The Readability of the World - (Signaletransfer: German Thought in Translation) by Hans Blumenberg (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Hans Blumenberg has, in the quarter-century since his death, become recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the postwar period. The Readability of the World represents Blumenberg's first full-length demonstration of the metaphorological method he had pioneered twenty years earlier in Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Whereas Blumenberg had confined himself in Paradigms to sketching this future research field, in Readability he applies his method to a single case study: the idea that the world presents itself to human beings as a book. The metaphor of the book of nature has been central to Western interpretations of reality. Beginning with ancient Greek cosmology and ending with the genetic code, Blumenberg traces the changes undergone by this metaphor in order to access the different expectations of reality that it articulates, reflects, and projects"--

Book Synopsis

The Readability of the World represents Hans Blumenberg's first extended demonstration of the metaphorological method he pioneered in Paradigms for a Metaphorology. For Blumenberg, metaphors are symptomatic of patterns of thought and feeling that escape conceptual formulation but are nonetheless indispensable, because they allow humans to orient themselves in an otherwise overwhelming world. The Readability of the World applies this method to the idea that the world presents itself as a book. The metaphor of the book of nature has been central to Western interpretations of reality, and Blumenberg traces the evolution of this metaphor from ancient Greek cosmology to the model of the genetic code to access the different expectations of reality that it articulates, reflects, and projects.

Writing with equal authority on literature and science, theology and philosophy, ancient metaphysics and twentieth-century biochemistry, Blumenberg advances rich and original interpretations of the thinking of a range of canonical figures, including Berkeley, Vico, Goethe, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bacon, Flaubert, and Freud. Through his interdisciplinary, anthropologically sharpened gaze, Blumenberg uncovers a wealth of new insights into the continuities and discontinuities across human history of the longing to contain all of nature, history, and reality in a book, from the Bible, the Talmud, and the Qur'an to Diderot's Encyclopedia and Humboldt's Cosmos to the ACGT of the DNA code.

Review Quotes

Learning about Blumenberg's metaphorology as well as the stars of intellectual history has been made possible for Anglophones by the extraordinary translation skills of Robert Savage and David Roberts.

-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"

Spanning from the biblical account of creation to modern genetics, Blumenberg's book can be understood as an intense effort to refract the history of ideas through the lens of a fundamental metaphor. In detailed individual analyses of relevant historical texts, he explains the metaphor's various assignments of meaning from the intellectual, sociocultural, and biographical contexts in which it is deployed.

-- "Rhetorica"

About the Author

Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) was one of the most important German philosophers of the twentieth century. Among his books translated into English are Paradigms for a Metaphorology, Rigorism of Truth, St. Matthew Passion, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, and Care Crosses the River. His criticism and other writings have been collected and translated in History, Metaphors, Fables.

Robert Savage is the author of Hölderlin after the Catastrophe and the translator of several books, including Jan Assmann's The Invention of Religion.

David Roberts is the author of several books, including The Total Work of Art in European Modernism and History of the Present.