난파선과 구경꾼_한스 블루멘베르크

Martin Eden (2019, Marcello)

 

1. Seafaring as a Transgression of Boundaries

 

metaphorics of the perilous sea voyage. 

human beings living on land nevertheless prefer, in their imagination, to represent their overall condition in the world in terms of a sea voyage. 

 

the sea as naturally given boundary of the realm of human activities and its demonization as the sphere of the unreckonable and lawless, in which it is difficult to find one's bearings. 

The sea has always been suspect for cultural criticism. 

The rules of time seem to be what remain of the cosmos for the sea. 

 

It is precisely in this criticism that we first encounter the culture-critical connection between two elements characterized by liquidity: water and money. 

 

2. What the Shipwrecked Person is left With

 

The contraposition of dry land and deep sea as the primary frame of reference for the paradoxical metaphorics of existence might, however, lead us to expect that, going beyond the ideas of storms at sea and sinkings, there must also be the, as it were, emphatic configuration in which shipwreck at sea is set beside the uninvolved spectator on dry land. 

 

could hardly fail to occur in literature

takes note of his distance from the enormity with satisfaction or even enjoyment. 

'ship of state' into political rhetoric

storms as civil wars

lamenting but uninvolved speactator.

 

<Shipwrecked Man>

Flying through the air, seafaring, and stealing fire are brought together in one context. 

Shipwreck, as seen by a survivor, is the figure of an initial philosophical experience. 

The account has the philosopher

even in the hopelss situation of being shipwrecked on a foreign shore, a philosophically trained person still knows what to do - he is a man who can take care of himself rather than a man who draws lessons from the shipwreck. 

His wealth of knowledge he easily persuaded the learned and virtuous inhabitants to provide him and his companions with everything they needed to live. 

" Certainly a man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself."

Self-possession achievable through the process of self-discovery and self-appropriation. 

 

Another metaphor, which warms us not to swim against the current in the conduct of our lives. 

"in any case, hold a steady course." : Descarte's Provisional Morality

He speaks of himself in the double role of savior and saved

 

the loneliness of the man who is saved, for whom alone the plank has room, in the light of a disappointment with life. 

Living means already being on the high seas, where there is no outcome other than being saved or going down, and no possiblity of abstention. 

Shipwreck sought out and demanded. - Heroic nihilism. 

 

Spectator - - as evidence for the paradoxical assertion that nothing in nature is uselss

Montaigne does not justify the spectator of shipwreck by his right to enjoyment; rather, he justifies his pleasure, positively described as malicious, by this successful self-preservation. 

Capacity for this distance , he stands unimperiled on the solid ground of the shore. 

 

Nietzsche himself carried the imagination of seafaring and shipwreck even a few steps further. Those rescued from shipwreck are astonished by their new experience of dry land. This is the fundamental experience of science, that it is able to establish things that stand firm and provide solid ground for further discoveries.  - The reliability of firm ground is something wholly new for humans who are surfacing out of history. - Terra firma

But it is not the position of the spectator but rather that of the man rescued from shipwreck; the sense of unlikelihood 

- the reward of the risk undertaken. 

"Embark, philosophers!" - the compulsion to participate in the smallest way in a great sacrifice. - his pride at having attained a unique sympathy with ... - enjoy "the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity" in a way that only "someone who suffered continually" could have discovered. 

'happiness of eyes that have seen the sea of existence become calm" - This too is the happiness of a spectator

But it is not the sea's calm and serenity. that gratify the spectator, - rather wholly in the style of the idealistic subject, it is the power of the sufferer - the metaphor is a projection of nature in the service of the subject

The familiar Aristotelian theory of tragic catharsis may have led Casanova to make this attribution. 

--- (After that) the melancholy that governs throughout all its adventures 

and that the lives of others, including those who were also entangled in his game, had always been a matter of indifference to him 

" I want to shelter you from its power and make you master of a property that it may not steal away from you."

The element of security is not same with the undisturbed and reflective observer of other people's shipwrecks. 

 

3. Aesthetics and Ethics of the Spectator 

 

observing, from the safety of shore, other people who are in peril on the storm-tossed sea

enjoying the safety of one's own standpoint

the relation between the philosopher and reality

What the spectator enjoys is not the sublimity of the objects his theory opens up for him but his own self-consciousness, 

the remaining assurance that such a firm ground exists at all, beyond the reach of the hostile element. 

The indifference of theory has made itself into the equivalent, in rank and power, of reality's indifference to man, its constituent part. 

the man standing on the shore of appearance to observe a certain regularity

man does well to be content with the spectator's role and not to abandon his philosophical standpoint before and above the natural world. 

The man who was content with his meager existence was tempted in vain by the sea to make the misstep of culture: "the wicked art of navigation then lay hidden and obscure". 

"If reason reigned over the earth, nothing would happen on it."

an "existentially" unactualized aesthetic attitude. 

Astronomy and speculative cosmology 

Spectator - Object

they took pleasure in their own lack of involvement

by curiosity alone "I was curious and sensitive"

A decade later, in the article "Curiosity" in his philosophical dictionary, Voltaire goes still further to free the figure of the shipwreck spectator from the suspicion of reflective self-enjoyment, which Voltaire finds so dreadful. If one could imagine an angel flying down from the empyrean sphere in order to observe, through a crack in the earth, the sufferings of the damned in hell, and in this way to take pleasure in his own incapacity for suffering, then this angel would no longer be distinguishable from a devil - Voltaire not only bases his judgement of the shipwreck spectator on his own experience but also appeals to that experience with the angel to human nature - In his curiosity, he even forgets to be concerned about himself! 

 - Galiani's twist: Curiosity is a form of sensibility from which the slightest danger tears us away, forcing us to be concerned with ourselves alone. --- Security and good fortune are conditions of curiosity

The need to attain an aesthetic level and to represent what is essentially human on that level admits the required distance between security and danger only as an artificial situation, and no longer a real one, as in the original metaphorical material. 

Man is a being of indeterminable greatness - nature is also an immense and undefined something

= Shipwreck is no longer the extreme image of the human situation in nature - It is the task of technology, of science, to deal with the problem of steering the ship. - The shipwreck metaphorics can now stand for the prudence of public administration and its opposition to every sort of passion. 

 

The nonsimultaneity of experiencing and speaking privatizes the configuration. - the reader's surprise is the artificial correlate of the author's pretended intensity of experience. -- Spectator: the one who perceives the condition of the ship more clearly from outside than those who are sailing it can. ;; the one who sees more bears a heavier burden. 

Herder described the current state of philosophy in terms of the shipwreck metaphor, not only as "doubt in a hundred forms" but also as "contradiction and sea surge;"

 

Distance is claimed, however, not only because of the separation between the event and the observer but still more because of the difference in national characters. -- The uncertaintly  concerning the spectator's firm standpoint. 

It is worth noting that the connection between shipwreck metaphorics and theater metaphorics, A DRAMA

The metaphor is only a translation of a translation

 

 

4. The Art of Survival

 

(P48-49 are omitted)

"The earthly paradise is where I am"

Everything is set up for the confrontation between the committed patriot and the Olympian spectator modeling himself on the ancients. - the offensive dubiousness 

The energy that drives us beyond the state of nature and the meager provision of the natural standpoint is itself a part of nature. - The spectator's self-discipline, which allows no outcry of distress and sympathy to be drawn from him, is distant from any naturalness of impulses. It is discipline in the classical form: a high degree of artificiality. =The self-disengagement. - to protect his history from history per se... the form-making power of nature itself

Catastrophic play of the atoms, in Hegel, by contrast, the drama of passions and folly, of ills and evils, of the sinking of the most flourishing empires, which history places before our eyes, is only the means to the "true result of world history"

It is less a position than a "path of reflection", which makes it possible "to ascend from the specatcle of historical detail to the universal principlie behind it." --- Indifference for Goethe, His distance is not that of reflection but rather that of escape(in relation to the ambition to free humanity's relation to death) -> One should feel pity rather than lay blame, he says, when weariness with life overcomes people. 

Here he has reverted entirely from consolation to the image of his own "story" - those "stories" be described as that of a retrospecitve and exalting living-though of danger. "the drenched survivor dries off..".. does not reject the little cares of a limited existence. -> As Erasmus interprets it, this is supposed to apply to everyone who is tempted to expose himself to danger a second time and against his own experience. - The poem entitled "Glückliche Fahrt" is the counterpart of "Meeres Stille" --> he indicates the vain historical pride taken by the outgoing century of the Enlightenment "Prometheus" - "the absurd in fact fills up the world"

:: Both progress and sinkings leave behind them the same peaceful surface.

 

 

5. The Spectator Loses His Position

 

Schopenhauer calls on the shipwreck-spectator configuration. - It is reason that can make man into the spectator of what he himself suffers. 

The distinction between the ship captain and the uneducated sailors = I and Me = the double life of the subject

attains the peace of contemplation - the two-fold nature of his consciousness reaches the highest degree of distinctness.

the eternal, peaceful, knowing subject, the condition of the object, the supporter of this whole world (I) - In reflection, the spectator surpasses himself, becoming the transcendental spectator. All this has become his representation. -> The multiplicity of worlds exists "only" in and through our representation. 

The distance of remembering "satisfaction and pleasure we can only know indirectly through the remembrance of the precedent suffering and want" - Remembering a peril that one has survived is precisely "the only means of enjoying the present blessings." - Therein consists once again the happiness of theory

The egoism of contemplation as morally dubious

Crack-up becomes inevitable  - Death

For the functioning of the metaphorics of existence, there is a close affinity between the basic themes of seafaring and theater. - The spectator metaphor had already unexpectedly turned into the theatrical scenario. 

This is entirely plausible if the interiorized double role of the single subject is to be presented.

In his withdrawal into reflection, man resembles "an actor who has played his part in one scene, and who takes his place among the audience until it is time for him to go on the stage again, and quietly looks on at whatever may happen, even though it be the preparation for his own death, but afterward again goes on the stage and acts and suffers as he must." - This doubleness of life

 

Who continues the play when the actor definitively withdraws, to become a spectator? Stoicism - contemplation by means of a single image - Nothing need to be said about the ship's voyage and goal, because it has become wholly the vehicle of surviving(Ueberleben) and rising above life (Ueber-Leben). 

Just as Lucretius's spectator no longer needs a sailor in peril at sea, because he projects his own past or future distress into the image of the raging sea, so the sailor in his little boat no longer needs a spectator on the shore, because he himself has become, or is about to become, a world spectator. 

 

What merits our attention here is not the metaphorical scene itself but rather the grounds on which the contemporary, the eyewitness, turns away. (1) A reversal of the situation: I saw how he strethced out his hand toward me , but did not grasp the outstretched hand. - he asserts that he was right not to have done so, for he thus avoided endangering the precious cargo ("I was carrying on board my ship the gods of the future.") (2) The dissolution of its original relationship to nature. - the shipwreck metaphorics was completely occupied by the newly emerging historical consciousness and its insoluble dilemma of theoretical distance versus living engagement. a continuity that persists through downfalls and new beginnings, as an "essential interest of our human existence."

"A man who had a sense of this wouldcompletely forget fortune and misfortune and live on in pure longing for this knowledge." 

The "imagined" spectator - the unreal embodiment of the historian's good fortune --- It is important that the fiction is related to the history that is impending, the epoch of the coming decisions. 

Burckhardt sees a consciousness of provisionality as the result of this period and also as the dominant feeling of his own present time. - There follows immediately the radical and, if we did not know better, last possible transformation of the seafaring metaphor, along with its full denaturalization through the elimination of the dualism of man and reality. "We ourselves are these waves." - "Objective knowledge is not made easy for us"

- The impossibility of the spectator, and the near impossibility of the historian (in part), is the concluding point of Burckhardt's paradoxical sharpening of the metaphorical theme.

--> Over against the uniqueness of an object into which it sees itself as integrated, theory discovers something that one might later have called its "existential" involvement. - the transition from "interesting" to "interests", to this already suspicion-arousing plural, makes it natural to raise the question of the "purity" of the theoretical object. -- The question "whether this is an academic subject". If one takes the claim to knowledge in an absolute sense, knowledge proceeds only "from areas that are kept pure, closed off, withdrawn from purposes and passions."

"Every later opinion regarding the 'how?' would be deceptive, even though, in and of itself, it would be a pardonable curiosity to aks on which wave of this sea we are presently being borne along"

 

 

6. Shipbuilding out of the Shipwreck

 

Can it be that only the historian, anticipating the concept of "historicity", sees the interrelation of the subject and history as dissoluble with his paradoxical metaphorics, sought to represent it and at the same time to express it in its unrepresentability? 

Du Bois-Reymond said: "We may henceforth, while we hold fast to this doctrine, feel like a man who would otherwise helplessly sink, were it not that he clings to a plank that barely holds him above the water. In a choice between the plank and going under, the advantage is decidedly on the side of the plank" - "living with shipwreck". 

No one talks any more about voyages and courses, landings and harbors. Shipwreck has lost its story setting. 

- His concern had been with the degree of probability of that explanation.

 

The plank is the most that can be expected in the human situation of immanent self-help through science, 

The economy is one of self-preservation, not one of navigation toward landings and harbors, and certainly not one that takes into account firmly situated spectators. -- A reversal in the strict sense would be present only if the helpless man borne along on his plank at sea were the initial situation if the construction of a ship were only the result of self-assertion proceeding from this situation. - on one hand by the predominance of axiomatic method after the displacement of Kant, and on the other by a hermeneutics oriented toward language philosophy. "life" refers only to a contingent framework imposed on thought

 

According to Neurath, there is no way to put a language of definitively certain protocol at the beginning of scientific knowledge. "We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the high seas, without ever being able to take it apart in a dock and reconstruct it out of the best parts. Only metaphysics can disappear completely. The imprecise 'clusters' are always somehow part of the ship." - The beginning means ... to imagine the situation without the mother ship of natural language and, apart from its buyancy, to "reperform" in a thought experiment "the actions by means of which we -- swimming in the middle of the sea life -- could build ourselves a raft or even a ship." - to found his life on the naked nothingness of the leap overboard. 

The sea evidently contains material other than what has already been used. Where can it come from, in order to give courage to the ones who are beginning anew? Perhaps from earlier shipwrecks?

 

---

An interdiction on metaphor applies to what is designated by the expression "freedom". Because it could be deduced only "as a necessary presupposition of reason," Kant says, freedom is an Idea. "because no example can ever be given of it in accord with any analogy whatsover." 

Kant represented the synthesis of transcendental apperception as an operation of the understanding, and the categories of the understanding as the ultimate rules of that operation. 

The understanding is not the subject that makes use of a mode of operation in its actions; rather, it is nothing other than the sum of this regulated operation itself. - The synthesis of representations, itself, is already an action of the understanding. 

Human beings, then, would "make" their history freely, or more freely, because the synthesis of their representations is an "action" of their understanding. 

 

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