International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN: 0967-2559 (Print) 1466-4542 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riph20

Pushing the Monstrous to the Edge of the World;

Shaking the Nightmare off the Chest: Hans
Blumenberg and Walter Benjamin’s Philosophies
of Myth

James Kent

To cite this article: James Kent (2017) Pushing the Monstrous to the Edge of the
World; Shaking the Nightmare off the Chest: Hans Blumenberg and Walter Benjamin’s
Philosophies of Myth, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25:3, 363-377, DOI:
10.1080/09672559.2017.1320016

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2017.1320016

Published online: 08 May 2017.

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International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2017
VOL. 25, NO. 3, 363–377
https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2017.1320016

Pushing the Monstrous to the Edge of the World;

Shaking the Nightmare off the Chest: Hans
Blumenberg and Walter Benjamin’s Philosophies of
Myth
James Kent
School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University, Clayton,
Australia

ABSTRACT
This paper explores the philosophies of myth of Walter Benjamin and Hans
Blumenberg. It defends the thesis that both approaches to myth, despite their
differences, bring the longer, more ambiguous, legacy of the history of the human
species into relation with the more familiar history of logos (a history of thinking).
They do this by maintaining a distinction between myth as it probably first emerged,
namely as a way of controlling human anxieties and vulnerabilities that arose as a
consequence of the pragmatic, material conditions of the pre-historical world, and
myth as the vast array of orally transmitted traditions left to history. In the case
of both thinkers, this dichotomy illuminates myth, not as one category of human
expression, but as a representation of the deeper vulnerabilities experienced by
human beings, and the concerted, collective (largely failed) attempts to overcome
them. Philosophy’s task in the face of a longer, darker history of the species, is
a vigilant negotiation with the human frailties that might see its work undone.

KEYWORDS  Walter Benjamin; Hans Blumenberg; myth; philosophical anthropology

In his extraordinary work Arbeit am Mythos, published in 1979, Hans

Blumenberg began his discussion of myth by speculating about the conditions
that necessitated its emergence. He argued that ‘man came close to not having
control (nicht in der Hand) of the conditions of his existence and, what is more
important, believed that he simply lacked control of them’ (Blumenberg 1985,
3–4; 1979, 9).1 Blumenberg conceded that, although the details of the earliest
myths are a mystery, their introduction of a violent form of fate must have
constituted an attempt to control the directionless dread (Angst) felt by early
humanity, in a world it felt always slightly beyond its grasp – what he called the
‘oppressiveness of contingency (Bedrängnis der Kontingenz)’. He argued that

CONTACT  James Kent  james.kent@monash.edu

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
364   J. KENT

this initial situation constitutes a state of affairs that ‘lies behind myth’, mean-
ing myth is in constant negotiation with the ‘memory’ of its catalysing event
(Blumenberg 1985, 293; 1979, 325). Some years before, in the early decades of
the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin had argued that the stories contained
within the ancient mythical, oral traditions represented the crucial ability to
‘exchange experience’ in order to temper the often terrifying presence of fate
in earthly life, something that created a source of communal solidarity in the
face of the often ambiguous authority of the gods (Benjamin 2002, 143; 1977,
439). Benjamin, who did not attempt to guess the details of these first days,
nonetheless argued that fate, which probably emerged as an attempt to process
the alienating events of the natural world, would have had to have been tackled
by early groups or societies, in the attempt to lessen the weight of its presence
and influence. According to Benjamin, the legacy of this attempt, namely the
myths left to history, came to embody a process of ‘disenchantment’, to alleviate
the primary destructive presence of fate. In the case of both thinkers, and in
spite of the critical differences, their approaches to myth can be said to belong
within a context that emphasises myth’s role in the relief of a human predica-
ment; namely an alleviation of a dread that arises by virtue of the deficiencies
of the human body in the world.
If there is a point of affinity in their respective philosophies, it lies in both
Benjamin and Blumenberg’s serious treatment of myth as reflective of impor-
tant, historical realities that confronted humanity not only during its history,
but also its pre-history. 2 They did this by distinguishing between myth as cor-
relate with what is usually understood as ‘fate’, the force that seemingly controls
but also simultaneously delimits the possibilities of human life, and myth as
synonymous with the vast traditions of orally transmitted stories that convey
accounts of life at the mercy of that fate. The implication is that the philoso-
phies of myth proposed by Benjamin and Blumenberg open up an important
distinction between two histories. First, a history of human vulnerabilities that
encompasses the vast, and largely lost legacy of human beings’ attempts to con-
trol and express the kinds of anxieties that can be distinguished from animal
fear. The second, more familiar history, involves the attempts to systematise
and come to terms with the legacy of those anxieties and vulnerabilities. The
first is what will be called in this paper a ‘history of the species’, and the second,
somewhat imperfectly, a ‘history of logos (thought)’.
The project of this paper is to argue that a discussion of Benjamin and
Blumenberg’s approaches to myth allow for a discussion of a philosophical
anthropology that emerges from the perspective of a history of the species. The
deployment of a biological category like ‘species’ does not imply any association
with a naturalism that considers any questions pertaining to human life to be
exhausted by the natural sciences. Rather, by emphasising the interaction of
humanity’s vulnerabilities with its rational faculties as something ineliminable
and historically connected (wherein the former shaped and informed the latter),
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES   365

the question of the ethical, and thus the rational, must always be couched within
the context of human finitude.

Myth as Fate and Stories: Benjamin’s Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique
of Violence), 1921 and Der Erzähler (The Storyteller), 1936
The thematic crossovers between these two essays from distinct periods in
Benjamin’s intellectual life are instructive. Despite the changes in his approach
to myth, Benjamin remained committed to what he considered its ambivalence;
as both the dangerous equation of life with fate’s presence and authority, and a
pre-historical oral tradition that, in spite of its violent presence in human life,
protected it from earlier, more ambiguous forms of pre-historical life.
The vast literature surrounding the 1921 essay Zur Kritik der Gewalt has, if
anything compounded the difficulties pertaining to the text itself.3 Underneath
Benjamin’s explicit correlation of myth with the violence of law, or means/ends
manifestations of human action, there is a distinct concern for the conditions
of human origins. He refers to this obliquely when he critiques the danger of
extending the very narrow sphere of Darwinian naturalism to the realm of
what would come to be the distinctly human. In criticising Naturrecht (Natural
law) as the mistaken belief that the legitimacy of the law, and the legality of
its contents, can be grounded in the ‘naturally’ occurring violence of nature,
he positions positive Recht (Positive law) as its alternative. In marking a crit-
ical distinction between Natural and Positive law, Benjamin makes the case
that the law is better understood as a product of historical legacies; a mani-
festation of human practises and vulnerabilities. The historical legacy of law
is, according to Benjamin, essentially the legacy of mythic authority which,
despite its bloody, fateful logic, protects human life from the dangers of that
earlier, natural realm of violence (Benjamin 1996, 237; 1977, 180). This is the
distinction between the authority supporting Positive and Natural law. It is a
product of dogma, he argues, to consider the legacy of natural history as the
founding moment of legal (and thus) human history; it represents, in other
words, the reduction of human life to the merely biological (Benjamin 1996,
237; 1977, 180). The mythic authority of law on the other hand, emerges as a
distinctly human phenomenon that shields humanity from the alienation and
danger of the purely natural world by the bloody enforcement of a fateful logic.
Although this follows the same basic dogma as the natural realm according
to Benjamin (namely the notion that the ends justify the means, and that all
systems of human thought should be understood as functioning within this
binary relation), the mythic establishes a form of ‘equality’. All parties cannot
cross or infringe the frontier of what the law allows for (Benjamin 1996, 249;
1977, 199). This is why the punishment in early mythic law operates so violently
and, as Benjamin argues, implements nothing but the ‘reestablishment of the
law’ itself: the form of life without these bloody restrictions is unimaginable
366   J. KENT

and, pragmatically, more terrifying than the alternative. The terrible beauty of
the fateful, mythic logic at the heart of the law is the fact it both protects human
life and thus necessarily limits it.4
These observations are, of course, historically contingent. Where myth once,
in the depths of human pre-history, had a pragmatic role in everyday life, its
presence in modernity was more threatening, precisely because those primary
historical conditions were ‘infinitely remote’ from the current historical situa-
tion (Benjamin 1996, 242; 1977, 188). Benjamin reminds the reader at the end
of the essay, ‘the critique of violence is the philosophy of its history’, and an
understanding of myth relies on a philosophical critique of its presence and
development across the vast expanse of its ‘temporal data’: in other words a
philosophical understanding of myth must be phrased within the perspective
of the history of the human species (Benjamin 1996, 251; 1977, 202). What
Benjamin seems to suggest is that a philosophical critique of myth’s long affil-
iation with the fragmented, often barbarous shapes of human life and history,
offers an emancipatory potential.
The immediate qualification of this statement is necessary. The suggestion
is not that Benjamin was uninterested in the interruption, what he calls divine
violence (göttliche Gewalt), of the mythic/fateful formulation of the current
human historical predicament. Rather, it is the claim that his position in Zur
Kritik der Gewalt does not equate myth with a purely destructive character.
In spite of his concerns regarding the violent forms of life embodied by myth
(mythische Gewalt), Benjamin was not without hope. Just as the earliest forms
of myth had protected human life from the ambivalence of nature, so too did
the forms of life reflected in the mythical canon left to modernity promise an
alternative, albeit a fleeting, perhaps impossible one. On the one hand myth
embodied ‘primarily a manifestation of (the gods’) existence’, and on the other,
in the case of Prometheus who rails against his fate, and ‘is not left by the legend
without hope of one day bringing a new law to men’, a potential challenge to
that very authority (Benjamin 1996, 248; 1977, 197). Here Benjamin suggests
that the reception history of the myth itself has something to contribute to its
primary aesthetic content. Niobe for example, like Prometheus, is punished
by fate via the death of her children and being rendered mute herself, but the
fact her life is spared (notwithstanding its guilty character) promises a prag-
matic hope to those who would hear the myth retold, that life is possible even
when out of favour with the gods (Benjamin 1996, 248; 1977, 197). This is
why Benjamin suggests shortly afterwards that the mythic foundation of early
written law in the Greek communities must be understood as a challenge to
earlier, more authoritative ‘mythic statutes’ (Benjamin 1996, 249; 1977, 199).
This difficult idea of Benjamin’s is perhaps best captured by the writer W. G.
Sebald who writes of the German nation’s immediate response to the after-ef-
fects of the Second World War, as one of horror at the primitive nature of life
hidden underneath the thin veneer of culture. Sebald refers directly to Zur
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES   367

Kritik der Gewalt when he suggests the great fear of the German nation, in wit-
nessing the destruction of life by the firestorm caused by the Allied bombard-
ment, was that it was precisely within that perfect manifestation of the depravity
of mythic violence, that the catalyst for a ‘divine justice’ lay hidden (Sebald
2006, 85). Sebald is referring to the Benjaminian recognition that, in spite of
myth’s authority, it is only in its presence (that marks the repeated disasters of
history), that the emancipatory moment can exist, catalysed by the violence of
myth itself. This moment of emancipation may represent only a momentary
flash. Sebald argues that the German silence that followed the war constituted
a form of repression that can be understood within the context of the muteness
that marks the presence of myth. Such a presence should be understood as a
representation of human beings’ repeatedly being struck dumb by their regres-
sion to nature which reduces history, as Sebald (2006, 101) himself argued, to
‘the catastrophic consequence of an anthropogenesis based from the first on
evolutionary mistakes, a consequence that has long been foreshadowed by the
complex physiology of human beings, the development of their hypertrophic
minds, and their technological methods of production’.5 However, it is when
confronted with such a melancholy natural history, that Sebald suggests the
question of the emancipation from myth becomes a genuine one. This is both
the Promethean predicament and hope that marks all human life: that the
salvation from the mythic violence of history is contained within the shared,
collective insight into our subjugation before those authoritative forces. This
approaches something resembling the idea of what Benjamin meant by ‘divine
violence’: a violence, or authority, that interrupts the logic of fateful authority,
in the name of another, un-named, and perhaps impossible authority: that of
humanity’s own (Benjamin 1996, 252; 1977, 203).6
This interpretation of Benjamin’s theory of myth demands a reading that
suggests his approach is committed to the strangeness and ambivalence of
myth as philosophically relevant. Where the violent authority implied by the
Gewalt of myth represented a bloody violence in the sphere of human life, the
material legacy of the complicated and untraceable web of oral legacies left to
written history showcased another side to that authority: the actual working
on, and through, of mythic authority on behalf of humanity itself. This position
is most explicit in his essay Der Erzähler (‘The Storyteller’), where Benjamin
maintains an analytic distinction between myth and storytelling (Benjamin
2002, 157; 1977, 457). Benjamin depicts storytelling as, fundamentally, the
‘ability to share experiences’, an ability he believed to be disappearing from
the world. Storytelling is important because it protects ‘the tiny, fragile human
body’ from the immense dangers and difficulties of the world, something he
considered especially important following the mechanised destruction of the
Great War (Benjamin 2002, 143–144; 1977, 439–440). Benjamin associates
storytelling explicitly with the epic, mythic oral traditions that have, he writes,
transformed in ‘rhythms comparable to those of the change that has come
368   J. KENT

over the earth’s surface in the course of thousands of centuries’ (Benjamin

2002, 147; 1977, 443). Some pages later, again discussing the oral traditions, he
refers to the ‘slow piling up, one on top of the other, of thin, transparent layers
which constitutes the most appropriate images of the way in which the perfect
narrative is revealed through the layers of various retellings’ (Benjamin 2002,
150; 1977, 448). The emphasis on the act of retelling is clarified late in the essay
when Benjamin insists on the vital connection between storytelling and the
human body, particularly the hand. A vital aspect of the tradition now largely
lost, Benjamin (2002, 161–162; 1977, 464) writes that, ‘…in genuine storytelling
what is expressed gains support in a hundred ways from the work-seasoned
gestures of the hand’. In these passages Benjamin recognises that it is precisely
the most vulnerable aspects of human existence – in this case the fragility of
the body itself – that are deployed in the storytelling that seeks to protect it.
These passages that recall not only the performative, gestural foundations
of the oral tradition, but also the necessity for its being listened to by an atten-
tive audience, suggest Benjamin is referring to the prehistory of storytelling
itself. His distinction between myth and stories (for example, fairy tales) is vital
insofar as it shows Benjamin (2002, 157–158; 1977, 457–458) considers the
latter a form of ‘working on’ or ‘disenchantment’ as he calls it, of the former.
When Benjamin (2002, 157; 1977, 457–458) argues that the fairy tale ‘tells us
of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare
which myth had placed upon its chest’ he makes two vital claims. First, that
myth itself represents a ‘primary necessity’, wherein the Gods’ authority plays a
terrifying but necessary role in mediating the ambiguous presence of nature in
human life. Second, that this primary human response was, as can be derived
from the countless millennia of oral traditions, immediately worked upon to
alleviate that initial but necessary ‘weight’ of fate. Thus, fairy tales that tell of
friendly animals helping children (for example), finally put to rest that primary
anxiety and assure the listener that nature ‘much prefers to be aligned with
man’ (Benjamin 2002, 157; 1977, 457–458). Just like certain iterations of the
Promethean myth, fairy tales teach us, so argues Benjamin (2002, 157; 1977,
457–458), to ‘meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with
high spirits’. This spirit of endeavour that is catalysed by fairy tales constitutes
a form of ‘liberating magic’ in ‘complicity with liberated man’ (Benjamin 2002,
157; 1977, 457–458).
The details of Benjamin’s distinction between myth and storytelling are
important in any broad scale discussion of his understanding of myth, both
as a ‘presence’ in human life, and its material legacy in the oral traditions.
Such a differentiation shows that Benjamin had in mind differing ‘modali-
ties’ of myth. In contradistinction to someone like Ernst Cassirer who (claims
Benjamin) rightly attempted to ‘historicise’ myth, but mistakenly posited myth
as pre-conceptual, reducing it to a purely ahistorical mode of cognitive experi-
ence that terminates with the emergence of rationalisation, Benjamin suggests
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES   369

the ambivalence of myth was due to its doubled presence. Namely, as a destruc-
tive force, and a history of human confrontation with that force, within which
forms of redemption lay hiding (Menninghaus 1988, 294–230). Benjamin con-
cludes Der Erzähler with an explanation of this idea. The storyteller, which ‘is
granted the ability to reach back through … not only his own experience but
much of the experience of others’, reaches back into the long history of human
being’s collective attempts to overthrow the weight of fate. Such a legacy might
come in the form of a proverb. If a proverb is ‘an ideogram of a story’ Benjamin
(2002, 162; 1977, 464) writes, then it is ‘a ruin which stands on the site of an
old story and in which a moral twines about a gesture like ivy around a wall’.7
Benjamin suggests, in other words, that the modern world is composed of the
reception history of earlier stories, which in themselves represent the history
of the exchange of human experience in the face of myth. The truth of a story,
then, relies on not only how it resonates with its audience, but also its inheritors.
The Benjaminian distinction between myth and storytelling is, thus, between
the perceived presence of fate in human life, and its reception. Rather than
reducing myth merely to the pre-conceptual, or an ahistorical presence of the
‘daemonic’, Benjamin attempts to work through the idea that is only suggested
in the earlier essay, Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Namely, that within the mythic, oral
traditions themselves (in their working on/working through) lie material leg-
acies to man’s constant attempts to overcome the terrors and authority of fate.8
Benjamin suggests that through the collective recognition of the horrors of fate
by the attentive audience, there lies the hidden potential for another form of life
to be recognised. Not only does the (comparatively) more contemporary fairy
tale impart this ‘lesson’, but so to do mythic traditions portrayed in tragedy, the
Homeric tales, as well as older oral traditions, that all worked upon the ‘problem’
of human life and freedom under fate. In all of these examples, the question
of human liberation, or authority, stands as the pressing concern (even in the
guise of its complete abandonment as potential or hope).
The above is but one reading of Benjamin’s treatment of myth. One possi-
bility that points to what has been called the ‘ambivalence of myth’ is that the
dangerous, daemonic facet of myth embodies the terrible, but stable, forms of
authority that humanity conjured in response to maintain control, and take
account of, a primeval terror; whereas its redemptive potential lies precisely
in the collective recognition of a form of solidarity on behalf of the attentive
audience of what it means to collectively live before and by means of that
authority. Benjamin’s distinction between myth and storytelling represents the
differentiation between fate and the flashes of emancipatory potential that flash
past in the collective reception of fate as reflective of the human predicament.
The way a story, or myths, resonates with humanity in terms of its predicament
in the world might be referred to as its truthfulness.
370   J. KENT

Blumenberg and the Work of/on Myth

Early in Arbeit Am Mythos Blumenberg writes, ‘Geschichten warden erzählt,
um etwas zu vertreiben’. The translation into English – ‘Stories are told in order
to “kill” something’ – is misleading (Blumenberg 1985, 34; 1979, 40). The act
of killing suggests a finality that is not implied by the verb vertreiben, which is
better translated as ‘to expel’ or ‘to banish’. This is an important distinction that
clarifies one of the central ideas pertaining to Blumenberg’s theory of myth,
because it insists on the fact that the primary condition, or predicament, of
human life that myth seeks to alleviate is never entirely overcome, but is merely
pushed to the very edges of possibility and consciousness. This emphasises the
role myth plays: of a series of never ending tests that attempt to escape what
could no longer be overcome in the animal instinct of fleeing. The fears that
could not be run from in early human life, according to Blumenberg, necessi-
tated the act of naming, and the telling of stories about that which was named.
He writes:
To equip the world with names means to divide up and classify the undivided, to
make the intangible tangible (greifbar), though not comprehensible (begreifbar).
The setting up of means of orientation also counteracts elementary forms of con-
fusion – of perplexity, at the least, and, the limiting case, of panic. (Blumenberg
1985, 42; 1979, 49)
This is an important response to those that would suggest myth is the expression
of a primitive embodiment of the human desire to ‘answer questions’ or a rudi-
mentary system of symbols that eventually gave way to reason.9 Blumenberg
suggests that myth predates this urge and this state, but allows for the conditions
under which these questions might sometime be asked. That is, myth does not
answer questions about the world, but makes the world unquestionable, a far
more pressing concern for early humanity, that is confronted with a world with-
out any of the conceptual categories that Kant would much later suggest are fun-
damental to the world’s being conditioned by the thinking subject (Blumenberg
1985, 126; 1979, 142). The more sophisticated works of logos that would come
later, and the urbane disposition required for its undertaking, was conditioned
upon the terrors of the world being distanced and, thus, controlled. Blumenberg
(1985, 26; 1979, 33) writes:
Leisure and dispassion in viewing the world, which theory presupposes, are
already results of that millenniums-long work of myth itself, which told of the
monstrous as something that is far in the past and has been forced back to the
edge of the world.
Thus myth is not explanatory, but conditioning, insofar as it distances the
subject from the natural world and so constructs the uniquely human world.
According to Blumenberg’s formulation, myth is ‘not even a “symbolic form”
but above all a “form as such”’ (Blumenberg 1985, 168; 1979, 186). He reminds
us, the ‘initial predicament’ of humanity is entirely lost to history, relegating
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES   371

any concrete claims as to its reality to the purely speculative. However, by vir-
tue of the myths left to history, something of a reflection of what might have
confronted humanity’s pre-history remains, namely that the initial situation
demanded ‘not just to shiver in the dark, but to sing as well’ (Blumenberg
1985, 62; 1979, 72). In other words, the fears associated with the uncertain-
ties of nature, were also accompanied by the need to express and share those
experiences with others.
While warning away from any speculations of origins, Blumenberg nonethe-
less claims it is instructive when attempting to think critically about a history
of the species to think of it as, not the beginning, but the Vorvergangenheit (the
past’s past). Such a perspective illuminates the myths that are left to history as
the webs of stories and metaphors that resonated with countless pre-historical
generations because they continued to be what Blumenberg (1985, 59–111;
1979, 68–126) calls ‘significant’. This is another way of saying that they contin-
ued to resonate as ‘true’. Such a perspective shows Homer, usually considered
to be occupying some form of ‘beginning’ in history, as also an historical end,
or finalisation, of the oral traditions worked upon by countless generations of
attentive audiences (Blumenberg 1985, 152; 1979, 169). The original work ‘of ’
myth’ is lost and unknown to us, claims Blumenberg, but the reception of that
initial story, the work ‘on’ myth, remains to this day, making works of myth as
always simultaneously works on myth. This is another crucial characteristic
of myth according to Blumenberg: its ability to resonate, and remain truthful,
despite its capacity for infinite variation. This is because myth does not illu-
minate or speak to any ahistorical essence or capacity of humanity, but simply
offers a reflection of its constant grappling with the world’s material realities. Of
course, this necessitates the recognition of perhaps Blumenberg’s most impor-
tant claim: ‘myth itself is a piece of high-carat “work of logos”’ (Blumenberg
1985, 12; 1979, 18).
Later in Arbeit Am Mythos, discussing the fragmentary play Prometheus
Unbound, Blumenberg suggests it must have been an unusual tragedy insofar as
it seems to have dealt primarily with persuasion (Überredung). Gaea seemingly
must have persuaded Prometheus away from his obstinacy, rather than using
force (Gewalt), which was ‘myth in the form with which the Greeks were most
familiar’ (Blumenberg 1985, 317; 1979, 348). The re-appearance of the word
Gewalt – the same word used by Benjamin in distinguishing between its mythic
and divine manifestations in the Zur Kritik der Gewalt essay – is pertinent.
Blumenberg’s recognition that the ‘function’ of myth was most easily correlated
with the forms of life implied by Gewalt –violence, force, authority, power,
control – highlights a critical element of his broader philosophy. Namely, that
the changes in myth via its reception (the work on it) like those that probably
appeared in Prometheus Unbound – so that the primary presence of the play was
persuasion, rather than forceful authority – shows that while myth can occupy
a limiting and authoritative presence in human life (perhaps as a reflection and
372   J. KENT

result of practical requirement deeper in the past), it also simultaneously prom-

ises the potential to catalyse other forms of reflection in human life. Benjamin
makes a similar claim in his paper Schicksal und Charakter when he suggests
that tragedy represented a historically material instance where ‘demonic fate
is breached (and) pagan man becomes aware that he is better than his God’
(Benjamin 1996, 203; 1977, 175). As Benjamin (1996, 203; 1977, 175) imme-
diately points out, mythic authority reasserts itself in the face of the challenge
by robbing humanity of speech, thus making the cruel irony of tragedy, where
humanity’s own authority comes to fruition only through its necessary silenc-
ing, the source of its sublimity. It is precisely this idea that Blumenberg had in
mind when he suggests that myth, although primarily an authoritative, forceful
presence in life intended to give a name to ‘the chaos of the unnamed’, in being
worked upon continually, always contains the possibility of humanity exerting
its own authority. Blumenberg’s notion of the work of/on myth necessitates the
recognition, perhaps first postulated by Vico, that although all myth must by
definition be a ‘work of human authority’ it nonetheless asserts a daemonic
presence that removes the possibility of human agency (Vico 1999, 1977). Thus
because the possibility of logos is predicated upon the distance gained between
subject and world (a legacy of myth), any work of logos undertaken in the
spirit of human authority that seeks (by necessity of its historically traditional
opposition to myth) a ‘way out’ must recognise the mythic conditioning, and
therefore limiting, possibilities of that hope and desire. Such a ‘space of pos-
sibility’ figures in a philosophical anthropology that recognises myth as the
primary and perhaps only successful legacy of humanity’s attempt to temper the
anxieties that emerge as a result of the ability to cognise its many shortcomings
in the natural world.
As such the broader philosophical concern with the concept of Gewalt in
both Benjamin and Blumenberg can be understood in relation to how the
longer history of the species meshes with a history of logos. Where Blumenberg
recognises myth as ‘conditioning’ the world by distancing the subject from its
visceral terrors, Benjamin sees it as representing the remnants of a momentary
flash of archaic experiences. For Blumenberg, myth’s continued role in life
despite the remoteness of the original pre-historical conditions that necessitated
its creation, is due to the fact that human beings are still ultimately unable to
come to terms with their natural deficiencies. Conversely for Benjamin, myth
is a largely unwelcome remainder of a legacy of pre-historical forms of life.
As such, the affinity between Benjamin and Blumenberg’s theory of myth is
a fine, but important one.10 In both cases, because it still lies at the heart of
thought, myth is forever delimiting the possibilities that are promised by the
momentary glimpses of genuine human authority or enlightened liberation,
that emerge in fragmented moments of history, catalysed by those very mythic
forms of thought.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES   373

Philosophy in the Shadow of the History of the Species:

Conciliation by Way of Difference
Benjamin himself suggests that it is precisely this insight regarding the con-
ditions of possibility of our respective historical moments that promises the
‘interruption’ of those conditions, if only momentarily. Where Benjamin con-
sidered this a ‘divine’ violence, Blumenberg was more sceptical, perhaps more
melancholy. Such caution was commonly read as a political conservatism; in
effect a response to the ideologies inherent in the Marxism of the ‘Frankfurt
School’ (Nicholls 2016, 13). While the truth of this claim must be mediated
by a historical understanding of why Blumenberg, a post-war thinker, might
have been more disposed toward a liberal minded conservatism, the genuine
difference in the two thinkers’ philosophical approach to myth rests in their
understanding of modernity’s relationship to pre-history. For Benjamin, the
key is in his difficult distinction between Urgeschichte and Vorgeschichte which,
though broadly untranslatable, distinguish between an ‘urhistory’/‘primordial
history’ and ‘prehistory’.11 Urgeschichte is not a term directly referenced by
Benjamin in either Zur Kritik der Gewalt or Der Erzähler but is discussed in his
1925 work intended for his Habilitation, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels
(Benjamin 1977a, 1963), as well as later, albeit used in a more refined way, in Das
Passegen-Werk (Benjamin 1982, 1999). Originally intended to refer to a history
that pre-dates the written, in Benjamin’s later work Urgeschichte comes to refer
to a presence or the remnant of the archaic past within the very foundations
of the present. Urgeschichte embodies the material presence within the present
of a long history of the species that shows all human thought to be predicated
upon a much longer negotiation with demons that demand repression. The
presence of an Urgeschichte in modernity demands a coming to terms with
what rational thought is predicated on. Crucially for Benjamin it is precisely this
‘detritus’ of history, the mythic remnants and reflections of the earliest human
experiences, that hold the potential to interrupt the necessity and violence of
historical time. The rational hope for something new (philosophy’s task) has
an essential relation to a confrontation with history as understood as a form of
failed repression from the long story of the species’ attempt to assert itself in the
world. In other words, for Benjamin, the hope for something other for human
life is necessarily tied to, and delimited by, the way these archaic experiences
mediate the experience of the present.12
For Blumenberg, the mastering of the intense, pre-conceptual alienation
at the beginning of human prehistory, what he calls the Absolutismus der
Wirklichkeit (Absolutism of Reality) is the founding moment by which all
human history is marked. The first sentence of Arbeit Am Mythos reads:
To those who are bored with this success, the mastering of reality may seem a
dream that has been dreamed out, or was never worth dreaming. (Blumenberg
1985, 3; 1979, 9)
374   J. KENT

In Blumenberg’s view, humanity has become bored by its incredible victory over
an alien world; it has forgotten the immense stakes and requirements in making
a void replete with meaning. This is why Blumenberg strikes a more cautious
tone in his approach to the question of the end (finality) of myth, which since
the Enlightenment has become more pressing, because he acknowledges its
role in the conditioning of the world. As such he considers philosophy’s role
as involving the sustained reception of the mythic conditions of possibility of
human thought and meaning, such that a genuinely enlightened disposition
might involve the cautious negotiation with the ineliminability of those con-
ditioning forces. This is why Blumenberg remains essentially tied to tradition,
insofar as philosophy itself, logos, relies on the mythic conditions of experience
and meaning and, thus, thought.
The differences between Benjamin’s Urgeschichte and Blumenberg’s
Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit are related to their respective philosophical
approaches to how myth relates to important questions of human life and
autonomy. Where both thinkers see myth as the very foundation of what it
is to be human, Benjamin hopes that this tragic predicament might one day
be overcome in the name of the lost possibilities of history, as yet unseen and
un-thought, where Blumenberg’s position suggests the very possibility of a
humanity – of a ‘we’ – lies in the inescapable negotiation with that predicament.
This is the critical difference between their respective anthropologies: one in
which myth must be overcome in order to establish what might be called the
potentiality of the ‘truly’ human, and the other in which myth itself is the
uniquely human success. The first places humanity’s potential in the future as
something as yet unachieved, the other views all history as on this side of the
ultimate success in deriving meaning from nothing. Philosophy, logos, either
exists as the (relatively) new hope for something other, or the greatest legacy of
myth’s achievement in ‘quieting the world’ – myth of course does not emerge as
a distinct category until philosophy situates itself as its enemy (Morgan 2000,
23). If there is any form of reconciliation between these two views, it lies in both
thinkers seeing the traces of human potentiality in the long grappling with the
conditions of its existence in the world. What promises these two respective
philosophical anthropologies offer in the face of this reconciliation remains a
historically contingent, and ongoing, reflection of the problem of the relation
between human beings’ fallibility and their rational faculties.

Notes
1. 
Hereafter, initial page numbers in citations of Blumenberg and Benjamin refer
to the English translation and the original German edition respectively.
2. 
This rejects the theory that myths reflect unchanging, ahistorical archetypes
across traditions and time that resonate simply by virtue of an essence of
humanity. See for example the theories of Carl Jung (1991) and the ‘collective
unconscious’, Mircea Eliade’s (1991) attempts to find universal patterns amongst
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES   375

mythical traditions or Joseph Campbell (2008) and his ideas pertaining to the
‘hero of a thousand faces’, which universalises the distinctly Indo-European
tradition of ‘the hero’s journey’.
3.  The beginning of the sustained interest in the paper can perhaps be dated to
Derrida’s address to the Cardozo Law School in 1989: see Derrida 1992.
4.  Eli Friedlander (2012, 118) points out that fate cannot be simplistically
reduced to systems of punishment but that ‘fate is that condition of life that is
essentially guilty’. That is, fate shapes a form of life itself, and the law associates
an ‘indeterminate guilt with a specific misdeed’.
5.  Blumenberg makes an oblique reference to this idea when, at the end of his
chapter ‘To Bring Myth to an End’, he names the murder of Jürgen Ponto by
the Red Army Faction as an example of the repeated attempts to liberate the
world of myth via a reintroduction of its violence. This Oedipal rage of the
student movement felt towards the muteness of their Fascist parents embodies
the descent back into myth through the attempt to overcome it: see Blumenberg
1985, 293; 1979, 325. With thanks to Jim Mitchell for the clarification of this
point.
6.  This is why Benjamin (1996, 252; 1977, 203) argues the ‘expiatory power of
violence is invisible to men’.
7.  For an interpretation of the relationship between Benjamin’s theory of the
mimesis of gesture and his anthropology, see Ogden 2010.
8.  The ‘daemonic’ refers to the presence of the ungraspable, noumenal realm that
myth nonetheless attempts to grasp. This perhaps also highlights how myth can
transform into mysticism, for example in the reception of early Greek myth and
its adoption into the mystery cults. For an excellent discussion of the history of
‘the daemonic’ see Nicholls 2006; for an overview of Greek cultic ritual’s relation
to a longer anthropology of pre-history see Burkert 1983.
9.  See for example Ernst Cassirer’s theory of myth. Cassirer’s (2013, 1955) theory
of the symbol is predicated upon, first, a reading of the Kantian categories as an
ahistorical mode of intuition, where myth represents a system of thought that
gives way to more sophisticated, purer forms of thinking (logos).
10. Although in terms different from mine, Alison Ross provides an excellent
overview of the relation between Blumenberg and Benjamin’s theories of myth.
See Ross 2015, 139–145.
11. Here Benjamin makes a distinction between the presence of past forms of life
that linger in the present, related to his idea of origins (Ursprung) and a more
basic notion of events and their relation to chronology. Although different from
my own reading, for a good explanation of the distinction see Steiner 2012, xi.
12. In Freudian terms this would make history a form of constant ‘repression’ of
the terrifying, but formative moments of the much longer, but more obscure
history of the species.

Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Professor Andrew Benjamin, Associate Professor Alison Ross and Jim
Mitchell for helpful comments on an earlier draft. I would also like to acknowledge the
anonymous reviewers for their suggestions in improving this paper.
376   J. KENT

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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