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A rhetorical approach of politics : Blumenbergs principle of insufficient reason and its pascalian consequences

In the chapter 35 of Robert Musils novel, The Man without qualities, the main character, Ulrich, has a discussion with Leon Fischel, a director of the Lloyds Bank in Austria, about the setting up of an organization called The Parallel Action, which has been launched by high officials and personnalities. The programm of this organization is highly vague : it aims at giving a solid form to a great idea or at keeping ready for an important common work , and also at working for the true progress, the real Austria Leon Fischel is, on one side, a cautious man, but he doesnt want to miss something that could be important. Nevertheless, something puzzles him in the (secrete) manifesto of The Parallel Action : he wants to know what means the word true in such devices as the true progress, the true Austria, the true patriotism Ulrich is supposed to be involved in The Parallel Action, but when Leon Fischel asks him about that (what means true in all these expressions), he replies : Ive not the slightest idea of what it means, and no one has the slightest idea of what the true is but I can assure you that it is becoming a reality right now . This chapter is entitled M. Leon Fischel and the Principle of Insufficient Reason , and the following chapter Thanks to the Principle of Insufficient Reason, The Parallel Action is becoming something tangible even before anyone knows what it is . I wont develop here Musils conception and use of the principle of insufficient reason. I would like to speak about Hans Blumenberg, who is one of the few modern philosophers, after Nietzsche, who has not only developed a positive account of rhetoric (that has become almost usual in recent times), but who has endowed rhetoric with a major anthropological significance. And what authorized me to begin with Musils impossible fragmentary and endless novel is the fact that Blumenberg asserts that the main principle, the axiom (Hauptsatz) of all rhetoric is the principle of insufficient reason. He has done it, especially, in a text that was first published in 1971, Anthropologische Annherung an die Aktualitt der Rhetorik 1.
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Hans Blumenberg, Anthropologische Annherung an die Aktualitt der Rhetorik, 1971, p. 406-431, reprint in sthetische und metaphorologische Schriften, Francfort/Main, Suhrkamp, 2001 ; An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric , english translation in Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman and Thomas McCarthy (ed.), Philosophy, End or Transformation ?, MIT Press, 1987, pp. 429-458. (but we refer here to the german text and propose our own translation). 1

What did Blumenberg exactly mean with this anthropological significance of rhetoric, and why did he consider that metaphor is not only a chapter in the treatment of the rhetorical instruments, it is a significant element of rhetoric, upon which the function of rhetoric can be shown and put in relation with its anthropological significance ? (p. 116). So this reflection about rhetoric communicates with another series of Blumenbergs essays, those devoted to the actual role of metaphor in the history of western thought, such as Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (1960). I would like here to try to show the interest of this approach of rhetoric and metaphor, and to draw attention upon two concepts that Blumenberg has not invented, but that he has worked out, absolute metaphor and principle of insufficient reason . But my lecture and discussion will focus on the explicit or virtual political consequences of this approach of rhetoric 1. Characterization of the situation of rhetoric : lack of obviousness and constraint to action Blumenbergs approach implies, as suggested by the very title of his 1971 paper, to grasp out the essential structures of the concept of rhetoric, and, at the same time, to point out the historical changes that necessarily touch such concepts as nature , technique , reality in a modern or contemporary context these changes having an impact on our view of rhetoric. Blumenberg characterizes rhetoric by a double condition or a double situation : in german, Evidenzmangel and Handelszwang, that is to say lack of obviousness and constraint, or obligation, to act . Handelzwang, first : rhetoric is a kind of speech, but also, according to Blumenberg, a type of thought that faces the emergencies of the praxis, and which cant afford to wait for a complete view of the situation. To see oneself in the perspective of rhetoric means to be conscious both of being compelled to act and of the lack of norms in a finite situation. , writes Blumenberg. In the ancient Greece, as we know, rhetoric was used in courts and political assemblies, that is to say in such situations where a limited time to speak is distributed, and in which a decision was to be taken after the controntation of the logoi a decision concerning an action or a judgment. But then Blumenberg adds : the constraint to act itself is not entirely a real factor, it is grounded on the role that is attributed to the agent or through which he seeks to define himself (Blumenberg, 1971, p. 417). This suggests that rhetoric has always something of a role play , in the cours as well as in the political field, as suggested by the ancient greek institution and gesture by which the person who was to speak received the spektron, that sign both of the legitimacy and of the honour to speak, that fascinated so much Pierre Bourdieu. And it is of course not by random that it has been so practised and theorized by a city or a civilization
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that gave also to theater a prominent social and political role. There, the constraint to act and the lack of obviousness, for the characters, are made more visible by the contraction of time. To continue with Blumenberg : rhetoric is not only a system that produces mandates to act, but also to realize a self-interpretation and to defend this self-interpretation for oneself and in front of others . If we take, for instance, academic rhetoric, let say my own discourse or writing right now, it is always at the same time an acting in which one must convince oneself and the others, the audience, that you are not a casting-mistake . Blumenberg refers to Erwin Goffmans theme of a theatrality of everyday life, and the always threatened congruence between the consciousness of role and the expectations associated with the (social definition of the) role : am I acting or behaving like a real mother, a real man ?, and so on the paradox being that real here is precisely a conventional role. One should also add this interesting paradox and nuance that Blumenberg introduces about the time structure of rhetoric : on the one hand, there is a structural constraint to act or to take decisions, but on the other hand, rhetoric is always something that creates delay, it is a way of saying : well, no rush, no panic ! Even if the situation is grave, we must take time to discuss Hence the kind of decisionist hostility towards rhetoric and towards one of its institutional contemporary form : parlementarism (let think of Carl Schmitt). Rhetoric is a detour, an indirect way (Umweg, says Blumenberg, who sees in this capacity of taking time to arrive somewhere, to not react immediatly to something, an essential character of culture or civilization). The second point, Evidenzmangel, is linked with the limits inherent to any situation and viewpoint in a context : we are doomed to act without possessing all the informations that would be useful to have a perfect view of the situation and of the possible consequences of all the possible decisions. What would be good to do is not obvious, and we can take good here in a practical as well as in an ethical way. So if there is something as an ethics of rhetoric, it cant be an ethics of the obviousness of Good that should be first contemplated, and then applied. Such an access to the eternal Idea of the Good is a platonician presumption that leads to the depreciation of rhetoric. As Blumenberg puts it : An ethics [such as the platonician ethics] that starts with the obviousness of Good does not let any room for rhetoric as theory and practice of influence upon the human relationships, under the presumption that the obviousness of Good is not available . The anthropological approach of rhetoric is certainly built against the metaphysical approach of rhetoric, in which rhetoric is always measured from a point of view where a superior or divine truth has to prevail against the type of truth that rhetoric can offer. And this approach implies a re-reading of the
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whole history of western thought. As Blumenberg puts it : the rejection of sophistic by Plato has had for effect the exclusion of technique out of the spiritual legitimacy of the european tradition (Blumenberg, 1981, p. 45). As crafts or techniques defining a capacity to deal with every problem, as offers of a formal capacity of speaking and thinking, rhetoric and sophistic were the counter-images of the emphatic image of knowledge in which Plato wanted to link moraliy with pure theory, in what Blumenberg calls a promise of obviousness (Evidenzverheissung) ; and a promise of felicity through knowledge. But there is no such thing as a science of praxis (as the type of sophia that Plato wanted to build, an ethics grounded upon a metaphysics and applied in a politics), no science answering the question : how to behave oneself ?, as Max Weber noticed it, also in an anti or a post-platonician view, in Science as a vocation . It does not mean that no rationality is ever possible in these matters, but it has to be a form of rationality that recognizes the uncertainty and the partial opacity of the public affairs and of praxis in general. How Blumenberg conveys it (and we see the principle of insufficient reason is not far) : In the realm of justification of (the) life praxis, the insufficient might be more rational than the insistence upon a procedure that would have a scientific form, and it is more rational than the covering of already fallen decisions by scientific justifications (Blumenberg, 1971, p. 125) This might sound quite aristotelician, if we remind the moments when Aristotle values, against Plato, this form of practical intelligence that has to do with the indetermination of future, to processes, the phronsis. Indeed, in a way, Blumenberg gives here a new formulation of the old aristotelician idea that there are some forms of intelligence that are turned towards what becomes, what is always moving, towards contingency, towards the indermination of the future, and that these intellectual technics and skills, such as rhetoric and, in part, politics, imply that we dont know the reason of everything that happens or will happen. But this limited knowledge doesnot prevent us to discuss about our own expectations. As Blumenberg says, rhetoric deals not with facts, but with expectations . But he makes one step further, that Aristote didnt do, because according to Aristotle there were areas of higher knowledge : the knowledge of the necessary movements of stars, the knowledge of the principles, the knowledge of God as nosis noeses. Rhetoric dealt with human affects and passions, but when knowledge turned itself towards objects without affects and passions, we were placed in another realm, in another world , in another part of the cosmic order. And consequently in an other form of rationality. Whereas if rhetoric has an anthropological significance, for Blumenberg, it is because, in a way, all the sciences and knowledges are subject to procedures of
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discussion and refutation, to a quest for a relative consensus that is partly a matter of rhetoric. The specificity of science, according to Blumenberg (who devoted thousands of pages to the copernician revolution and the history of its effects) is that is has time, or that it stands under the convention of having all the time necessary to test the assertions, hypothesis, arguments, experiments, whereas rhetoric stands under the short delays of decision and action. But one of the transformations or shifts which have given a new topicality to rhetoric is precisely that we see science, today, much more as a process than the Greeks did. So science and rhetoric cant be seen as completely separated kinds of discourses. As Blumenberg puts it : as long as philosophy could place eternal things in perspective, or at least final certainties, the consensus as ideal of rhetoric was to [] look dubious. But with its transformation into a theory of scientific method , the renouncement that grounds every rhetoric was not spared to philosophy, in modern age . Indeed, if la mthode was first invested of the hope to give access to new certainties, to a mathesis universalis, our idea of the scientific life is much closer to the rhetorical ideal of refutation and intersubjective consensus (Blumenberg argues that Thomas Kuhns idea of the scientific paradigm is nothing else than a consensus which is stabilized also (but not only) through the rhetoric of academias of science, through the pedagogic manuels)

2. Rhetoric and the principle of insufficient reason. The axiom (or main principle, Haupsatz) of all rhetoric is the principle of insufficient reason.... It is a correlate of the anthropology of a creature who is deficient in essential respects. (Blumenberg, 1971, p. 422-423). The principle of insufficient reason is of course not an invention of Blumenberg: we can trace it back to Bernoullis Ars Conjectandi (1713) and its reflections upon the calcul of probabilities, and it has been taken up by statiticians and economists, such as von Fries or Keynes in this perspective. Keynes has writen a Treatise on Probability (1921), in which he gave this definition of the principle : equal probabilites must be assigned to each of several alternatives, if there is an absence of positive ground for assigning unequal ones. This lack of ground opens the space for rhetoric, as the only procedure that remains to foster this or that alternative, and to deal with these apparently equal probabilities. But Blumenberg uses it in a more metaphysical (or anti-metaphysical) way, that is as a transformation and inversion of Leibnizs principle of reason. Indeed, I quote the next lines of the text : If man's world accorded with the optimism of
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the metaphysics of Leibniz, who thought that he could assign a sufficient reason even for the fact that anything exists at all, rather than nothing.... then there would be no rhetoric, because there would be neither the need nor the possibility of using it effectively. (Blumenberg, 1971, p. 423). Im not sure that this argument is absolutly right, beacause in Leibnizs view, the capacity of giving the sufficient reason to every particular thing and event would suppose a knowledge of the whole series (series of realized and non-realized possibilities), and that knowledge was of course reserved to Gods infinite understanding. In Blumenbergs view, such an idea of the divine understanding certainly belongs to a past epoch of metaphysics : the last sentence of his essay Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie speaks of a disappearance of metaphysics and associates it, with its replacement by metaphorology. Nevertheless, the principle of insufficient reason was, in a way, prepared and called for by Leibniz himself when he noted that the art of judging probable reasons is not yet well established, our Logic is very imperfect in that respect . And Leibniz worked to establish a study of what he called in french-latine the verissimilitudes , as he says in the Nouveaux essais sur lentendement humain, a logica probabilium, what Pascal called at the same time une gomtrie du hasard ( a geometry of chance) all these projects are ancestors of the game-theory and statitics. Leibniz felt that such an application of mathematics to the regularities of human actions in a society would deeply change our view of social determinism, chance and individual responsability and thats precisely the aspect that fascinated Musil in principle of insufficient reason, and thats what makes it so fit to a concept of rhetoric, according to Blumenberg (who is, here, strictly aristotelician) : rhetoric deals with probable reasons, whith things which might happen and which usually happen, but wich might also not happen. The essential concept here is that of verisimile in latin, verissimilitude in english, wahrscheinlich in german, vraisemblable in french all these terms bear an essential ambiguity to which Blumenberg devoted a chapter of his Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie : der Wahrscheinlichkeit Paradigm. Wahrscheinlichkeit can be translated by likelihood, probabily, plausibility But here we lose the ambiguity : wahr means true and scheinlich means appearant, also a fake appearance. An appearence of truth that can be delusive but there are chances that it is trueWe see how rhetorical such a category can be, maybe is it the ontological category of rhetoric, as Cicero seems to have seen it. Of course, the platonician view of the ideal city does not recognize the principle of insufficient reason : it wants an order that would be absolutely justified, and rhetoric cant supply absolute justifications. According to Platos Gorgias, rhetoric was not to be considered as a real art (techn), but only as a practical skill, bacause, says Socrate it cannot give any account of the nature of the hte things it offers and so cannot explain the
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reason why it is proposed (Gorgias, 465). Hence the series of comparisons : rhetoric cant be compared with medecine, as a real art that implies the knowledge of the nature of the human body and the reason for the treatment if gives him (Gorgias, 501), it can only be compared with cookery a practical skill, which has to do with the taste of an audience, and that the variety of tastes is a good image for the various sensibilities of an audience in any caseThis skill does not imply the knowlegde of unalternable principles, it seeks to obtain effects, to please immediatly, even if its not good for the human body One should add, nevertheless, that seventeen years after the Gorgias, in the Phaedrus, Plato has worked out what the Gorgias (517) only mentioned as the possibility of the true art of rhetoric, not the flattering form of it . This true rhetoric, this good rhetoric should of course be enlightened by an led by the knowledge of the true and the Good. Nevertheless, Blumenberg can build a paradigmatic opposition between what he calls a rhetorical conception of politics and a platonician conception of politics , which crosses history and which is also an opposition between diverse rhetorical traditions, a rhetoric against another rhetoric because, of course, Plato was much too clever to abandon rhetoric to rhetoricians. For the rhetorical conception of politics , rhetoric and democratic confrontation of the various viewpoints are not only a kind of concession or a pedagogic process by which people shloud be led to truth, a truth already existing prior to discussion so that it should be recovered or re-discovered. There is nothing beyond these technics of truth , as Foucault says in his late lessons and conferences. For the platonician conception of politics, rhetoric has to be mastered as a means of control and of taming towards passions, but it is subordinated to the higher knowledge of Good and True. There is no rationality of rhetoric here, rhetoric is not considered as a genuine medium of a rationality that would emerge from the agn in the agora. It is, so to say, a driving belt between the Guardians of the City and the citizens. And one can observe this subordinate view of rhetoric and of democracy each tme that politics is supposed to be led by a superior rationality, by a transfer of rationality. I borrow this expression (transfer of rationality) to Henry Jolys book, Le Renversement platonicen : Joly defines the platonician project in these terms : the platonician project of a genuine science of politics essentialy suposed a transfer of rationality. A transfer of rationality was to be realized upon the matters of the city, from realms and models of rationality already existing . And Joly enumerates these models of competence that are metaphorized by Plato to become the models of the political art : the medical, geometrical models and the model of the craftsman. Whats fascinating is that the whole operation of the platonician politics is a metaphorical operation, a gesture of displacement of models of rationality and competence.

This transfer should spare us the disorders of irrationality and democracy. But here, one could say : well, what is at stake in criticizing the platonician conception of politics today ? that is to say when nobody, except Alain Badiou, claims to be or is platonician ? It is clear that in Blumenbergs view, the platonician conception of politics has taken new shapes in the modern age, and is still there. So let come to these political consequences of Blumenbergs approach of rhetoric. 3. Rhetoric and democracy Concerning the political consequences of what we could call Blumenbergs rhetorical skepticism, I think that they are surely favorable to democracy, more favourable than the metaphysical contempt for rhetoric ; and they are surely liberal , in the french acceptance of the term more than in the american one, against the thinkers, both from right and left, who pretend to offer some better truthes and some superior aims than those that rhetorical contests can produce , so superior that they dont have to be placed in the field of the democratic discussion. The link between rhetoric and democracy is tackled by Blumenberg in the text Anthropological Approach of the actual Significance of Rhetoric , through its treament by Hobbes in De Cive, The Citizen, but I think a more complete view of this reflection should include Blumenbergs references (in other texts and books) to Rousseau, Marx, as well as one of his first papers about Pascal and his discussion of Carl Schmitts political theology. Blumenberg notes that in De Cive, it is one of the most important objections against democracy that democracy cannot do without [auskommen] rhetoric, and consequently reaches its decisions more through impetu animi than through recta ratio, because its orators dont follow the nature of things , but the passions of the audience (Blumenberg, 1971, p. 428). The establishment of a real political rationality implies, according to Hobbes, to follow the new scientific method that was first illustrated by Galileo : at the beginning of De Corpore, in his Dedicace to the count of Devonshire, Hobbes states that physics is a very recent science (Hobbes traces it back to Galileo), but, he adds, the philosophy of civil society is more recent yet : its not older that my De Cive . Why ? Because Hobbes considers his work to be the first application of the scientific method to the political body a resolution into its elements, and a composition or recomposition, as that of a machine (or of a body-machine).

Thats a new form of the platonician conception of politics, because here again, a science, an extrinsic rationality is presented as the means to get rid of what Blumenberg calls Hobbes pathology of rhetoric . A discussion of Blumenbergs thesis could argue, here, that Hobbes wrote in a time of religiously stirred up civil war (a point that Blumenberg does not mention in Anthropological Approach , but that he tackles in the chapter of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age about Political Theology), and which is important to grasp what Hobbes has in mind when he described the dangerous effects of rhetoric the rhetoric of passionate religious controversies that could lead to civil war. Hobbes solution to this agitation is, as we know, the building of a kind of minimal civil theology, that would put an end to the christian theological contests and their fanatic developments. The civil theology has only one, and very short, article : Jesus is the Christ . Everybordy agrees ? Ok, so, enough with religious controversy, let civilisation, business, art, science peacefully bloom. The absolutist State is here, as Carl Schmitt has stressed it, an instance of neutralization by secularization, the instrument of what was called, in the XVIeenth century, the peace of religion , la paix de religion . Of course, we can be very reluctant to this absolutist peace making, but I think that we cannot pronounce a general praise of rhetoric without taking seriously the idea and the fact of pathologies of rhetoric, the dangers of a rhetoric that plays with what Spinoza called the sad passions hatred, ressentment, and so on An anthropological approach of rhetoric does not deny this potentiality, but I think that it prefers the dangers of democracy to the peace of Leviathan. Blumenberg reads Hobbes here essentialiy as a representative of the absolutist State, but also of the political rhetoric of antirhetoric : the exemple of Hobbes shows (writes Blumenberg) that antirhetoric has become, in the Modern Age, one of the most important rhetorical figure to take on oneself the claim for harshness (Hrte) of realism, which promises to be the only way to be up to the seriousness of human situation here in his state of nature (Blumenberg, 1971, p. 429). The rhetoric of antirhetoric has diverse dimensions : its laconic rhetorical device would be res, non verba ! , and this rejection of any verbalism is frequently directed against the so-called ornaments of speech. In De Cive, Hobbes pathology of rhetoric reconducts the excitation of passions to the metaphorical use of words or, concerning the political conclusions, to a misinterpretation of the metaphors and figures from the Bible. In the chapter X, Hobbes writes that metaphore is itself fit to passion , and consequently very far from a true knowledge of the thing . One could almost say that in Hobbes system, metapher is the passion of language, the moment when language is not
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governed by recta ratio, when the emotions speak. And here we could observe that, as he frequently did in his relationship to Hobbes, Rousseau has taken up and reversed the idea : if metaphors and tropes in general are the expressions which are fit to passions, so one must conclude that they were the original form of language : les premiers mots furent des tropes, le langage fut dabord potique , as we can read in the Discours sur lorigine des langues. But that is not evil : Hobbes condemns the natural passions, according to Rousseau, because he has projected into the natural, original state of man, some passions which only developed and sophisticated (and in Rousseaus view perverted) societies have placed in the hearts of men such as envy, violence, hatred, rivalry, and even maybe the fear of violent death. But the irony is that just the same kind of argument was thereafter directed against Rousseaus own view of the state of nature your so-called Nature is a reconstruction, an already civilized man And here, we may put the finger on one of these historical transformations that contributed to the modern topicallity of rhetoric : it is almost impossible to appeal for a natural state, a natural nature, so to say, because, as Blumenberg puts it in a paper about the husserlian concept of Lebenswelt (Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter Askpekten der Phnomenologie, World-life and technicization in a phenomenological perspective), the reality that surrounds us is from part to part a product of art , techn, artifice in such a way that Nature has lost its appeal-value. And a sign of that is precisely given, according to Blumenberg, by Rousseau himself : its a typical feature of Rousseaus consciousness a modern (and lucid) consciousness that he admits you cant correct the effects of technique through a simple return to a natural state. You can only do it through an expansion of technique, as suggested by Rousseaus reply to the criticism of some philosophers and (former) friends as Diderot, who accused him to promote a backward movement to an imaginary good Nature : montrons leur dans lart perfectionn la rparation des maux que lart commenc fit la nature ( let show him in the perfected art the repairing of the pains the beginning art has caused towards nature ). As I would like to develop now, this view of rhetoric and nature has also some important political consequences, not only against the absolutist and, let say, rightist views of the City, but also against some sorts of progressist theories and alienation-theories. Here, we should carefully read what Blumenberg has written about the rhetoric of the naked truth which uunderlies the writings of what we could call the thinkers of desalienation, such as Rousseau and Marx because we face here the left version of the rhetoric of antirhetoric, of the discourse of debunking , unmasking (Entlarvung).

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4. Social criticism, nature and convention

Blumenberg does not hide his skepticism towards the enterprises of Entlarvung and of radical emancipation, or his distance towards the german Ideologiekritik, to which some readers of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and of its criticism of the ideological moment of the concept of secularization had been tempted to attach Blumenberg. In the chapter IV of Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie about the metaphoric of naked truth , Blumenberg notes : At the start, in modernity, the discourse about the naked truth was the discourse of the bourgeoisie, built against the world of habits of nobility and clergy, but it is a discourse that became repeatable for any social state which considered itself to be naked. [in the sense, here, of fit to the very nature of man] [] Rousseau had believed that the natural and genuine man was to show himself as soon as he would be stripped of his social disguise. But later on, [in the Manifesto of the communist party], Marx discloses that this undressing process has conserved only merchandize and interest, a new fonctional occultation of man that requires, in turn, to be get rid of, so as to let man appear in himself, in his naked truth. And Blumenberg concludes The modern uninterrupted quest for the natural nature always seeks for itself a new scenery (Blumenberg, 1960, 1998, p. 64-65). The nature which is invoked by all these theories of alienation proves to be artificial, and delusive, and thats, according to Blumenberg (1947), what a deep spirit like Pascal had grasped, this dialectics of the social disguise and of the naked truth. Rousseaus antirhetoric of sincerity denounces the social disguise and masks and hopes for a society where the social divisions, dissimulations, unequalities and the effects of personal interets and egoisms would be over. One could be tempted to describe such a society as a society without rhetoric, whithout a need for rhetorical expression. And it could be shown that in the early Marxs view of the communist society, no role and maybe no rhetoric would be necessary neither, because the processes of alienation would not prevail anymore. This social transparency is certainly, in Blumenbergs view, an illusion, or an image that is built against the modern separations and technicizations that seem to hide the natural man.If such a nature is the result of a rhetorical opposition to ornament, Blumenberg doesnt believe that we should and that we could, in fact build a political theory that would fit the nature of man, by putting aside all that is supposed to hide it or to hinder it to be pure and nude again for the good reason that such a nature is a myth. And in a way, Marx knew it too well, as suggested by his famous pages about the French Revolution, that Blumenberg evokes The
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Legitimacy of the Modern Age : the paradox raised by Marx here, it that social and political innovation go with historical mimicry and rhetorical invokation of the past (ghosts). And that shows well what Blumenberg calls the need for background and pathos (Blumenberg, 1966, p. 104), that borrows as well to the christian theologoumena (Sieyes and his pouvoir constituant ) as to the pagan Rom and its habits or rituals (civil ceremonies, oath, images of the ancient Republic). Marx himself borrows to the biblical prophecies, to the biblical models of Exile and Desert, to christian images and rhetoric It is not ontly that the political discourse of Entlarvung cannot do itself without rhetoric and technics, it is also that the politics of emancipation itself cannot re-build a state of social transparency and self-adequacy, a new Eden because there never was such thing as an Eden, a Paradise Lost or a Nature perflectly mirroring the desires of men. 5. Political consequences and discussion This might sound quite familiar to our hears : Blumenbergs reflection could echoe an important trend of criticism towards the illusion of a supra-historical and pure essence or nature of man, which is supposed to be alienated and finally freeed forme all the self-divisions, separations, alieanations this humanist and dialectic schema has been attacked both from inside marxism (by Althusser, for instance, Althusser, 1965) and form outside (by Foucault, 1966) and we could add both from inside and outside by Ernsto Laclau (1996), though, in a way, it developed an intuition that we find in Marxs texts and early criticism of Feuerbachs naturalism, when he empahizes the fact that the nature that surrounds us, the fields, the forests, have been deeply transformed or producted by a human activity, and that there is no timeless structure of human nature . In a way, Blumenbergs remarks on the impossibility of isolating a nature pure from any technicity or a world without distance , radicalize this intuition, but Blumenberg turns it against the revolutionary hopes or illusions of a man absolutely reconcilied with himself. It is significant that, in a paper about the significance of the copernician revolution in the self-image of modern times (Blumenberg, 1975), Blumenberg quotes with irony the early Marxs Sprengmetapher ( self-contradictory, exploding metaphor ) by which Marx (in his Criticism of Hegels Philosophy of Law) attempts to convey the idea that the communist man would be, in the same time, the root of all things, and, in a variation around the copernican revolution, a center of gravitation and a planet turning around itself like around its own sun : being radical means taking things at their roots. And the root is man itself , religion is only a delusive sun, that turns around men, as long as man does not turn around himself , being in fact his own genuine sun . Blumenberg sees this as a rise to absurdity of the cosmological metaphors, where the irrepresentability of a synthesis of these diverse
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metaphors might suggest the hiatus between the present state of man and the absolutely different history and humanity that is suppposed to emerge with communism. What does Blumenbergs political skepticism opposes to these indeterminate hopes and theses contradictory images ? Its difficult to answer this question, as Blumenberg never developed a political philosophy ; but we can find elements, for instance, in a early paper about Pascal, where a very different articulation of social debunking and political action is at stake. Blumenberg noted that Pascals social criticism was sharper, more radical than others coming after it, by pointing out the absence of real ground of any social order, its force lying on imagination and force (and here again, we find something similar in Derridas late analysis (Derrida, 1992) of what Pascal called the mystical ground of authority ), but that it was also original in its conclusions: if this radical deconstruction of social order goes to the roots , it is also able to see at the root of social reality, the threat of chaos , and to consider as a criterium of higher political wisdom the will to prevent society from falling into chaos. So if Pascals thought is genuinely revolutionary , it deliberately limits the revolution to the spirit of the savant . Blumenberg appreciated this skepticism towards what he calls, at the end of this paper, the progressist revolutionarism and any thought of a logic of history , or the will to consider man in the pure facticity of his situation . In 1947, facing the spectacle of the german chaos after the so-called national-socialist legal revolution and its horrible consequences, and certainly also the stalinist secular eschatology of progress , he praised Pascals prudence and his stress on the importance of social costumes and habits, rhetoric and conventions as creating an artifical but necessary social respect the social appearances are a charitable veil put on the abyss of human nature . Ordre de convention. But Blumenberg was also aware of the limits and dangers of such a pascalian attitude, which were the temptations of a mere irony or cynism. And what can mean, for our time, the claim to preserve a treasure of forms historically realized, but whose historical roots and diversity are destroyed and devalorized ? , asked he himself. It would not be difficult to find in the present-day social philosophy, or in the post-modern ironic liberalism echoes of these questions. Our concern would be that these views could lead to a kind of social fatalism, depriving social criticism of any strenght and legitimacy. How to combine a rhetorical view of politics , necessary to prevent the totalitarian temptations of absolute politics, with a living care of struggle against injustices and unequalities ? How to avoid that the rhetorical view of politics entails the cynism of a fake public sphere manipulated by mass-media and capitalistic groups ? Does not Blumenberg falls into a political fatalism or a social pessimism that considers that the emancipatory projects are doomed to open the way to chaos ?
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Blumenbergs defence of rhetoric goes hand in hand with his rejection of political violence : In the political realm, the reproch that a verbal or demonstrative act would be pure rhetoric is a grave one ; but that belongs itself to a rhetoric which doesnt want to perceive and does not need to perceive that the more a politics can limitate itself to mere words , the better it is (Blumenberg, 1971, p. 416-417). Blumenbergs view of rhetoric lies upon an opposition between, on one side, language, and maybe more specifically dialogue, and, on the other side, violence an opposition, known since Socrates as that of logos and bia (force), which is as old as philosophy and democracy. Here, there seems to be an agreement between the platonician view of rationality and the rhetorical view of politics : Plato states, after Socrates, that persuading someone through a dialectical exchange is better than forcing him to agree , and is, in fact, the only effective persuasion ; but Platos own evolution shows that he was not convinced that the good policy could ever be implemented without a kind of coercion as suggested by his dialogue on Laws. In fact, Blumenbergs view here seems to be directed against the kind of decisionist and tyrannic despise for what Carl Schmitt called the infinite discussion , or what Donoso Corts called the discussing class . A positive view of rhetoric implies a positive view of deliberation and of the parlementarist dimension of democracy, whereas the platonician view of politics, as taken up and mixed with marxism-leninism by Alain Badiou, claims parlementarism to be nothing else than a weakened form of democracy, deprived of any link to the superior thruth . A fascination for violence certainly lies behind these rightist and leftist rejections of parlementarism and regulated discussion. Consequently, I agree a great deal with Blumenberg, but I think that we cant forget the violence that rhetoric can itself contain, and which can lead to physical violence. If Bourdieus notion of symbolical violence or Foucaults theme of a semi-coercive order of discourse (ordre du discours) can be discussed, they point out the fact that speech, and rhetoric as well, is not a pure activity where no constrains would play, but a game in which the social and legitimate places are at stake and in which it is highly difficult to speak from nowhere, or from the subordinate places. A major question is to be raised here : who is considered as a legitimate speaker ? who takes part to the play ? are some people (the poorest, the lowest in the social scale, the strangers ) deprived of, or excluded from (even under a non-intentional but structural form) the possibility to take part in the game of rhetorical discussion about the content of politics ? Here, we could oppose to Blumenberg the recent reflection of a democratic marxism , represented in France by Etienne Balibar (1992) and his concern about the boundaries of
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democracy and the droit de cit of the immigrant, or by Jacques Rancire (1995) and his reflection about politics as something that troubles the police , that is the everyday managing of things, with the disruption of new subjects of speech, those who had previously no part in the public discussion (les sans part ). But in a way, Blumenberg could himself contribute to a critique of the actual mechanisms of privation of participation to the public discussion and political decision, for instance when he emphasizes (we have already quoted this) the fact that the rationality of rhetoric, linked with the principle of insufficient reason, can appear as a weakened form of rationality, whereas, in fact, it is more rational than the technocratic justification of essentialy political decisions presented as purely technical or covered by a scientific discourse. Blumenbergs rhetoric view of politics should then be combined with an approach of the city less obsessed by the threat of chaos than Blumenberg was in 1947, and more concerned with the real factors of an unequal distribution of the capacity to enter the rhetoric sphere, and with it, the public discussion. Thats the condition for a deepening of democracy without any platonician nostalgy for absolute politics.

Jean-Claude MONOD
CNRS / ENS, Paris jean-claude.monod@ens.fr

Althusser, Louis, Pour Marx, Paris, Maspero, 1965 ; For Marx, London, Verso, 2005. Balibar, Etienne, Les Frontires de la dmocratie, Paris : La Dcouverte, 1992. Blumenberg Hans, Das Recht des Scheins in den menschlichen Ordnungen bei Pascal, in : Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 57, 1947, p. 413-430 ; french translation : Le droit de lapparence dans les ordres humains selon Pascal , in : Droits, 20, 1994, p. 167-182. Blumenberg, Hans, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, in : Archiv fr Begriffsgeschichte, Bonn, Bouvier, 1960, reprint Francfort/Main, Suhrkamp, 1998 ; french translation : Paradigmes pour une mtaphorologie, Paris, Vrin, 2002. Blumenberg Hans, Kopernikus im Selbstverstndnis der Neuzeit, in : Akademie der 15

Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz, n 5, 1965, p. 339-368. Blumenberg Hans, Anthropologische Annherung an die Aktualitt der Rhetorik, in : Il Verri (Mailand), 1971, reprint in sthetische und metaphorologische Schriften, Francfort/Main, Suhrkamp, 2001 ; An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric , english translation in : Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman and Thomas McCarthy (ed.), Philosophy, End or Transformation ?, MIT Press, 1987, pp. 429-458. Blumenberg, Hans, Die Legitimitt der Neuzeit, Francfort/Main : Suhrkamp, 1966, new edition 1996 ; The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Cambridge : MIT Press, 1983. Blumenberg, Hans, Wirklichkeiten, in denen wir leben, Stuttgart : Reclam, 1981. Bourdieu, Pierre, Leon sur la leon, Paris : Minuit, 1982. Bourdieu, Pierre, Mditations pascaliennes, Paris : Seuil, 1997. Bouveresse, Jacques, Robert Musil. Lhomme probable, le hasard, la moyenne et lescargot de lhistoire, Paris : ditions de lclat, 1993. Derrida, Jacques, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority , in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by Drucilla Cornell and Michael Rosenfeld, New York: Routlege, 1992. Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx, New York : Routledge, 1984. Foucault, Michel, Les Mots et les choses, Paris : Gallimard, 1966. Foucault, Michel, LOrdre du discours, Paris : Gallimard, 1970. Joly, Henry, Le Renversement platonicien. Logos, pistm, polis, Paris : Vrin, 2000. Laclau, Ernesto, Beyond Emancipation , in Emancipation(s), London : Verso, 1996. Monod, Jean-Claude, La patience de limage. lments pour une localisation de la mtaphorologie, Postface Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmes pour une mtaphorologie, Paris : Vrin, 2002, p. 171-195. Monod Jean-Claude, La philosophie au XXe sicle et lusage des mtaphores, Esprit, 6, juin 2005, p. 26-42. Musil, Robert, DerMann ohne Eigenschaften, 1940-43 : Lhomme sans qualits, Paris : Seuil, 1995. Rancire, Jacques, La Msentente : politique et philosophie, Paris : Galile, 1995 ; Disagreement, Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

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