Hans Blumenberg’s anthropology of instrumental reason: culture, modernity, and self-preservation

© 2017 Dr. Francis Dominique PlagneThis thesis argues that a notion of biological self-preservation is central to the philosophical anthropology of Hans Blumenberg. It shows how Blumenberg adopts an understanding of the human being developed in early 20th century German Philosophical Anthropology, particularly in the naturalistic variant proposed by Arnold Gehlen. This theory of the human argues that the unique biological make-up of the human being should be the central consideration in the interpretation of human life and its production (culture). Against the backdrop of an archaic experience of the power of nature that he calls ‘the absolutism of reality’, Blumenberg adopts this ‘anthropobiological’ paradigm and uses it as the basis for a functional interpretation of culture centred on human self-preservation. The thesis demonstrates that this philosophical anthropology is not only descriptive, but also has normative and critical aspects. Blumenberg proposes an unsurpassable limit in the possible transformations of the human relationship to nature, denying the possibility of a receptive opening to nature that would break with instrumental mastery. This anthropological limit is formulated in critical dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s work and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, both of which look forward to a reconciled relationship between the human and non-human. It then argues that Blumenberg’s interpretation and defence of modernity is also grounded in his philosophical anthropology. His account of modernity through the category of ‘self-assertion’ functions as a complete reversal of the critique of instrumental reason in Heidegger and Critical Theory. Blumenberg celebrates the modern intensification of the instrumental relationship to nature as the moment in which humanity first properly recognised and accepted its true relation to nature. Only by reading Blumenberg in dialogue with the critique of instrumental reason can these implications of his anthropological position and account of modernity be brought to the surface