Resumo

NAUDE, Charl-Pierre. Hans Blumenberg's philosophical foundation of art as a form of knowledge. Tydskr. geesteswet. [online]. 2023, vol.63, n.3, pp.632-654. ISSN 2224-7912.  http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2224-7912/2023/v63n3a13.

Blumenberg 's philosophical anthropology, about the origin and development of imaginative thinking among early human beings, serves as the backdrop to this article about the reasons art exists as a human activity. The article could be read in conjunction with a prior set of two articles by myself (in Afrikaans), "Hans Blumenberg's philosophical anthropology" and "Hans Blumenberg's model for the evolution of thought". Blumenberg posited that a strong connection exists between the earliest existential anxiety and the development of self-consciousness in humans and that this sets the human apart from the natural animal. My article looks at the evolution of thinking about art in the European human being, the way it occurred in various historical times, against the backdrop of the first thinking responses in primordial times. Art originated as a form of wishful thinking, as part of a survival response, which compensated for the early human's sudden lack of belonging in the world. This sudden lack occurred when the creature accidently strayed from its earliest natural habitat - that of being enclosed by primordial forests - and ended up on the open grasslands exposed to all kinds of dangers. As a result of this catastrophe, the early creature was confronted by the "absolutism of reality", as Blumenberg calls it, i.e. a near total lack of control over his own destiny in the face of overpowering factors of reality. The creation of art had a direct connection to this abysmal existential anxiety because it featured forms of imaging that assuaged the anxiety. Through the ages and to this day art plays a pacifying role in human culture. Blumenberg points out that the earliest developed forms of thinking were mostly of a mythical nature, i.e. of a wished-for or dreamt-up nature, such as the creation of the gods, and art in its first forms was part of this response. The primordial humans placed the gods between themselves and the absolutism of reality. They could approach the gods for favours or at least ascribe their sufferings to the wilful actions of these all-powerful beings. The humans made art as a form of assuaging their anxieties but as makers they had to make sure that they did not transgress on the gods 'primary right of creation. Move on now from primordial time to historical time. Especially in the Middle Ages, the human being found itself in a position of intense negotiation with Christian theology and with God as the Creator to make sure that while they created things they still could rely on the favour of the Creator. My article looks at Blumenberg's analyses of historical epochs, defined as such by him, that preceded the Modern Epoch and how this diachronic historical process eventually opened up the space for modern art to make its appearance. According to Blumenberg, the nature of the epochs and the reality concepts that govern these epochs, as well as their intermediary junctures, can only become apparent in retrospect. It is Modernity and the phenomenological ability that comes with modern times that enables this retrospective awareness in people. Blumenberg believes that the shapes of knowledge - be it philosophy, religion, culture or art - exist in particular ways within the broad machinations of an epoch - a way that pertains to that epoch alone. Knowledge has certain functions that may change in a follow-up epoch. Every epoch's institutions and traditions have the primary goal to ensure the survival of the human being as a social being (i.e. a failed natural creature). Aristotle's idea of "art as mimesis of nature" was the conception of art that reigned from European Antiquity through the Renaissance to early modernity. It was an idea designed to keep the favour of Providence while humankind slowly, and hidden to itself, expanded human autonomy in its self-expression. The Aristotelian God was the maker of things, based on the Forms of Plato, through the influence of Neoplatonism, and people did not exist as anything else but a subsidiary part of God's creation. The article traces several reoccupations within the Aristotelian scheme towards the eventually fully autonomous modern artist. All the reoccupations happened within reigning Christian theology, including the last vital one, the freeing of the human will on account of the expanding influence of Augustine's free-will thesis. It was theology that governed all knowing and its possibilities. But the changing of the guard in the reoccupation process leading to the meanings of modern art was laborious and slow. The "logic" of a particular threshold-period, namely the Renaissance of Leonardo da Vinci, was still bound up with the idea of a privileged viewpoint within the Aristotelian mimesis structure, much comparable in structure to the scientific observations of Copernicus. Both thinkers were still coming to terms with the unseating of the centrality of the given world. Blumenberg's critique of Paul Valéry 's wished-for analysis of Leonardo in Valery's own modern terms, argues that premodern art can only be understood for what it says if judged within the function of its own epochal frame. However, Blumenberg admires Valéry 's terms for modern art, especially the term objet ambigu, which finally leaves behind the privileged window image of art that reigned supreme during the Renaissance. The objet ambigu is an art product that has full spacial dexterity and movement. My article argues that the hard-earned freedoms that characterise the objet ambigu bring new securities as well as insecurities to the human being's world concept. One of the great gains for the modern mind is that it can consciously view meanings in terms of phenomenology, that is in a distanced way as if he is in the other time despite being in his own time. The earliest patterns of meaning that were devised by a primordial mind are mythical. These are so basic to thinking that they are imperishable, and still very instrumental in the communication modes of modern art, as my analysis of a Robert Frost poem shows. But the metaphorology underlying these "significance structures" has now been rendered self-conscious in the human, compared to the human of premodern and primordial art. In conclusion, it is postulated that certain shifts in late modernity are bringing about new forms of the absolutism of reality and existential anxiety, and that these have definite implications for the art product. Blumenberg's reality concept (Wirklichkeitsbegriff) of Widerstand ("withstanding") - of a world utterly traumatised by its freedoms and divisions - seems particularly apt, and my article cautions that the late modern state of affairs holds a threat to the freedom and intentional dimensionality of the objet ambigu. The reason for this, I propose, is that a world disunited in its attempts to save its rhetorical bulwark - i.e. the broad range of human mind activities that sets him apart as a social being - will be inclined to demand simplicity and partisan allegiance from the late modern artist, which amounts to an anti-modern and retrogressive stance despite all our means available to the contrary.

Palavras-chave : anthropology; Aristotle; Hans Blumenberg; Leonardo da Vinci; metaphorology; modern art; mimesis; modernity; mythical; Neoplatonism; Paul Valèry; Odysseus; phenomenology; rationality; Renaissance; Robert Frost; late modernity.

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