The Somersault of Intelligence: Blumenberg and the Legitimacy of Modernity (Part I)
Reading Part II, Chapter 5 of Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Part 1 of this essay will cover his take on Descartes, with Part 2 taking up Kant. Part 3 will address the legacy of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). We’ll be tracing the emergence of a form of intelligence capable of anticipating and altering events—i.e., exerting power by moving faster than nature does on its own—from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.
Centripetal and Centrifugal
In the opening paragraph of this chapter, Blumenberg marks the emergence of the modern age as a change in the orientation of motion from the ‘centripetal’ to the ‘centrifugal’:
The process of the disassociation of theoretical efficacy from the idea of truth can also be described as a correlate of the declining anthropocentric consciousness, which is transposed from the diagram of the centripetal and thus teleological referential structure of man and the world into that of the centrifugal and thus demiurgic activity exercised by man upon the world. If the world is no longer reliably arranged in advance for man’s benefit, neither is the truth about it any longer at his disposal. (Wallace trans., 205)
What follows is a chapter that unpacks this characteristically long and dense opening two sentences, which presents the image of a long and slow turning of motion. Blumenberg will not return to the centripetal/centrifugal as a central image of this chapter. He immediately turns to ‘a photographic negative’ to describe this movement from inward to outward motion. It seems that the right image is difficult to find because this is not purely a reversal that would involve the necessity of a moment in which all motion stops before it reverses direction.
Reversal also implies a symmetry that Blumenberg’s prose wants to avoid. He is telling a history of the transformation of consciousness necessary to get from a pre-modern constellation of knowledge, truth, and morality to Modernity’s configuration. To treat this through any image of pure reversal risks treating the multi-dimensionality of time as the flat images of lines or circles.
I’ve reached for the image of the somersault to try to capture that complexity of motion that is required to think the transition Blumenberg describes because it works better than lines, circles, and reversals for describing actual historical processes. This somersaulting that slowly turns the centripetal to the centrifugal is a more accurate way to trace the emergence of what Blumenberg argues is Modernity’s legitimacy—human consciousness learning to assert itself as the motor of history.
In this chapter somewhat confusingly titled ‘Cosmogony as a Paradigm of Self-Constitution’, he traces the reconfiguration of truth, knowledge, and morality as this slow turning. Put schematically, it covers two key points that I want to unpack in this essay:
The movement from the pursuit of truth as a moral effort of alignment with the cosmos to the pursuit of knowledge as a ‘demiurgic activity’.
Morality is not left behind in this movement, but it must find new footing as intelligence changes its orientation to time.
In this story, we’ll find one of the clearest, though dense, expressions of the Enlightenment as the broad-based transformation of intelligence into the ability to decipher nature’s contingencies and turn them to other purposes. This is ‘human self-assertion’, and it marks the transformation of the Middle Ages into the Enlightenment. Knowledge production, no longer oriented to stable moral truths guaranteed by a purposeful universe, re-orients to humanity’s confrontation with fate as decipherable natural processes. ‘Human self-assertion’ becomes the motor of history when it sees ‘nature’ as no longer the hard-coded decrees of fate, but as a field of ‘open consistency’ that intelligence can read, codify, and exploit to human ends.
Knowledge is no longer the centripetal revelation to consciousness of what the cosmos has always been but the centrifugal expansion of the power to anticipate, alter, and produce the future.
To return to the problem of metaphor: moving from the centripetal to the centrifugal is not a hard break on a linear timeline. Histories that proceed as pure continuities or discontinuous breaks are not what Blumenberg was up to. To turn the orientation of intelligence from alignment with moral truths to the ‘demiurgic activity’ of human self-assertion requires metaphors other than broken lines and closed circuits. It requires more complicated images, such as a somersault or, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘a wheel tuning out of itself’. Time does not stop on a dime, turn around, and start heading in a new direction. Blumenberg’s Enlightenment, and the Modernity that follows from it, unravels the threads of an earlier tapestry that was repeating a prescribed and already revealed pattern. This unraveling opens time to other options that humanity itself learns to weave as it goes.
Blumenberg’s history of this somersault is mostly intellectual. He is telling a story of the ‘history of consciousness’ through intellectual history’s usual suspects—Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Kant. My aim is to elaborate histories of intelligence through these figures but also through material developments of infrastructure and institutions. Like Blumenberg, the histories I want to tell are not of a stable subject (consciousness, intelligence) learning new facts and gaining a wider perspective. Rather, the transformations Blumenberg traces are far more fundamental and consequential for our time. This is a wholesale change in experience that can be traced through the historical record.
Moral Alignment
Prior to the modern age, truth, knowledge, and the universe promised reassurance to mankind. The cosmos was assumed to be not only a complete system but one that is oriented to the human being—an ‘anthropocentrically assured claim to truth’. The cosmos is not only knowable but designed for man as such.
This knowledge, crucially, is not the kind of knowledge that would allow for human self-assertion to be the motor of history. This is a moral knowledge of alignment with de rerum natura—the nature of things.
This does not require, as is often asserted, that man is the physical center of the cosmos. All it requires is the faith that the cosmos presents its phenomena as intelligible to mankind. This faith is not an orientation to an open-ended future; it is an act of aligning the self with what nature has provided. It weaves the threads of experience into a tapestry with a given and repetitive pattern. Blumenberg locates this faith in ancient morality’s reliance on theoria— ‘an essentially contemplative role in a teleologically determined world’ (213).
Kant, a pivotal figure in this history, was an advocate of this moral alignment before he published his Critiques:
All nature, which involves a universal harmonious relationship to the self-satisfaction of the Deity, cannot but fill the rational creature with an everlasting satisfaction, when it finds itself united with this primary source of all perfection. Nature, seen from this centre, will show on all sides utter security, complete adaptation. (Blumenberg quoting Kant, 213)
The ‘pre-critical’ Kant’s nature is not essentially different than that of the Stoics—a perfection of processes that are not fully open to human manipulation. Our moral orientation is one of acceptance, ‘complete adaptation’, and alignment that brings about ‘utter security’—what the Epicureans called ataraxia and the Stoics called apatheia. Nature is not there for mankind’s exploitation and manipulation.
History of Consciousness
As an intellectual historian, Blumenberg moves through pivotal figures to tell the history of consciousness and its coming into the power of ‘self-assertion’—turning fate into possibilities. We need not understand this as a story of great men. Unraveling a tapestry leaves the threads of earlier questions in place that may not be strictly necessary for the reweaving that is underway.
Lingering questions are a crucial feature of Blumenberg’s approach to history. For example, as Christianity’s belief in the eschaton didn’t age well, its belief that history should add up to something meaningful becomes Modernity’s need for ‘progress’ and ‘philosophies of history’:
It was this compulsion to ‘reoccupy’ the ‘position’ of the medieval Christian schema of creation and eschatology—rather than leave it empty, as a rationality that was aware of its own limits might have done—that led to the grandiose constructions of the ‘philosophy of history.’ (Wallace’s introduction to The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, xx-xxi)
The notion of ‘inevitable progress’, which came to dominate the philosophies of history of the twentieth century (Marxism, Fascism, Social Darwinism), was not strictly necessary for Modernity, but the lingering template of Christian eschatology made it attractive and possible. Consciousness does not sit outside history transparently evaluating what is relevant and what is not. It is moving in the currents of time—embodied and activated in available texts and oral traditions—taking what is given and making modifications and adjustments along the way. Questions can linger that, when seen in the rearview mirror, need not have been that important yet they continue to have an influence on the movement of time.
These leftovers and remnants of earlier ages signal something important in Blumenberg’s story: we should see consciousness itself as the weaver of the tapestry. Great men emerge within this movement of consciousness but should not be seen as ex nihilo geniuses.
Descartes Cosmogonic Hypothesis
Descartes is the pivotal figure before Kant arrives at his Critiques. He accelerates the turning from the centripetal orientation of morality to seeing nature as ‘the substrate of demiurgic production’:
The power to foresee events, to anticipate them, to alter or to produce them, proves to be the ‘self-assertive’ sense of the incipient modern science. (209)
Descartes did not set out to create exploitable nature as his intended object. Rather, he introduces what Blumenberg calls his ‘cosmogonic hypothesis’ that ‘regards the world as a system gradually developing from original matter’. His innovation is this: the world is not given as a whole and made known to man through revelation; it is the result of ongoing processes. The temporality is fundamentally different. In the traditional cosmology—as Plato presented it in the Timaeus and the atomists adapted it—what exists flows from an essence that precedes it. The self attains moral perfection by aligning harmoniously with these essences.
The Cartesian move makes existence into something worked out from an original state of chaos—itself created by God smashing a primordial substance into disorganized atoms. As mere materiality and an ongoing process, Descartes makes the cosmos into something that is ‘producible’, which opens it to human exploitation.
Following the Cartesian program, man first of all refines his ability to enjoy nature’s benefits by supplying himself with the theoretical knowledge that is a precondition of an existence in conformity with nature, but already he does this reserving the right to interfere in nature, to subjugate it as the substrate of demiurgic production. (209)
Thus Descartes cosmogonic hypothesis includes a hedge: if we don’t like what nature provides, we can learn to use our powers of intellect to turn fate into possibilities:
Reduction of the world to pure materiality is not primarily a theoretical proposition, which would have to compete with a traditional truth, but rather a postulate of reason assuring itself of its possibilities in the world—a postulate of self-assertion. (209-10)
Even as Descartes opens the door to an empowered intellect, he preserves the omnipotence of God. He does so by introducing a kind of rational humility that is different in kind from the infinite perfection of God’s purposes. God operates as infinite power while humanity operates in a smaller sphere suitable to its finite intellect (206). In this way, God remains a doctrinal figure for the Catholic Church (Descartes was educated as a Jesuit) while carving out a realm of autonomy for the intellect to do its work in a material world.
The distance between God’s infinite power and man’s reason is not measurable as are the distances between the Earth and the stars. God operates in His realm while mankind operates in its. Once knowledge becomes separated from knowing God’s purposes, human intellect can operate in a realm of conjecture free of dogma and the prohibitions against curiosity.
The paradox that we need to come to terms with is how his ‘rejection of anthropocentrism’ (206) leads to an increase in the scope and power of the intellect, not a decrease. No longer oriented toward moral alignment with the given purposes of the cosmos, human intellect is free to roam. Once those purposes are declared opaque, non-existent, or otherwise off limits (as metaphysics), the intellect moves from treating nature as fate to treating fate as nature as we have been defining it in Time as Practice: nature is the name our intelligence gives to fate when it seeks contingency in the causal chain. Decartes’s producible cosmos—his cosmogonic hypothesis—allows nature to be accepted as fate when it suits mankind, but fate becomes producible nature when it doesn’t: ‘The world must be regarded as producible if it is not certain that man can get by with what is given’ (209).
What happens to morality in a cosmos drained of purpose and open to manipulation by a re-oriented and newly empowered human intellect? Morality can cut both ways. On the one hand, so long as nature suits our needs, then morality remains an effort of alignment and acceptance. On the other hand, the moment it doesn’t, the intellect can claim the right of intervention into a material and producible nature. This resituates morality as dependent on the situation it faces:
Once morality has been defined as dependent on the given reality—that is, as the human conduct that is fully appropriate to the situation, that guarantees man a peaceful conduct of life thanks to the absence of conflicts with reality—then this conception already contains the conclusion that not only the adaptation of man to reality but also the adaptation of reality to man can bring about the same effect (even though this may no longer be aptly described as “morality”). (209)
We are not sitting on one side or the other of a hard break in linear time. We are unweaving a tapestry with the given threads still present. We are somersaulting out of a morality based on alignment with teleological nature to one that will need to find its footing in a nature that is producible, contingent, and therefore open to human self-assertion.
Descartes does not get us all the way there. For this, we must turn to Kant, which we will take up in Part 2.