He writes: “Only episodes can be dealt with under the heading The Readability of the World.” It’s a way of “capturing the whole in the part,” à la physiognomy and the Romantic ruin, or the way an aphorism distills a stream of thoughts, or the way we talk of novels as “worlds.” He reminds readers that wanting to know it all (omniscience) is a temptation as old as the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. No illustrations.īlumenberg’s solution to offering readers “the world” of things that can be read is to opt for an episodic presentation. He furnishes minimal aid to the reader to carry his books’ weight. As the James Joyce of philosophy who expects so much from readers, Blumenberg refuses the role of textual Sherpa. His reputation as “ one of the most important philosophers of the postwar period” arose, in part, from doorstop books like The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966), The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975), Work on Myth (1979), and Cave Exits/Entrances (1989). Homer, Plato, Socrates, Francis Bacon, George Berkeley, Kant, Descartes, Rousseau, Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Ernst Robert Curtius, Ernst Cassirer, Schrödinger, Georg Lichtenberg, Leibniz-you get the picture, even if you count the cameo appearances by Anna Freud, Hypatia, and Dorothea Schlegel. In 22 chapters, he squeezes in what any academic could label a parade of dead white men. The Readability of the World counts as evidence of Blumenberg’s own voluminous expressiveness. Think of the ubiquity of bumper stickers. If a man is wearing Doc Martens, he’s conservative.” According to Blumenberg, humans have a built-in drive toward legibility, a yearning to be read, manifested by excessive expressiveness. Despite noise, many of us imagine that we can read one another easily: “ If a woman is wearing Doc Martens, she’s liberal.
It’s partly why we have Amber Ruffin’s comic routine “Amber Says What,” as well as the South Park episode “Do You Know What I Am Saying?” On one level, Grant’s thesis confirms a fundamental principle of understanding, articulated by Hans Blumenberg in the last chapter of The Readability of the World (published in 1981 as Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, and in English translation last December): “What is readable, the document, is the absolutely improbable in its surroundings the probable is chaos, noise, de-differentiation, decay.” Over 150 years earlier, the founder of the modern theory of understanding called hermeneutics, Friedrich Schleiermacher, condensed the matter to “ misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course.” A similar point has been made in our time by French philosopher Michel Serres, who proposes that before the word, there was noise. “WE’RE ALL TERRIBLE at understanding each other,” says social psychologist Heidi Grant.
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