Between Luxury and Need: The Idea of Distance in Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract

This paper offers a critical analysis of the use of the idea of distance in philosophical anthropology. Distance is generally presented in works of philosophical anthropology as the ideal coping strategy, which rests in turn on the thesis of the instinct deficiency of the human species. Some of the features of species life, such as its sophisticated use of symbolic forms, come to be seen as necessary parts of this general coping strategy, rather than a merely expressive outlet, incidental to the ultimate goal of life preservation. The paper analyses the arguments used in support of the thesis of instinct deficiency in Hans Blumenberg and considers their implications for the status of symbolic expression in species life. It contrasts the approach this thesis involves with one that proceeds by presenting and arguing from biological evolutionary evidence. The contrast is used to examine the questions: in what sense instinct deficiency is specifically anthropological, and in what precise sense philosophical anthropology is ‘philosophical’.

Keywords:

• Hans Blumenberg
• André Leroi-Gourhan
• luxury
• need
• distance
• philosophical anthropology
• instinct deficiency
• the image

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the referees and the editors of this Issue for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

Notes

1. For an overview of the field with an emphasis on the historicising potential of philosophical anthropology, see Honneth and Joas 1988.

2. Hans Blumenberg’s early thesis placed the issues in relation to the phenomenological conception of the life world: see Blumenberg, ‘Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung über die Strenge der Philosophie; Erste Fassung’ in Blumenberg 1949. Odo Marquard (1981, 54) points out the significance of distance in Blumenberg’s ‘anti-absolutist’, conceptual orientation. For Marquard too, distance is practiced as ‘scepticism’, which he understands as holding at bay the desire to uncover absolute truths or formulas, and a distrust more generally of all dogmaticism: see Marquard 1991; 1989. See also on Blumenberg, Ifergan (2015); Robert Savage’s ‘Translator’s Afterword’ to Blumenberg 2010, 141–142.

3. Blumenberg follows Gehlen’s notion of anthropological instinct deficiency [Mängelwesen] which is outlined in Gehlen 1959. The connection to managing this situation of deficiency through distance in Gehlen [institutions] and Plessner [politeness and tact] can be seen above all in the way Blumenberg insists on the importance of describing myth ‘as already the manifestation of an overcoming, of the gaining of a distance, of a moderation of bitter earnestness’ (Blumenberg 1985, 16). For this perspective the urge for the ‘critical’ unmasking of authority is viewed with suspicion, especially in regards to its emancipatory rhetoric: ‘One who reacts out of anxiety or in a state of anxiety has lost the mechanism of putting forward imagined “authorities” [Instanzen]. The despised formulas of bourgeois courtesy can also be an ‘authority’ that is put forward, and the “critical” destruction of which, while it does produce the desired “nakedness” between people encountering one another, also deprives the weaker person, who previously never had to be found out, of his protection’ (Blumenberg 1985, 6).

4. In Blumenberg’s view, anxiety is ‘never realistic. It does not first become pathological as a phenomenon of man’s recent history; it is pathological.’ Hence he argues that ‘we don’t learn anything new when Freud says that anxiety becomes neurotic as a result of its infantile relationship to danger, since, in anxiety, reactions are produced that are no longer appropriate to the situation of mature individuals’ (Blumenberg 1985, 6).

5. See Blumenberg 1985 for a description of the work on myth, 7 and for the work of myth, 26.

6. Blumenberg 1985, 7: ‘The “art of living” – that primary skill, which has become obsolete even as a phrase, of dealing with and husbanding oneself – had to be acquired as a faculty for dealing with the fact that man does not have an environment that is arranged in categories and that can be perceived exclusively in its ‘relevances’ for him. To have a world is always the result of an art, even if it cannot be in any sense a “universal artwork” …. Some of this will certainly have to be described under the heading of “work on myth”.’

7. The emphasis on the ‘big toe’ rather than the brain in species evolution is also highlighted in Bataille 1985. Many of the themes in Leroi-Gourhan’s approach have been adopted in subsequent French philosophy of the twentieth century. His attention to the anthropological functions of symbolic activities provides the frame for the importance of aesthetics in many thinkers. It is the basis for the understanding of an operational sequence in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) treatment of ‘faciality’ in A Thousand Plateaus; the framework used for Deleuze’s (1986) view of a substantial alteration in the motor-sensory operation of the image in his cinema books; the evaluative schema operating in Stiegler’s (2008) assessment of the degradation in symbolic activities; and the structure used in Derrida’s analysis of the external body of script in his account of the speech/writing distinction in Of Grammatology (2016) and Writing and Difference (1978).

8. Leroi-Gourhan (1993, 156) argues that the capacity to use symbols as implements for controlling the external environment is the basis for the steep ‘development curve’ of homo sapiens. This ‘control is unthinkable without language’ or ‘a complex social organization’.

9. The themes of unapproachability and distance are in this respect worth comparing with Walter Benjamin’s (2003a, 255) definition of the aura as ‘the unique apparition of a distance however near it may be’. For Benjamin (2003b, 338), unapproachability is the experience of distance that is specifically associated with ritual. Blumenberg’s ‘environment’ is more global perhaps, than the sense of the auratic environment that is akin to certain states of heightened perception treated in Benjamin, and distance is the remedy rather than the effect for this sensation in Blumenberg; nonetheless, each accentuate the existential dimensions of the experience of unapproachability.

10. Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 214: there is now a total separation between a ‘small elite acting as society’s digestive organ and the masses acting purely as its organs of assimilation’.

11. Leroi Gourhan may on this point be contrasted with the type of speculative anthropology advanced in Walter Benjamin’s treatment of the mimetic faculty, which is also structured by an interest in the degradation of this faculty under modern conditions. See Benjamin’s ‘The Doctrine of the Similar’ (1999a) and ‘The Mimetic Faculty’ (1999b). And see the discussion of these essays in Ross 2015, 80–86.

12. See also Hans Blumenberg’s study of the ‘exits’ enabled by the cave metaphor: Blumenberg 1989, esp. ch. 7. In this work he broadens the applicable functions of the cave to other types of human settlement. He treats, for instance, the city as a version of the cave. The city too implements a division of space with symbolic and psychic import: it provides an ‘exit’ that manages and places at a distance the absolutism of reality. Like the cave, the city is a substitutive space in which the absolutism of the wish prevails; the space it demarcates acts as a protective barrier not least in its status as an effective manner of dealing with the realities it does not bring forth itself, which are either distanced or incorporated as the mere materials for the production of its own reality.

13. Odo Marquard makes the argument that certain areas of modern philosophy function as mechanisms of compensation. In the so-called ‘saddle period’ after 1750 the philosophy of aesthetics, philosophical anthropology and philosophy of history all emerge. These three sub-fields are described by Marquard (1989, 41) as compensatory discourses. They respond to an ‘impairment’ of the life world that results from ‘overtribunalization’ and the need human beings have to escape into ‘unindictability’: Farewell, 41.

14. Blumenberg treats Goethe as a case study in Part IV of his Work on Myth. According to Blumenberg (1985, 398–557), Goethe’s work on myth is crystallised in his coinage of the supposedly ‘apocryphal’ citation: ‘Against a god, only a god’, which he uses as an abbreviated existential frame for his life.