Die Sorge geht über den Fluß

by Hans Blumenberg

German

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, German Literature

222 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) was a prominent German philosopher, known for his work in intellectual history and phenomenology. He is best remembered for his development of "metaphorology," a method that investigates the role of metaphors in shaping human thought, particularly in philosophy and culture. Blumenberg's most famous works include The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) and The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975), where he explored the historical and philosophical implications of metaphors and their transformative effects on human understanding.
Born in Lübeck, Germany, Blumenberg's career spanned several prestigious academic positions, including professorships at the University of Hamburg, University of Gießen, and University of Münster. His intellectual contributions deeply influenced fields such as philosophy, literary studies, and history of ideas. He was particularly concerned with how philosophical concepts were deeply intertwined with metaphors and how these shaped the intellectual trajectories of entire periods, like the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.
Blumenberg's work focused not only on philosophy but also on the philosophy of technology, language, and aesthetics, drawing from a broad range of sources, including phenomenology, historical analysis, and myth theory. His exploration of "absolute metaphors" — ideas that transcend their original metaphorical contexts and become integral to philosophical and cultural systems — marked a major contribution to postwar German thought.

Reviews

[Mesoscope · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short book might perhaps best be described as a literary-philosophical essay or collection of essays which deal with a variety of individual topics grouped around particular themes. For example, several pieces which deal with the topic of ship wrecks in various ways, and another collection consider various images of ground or groundlessness in modernity. The short pieces are typically constructed around around fragments, quotations, or short poems by canonical authors including Seneca, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Thomas Mann, and Goethe. But by design these seeds are peripheral to their main line of the authors' work, and Blumenberg often drawn from unpublished material, comments in interviews, or other marginalia.

The novel structure of this book is itself an essential component of Blumenberg’s argument, which seeks to uncover and trace a constellation of resonant clues that appear in different corners of the life of our culture, and which hint at the outlines of how various primary orienting shapes or forms of reason and thought have taken shape over time. It is a beautiful and exceedingly interesting approach, and it must be said that this book has literary qualities that very few serious works of philosophy can approach or equal.

The book deals with serious philosophical themes, but it does not particularly demand any solid familiarity with the history of philosophy. This is a rare work that will be nearly as illuminating to the lay reader as to the specialist.

But those already armed with a study of philosophy will be impressed by his extremely insightful readings of several key figures - especially Heidegger, whose analysis of an old Latin allegory of Care crossing the river in Being and Time inspires the name of this collection.

But I daresay the evocative title has a wider and deeper reach than this parable supports, and reflects Blumenberg’s central organizing interest in shedding light on key existential features of our experience of and concerned interaction with a world that is increasingly understood as without a fixed foundation in a variety of senses. There is a suggestion in the title that our capacity for concerned involvement in some sense keeps us a float and allows us to navigate the depths that separate us not only from aboriginal reality, but from one another as well.

Blumenberg’s use of pregnant thematic organizing images reminded me a bit of Wagner’s use of Leitmotifs, which gain clarity, definition, and power through their varied repetition. If you believe, as Nietzsche did, that the will to a system lacks integrity, you may be very excited by this procedure, as I was.

This small book is very profound, and one of the best works of philosophy from the twentieth century that I have read. Blumenberg is fairly popular in Germany, but, I think, little known outside of it, and that is too bad. I myself learned of him only recently, after reading a short discussion of his thought in Jürgen Habermas’s Auch eine Geschichte von Philosophie.

I very highly recommend this work. I read it in German, but Paul Fleming’s English translation, called Care Crosses the River, appears to be very good, judging from my browse on Amazon.

[Timothy Lavenz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Care Crosses The River" is not your average philosophical work. It has no clear theoretical objective or mission statement, save perhaps for its enigmatic title. But this is because Blumenberg immerses you in his many areas of interest: science, culture-critique, meaning, knowledge, time, boredom, hesitation, consolation, Enlightenment, care, death, infinity, the "foundations" for or assumptions behind all these things, how they've been treated historically, and how metaphors have mobilized these ideas. You never get the feeling that an idea is being imposed on you or that there is some moral maxim to adhere to at the end. Rather, assumptions are investigated, and we are led through the narrows of progress made on all these fronts. Not to push the metaphor too far, but it is as if these ideas and your reaction to them both rise to the surface of the river of their own accord; and whether they be obstacle or waterlily, we have a careful guide in Blumenberg.

This book draws heavily from the history of German literature and theater as much as from Schopenhauer and Heidegger. The combination is always elegantly performed and doesn't require much, if any, prior acquaintance with the material-- and for that matter, Blumenberg is usually chasing down things most people would never bother with: extant letters, anecdotal stories, different accounts of the same seemingly trivial event or missed encounter, images borrowed from antique sources and the modification of these images as they are transmitted through history by different authors. He's often doubtful of the stated intentions attributed to the figures he recounts, and he loves to probe deeper and deeper into any easily digestible quip. But in doing so, figures like Goethe or Liebniz are not "critiqued" in a vulgar way. What's drawn is a picture of these figures that is human, vulnerable, uncertain, and complex, rather than assuming beforehand that -- because they were "great figures" -- they are somehow not susceptible to fallibility like the rest of us. This is his unique way of encountering the thinker head-on, and it lets him bring out what he finds most fruitful in his example in a way that any merely "theoretical" analysis would miss. And between his loving portrayal of these figures, moments, and ideas in human history, there is no lack of driving insight and certain (even if provisional) "lessons" to be drawn -- lessons, I would add, the reader largely gets to draw for themselves.

This book is written with such clarity and economy of words that the reader can be left feeling two contradictory things: that something brilliant has just been said, and that one can't quite pin down what is brilliant about it. This work is a joy to re-read because of its brevity. Blumenberg does not indulge his readers with lengthy explanations ("eschewing academic ponderousness," as the blurb reads). Referring to philosophical works in general, he writes, "the products the readers have in their hands are final versions, in which everything that could be taken as a capricious trace of subjectivity is deleted." His own work adheres to what this implies. Simply because of the breadth of subject matter, I can imagine this book being many times the size of its final version, and sometimes I yearned for a few more "explanatory" passages. But it is clear that, so far as he was concerned, Blumenberg buffed his work and his ideas intently to the point of maximum intensity without sacrificing one ounce of theoretical or illustrative "depth." The result is a highly idiosyncratic work that shines with both happiness and consciousness, rewarding the reader for every bit of their own engagement.

The final chapter -- perhaps as expected -- carries the heading "Dasein's Care." In one swift section, Blumenberg seems to accomplish what others might have spent volumes achieving. Themes that were omnipresent, even if hidden, throughout the book -- the question of the fundamental concern for being [Seinsgrundsorgen], for reason, for happiness, for human consolation, and for the world -- are not overemphasized or impressed in this final chapter, but find theoretical articulation that reaches back across the book, and forward beyond it. I'll leave my review at that, and simply encourage you to wade into its waters.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man will es nicht Geschwafel nennen, kann man auch nicht, tatsächlich klingt vieles sehr gut, aber was hat das Buch gegeben?

[arda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hiçbir şey anlamadım. Keşke 5 yıldız yağdıranlar kadar entelektüel olabilseydim.