HANS BLUMENBERG: REALTÀ METAFORICHE E FENOMENOLOGIA DELLA DISTANZA

Hans Blumenberg 's philosophy is based on three main theoretical key-themes: the metaphor, the Life-world (Lebenswelt) and the myth. Blumenberg’s thoughts are an innovative intersection between E. Husserl’s and E. Cassirer philosophies. Blumenberg develops a metaphorology to investigate in-conceptual or pre-conceptual levels of experience of the world. According to Blumenberg, metaphors and myths belong to the expressive dimension of experience, similarly to Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic form. In virtue of that, the metaphorology can be considered as a phenomenology, or better, a genetic phenomenology of forms that give meaning to the world. Lebenswelt is the limit concept of the experience. It is always already presupposed as the universe of obviousness, in which the sense of the world is unperceived. But Life-world is also the critical ground of philosophy. The philosophy itself has Lebenswelt as its last and most difficult object to investigates, because the concept of reality belonging to the Life-world is the opposite of theoretical experience. Nevertheless, Lebenswelt is the dimension in which formed and historical experience of world takes its own roots. Metaphors are related to the Life-world, but they aren’t its direct expression. Instead, the metaphorical process is the memory of the disappearing Lebenswelt. Finally, the myth is the fundamental level of the cultural experience. It is the matrix of the meaningful world in opposition to the absolutism of reality: the non-sense that constantly oppress human life in the world. The myth illustrates the impossible memory of a world without human meanings, beyond the divergence between time of the world and time of life. In this sense, the persistence of myth in history is an illustration of the structural contingency of human life and it’s also a possible relief. Blumenberg's philosophy is a phenomenology of distance. It aims to discriminate real reality from metaphorical reality and vice-versa. It shows the distances between the different realities in which human beings live and it displays them as inconsistent, substitutive, affected by temporality – in one word – unreal.