Shipwreck with spectators

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With his painting Scene of a Shipwreck ( The Raft of the Medusa ), Théodore Géricault confronted visitors to the Paris exhibition in 1819 with a shipwreck 3 years ago by putting them in the role of the spectator: After the French frigate Méduse ran aground on the West African coast a raft was built that floated in the sea for 10 days.

" Vous êtes embarqué "

This quotation from Blaise Pascal is prefixed by Blumenberg to his treatise in 6 chapters.

The philosopher Hans Blumenberg , published in 1979, compares shipwreck with viewer the shipwreck metaphor and its different uses with examples of the history of philosophy and literature from antiquity to the 20th century and demonstrates the change in the philosophical position. In the appendix, Outlook on a theory of non-conceptuality , he presents his metaphorology , which says that there are insights that cannot be formulated in scientific terms, but which can be illustrated with holistic imagery.

Seafaring as a border violation

The author's starting point is the early Greek view of the world: The ocean surrounding the habitable land is ruled by gods ( Poseidon ) and demonic powers and is therefore an unpredictable, disorienting, lawless sphere for people as "mainland creatures" and thus the natural limit of their activities. Ancient authors, e.g. B. Hesiod , consequently contrast the threat to seafaring (reefs, storms, shallows, calm) with the security of the land (harbor), gain a feeling of calm and warn against the recklessness and excess (wealth through trade) of nautical ventures . The Roman Lucretius takes up this idea and warns of the risks of crossing boundaries out of profit addiction. Horace associates the hubris of the seafarer with the actions of Prometheus, who intervened in divine powers, and in one of his odes calls the ship, damaged by a storm, back to the port.

What remains for the shipwrecked

The ship of fools by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch symbolizes the world. Similar to the moral satire of the same name by Sebastian Brant ,which was also created in the late Middle Ages,the artist presents the viewer with human vices and follies that could lead to the “shipwreck of the world” feared by Montaigne.

The situation of the survived catastrophe, which is taken up in the history of reception by different authors and varied according to their location, is for Blumenberg "figure of a philosophical initial experience":

According to Diogenes Laertius , the Stoic Zeno of Kition became a philosopher through such an experience, and Vitruvius reports that the Socratic Aristippus recognized that only those possessions are important that can be saved in a shipwreck. This reduction correlates with the ancient theory of happiness ( eudaimonia ) as a “pure form of the relationship to the world”.

The humanist Michel de Montaigne connects the initial experience with "moral [r] autarky". “In the process of self-discovery”, “self-possession”, ie the substance of personality, is gained. For him, the image of seafaring means abandoning oneself to “optical subjectivity”, the deceptive hope, of “considering oneself too important”. By moderation in the fixed position of the country (self-possession) one can be saved "from the general shipwreck of the world": by oneself.

During the Age of Enlightenment , the seafaring metaphor was often revalued, as the risk and the courage to set out were viewed as positive. B. Fontenelle or Émilie du Châtelet , who equates staying lying in the harbor with missing the chance in life and missing luck. The risk of distress at sea is the alternative to standing still. Even Voltaire's novel characters benefit from dangerous experiences: Candide needs to make the experience of the accident for its further development and the protagonist of the philosophical tale Zadig is taught, that life may be driven only by processes that might have even fatal.

Goethe metaphorically illustrates a biographical situation : Rescue from a shipwreck means a gain for his continued existence despite the lost goods. In a letter to Lavater of March 6, 1776, he wrote that he wanted to discover something new on "the wave of the world" with the risk of failure. Faust says the same in his night monologue when looking at the earth spirit sign.

In a similar way, Friedrich Nietzsche chooses this image for human existence. In Pascal's sense , he would risk a finite bet with the possibility of an infinite win. This presupposes the idea of ​​a life from the beginning on the unsafe sea, with the great probability of the loss of the apparently helpful old habits, whose makeshift remedies he does not need (entablature, framework of concepts). But there is a prospect of an intellect that has been freed after an accident and rescue and the new experience and bliss of solid ground: For the philosopher, the discovery of the new world means “winning the risk” to set off. The endangerment is a side effect of the movement. In the Zarathustra fragment Vom Tümmel , for example, the title character is thrown ashore after a shipwreck and jumps back into the sea with the exclamation “I am losing myself”.

Aesthetics and morals of the viewer

The extension of the metaphor confronts an unaffected spectator on the coast with the passengers threatened with death. The motives of the observers and their scientific positions, as well as those of the authors, have been discussed since ancient times:

The picture The Wreck in the Arctic Ocean (1798) depicts the theme of the wrecked ship and the audience . Since it is disputed whether Caspar David Friedrich is really the painter of the painting ascribed to him, there is a lot of leeway for the viewer to interpret this allegory of failure and the roles and motifs of the people.

The Roman Lucretius coined this configuration with the idea of ​​observing people in distress from the shore "with pleasure", and not with curious satisfaction about the suffering of others, but with the awareness of the unaffected location of the philosopher. That means: enjoyment arises in this " Epicurean didactic poem" in connection with a feeling of a secure basis of the worldview through the distance to reality, to which also the viewer belongs, in connection with the "existence success of the ancient theory", the happiness as "Pure [r] form of the relationship to the world". Compared to Epicurus , however, in Lucretius the sublime cosmos as an object no longer fills the viewer with a feeling of elation, but rather the experience of one's own position of a “quasi-extra-worldliness”, preserved from hostile powers. Following Epicurus' atomism, his image of the universe resembles that of an anonymous “ocean of matter [...] from which the figures of nature [in an identity of catastrophe and productivity] are thrown onto the beach of visible phenomena like rubble from huge shipwrecks [...] “- like a person at birth. These images of the treacherous sea warn the mortal viewer against abandoning their philosophical position: Man should free himself from the fear that is caused by random natural phenomena, in that he consequently regards them as indifferent to himself. Accordingly, the sage strives for a position outside the world.

With the shipwreck metaphor, Montaigne (see above) also focuses on the downfall of the state or the world and sees people in a double role: as a stoic spectator of a state's downfall that he could not prevent, he is interested in the symptoms. His role as a viewer is not without pity, but also arouses “pleasant sensations” and “enjoyment”. These thoughts are similar to those of Lucretius, but differ from them in the following: The human being - and this is life-sustaining - is determined by ambition, jealousy, envy, vengeance and cruelty in addition to positive characteristics, sometimes even pity is mixed with it "Malicious well-being", to stand on the safe shore and not have taken a risk.

As a consequence of the revaluation of the role of humans since the time of the Enlightenment (see above), the viewer is also more closely involved in the observed process. He is no longer the distanced outsider. Voltaire (see above) criticizes the self-enjoyment diagnosed by Lucretius and declares the observer's attitude to be helpful and, if they could not help, as non-malicious human curiosity, a passion that he shares with animals as part of his active being. However, Abbé Galiani contradicts Voltaire and takes Lucretius under protection: The prerequisite for pure curiosity and fascination of the audience is a safe location, such as that of a theater audience who follows fictional tragedies from a safe place. Security and happiness in the sense of Lucretius are therefore prerequisites for curiosity.

Survival art

Blumenberg also relates the configuration to the life situations of well-known personalities or historical events. The central question is how the viewer reacts to the pain of those personally affected. The author compares the processing of painful experiences (Goethe) with the panoramic view of a catastrophe in the context of the development of world history (Hegel).

Using Goethe's example, one could on the one hand infer the change in his consciousness and his empathy or, on the other hand, the ambivalence of his role as a spectator would become clear: As a 23-year-old representative of Sturm und Drang , he criticized a painting by the Swiss artist Salomon Gessner , which is idyllically viewed out of a rock while watching a storm shows as unrealistic and compares the situation with that of Voltaires. The latter describes in a letter (1757) that from his bed he had watched a storm on Lake Geneva through a mirror. This could be understood as a metaphor for a calm distance and self-sufficiency from the kingdoms of France and Prussia, with which he was in conflict, but the young Goethe complains about the nature observer's lack of emotion. Later, as a statesman, he apparently no longer felt the indignity of the unmoved spectator of catastrophes. In 1807 the Weimar minister visited the battlefield near Jena , where the year before the French troops had defeated the Prussian-Saxon troops, and told the Lucretian translator Karl Ludwig von Knebel and the historian Heinrich Luden that he saw himself as a spectator of history, like described in Lucretius, felt. To the patriotic interlocutors suffering with the victims of the defeat, he presents himself as a disciplined “Olympic spectator of ancient self-imprint”. Blumenberg interprets Goethe's endeavor to distance himself as that of someone who "escaped [from ruin] himself", cites Goethe's rescue from French soldiers in Weimar (1806) by his partner Christiane Vulpius , whom he then marries out of gratitude, and refers to Schopenhauer's formulation the "memory of the previous suffering and deprivation" (see below).

In comparison to this personality- related reaction, Hegel transfers Lucretius' metaphor to his philosophy of history: Passions and ignorance lead to the downfall of great empires, but are only stages to the “true result of world history, the end to which these monstrous sacrifices have been made.” The viewer follow these disasters with deep compassion, but reflect from the position of reason that they are means of ascent. In this way, "the real, which seems wrong, becomes the rational [transfigured]."

The viewer loses his position

William Turner (The Shipwreck, 1805) draws the viewer into the scenery of the billowing sea and makes him a participant or needy on a lifeboat or the wreck.

Arthur Schopenhauer sees the human being as if in a double life in both positions: as a spectator of his own concrete misery, reason helps him to achieve abstraction and calm "distancing from immediacy" as well as an overview of life. This results in a “feeling of the sublime”, on the one hand through the elevation above the natural forces (the will), which only fight with each other in one's imagination, and on the other hand in the self-awareness of being the subject of knowledge. Schopenhauer consequently interprets the viewer's attitude in the Lucretian poem as a “distance of memory” of pain suffered and not in connection with the Epicurean tradition of the metaphor for “the nature of things in the view of atomism”: “Only pain is given immediately, We could only recognize satisfaction and enjoyment indirectly, through memory of the previous suffering ”. The philosopher illustrates the ambivalence of life with the change of place of an actor who follows the action from the audience after his appearance. This removes the rigid division of roles in the configuration at Lucretius.

For the cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt, there is no longer a fixed position of the distant observer when considering world history, because we are "on a more or less fragile ship [...] But one could also say: We are partly this wave ourselves" . In a sailing ship metaphor, the observer's uncertainty as to whether he is an actor (wind) or driven (sail) is increased to a paradox: "The colorful and strongly billowing sail thinks it is the cause". The viewer does not have a fixed position: In contrast to the viewer at Lucretius, he cannot observe nature from the shore and gain knowledge from it.

Shipbuilding from the shipwreck

Emil Du Bois-Reymond , as a representative of Darwinism , changed the metaphor for “feeling the […] hopelessly sinking […] who clings to a plank that just carries him above the water”, and for the idea of ​​“living with a shipwreck “, Without hoping for the safety of an accessible port: Applied to science, this means that it cannot draw any conclusions about the transcendent meaning of existence from the perspective of an independent spectator, but just suffices for the self-preservation of life.

Iwan Konstantinowitsch Aiwasowski (Regenbogen, 1873) painted in a romantic manner castaways who have escaped from the sinking ship and glide through waves that glistening reflecting the light.

Otto Neurath speaks not of a saving plank, but of a ship that can never call at a port and that therefore does not have to be repaired or converted in a dock but on the high seas . In relation to language, he wants to illustrate the difference between his position of logical positivism and " Rudolf Carnap's fiction of an ideal language built up from [derived from everyday language] clean atomic sentences [and all inaccuracies]": "There is no means to put a language from finally secured protocol sentences at the absolute beginning of the scientific knowledge [→ Hafen] ". The exclusion of metaphysics also leaves some conceptual imprecision: only the syntactic framework works as long as it can be kept floating, the conceptual system has to be renewed again and again through reconstruction. The passengers cannot leave this linguistic vehicle, as it is a framework condition.

Paul Lorenzen replies in the constructivist context of Neurath that we are not inextricably bound to the usual instruments of language and that we could think of a beginning (mainland) with a different methodology. He turns the ship metaphor around by adding a prehistory: The ancestors of the passengers could swim and first assembled a raft from driftwood and then a functional ship from it.

Blumenberg continues this consideration: In an "artificial distress", we would have to jump from the comfortable ship into the sea in order to dare a new beginning without the "mother ship of natural language", that is, from philosophical zero point, and "the To understand actions with which we - swimming in the middle of the sea of ​​life - build a raft or even a ship from previously unknown materials from previous shipwrecks. "

literature

  • Jürg Haefliger: Imagination Systems. Epistemological, anthropological and historical mentality aspects of Hans Blumenberg's metaphorology . Lang, Bern 1996. ISBN 3-906756-83-1 .
  • Oliver Müller: Worry about reason. Hans Blumenberg's phenomenological anthropology . Mentis, Paderborn 2005. ISBN 3-89785-432-5 .
  • Philipp Stoellger: Metaphor and lifeworld. Hans Blumenberg's metaphorology as lifeworld hermeneutics and its religious-phenomenological horizon . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2000. ISBN 3-16-147302-7 .
  • Philipp Vanscheidt: History in Metaphors . Weidler, Berlin 2009. ISBN 978-3-89693-535-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hesiod: Erga. s. Blumenberg, Hans: Shipwreck with a spectator. Paradigm of a metaphor of existence. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1979, p. 11 f. ISBN 978-3-518-22263-8 . This edition is quoted.
  2. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 9 ff.
  3. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 33.
  4. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 14 ff.
  5. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 15.
  6. ↑ Diogenes Laertius VII 1,2. s. Blumenberg, p. 15.
  7. ↑ Vitruvius: De archtectura VI 1-2. s. Blumenberg, p. 16.
  8. ↑ Blumenberg, pp. 22, 31.
  9. ↑ Montaigne: Essais I 38, II 14, 16, 17, II 9. III 1, 9. 12. Ders .: De la solitude . Essais I 38. p. Blumenberg, p. 18 ff.
  10. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 19.
  11. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 20.
  12. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 34.
  13. ^ Fontenelle: Dialogues des Morts . Ders .: Entretiens sur la pluralité des Mondes. s. Blumenberg, p. 34.
  14. ↑ Mme du Châtelet: Discours sur le bonheur . s. Blumenberg, p. 39.
  15. ↑ a b Blumenberg, p. 39.
  16. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 38.
  17. ↑ Goethe, Werke (Ed. E. Beutler), Vol. 23, pp. 663 f., 875. s. Blumenberg, p. 22.
  18. ^ Nietzsche: Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft I § ​​46, III § 124. s. Blumenberg, p. 23 ff.
  19. ^ Nietzsche: Works VI. s. Blumenberg, p. 25.
  20. ^ Nietzsche: Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft I § ​​46, IV § 289. s. Blumenberg, p. 26 ff.
  21. ^ Nietzsche: Works XIV. S. Blumenberg, p. 24.
  22. ↑ Lucretius: De rerum natura II, V. p. Blumenberg p. 33.
  23. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 31.
  24. ↑ s. Blumenberg, pp. 22, 31, 56.
  25. ↑ a b Blumenberg, p. 32.
  26. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 32 ff.
  27. ↑ a b Blumenberg, p. 56.
  28. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 21.
  29. ^ Voltaire: Curiosity. In: Dictionnaire Philosophique. s. Blumenberg, p. 40.
  30. ^ Galiani's letter to Madame d'Épinay, 1771. s. Blumenberg, p. 43.
  31. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 44.
  32. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 54.
  33. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 52 ff.
  34. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 59.
  35. ↑ Hegel: Reason in History. s. Blumenberg, p. 58.
  36. ↑ Schopenhauer: The world as will and representation I § ​​16, III § 39. s. Blumenberg, p. 65 ff.
  37. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 65 ff.
  38. ↑ Schopenhauer: The world as will and conception IV § 58. s. Blumenberg, p. 67 ff.
  39. ↑ Schopenhauer: The world as will and idea I § ​​16. s. Blumenberg, p. 69.
  40. ↑ Burckhardt: Historical Fragments. Ders .: World historical considerations IV, VI. s. Blumenberg, p. 73 ff.
  41. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 75.
  42. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 76.
  43. ↑ Du Bois-Reymond: Darwin versus Galiani. s. Blumenberg, p. 78.
  44. ^ Neurath: Protocol sentences. In: Knowledge III. 1932. s. Blumenberg, p. 80 ff.
  45. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 81.
  46. ↑ Lorenzen: Methodical Thinking. In Ratio VII, 1965. Ders .: Methodical thinking. Frankfurt, 1968. s. Blumenberg, p. 81 ff.
  47. ↑ Blumenberg, p. 83.