»Moses the Egyptian« is an essay by Hans Blumenberg, in which he engages with two of the defining thinkers of the 20th Century: Sigmund Freud and Hannah Arendt. Written at the end of the 1980s and preserved in a folder marked »Forbidden Fragments«, the essay is one of the most spectacular texts in Blumenberg’s posthumous œuvre.
Blumenberg begins with Freud’s late work, Moses and Monotheism (1939), which he describes as his »last great insult to mankind in the guise of those who have suffered the most«, before proceeding to an incomparably trenchant critique of Arendt and her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. In both cases Blumenberg identifies a certain rigorism at work, which is employed in the name of the truth but which lapses into ruthlessness due to its blindness to the political and deafness to the incomprehensible. »Just as Freud took Moses away from his people, Hannah Arendt takes Adolf Eichmann away from the State of Israel« – as Blumenberg writes in one of the many remarkable conclusions he draws in this dense text, which also provides a glimpse of the philosopher’s attitudes to Judaism and Zionism.
»Moses the Egyptian« is published here in its entirety for the first time, along with commentary by the editor and other unpublished texts on related topics.
»The Rigorism of Truth, now published by Suhrkamp, has been edited with great care by Ahlrich Meyer. Which is a good thing, as it covers a sensitive subject and confronts the reader with, in regards to Blumenberg, the unexpected.« der Freitag
»Blumenberg’s text, with his affirmation of the redeeming quality of mythical thinking and acting which humans need in order to ease the burden of the absolutism of reality, is insofar consistent as he proves his thesis of the subjectivity of ›truth‹ brilliantly.« Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag
»The Rigorism of Truth, now published by Suhrkamp, has been edited with great care by Ahlrich Meyer. Which is a good thing, as it covers a sensitive subject and confronts the reader with, in regards to Blumenberg, the unexpected.« der Freitag
»Blumenberg’s text, with his affirmation of the redeeming quality of mythical thinking and acting which humans need in order to ease the burden of the absolutism of reality, is insofar consistent as he proves his thesis of...
For more than three decades, Hans Blumenberg and Reinhart Koselleck maintained a correspondence that was characterized by mutual affection but also by distance. It shows two academic protagonists discuss the founding of universities and interdisciplinarity in times of university reform – and two sensitive scholars trying to communicate central aspects of their research: conceptual...
In January 1948, shortly after completing his doctorate, Hans Blumenberg begins working on his habilitation thesis. It quickly grows into a monumental project that wants nothing less than to measure the philosophical horizon of modernity against the background of its crisis. Although The Ontological Distance does not live up to this claim completely, the study’s combination of...
When asked which contemporary philosopher he considered the most important, Hans Jonas answered more than once: Hans Blumenberg. Conversely, there were only few colleagues Blumenberg respected more than Jonas. Their correspondence, which spans almost 25 years, is a testament to their mutual esteem, but also to occasional tensions, and offers insights into the biographical and historical...
In 1947, Hans Blumenberg from Bargteheide in Holstein submits his doctoral thesis entitled »Contributions to the Problem of the Originality of the Medieval-Scholastic Ontology« and written under the most difficult personal circumstances to the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel.
In it, Blumenberg presents an examination of the thought of the Christian Middle Ages, with constant...
What do we mean when speaking about reality? What does realism of thoughts mean? How do humans come in contact with reality and become conscious of it? These fundamental questions occupied Hans Blumenberg all through his life, and they remained important undercurrents in many of his books. He never published a monograph about these topics, but he had been planning to do so, as documents in his...
From the early modern period and increasingly so since from the Enlightenment onwards, divine privilege of possessing unconditional truth has been challenged and made more democratic. The...
France (Seuil), Korea (Ghil)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (bäng)
On the 27th of April 1988, the 50th anniversary of the death of Edmund Husserl, Hans Blumenberg noted: »The century now rushing towards its end will be regarded with hindsight by philosophy-historians as the ‘century’ of Phenomenology.« This prognosis is also an indicator of his own philosophical legacy: a phenomenological anthropology as developed by Blumenberg throughout his lifelong debate...
Long awaited and now available from the estate: Hans Blumenberg’s reviews, talks and lectures on international literature: Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Greene, Kafka, Jünger, Faulkner, Robbe-Grillet and many others.
»Although the laws of the last twelve years have made impossible any journalistic expression whatsoever in the same way as they have made impossible the...
In the 1950s and 1960s, Hans Blumenberg considered combining a philosophy of technology with a philosophy of time, which is only rarely mentioned today. This may be due to the fact that he never wrote a »Philosophy of Technology« – however, a series of shorter writings in which he develops his idea on the subject poignantly were found in his literary...
France (Seuil), Croatia (Mizantrop)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Italy (Morcelliana)
Spanish world rights (Fondo de Cultura Economica), Turkey (Ketebe)
»For distinguished philosopher Hans Blumenberg, lions were a life-long obsession. Lions [...] collects thirty-two of Blumenberg’s philosophical vignettes to reveal that the...
English world rights (Seagull), France (Klincksieck)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (bäng)
Spanish world rights (Fondo de Cultura Economica)
Korea (Ghil)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Pre-Textos), Italy (Mimesis)
France (du Cerf), Italy (Laterza)
Spanish world rights (Pre-Textos), France (Editions du Felin), Italy (Mimesis)
Brazilian Portuguese rights (UFMG), Catalan rights (Papers Amb Accent), France (Editions de l'Eclat), Italy (duepunti Edizioni), Turkey (Ketebe)
Spanish world rights (Fondo de Cultura Economica), France (du Cerf)