning in terms of salvation…. Despite all the conjuring up of love and unity in the Trinity, traces of the old dualistic temptations have remained ineffaceable. Especially in the distribution of roles: of creation to the Father and redemption to the Son, as well as of the posteschatological (even antieschatological) institutionalization of the store of grace, which is assigned to the Spirit—the Spirit of Disappointment. Thus when, rather than looking at the conciliatory formulas, one analyzes what is implicit, an element of opposition always remains—always something of Prometheus in the way the Son acts in solidarity with mankind, who have fallen from Paradise. That applies to the demand that we should see the harshest sacrifice as the offer, to the Father, of the ransom for man; but it also applies to the intradivine rivalry for the assumption of the office of judge at the end of the ages.”
Finally, Blumenberg goes back to how the nineteenth century philosophers related to the myth of Prometheus. “Only when Nietzsche rediscovers in Prometheus the central figure of ancient tragedy, and finds in that figure the absolute antithesis of the Socratic type, does it become clear that the century had wagered on Prometheus as the victorious conqueror on behalf of mankind, the god who invents ways to combat the gods’ playing with men's fortunes, the patriarch of historical self-discovery.… The century had indeed used the Titan’s great gesture of the institution of fire as a metaphor for its own accomplishments…. It had not connected the mythical idea that earthly consummation could never be anything but “an encroachment on the gods’ privilege of happiness and their perfection” with the suspicion, or even fear, that in making himself comfortable in the world man might have to be prepared for resistance, for limits, or even for objections imposed by overwhelming force.” August Wilhelm Schlegel cries out, “O son, you are drunk with the delusion of creation!”
German Idealism resurrected Greek myth, but for its own purposes and in its own context. Friedrich Schlegel opined, “If the inner natural meaning of the old saga of the gods and heroes, the sound of which reaches us on the magic stream of imagination as the giant voice of the primeval age—if this meaning will be more closely revealed for us, and will be renewed for us, too, and rejuvenated, by the spirit of a philosophy that is itself alive and that also understands life clearly: then it will be possible to compose tragedies in which everything is ancient, and which yet would be certain to capture the sense of the age through the meaning.” Blumenberg comments, “The renewal of myth within Idealism is not a simple task, because Idealism is itself a myth. That a story has to be told about the spirit, a story that can only be imprecisely surmised on the basis of the actual history of ideas, is also part of the attempt to overcome the contingency that oppresses the self-consciousness of the modern age…. Zeus “chose” the world and he, Prometheus, chose man—that is the formula for the conflict both between ancient and modern and between cosmocentric and anthropocentric metaphysics.” Friedrich Schelling relates, “Prometheus is the thought in which the human race, after it had produced from inside itself the whole world of the gods, turned back to itself and became conscious of itself and its own destiny (the thought in which it perceived the unfortunate side of belief in the gods)…. Prometheus is not an idea that any man invented; he is one of the original ideas [Urgedanken] that force themselves into existence and that unfold logically when, as Prometheus did in Aeschylus, they find an abode in a thoughtful spirit in which to do so.” Blumenberg concludes, “The Prometheus myth, treated in this way, is no longer an element in the class of myths, but rather the one myth of the end of all myths.”
