The Readability of the World

By Hans Blumenberg, Robert Savage and David Roberts

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Release date: Dec 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501766626

Book preview

Cover: The Readability of the World by Hans Blumenberg

THE READABILITY OF THE WORLD

HANS BLUMENBERG

Translated by Robert Savage and David Roberts

A Signale Book

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS AND CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

ITHACA AND LONDON

Liber scriptus proferetur,

In quo totum continentur.

Unde mundus judicetur.

A book will be brought forth,

In which all will be written,

By which the world will be judged.

—DIES IRAE

CONTENTS

Note on the Translation

Preface

I. A Metaphor for the Totality of Experience

II. The World of Books and the Book of the World

III. The Sky as Book, the Book in the Sky

IV. Alphabetic Analogies

V. The Delayed Appearance of the Second Book

VI. The Illiterate Layman as Reader of the World Book

VII. God’s Books Agree with Each Other

VIII. Asymmetries of Readability

IX. Encryption and Decryption of the Human World

X. World Chronicle or World Formula

XI. A Robinsonian World against the Newtonian World

XII. Anticipations of the Nineteenth Century

XIII. The Hamburg Book of Nature and Its Reflection in Königsberg

XIV. Signs on Foreheads, Signs in the Sky

XV. How Readable the Book of Nature is Becoming for Me …

XVI. The World Must Be Romanticized

XVII. The Idea of the Absolute Book

XVIII. A Book on Nature as a Book of Nature

XIX. The Empty World Book

XX. Preparation for the Interpretation of Dreams

XXI. Making Dreams Readable

XXII. The Genetic Code and Its Readers

Notes

Name Index

Subject Index

NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

Die Lesbarkeit der Welt was first published in 1981 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. We have tried to follow the presentation of Blumenberg’s text as closely as possible, generally only deviating from this principle where he quotes in foreign languages. On these occasions we have provided English translations in the main text and consigned the original wording to the endnotes, except in the case of very short quotations, where the phrase in the original language follows in parentheses along with the English translation. Our insertions in the text and notes are enclosed in square brackets. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own.

We wish to thank Peter Uwe Hohendahl, the outgoing editor of Signale, for accepting this book for the series, and Paul Fleming, incoming editor, for seeing it through to publication. During the revision process we benefited from consulting Steven Sidore’s translation of Chapter XVIII, A Book on Nature as a Book of Nature, in Cosmos and Colonialism: Alexander von Humboldt in Cultural Criticism, ed. Rex Clark and Oliver Lubrich (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012), 195–210. We thank the translator and editors for their friendly cooperation.

PREFACE

What did we want to know?¹ This is how we might phrase the question that has come to take the place of Kant’s basic question in the two centuries since his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason): What can we know?

The Socratic wisdom that we know nothing proved unsustainable in the face of the onward march of knowledge and its indisputable successes. Knowing what we could not know became the business of critical reason. Ever since then, the suspicion could not be brushed aside that we perhaps already knew too much, or at any rate that we did not know what we wanted to know when curiosity was still the driving force behind the quest for knowledge.

The insight that the results of historical processes never quite live up to expectations should not deter us from asking what it was that we wanted to know. It may be supposed that even disappointments are worth studying, because their insistent indeterminacy is one element on a scale of basic historical attitudes ranging from resignation to fury at the world. What was it that knowledge seemed to hold out as promise? How must, how should the world present itself for us to feel assured about our place in it?

These questions, which could be multiplied at will, remind us of what we had almost forgotten. They run counter to all criteria of what can be known and is deemed worth knowing; superseded and made redundant by progress, they still lie deeply embedded in all scientific results. Metaphorology is a method for recovering the traces of such wishes and expectations, which do not have to be repressed to justify our interest in them.²

Even expectations that were not met and could not be met are historical facts and factors, launching pads for recurring enticements and temptations all the way up to the delirium of wanting it all: Vogliamo tutto!³ Such unsatisfied subterranean wishes for intensive experience of the world spawn exotic gurus, advertisements for initiation into the unsayable, trainers for levitation in the broadest metaphorical sense. The traces lead us back to where wishes took shape and struck root, and from there through the guises and disguises of their traditions. Ever since a single book promised to contain all truth, this basic form for possessing the truth has remained practically indispensable—the great rival even and especially when other forms could appear only under the proviso of infinite labor.

Only episodes can be dealt with under the heading The Readability of the World. These nevertheless indicate a continuity of longing that spans the discontinuity of its expressions, pathos, and rhetoric. The fact that something remains episodic does not already put it in the wrong. The magnitude of history is not constituted by the sheer multitude of years or centuries. The obstinacy with which some things return and metamorphose is more thought-provoking than the constancy with which others simply linger. But the danger of being deluded by what returns and releases its energetic charge for the opportune historical moment is also in play: what can only ever be a corrective of the respective present then appears as a tangible future.

That is why the metaphoric complex readability of the world is also a guide to sobriety. The leap into utopia can be studied in all the phases of its futility: renouncing mastery of nature to gain familiarity with it; knowing the true names of things instead of only the exact formulas for producing them; reviving hieroglyphic memory instead of eschewing prognostication; experiencing expressiveness rather than learning chemical formulae; grasping meaning instead of identifying factors—these are all wishes that do not become meaningless just because they cannot be taken as pledges awaiting redemption.

The concept of experience has been through a lengthy slimming regime. From its endpoint, it is hard to imagine that readability once was, could still be, or might again become a metaphor for experience. Experience is now seen as the most disciplined form of relating to the world because it takes the direct path to judgment, and hence to those provisional certainties that make up the history of theories and sciences. Perhaps the discrediting of life experience in youth movements since Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress)—to no more than the dregs of everything life has to offer—led to the loss of the assumption that experience could be richer than the mere agglomeration of verification and refutation procedures, as set out in methods or deduced from theories. The custodian of experience, however they came to possess it, has become an anachronistic figure.

When everything has been reduced to experience at second hand, media-bound contemporaries rely on armies of functionaries for experience. Readability is then suspect: we read about experiences that are never our own. All the more reason, then, to reflect on what the metaphorics of readability bring to mind: all that can be lost or never went beyond wishing yet persists as the figure of familiarity, with a meaning that may refuse itself but can still be felt in its refusal.

Phenomenology has taught us to see experience as more than the mere vehicle and proving ground for judgments. Intuition has become the name given to fulfillments that exceed the limits of description. It is no longer simply a question of objects put forward for judgment but of horizons, structures of meaning, and typologies of expectation, expression, world. The philosophy of life pitted lived experience (Erlebnis) against the traditional concept of experience (Erfahrung) as its putative original state; and positivism, too, staked a claim to something elemental and nonsynthetic with its raw material of experience. The term readability contests the exclusive claim of praxis to restore the wealth of experience beyond its current emaciated state. Simple delight in the world, spectatorship, noninstrumental openness to the world—all partake of that richness.

Is anything essential at stake here? At the risk of causing offense, the question must be asked: Essential for whom? For not only are our insights (Einsichten) essential because they could persist, so too are our views (Ansichten), even though they may not. Human beings are as much creatures of views as they are of real or potential insights. Where they have a world or give themselves one, they are content—even before the onset of skepticism—to view the world without any prospect of gaining insight into it. The investigation of metaphors pauses on the threshold of insights to give views their due.

I

A METAPHOR FOR THE TOTALITY OF EXPERIENCE

Were the current clichés of cultural criticism to be condensed into a single phrase, it would read something like this: Discontent with civilization is dominated by a disappointment for which no one has yet been able to identify the expectations that were disappointed. It will readily be granted that basic human claims on the world arise, persist, and are frustrated, particularly if we proceed from the laconic natural law principle that everyone is free to do as they please. If a subject of highly indeterminate identity should be found to have inflicted injuries for which no one else can be blamed, every other potential culprit is let off the hook. Setting aside for the moment the question of who might have prevented expectations from being fulfilled—what were these expectations in the first place?

If we take Kant’s catalogue of ultimate questions as our guide,¹ the first cannot detain us for long: What can we know? Disappointment precisely with what we proved capable of knowing impels us to ask, What was it we wanted to know? The other basic question in the canon, What may we hope for? likewise inevitably gives way to the variant: What might we have hoped for?

A line of questioning thus directed at the frustrations of consciousness will have difficulties securing its sources. Where lies hidden what once was, perhaps still is, or may yet be expected? In pursuing this line of inquiry, we cannot ignore evidence that by today’s standards would be disqualified on grounds of anachronism, or at best indulgently remembered for anticipating the latest orthodoxy. Experience has always had its covert ideals in its everyday dealings with reality; yet when compared with later, very different successes and superiorities, these easily fall under the suspicion of obsolescence, obscurity, and ridiculousness. Human relations with the world cannot regain their former confidence in the horror vacui or in universal purposefulness (with or without anthropocentrism), precisely because such assumptions had prevented empirical prescriptions from being enforced and had rightly been banished from theory, only to return by all kinds of back doors in all manner of guises and disguises.

No matter how detrimental any history of science must consider such conjectures about the world to have been, this does nothing to alter their affinity with the clandestine human expectations they express. The rigorous suppression of such prejudices has only shifted responsibility for inflated expectations of reality, without making grand statements any less frequent or more modest.

The question of whether our world is the world we wanted belongs in the realm of political rhetoric. Such rhetoric must give rise to the justified impression that there are (or were) different worlds to choose from; perhaps the wrong one was chosen, in which case corrections will be both necessary and legitimate. Yet what thus flows into the imperious gesture of setting the world to rights can in fact be asked of any historical epoch: Which was the world we believed ourselves capable of having?

The wish that the world might prove accessible in some way other than the mere perceptibility and even exact predictability of its phenomena, that it might disclose itself in the aggregate state of readability as a meaningful whole of nature, life, and history, surely does not correspond to some innate human need, like the need to gain mastery over untamed powers through magic. This wish nonetheless epitomizes the demand for a meaningful reality, directed at its most perfect, no longer coerced accessibility. In this respect, it can only be compared with that other wish for direct intimacy—the wish that God himself might prove edible, fit to be ingested whole and without remainder in a ritual of incarnation.

Experiencing the world as we would a book or letter presupposes not just literacy, not just the preformation of desires for meaning by writing and the book, but also the cultural idea of the book itself, no longer understood simply as a means of accessing whatever lies beyond its pages. Once it has gained autonomy as an experience of totality, as it does in exemplary fashion in the early Greek epic or in the book of books, bookish experience comes to rival worldly experience.

Experience that effectively contests, displaces, and supersedes the primacy of any given book is thus a late cultural phenomenon. The attitude absorbed in its linguistic self-presentation and preserved in many of its formulations promises dedication to the will to knowledge, deepened insight into what has always escaped detection by the naked eye. Even the scientifically shaped experience of the modern age largely asserted itself against the supremacy of a single book, or the authority of a few books, by drawing its legitimacy from the book metaphors that underpinned its theoretical achievements. Only those who see the theoretical empiricism of the modern age as the most natural thing in the world, a finally attained immediacy to a nature that had been waiting to be unveiled all along, can consider it rhetorically redundant that this claim was made in the language of rivalry with the book, as the readability to end all previous readabilities.

The millennium that is now drawing to a close has been full of talk about the demand for meaning and the loss of meaning, about seduction through offers of meaning and dismay at their failure, but it has never drawn inferences from what was lost to what was demanded, nor has it described the withdrawal even in bare outline. Orientation in the face of such helplessness may therefore be sought in a typology of the forms in which meaning had once been realized, projected, or already forgone. There can be no question of restoring the world as the readability of friendly or grudging, threatening or propitious messages for humankind. But the privileging of a unique kind of experience, one aimed not so much at making us feel at home in the world as at placing it at our disposition, can be recognized as non-self-evident and historically contingent, albeit inescapable. This approach should not be chalked up to the critique of science, since any deprecation of the unsurpassable contribution to our lives made by modern science is both unwanted and abhorrent to me; to flirt with despising it is itself despicable. To say that it does not exhaust the sum of the possible, however, is more than a mere platitude.

The impact of desires for an experience of the world that knowingly competed with that of the great, life-shaping book must therefore be revived. These desires articulated a claim to a world imbued with meaning, to a constitutively open, humanly accessible reality that marks a limit-value in our relations with the world. What is easily forgotten, and should therefore be noted at the outset, are the agonies—not just intellectual—that the interpretation of those canonic, life-shaping texts can hold in store for entire cultures in the areas where they hold sway. Where the truth is thought to lie near, pain is also not far off.

It would be perverse to turn the metaphor of the world’s readability into a utopia. The forms of disempowerment suffered by that claim to meaning, but also those of resistance to its deprivation and sensations of its loss, will be presented over this historically protracted process. Whether the triumphantly or surreptitiously asserted idea that reality is accessible to the extent that it can be read like a book is worth wresting from oblivion—this can never be decided with complete objectivity. It is not enough to set out the historical evidence. The readability of what is said about that evidence is also at stake.

The reader may therefore forgive me a personal reminiscence at this point. In the mid-twentieth century, Erich Rothacker was instrumental in pioneering the nascent discipline of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) and in launching a vastly ambitious terminological encyclopedia of the cultural sciences. In 1950 he planted a time bomb in the bibliography of his own writings that he appended to his studies on anthropology and the history of science: under 1946, he listed the title The Book of Nature with the remark unpublished. In 1958, when I presented the sketch of a metaphorology at a German Research Foundation conference on the history of concepts organized by Gadamer, I mentioned the metaphors of writing, the letter, and the book while discussing mechanical and organic background metaphors. Rothacker, who attended the conference, made no reference to his unpublished monograph. He was no more forthcoming two years later, when he included my Paradigms for a Metaphorology in his Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte (Archive for the history of concepts). Because I was still unsure at the time if and when this work would come to light, I referred to it in a footnote and explained my reticence thus: This metaphor will not be subjected to renewed scrutiny here; I introduce it only as a contrast to help bring out the specificity of mechanical metaphorics.²

In 1966, giving a speech in Rothacker’s memory at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, I chose not to touch on the half-painful, half-ironic point of our rivalry with regard to this topic, but I justified my respect and anticipation concerning his affinity for this very metaphor by mentioning his dissatisfaction with the concept of the world conveyed by the natural sciences. I tried to describe the relaxed cheerfulness with which a smiling Rothacker would chide the academy’s scholars for the blinkers that prevented them from perceiving a nature friendly to human beings, generous in its provision of love-nests and robbers’ lairs: The restoration of paradise was of no interest to him because he viewed the expulsion as not yet entirely successful; melancholy in the face of its vanishing remainder was perhaps a condition of his capacity for enjoyment.³ Rothacker started out from a notion of lifeworldly experience that, far removed from the indifferent uniformity of a world of objects, turned the spotlight of vital interest on the world’s ordinarily unilluminated background. This late technological addition to the metaphorics of light relates to what Rothacker called his principle of significance: a lifeworldly principle for selecting and evaluating experiences in their meaningful givenness. A sober guideline for what significance might denote was best provided by what, under the name of Gestalt, had succeeded sensualism and mechanical association in the theory of perception: The principle of significance is the first to account for why intuitions are not just vivid but also meaningful.⁴ If the author of this sentence had set out to present the metaphorics of the book of nature, something significant could be expected of him and would have to be awaited. But had he ever gone beyond the planning stage? The encyclopedically minded editor and big ideas man may have so clearly envisaged his intentions that he might almost have forgotten they had yet to be realized.

In a lecture series held in winter semester 1978–79, I returned to the idea of a metaphorology, devoting considerable space in my reflections to writing and book metaphors. Now, almost a decade and a half after Rothacker’s death, my restraint concerning his theme had given way to a determination not to abandon it to the fate of his literary estate. But I was mistaken when I told my students that such a manuscript had never existed and the entry in the bibliography could only indicate the importance Rothacker had attached to writing it, equaled only by our interest in reading it. The same year, 1979, saw the appearance of Materials and Fundamental Considerations on the History of Metaphors, edited and revised by Wilhelm Perpeet under the title The ‘Book of Nature.’ Without the editor’s significant additions to the materials found in Rothacker’s literary estate, however, the book would hardly have been worth publishing. At any rate, it did not go much beyond Ernst Robert Curtius’s Writing and book metaphors in world literature, a pioneering achievement that Rothacker had published in his own journal in 1942 and had then been included in Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948).

Curtius had made a very narrow selection, restricting himself to the technical field of images relating to writing, books, and their production. In the process, he had ignored the connotative richness of the contents and achievements, offers and reservations, expectations and disappointments invested in writing and in books. In his posthumously published work, Rothacker castigated his predecessor for these limitations: It is as if the work had been written for the anniversary of a printing works or a fountain pen factory.⁵ This is probably not how the editor of a journal should behave toward an author whose work he had once introduced to the public. On the other hand, Rothacker’s caustic comment reveals the extent to which he felt obliged to rectify his Bonn colleague’s omission by extrapolating the monumental philosophical task flagged in the title, the world as a hermeneutic problem, and presenting it as capable of solution. In the end, however, he too fell short of the demands made by his source materials and their authors, which he assembled as mere trouvailles divorced from their contexts. The master of significance neglected to furnish the crucial proof that these same metaphors were anything but chance digressions or indulgences on the part of their authors.

And yet, precisely when dealing with metaphors that concern the totality of nature and the world, we need to bear in mind the extent to which an author’s expressive means cohere, the degree to which they reinforce and illuminate or interfere with each other. Only then can the necessarily pallid conceptuality of so vast a whole be revitalized through its imagery, which hovers in the background rather than providing a foundation. Only then will it be possible to provide descriptive answers to, or at least more pointed rewordings of, the question: How does reality present itself to us? And how did it present itself (or, how was it supposed to have presented itself) to an epoch or author?

Once the sphere of wishes and fantasies has been left behind, is reality something bewilderingly exotic that should only be gaped at in wonder, guarded against in its intrusive alterity, but otherwise kept at arm’s length? Or does reality manifest itself as the malleable mass of an interconnected whole that cries out for demiurgic intervention, recalling before everything else the sheer energy needed to shape it into different forms? Or is it the entrance hall to the aesthetic museum in which selected pieces are held in readiness for the practice of pleasure and its refinement? Is it, finally, the writing on the wall of nothingness that points to an unknown finality hidden around the corner—or that refers through additional inscriptions only to itself?

No ultimate truths are at stake in these metaphors—no ontologies, no histories of Being, no metaphysics. What they offer instead is material for interpretation that prefaces something else, coordinates and colors other matters, falls short of objective determinacy without permitting us to infer the blank indeterminacy of the whole and its always unrealized possibilities. No experience ever moves in a space of complete indeterminacy, any more than it merely retraces, in linear fashion, the causal interconnections of its objects. The metaphorics of our capacity to experience the world, for which readability stands as paradigm, have to do with this determinate indeterminacy.

II

THE WORLD OF BOOKS AND THE BOOK OF THE WORLD

There is an age-old enmity between books and reality. The written word usurped the place of reality, purporting to make it functionally obsolete as what had been labeled and secured once and for all. The written and then printed tradition has repeatedly diluted the authenticity of experience. Books have something like an arrogance by virtue of their sheer quantity, giving rise, after a certain period of scribal culture, to the overwhelming impression that everything must already be contained in books and that it is meaningless, in a lifespan brief enough as it is, to look again and more closely at what had once been recorded and made known.

The power of this impression dictates the force of the revolts against it. Then, all at once, the coat of dust on books comes into focus. Books are old, moldy, musty; authors copy from each other because they no longer take the trouble to look up from the page. Library air is stale, and tedium is the inevitable result of a lifetime spent inhaling it. Books cause short-sightedness and lethargy, sapping vital forces that can never be replenished. From stuffiness, lamplit gloom, dust, and myopia, from submission to their surrogate function, the world of books thus emerges as one opposed to nature. And youth movements have always directed their energies against what is unnatural—until nature again holds sway in their books.

It is all the more remarkable, then, that the book could become the metaphor of nature itself, its hostile antipodes, which it seemed destined to drain of reality. All the more substantial and compelling must be the impulses that brought about this alliance between nature and the book.

There are perhaps only two. On the one hand, competition with the one book, its authority, its exclusiveness, its insistence on inspiration. On the other, fascination with the power wielded by the book through its production of totality. The ability to comprehend the disparate, far-flung, antagonistic, alien, and familiar in their ultimate unity, or at least to pass them off as comprehended in this way, is essential to the book, regardless of the material on which the operation is performed. That is why modernity’s great flirtations with totality could arise from books—by and large, those spawned in big libraries at one remove from perceptible realities.

Once pictured as a book, nature is seen as already possessing this quality of a seamless whole by virtue of laws that allow insight into the unity anticipated in its concept. Tempering the anticipation of familiarity with a more sober outlook then calls for the irksome codicil that nature may well be a book but one written in hieroglyphs, in code, in mathematical formulae—the paradox of a book that repels readers. From here, a path leads to Serenus Zeitblom, narrator of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, who understood even as a boy that nature, being outside of man, is fundamentally illiterate, which in his eyes is precisely what makes her eerie.¹

What is fascinating about this chapter of a metaphorology is that it will always start out from an impression of hopeless anachronism. For there is not just an ancient enmity between books and reality but also a more recent one between books and the natural sciences. The pathos of the experiment is directed against the accumulated tomes of libraries, from which it turns with a fresh gaze to peer through the telescope and microscope and observe the thermometer and barometer. This experience is (or appears to be) open-ended and unending, allowing for increases in precision, resolution, and accuracy. The claim to finality and conclusiveness raised by books is already false by virtue of its very form. It is thus ironic that the discourse of the early natural sciences again took metaphorical recourse to the book. The metaphorics of the two books and their equal status announces competition with Aristotle, not just with the authority of the Bible. The question of how this book of nature might be read, what language it is written in, and how its grammar could be reconstructed, slides over the underlying metaphorical rivalry between books, in which the two books are primarily ranged alongside and only secondarily pitted against each other.

It might be thought that the idea of the book could be dispensed with once this situation of early weakness had been left behind. Yet the book not only remains the figure of a covert longing for a more accessible understanding than that offered by the jargon of theoretical specialization, it also serves to illustrate the structural processes of scientific theory itself. An incomparable example of an unknown book metaphor whose development was blocked, and which certainly would have been dismissed had it been noticed, is the concept of evolution in its supremacy over our ideas of nature. What went unremarked is that e-volutio, the word’s Latin root, denoted the unrolling of a scroll. This reference in its favorite concept escaped a science that had grown averse to all classicisms, since the only books it now encountered were those that could be opened or closed—but it was also due to the bias toward the preformation thesis built into the scroll metaphor. What lay linguistically close to hand was thus far removed in substance. Genetics was to do away with these typically nineteenth-century barriers and read a new love of reading into nature.

Another modern example is perhaps well-suited to highlighting the indestructible appropriability of the old metaphor. Gestalt psychology and phenomenology’s rejection of sensualist atomism in the nineteenth-century theory of perception replaced associative and dissociative mechanisms with a very different structure of perception. Anyone seeking to describe this change falls almost inevitably into the metaphorics of language and reading. For Ernst Cassirer, the realm of human experience is constructed by saturating contents with functions of meaning that support systematic composite and referential structures. The mind thereby acquires the power to spell out phenomena, to read them as experiences. Accordingly, each individual phenomenon is no more than a letter which is not apprehended for its own sake or viewed according to its own sensuous components or its sensuous aspect as a whole; rather, our vision passes through the letter and beyond it to ascertain the signification of the word to which the letter belongs and the meaning of the sentence in which this word stands.² The transition to the whole is possible from each element, because the organization of this whole is representable and represented in each element. The emphasis here no longer lies on the book and its content but on the act and performance of reading. When it is said of the content that it speaks to the mind, this means: Its whole existence has in a sense transformed itself into pure form; henceforth it serves only to communicate a definite meaning and to compose it with others into structures of signification, complexes of meaning.

Where does the border with anachronism lie? I ask myself this question when I read a sentence like the following: Being that can be understood is language.³ A sentence of this kind leads to the murky ambiguities it was surely written to avoid. Is language the precondition for understanding Being? Or can only such Being be understood that already has the form of language: literature in the broadest sense of the term, intended and willed expression?

It is far from obvious that the metaphorics of language are of the same kind as book metaphorics. The metaphor of Being as language is aesthetic. What that means, since the demise of the old definition of the beautiful, can most easily be determined by exclusion: means–ends relations are ruled out. This is also directed against aspects of book metaphorics to the extent that the latter also (although not only) taught conformity to nature.

Increasingly, the predicate of comprehensibility has become aesthetically charged. Guided by the self-conception of art, it came into conflict with nature’s old claims to be imitated and transcribed in human works as the epitome of all norms. The more understandable art is or is purported to be, the less nature could remain understandable. Indeed, for the proverbial man on the street, it had already ceased to be understandable because the book of nature had been written in a code requiring something other than hermeneutics to be deciphered. The book of history becomes the first that humans have written in their own language. Proceeding from the principle that we can only access what we have fashioned ourselves and via doubts as to whether history really is such a human artifact, the hermeneutic blanket clause took refuge in the sanctuary of the aesthetic, whence it cast its light on the latest interpretations of Being.

What is gained or lost in the process? Hermeneutics does not seek to eliminate ambiguity in the material it subjects to interpretation—far from it. It therefore has no interest in retrieving whatever quality would have to inhere in a message, or for that matter a revelation, even if factual experience fails to confirm the premise that communication was the intent. Hermeneutics does not concern itself with what has only a single meaning, which can be accessed and apprehended through the ages, but rather with what absorbs interpretations into its meaning by virtue of its constitutive ambiguity. It proposes that its object is enriched by continuous exegesis, such that its historical reality practically consists of its assimilating new readings and sustaining new interpretations. What cannot be made present and possessed all at once, in unequivocal synchronicity, is only realized through time and in historical horizons. The linguistic metaphor serves a conception of Being directed squarely against the ideal of scientific objectivation.

III

THE SKY AS BOOK, THE BOOK IN THE SKY

Ascertaining the historical value of so far-reaching a metaphor requires demonstrating, above all, that it did not arise as a matter of course, that it has not always been plausible. The Platonic cosmos of ideas is nothing like a book; our imagined relationship to it and to the world of appearances is anything but a comportment and activity akin to reading. The process for grasping the interrelationships among objects in that cosmos is much more like the reception of images. Concepts are formed through their reduction to an outline, to what allows them to be recognized as such. This reduction is not just typical of Platonism. It is already found in the atomism of Democritus, reprised in Aristotle’s metaphysics of forms, and finally all but caricatured in Epicurean epistemology, which has wafer-thin images (or eidola) floating free of objects and attaching themselves to our sense organs.

More importantly, speech is absent from Greek cosmogony. Neither Prometheus, the sculptor of humankind, nor the Demiurge in the Platonic artificial myth have anything to say as they apply their craft. Rhetoric is needed, however, to consolidate their handiwork and defend it against the blind force of necessity. Ananke must be talked around, but only to dissuade it from resisting the demiurgic procedure. Nothing rhetorical can or does enter the work because its nature is eternally prefigured in the exemplary form of the ideas. Gazing on archetypal images—not pronouncing what shall be—is the constitutive condition for cosmogenesis. What stands in the relationship between archetype and reflection must, above all else, be apprehensible as an image. It cannot be found between the covers of a book.

By contrast, the biblical idea of creation has an imperative rather than a demiurgic orientation. The Lord commands, and his will is done. He must dictate what should happen, not how it is to happen. I have made the earth, the men and the beasts in all the world, by my great power and by my outstretched arm, and have given it unto whom it seemed meet unto me.¹ In keeping with this imperious gesture, the creator verifies afterward that the command was obeyed and affirms how well everything turned out. Speculative wisdom and logos speculation not only hypostasize this verbal quality of the act of creation, they also elevate the content of the command to the level of deliberative action. The divine fiat thus becomes a self-display of the same order as the Hellenistic cosmos.

Creation does not involve communicating a message that has to be understood or enacted; it relates wholly and exclusively to the separate, revelatory form of the law. Its unfathomability is first prefigured in paradise, with the ban on eating from the tree of knowledge. In relation to nature, however, the creator demonstrates his power to guarantee confidence in history. God the creator becomes the God of the covenant, who had asserted his supremacy over all other gods at and through the beginning of all things. The idea of nature underlying this demonstration of power gives as little purchase for scribal and book metaphorics as does the isolating tribal law for anything resembling natural law.

The collective singular of the holy book—the holy books characterized in their unity, at a fairly late stage, with the Egyptian loanword biblos—is the linguistic precondition for everything that follows: for the book as metaphor of a totality, be it that of nature or history. This unity is primarily represented in a divine book that anticipates the later book of history more than that of nature: the book of life. Its unity documents the exclusive interest in salvation in the phase of acute apocalyptic expectation: it is as if anyone whose name is missing had never existed. More than a hint of celestial accountancy will cling to parish registers, census records, and passport offices: to be missing from the list is not to have lived. In Theodor Fontane’s novel Der Stechlin, the elderly Domina sums up her disdain for the English by stating: They’re not recorded in any book and don’t even have what we call the Residents’ Record Office. So you could practically say, they as good as don’t even exist.² The pure idea of the alliance between writing and bureaucracy could be expressed in terms suggested by Descartes: inscriptus ergo sum. But it also nourishes the culture of memoria.

Those destined for continued existence are recorded in the ‘book of life,’ corresponding in form to the belief in resurrection offered in St. John’s Gospel, which reserves the blessing of life for the righteous while leaving the wicked to rot in their graves.³ A single book is all that is needed, since nothing is inscribed in its pages other than names. Be glad that your names are written in heaven, the Gospel of Luke has Jesus proclaim to the seventy when they return to report how the demons obeyed commands given in his name. They are told to rejoice, not in the submission of the spirits, but in the preservation of their names in the skies.⁴ The comparison with entries in ancient genealogies and registers of origin may have suggested itself, but there is little if any link to the oriental legacy of celestial tablets of destinies.⁵

The latter more closely resemble the prophetic and apocalyptic book of heaven, although this must be a scroll, not a tablet as in Babylon. In the language of Isaiah, it appears in the vision of God’s anger at the heathen. The prophet foresees the destruction of the people of all nations and their armies in the messianic age: The corpses of the slain will stink to heaven, and the mountains will drip with their blood. The sky recoils from the sight, turning away from the slaughter. The heavenly host vanishes, and the sky itself rolls up like a book: et complicabuntur sicut liber caeli.⁶

The metaphor does not refer to celestial signs—to what can be read from the sky—but solely to its withdrawal from the world. Because the sky is conceived as a two-dimensional film that separates the divine from the terrestrial realm and prevents any contact between the two, the apocalyptic event can only consist in the rolling up of the panorama, with its star-spangled side turned toward the earth. While an element of oriental astrology may have played a role here, it did so only insofar as the astral signs no longer had any validity once the sky was rolled up. The reversal of the metaphor in St. John’s apocalypse first reveals the imprint of determinism: the events predicted in the book come to pass as soon as it is opened.⁷

The Johannine Apocalypse reprises the prophet’s image as well. Following the opening of the sixth seal of the book of divine revelations concerning the future of the world and its people, the earth trembles, the sun darkens, the moon turns blood red, the stars fall from the sky like figs from trees shaken by storm winds. And once again, it is written (in the Vulgate, for the sake of comparison): et caelum recessit sicut liber involutus.⁸ We see how the obvious citation now added to the depiction of the catastrophe comes closer to a metaphorical deployment of the book. In its unfurled state, the heavenly scroll lets the world endure and history run its course; the eschatological reversal consists in it being rolled up, after the stars have already fallen down to earth, and there is no longer anything legible on the writing surface.⁹ In both visions of the celestial book, the unity of the metaphorical book is assured, since what represents both the course of the world and its end corresponds to the all-encompassing unity of the heavens.

The unitary tendency of the holy book stands opposed to that of an increase in heavenly books. Both the psalmist and the evangelist knew only the one book of life, kept by God himself, which was therefore also called God’s book and finally simply the Book. A name is either inscribed in this book or expunged from it. Inscription in the book of life decides salvation.¹⁰ With the importation from Hellenistic metaphysics of substantially guaranteed immortality, the function of Judgment Day is extended to good and evil, necessitating a form of double-entry bookkeeping where the name’s entry or removal had once sufficed. This appears to be connected to the formation of a hierarchy of celestial functionaries, since the tables of his friends and enemies are kept by bookkeeping angels on God’s behalf.

As soon as the system threatens to lapse into dualism, the need arises for a middle path that defers a definitive verdict. On Rosh Hashanah, three books are opened in heaven, according to the third-century Rabbi Yohanan, referring to the New Year’s judgment: One for the thoroughly wicked, one for the thoroughly righteous, and one for those in-between.¹¹ These last are granted ten days of penitence between New Year and the Day of Atonement before they are entered in one of the two other books.

The notion of heavenly books (in the plural) serves either the idea of preordained destinies or that of sinners being held accountable for their deeds. A symmetry between predetermination and reckoning becomes apparent: mere registers containing the names of the saved are no longer enough; instead, comprehensive records of all human actions are compiled in court books. Every sin is written down in heaven before the eyes of the Most High, every day until the Day of Judgment; likewise, the merits of the pious in God’s cause are also recorded. The level of detail captured in this universal chronicle extends all the way to the most banal everyday conversation. All this is read out to the dying at the hour of death: When a man departs from the world, all his deeds are brought before him one by one. God says to him: ‘Thus and so you did on such a day and thus and so you did on another day. Or do you disbelieve these words?’ When he then says ‘Yes, yes!’ God tells him, ‘Set your seal’!¹² Behind this stands the idea of a protocol being signed.

The biblical idea of God also has a deterministic side, without which the concept of predestination could never have taken root. Fateful predetermination takes shape in the image of a special book that God shows Adam after his creation. It foretells all the generations that will people the world, in such a way that the end and salvation cannot arrive until every directive is fulfilled: The messiah, son of David, will not come until all the souls of the body have been finished, i.e., until all the souls that are destined to inhabit physical bodies will do so.¹³ Since the world plan inscribed on celestial tablets can only be fulfilled through the events recorded in the Torah, it may be assumed that the Torah fuses with the world plan. For the rabbinical texts, the Torah has become the preexisting world plan itself. Plan and fulfillment make up one book.

The ideas of predestination and judgment—the book of God’s plan for the world and the book of life—seem to rule each other out, or at least diminish each other. After a spate of metaphorical candidates, this dilemma too was ultimately resolved in the language of the book metaphor: "Rabbi Eliezer, the son of Jose the Galilean, said: Everything that happens has been foreseen, but it still depends on human actions. A net has been spread over all the living, and the reckoning is always just. The world is like a shop that stands open for business, and like a table that