Evolution and palaeoanthropology in Hans Blumenberg’s Nachlaß
From Firenze University Press Journal: Aisthesis
Josefa Ros Velasco, Complutense University of Madrid
In the unpublished manuscript Ein Betrug? / Der böse Dämon(UNF 532–534), the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996) declared that «the whole world and human intelligence were hidden beneath the earth, where the relics of the precursors of life rest». I choose to open the paper with this quotation because it perfectly summarises the topic here discussed, namely this thinker’s interest in matters concerning human evolution and his understand-ing of palaeoanthropology.
Blumenberg had no formal training in palaeoanthropology, and never practised the profession. He was nonetheless passionate about this discipline, and such other related fields as ethnology and zoology. He was very familiar with discoveries and advances in such matters, drawing on them in order to offer a response, from an anthropological-philosophical perspective, to the great ques-tions of the human condition: What is mankind? How has it become what it is? How did such a weak creature achieve such evolutionary success? Is the human being in truth a weak creature?Over the course of at least two decades, from 1968 to 1988, Blumenberg became an expert in palaeoanthropology and human evolution, select-ing, underlining, annotating and compiling studies by such well-known researchers of the era as the German zoologist and ethnologist Hans Krieg, the Swiss Adolf Portmann and the Austrian Konrad Lorenz, the German palaeontologist Rudolf Bilz, the Austrian sociologist Justin Stagl, the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, and the German anthropologists and philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Helmuth Plessner, among many others.His working routine involved producing indexes of readings, classified on record cards (Karteikarten) by thematic discipline, such as Entwicklung, Anthropologie, Biologis-che or Ethnologisch.He then photocopied those excerpts from the texts that most interested him, and studied them before filing them in folders (Mappen).He entered notes about these texts on other cards stored in thematic card indexes (Zettelkasten) — Zettelkasten 01: Anthropologie, Konvolut Karteikarten zu den Themen: Entwicklung, Anthropologie, Eschatologie or Konvolut Materialsammlung Anthropologie, among others. He would typically note down the relevant quota-tions from these readings on his cards, accompa-nying them with comments which he later organised into brief manuscripts (UNF), which would ultimately become the foundations of his works.Even before his interest arose in academic readings on palaeoanthropology, Blumenberg had already, since 1965, set about clipping, studying, commenting and archiving numerous publications from such newspapers as the “Frankfurter Allge-meine Zeitung”or “Die Zeit”and from journals of the stature of “Nature”or “Science”, concerning our most distant past as a species. He maintained this habit up until at least 19905.He even col-lected a number of large-format posters, featuring our evolutionary family tree, which these journals issued for their readers (Figure 2).During the year I spent at the Deutsches Liter-aturarchiv of Marbach am Neckar (2013–2014), in Stuttgart, where the unpublished texts and manu-scripts of Blumenberg reside, I had the opportu-nity to familiarise myself with his palaeoanthro-pology-based work. I in fact found that the phi-losopher was entranced by matters connected with human evolution, and had gradually built up an array of knowledge reflected in anthropological-philosophical work of great significance, such as the Description of Man (2006).However, I then realised that the apparent thematic order which may be inferred in the clas-sification of unpublished documents and manu-scripts, conducted by means of their arrangement in endless folders and card indexes catalogued by subject (Entwicklung, Anthropologie…) was mere-ly superficial. While it is true that work concern-ing the disciplines can easily be located in certain Mappen and Zettelkasten on the basis of their title, there is no internal consistency among the con-tents of these groupings of material in accordance with the different sub-topics of a paleoanthropological nature. For example, in one Zettelkasten concerning anthropology, one may find a record card with notes about craniometry in hominids, while on the next card we find an entry about the extinction of dinosaurs.In some cases, Blumenberg marked the record cards and brief manuscripts (UNF) with abbre-viations of the topic to which they correspond-ed: ENTW, ANTHR… But this likewise proves insufficient to establish an internal thematic order within each of these disciplines which were of such great interest to him, about which he learned, and from which he drew inspiration for his anthropological-philosophical theses. The task of classifying his unpublished manuscripts about palaeoanthropology, and methodically systematis-ing them in accordance with different sub-themes, is a challenge which is unquestionably worth the effort, but which no one has yet ventured to take upon themselves.This would also need to be combined with the exercise of establishing the connection between the sub-thematic syntheses derived from unpub-lished paleoanthropological texts, and the known theses set out in his published work. The philosopher wrote countless notes which were not sub-sequently included in published manuscripts, and which prove of great interest not only in order better to understand the paleoanthropological philosopher, but to understand the background to his anthropological-philosophical conclusions. One could analyse at length what Blumenberg in truth drew on to give shape to his anthropological-phil-osophical postulates, and what he decided to keep to himself, and then venture the reasons prompt-ing him to take these decisions.This would, in short, involve excavating in the subsoil of Blumenbergian philosophy, to find ourselves face-to-face with his veiled relics. Many may see no sense in digging into the depths of the thoughts of a philosopher some of whose most fundamental propositions we are still trying to digest: metaphorology, the theory of myth, or phe-nomenological anthropology. It strikes me as an unprecedented challenge for studies of Blumenberg, which would specifically result in a mature understanding of those other more popular philo-sophical expressions.I have not been so bold as to succumb to such an invitation6.However, as part of my doctoral thesis — El aburrimiento como presión selectiva en Hans Blumenberg (2017) — I conducted a brief exercise of the thematic synthesis regarding some of the paleoanthropological nodes which attracted Blumenberg’s attention, on the basis of the unpub-lished manuscripts that I had the chance to con-sult at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. As for the rest, I will set out a brief presentation of the keynotes comprising those which strike me as the most important and appealing, in all cases in my humble and non-exhaustive approach to the paleoanthropological material of the Nachlaß.My aim with this brief introduction is simply to offer an outline sketch and arouse the curiosity of the reader as to this Blumenberg who remains, in part, buried beneath tonnes of unexplored paper.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Aisthesis-13641
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/13641
