The Blumenberg Legacy: Why Some Stories Survive and Others Are Forgotten

Research into myths conducted by philosophers and anthropologists since the late eighteenth century shows the eminently political charac­ter of myths. Traditionally, myths were believed to be a ‘fiction’ about the past, centring around the sacred, supernatural, or gods.

In modern political philosophy, mention needs to be made especially of the works of Ernst Cassirer (1985, 2010), and of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (2003) of the Frankfurt School. Cassirer’s work can be read as a forerunner to deconstructivist approaches, pointing to the most sublime mechanisms through which states manage to obscure their origins and historicity, that is, their genealogy, and the ways they shape knowledge and citizens’ lives. Horkheimer and Adorno (2003, 24) stress that the social functions that myths fulfil are merely obscured in scien­tific modernity as a process in which positivist followers of enlightenment dismiss universal meanings contained in myth first, as beyond empirical knowledge, and consequently, as untrue. Facing fascism, they warn that reason in its totalitarian tendency to usurp all finite arguments provides the instrumental means for barbarism, contained in systems of dominance, that is, the state (Horkheimer and Adorno 2003, 38, 43).

Preserving the caution of these earlier ideas, Blumenberg takes on myth in its culturally productive form.

That mythical subjects remain durable over long periods supports the faulty conclusion that they contain in fact timeless, even eternal truths. While this need not be the case, of course, one reason for enlighten­ment thought to dismiss myth is its refusal to explain itself. As such, myth attracted fierce resistance from enlightenment figures (and earned a bad reputation as delusional in common parlance), which Blumenberg attri­butes to the fear of the unreasonable. Myth allows for the reign of unrea­son, and possibly even enforces it (Blumenberg 2006, 180).

What can fruitfully be adapted from these understandings of myth in order to come to analytical results? What is the value for approaching international politics through the lens of a mythical conceptualisation? Myth is understood here as spelling out assumptions about reality which need not be questioned henceforth.

Under-complex analogies are in this sense undergirding the combi­nation of myth and fact. De-historicised analogies—critical scholarship tends to highlight decontextualized arguments referring to a synchronous relational decoupling of information—allow presenting an argument vol­untarily or unintendedly disregarding parameters. Examples abound, and arguments may as easily be questioned as they are brought forward under such curtate points: portraying Afghanistan as the USA’s (or the West’s) new Vietnam (Finlan 2014, 60, 162, 194), or—vice versa—arguing that Afghanistan could not be turned into a new Switzerland (Ruttig 2010) were tropes employed frequently. Such analogies help cognitively locating a problem but work alongside the longue duree of myths to construct a foundationalist understanding of a policy challenge. That Afghanistan was a highly militarised endeavour, and that the situation on the ground fos­tered a certain understanding of the situation (Duffield 2010; Smirl 2015; Bliesemann de Guevara 2014, 71-74), allowed for a quiet merging of myth and analogies, which I will demonstrate in the following paragraphs.

Before looking into the case in more detail, it makes sense to clarify what myths do as opposed to other concepts. We can distinguish myth with a long-ranging perspective grounded in history from policy myths such as statebuilding or the ‘international community’, which produce contradictory policy consequences (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn 2010, 2011; Kaczmarska, Chap. 11). Myths, in either sense, relate closely to what is taken as established truth, and they contribute to the discursive formation of an outside world which can hardly be influenced by individu­als: the outside world hands itself to man, relieving her from responsibil­ity. Myths become productive in that they guide repertoires of action—as a reaction to this outside world; they help preselect options available to political (but by extension also military or other) decision-makers (Finlan 2014, 43).

Unlike legends, which also have an explanatory function but concern a narrower field of social life and also concern assumed events, myths explain what is behind such action. In Greek mythology, legends of actual gods involved in concrete plots merely exemplify and thus make visible the characteristics of those involved. Such ascription of personal qualities is by no means incidental but codifies myth as an encrypted version of truth. We have to distinguish between the actual plot and the solidified truth claim behind it; what Blumenberg (2006, 15-17) calls ‘absolutism of actuality’ overwhelms the individual and demonstrates the helplessness she becomes aware of. It is thus functional for her to relate what happens into a higher context to give her life-world meaning.¹

On the surface of the deeper structure of myth, legends as one form of relaying events portray what might have happened but what might also not have happened: they are mainly representations of patterns to make sense of the surrounding reality and fulfil a significant role in interpreting reality in interventions such as in Afghanistan (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kühn 2015).

While interpretations of such narrative forms can be contradictory, with different versions competing for credibility, myths are beyond that stage. Blumenberg (2006, 196 et seqq.) describes more precisely as ‘basic myth’ what becomes paradigmatic for understanding truth; it is the maximum reduction of the myth’s main content and can hence be transformed into particularistic interpretations without losing contact and, more importantly, leaving intact the core pattern of the myth. As basic myths have no epi­sodic character,² they need not be spelt out in detail but are reconstructed in the minds of discourse participants. It is this quality that distinguishes myths from narratives. Narratives, one might argue, are crafted explana­tory tools, broadcast by someone or a group for a particular end. They tie together concrete events with elements of myths and assured knowledge in order to make a specific point usually suitable for the political inter­est of the sender. In the Afghan context, narratives have frequently been shaped by elites for different purposes, as will later be shown for Durrani/ Pashtun primacy to rule in Afghanistan. Narratives thus are coupled with particularistic interpretations of politics; they are more closely related to power and acute competition between political actors to establish knowl­edge about a situation—which, subsequently, may or may not converge with mythical claims to truth.

As all individuals act within the structures reproduced by the ‘epistemo­logical software’ which myths provide and which intersubjectively guides actions in societies, myths shape subjectivity.

As myths concern the overarching explanation of the world without being explicit about it, they are susceptible to international relations: after all, the ‘whole’ quality of global politics and structures highly depends on abstractions and basic theoretical claims; these can be opened up for methodical scrutiny, turning the discipline itself into a subject of inquiry. While this is not the norm, it also transfers the general onto a level of par­ticularity which then can be criticized and questioned on its own terms; the underlying basic myth remains untouched. No International Relations (IR) scholar will credibly be able to make the claim to ‘know’ empirically, by virtue of her own experience, how international relations work. If this can be assumed to be correct or at least plausible, then it is even more amazing that IR has not yet developed a branch concerning itself with myths and their function in shaping the epistemologies and practical exe­cution of politics. If we take into account the profound practice of myth in international politics, derogatorily using ‘myth’ as false belief reveals a very modern understanding of myth and, by extension, politics.

Post-positivist analyses of myth point us to the constitutive and per­formative functions of myth as representing basic truths. Some, such as Roland Barthes or Cynthia Weber, are motivated by ideology critique and the unveiling of hidden functionalities wherein myths play their role; philosophical approaches such as that of Hans Blumenberg lay open how myth cannot be disentangled from truth, how myths are required not as logical other to science but as logical underpinning for it. Blumenberg (2006, 18) puts it succinctly:

The boundary line between mythos and logos is imaginary and by no means dispenses with the question of the logos of myth in working free of the absolutism of actuality. Myth itself is a piece of high-carat work of logos.⁵