Kyklophorology:

Hans Blumenberg and the

Intellectual History of Technics
Helmut Mller-Sievers
Hans Blumenbergs sprawling and seemingly esoteric work is driven by
factors that are buried deep in the moonscape of postwar (West) German
intellectual history. Philosophical anthropology, Husserls phenomenology (in contrast to Heideggers history of being), the re-introduction of
French thought and literature (especially the writings of Paul Valry), the
activation of theological and scholastic thought, the debate with political
theologians and their concept of secularization: these are just a few of the
motivations that shaped the philosophers early work and continue to be
important for an understanding of his first mature books.
Three of these books, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Work on
Myth, and The Genesis of the Copernican World, have been admirably
translated and introduced to the English-speaking world by Robert Wallace.1 More recently, Care Crosses the River has given readers a sample
of Blumenbergs late style; and the new translation of Paradigms for a
Metaphorology, written in 1960, now makes accessible the most sustained
reflection on Blumenbergs methodology.2 Metaphorology, to attempt the
briefest of definitions, is the investigation into the function of metaphors,
and of rhetoric in general, based on the anthropological assumption that
metaphors are necessary but unrecognized linguistic weapons in mans
1. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert Wallace
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican
World, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
2. Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford, CA:
Stanford UP, 2010); Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert
Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010).
Telos 158 (Spring 2012): 15570.
doi:10.3817/0312158155
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155

156 Helmut Mller-Sievers

self-preservation vis--vis an overwhelming natural and social environment. More specifically, Blumenberg claims that the disproportion of
environment and resistance produces absolute metaphors: linguistic
images that have as yet no tenor in the prose of the world. This primacy of
the metaphorical function leads to systematic distortions in philosophical,
theological, and historical contexts, which Blumenbergs opera magna
attempt to uncover.3
A strong argument can be made for the case that metaphorology
persists only in and through its paradigmsthat there can be no metametaphorology.4 Collections such as Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, Die
Vollzhligkeit der Sterne, Hhlenausgnge, Die Verfhrbarkeit des Philosophen, Shipwreck with Spectator, Das Lachen der Thrakerin, and even
Care Crosses the River are applications of the metaphorological method,
with only the scarcest reflection on systematic or methodological coherence.5 This paradigmatic opacity leaves invisible Blumenbergs abiding
interest in the history and, more so, the logic of technics. At the beginning
of his publishing and lecturing career, this interest is more easily detectable in such weighty position papers as Das Verhltnis von Natur und
Technik als philosophisches Problem (1951)6 and above all Technik und
Wahrheit (1953);7 but in the 1960s and 70s it becomes more and more
3.A very good collection of essays on the theory and practice of metaphorology
is Anselm Haverkamp and Dirk Mende, eds., Metaphorologie: Zur Praxis von Theorie
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009).
4. See the section Keine Theorie der Metaphorologie, in Rdiger Campe, Von der
Theorie der Technik zur Technik der Metapher in Haverkamp and Mende, Metaphorologie, pp.30712. The following pages are simply an attempt to contextualize and unfold
some of the implications of this important text.
5.Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1986); Hans Blumenberg, Die Vollzhligkeit der Sterne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2011); Hans Blumenberg, Hhlenausgnge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996); Hans
Blumenberg, Die Verfhrbarkeit des Philosophen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005);
Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1997); Hans Blumenberg, Das Lachen der Thrakerin (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1987).
6.Reprinted in Hans Blumenberg, sthetische und metaphorologische Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 25365.
7.In Actes du XIme Congrs International de Philosophie, vol. 2, pistmologie
(Amsterdam and Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1953), pp. 11320. This is the same year in which
Heidegger gives his lecture on Die Frage nach der Technik. In Blumenbergs papers at the
Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, one entire folder is filled with notes and versions
of this paper.

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Kyklophorology

absorbed by the work of historical reconstruction. To elucidate the intersection between the historical and the systematic, and therefore between
the metaphorological and the technological factors in Blumenbergs work,
is the purpose of the following essay.
If the metaphorological enterprise can be called a technological history
of the intellect (Technikgeschichte des Geistes), a recent publication from
his papers has shown that Blumenberg pursued the project of an intellectual
history of technics (Geistesgeschichte der Technik).8 In strict inversion to
the claim of a groundless proliferation of metaphors, this project was motivated by the insight that technics (Technik) is particularly speechless, and
that its aphasia has led to equally pernicious and systemic distortions in the
intellectual history of the West as had the neglect of absolute metaphors.9
Blumenbergs deep engagement with phenomenology, as well as his more
oblique but nonetheless trenchant criticism of existential ontology and
history of being (Seinsgeschichte), led him to argue that technics must
not be conceived as a tool or projection, but rather, like absolute metaphors, as groundless and originary.10 Just as there are no moments where
metaphors supervene in preexisting literal systems of signification, so
are there no states of nature free of technical interventions or artifacts.
Metaphors do not simply cover the lack of proper concepts; they open a
terrain of investigation in which subsequent conceptual systems repress
their improper origin. Technical implements or strategies of problem
solving are not simply answers to natural conditions; they also create their
own environments in which solutions generate problems without clear
8. Hans Blumenberg, Geistesgeschichte der Technik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2009).
9. The speechlessness of technics is a constant concern for Blumenberg; see Imitation of Nature: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being, trans. Anna Wertz,
Qui Parle 12, no.1 (2000): 1754, where he speaks of the speechlessness of technics
(Sprachlosigkeit der Technik): No language was at the disposal of the approaching technological world, and the people involved with it could hardly have created such a language
(ibid., p.21); and Geistesgeschichte der Technik: The sphere of technicity suffers from
a lack of language, from a categorical deficiency. One has also expressed this as follows:
the ideals and contents of our cultivation [Bildung] offer no help for a tempered attitude
to technics (Blumenberg, Geistesgeschichte der Technik, p.27). As we will see, there is
a deeper reason for this dumbness: conceived as management of motion, and of rotational
motion in particular, technics does not represent anything; it is essentially non-mimetic.
10. See the extensive discussion of the relation of Lebenswelt and technics in Hans
Blumenberg, Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter Aspekten der Phnomenologie, in
Theorie der Lebenswelt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), pp.181224.

158 Helmut Mller-Sievers

distinctions of priority and causality. Metaphors are technical elements

of discourse; technical objects and procedures translate problems into
different states of solution. In one of his rare meta-metaphorological pronouncements, Blumenberg conjoined the history of ideas with the logic
of technics by calling for an analysis of the metakinetics of the historical
horizon of meaning.11
The conjoining of technics and metaphorics, viewed from the history of technics, adds to the project of metaphorology the parallel project
of kyklophorology. It takes its name, and its legitimacy, from the fact
that Aristotle, alongside his analyses of the linguistic and poetic motion
further (-), staked much of his ontotheology on the physical
motion around (-).12 As we will see, motion in a circle or
around an axis is not just one aspect of technics; it is of such importance
that Heidegger, for example, had wondered whether it is the essence of
technics.13 Blumenberg himself has discussed rotation at various, often
surprising moments of his work; thematically, the last of the Paradigms,
devoted to the sphere and its motion, and The Genesis of the Copernican
World revolve entirely around the acceptance of rotation. Yet the critical
potential of kyklophorology, of a careful analysis of the historical vicissitudes and technical intricacies of rotary motion, is not nearly as well
developed as the instruments of metaphorology.
Before explicating this potential, however, it must at least be mentioneda more thorough discussion would require a separate essaythat
with his interest in the history and inner logic of technics, Blumenberg consciously stepped on the terrain occupied by Heidegger and his enormously
influential lectures on The Question Concerning Technology. Blumenberg,
with a palpable sense of bewilderment, found it hard to understand why
this particular essay should have garnered so much attention when there
11.Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, p. 5.
12. The entire argument about the eternity of the cosmos rests on the non-contradictory, eternal nature of regular rotation. See Aristotle, On the Heavens, 2.3.285b2.7.289a;
see also Sylvia Berryman, The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), pp.14654.
13. Martin Heidegger, Leitgedanken zur Entstehung der Metaphysik, der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und der modernen Technik (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2009),
p.307: To what extent is uninterrupted rotational movement the soul of technics? Roller
[Walze], wheel (The turning element, and in such a way that, at the same time, the midpoint
moves forwardwagon wheel). The internal quotation is likely from Franz Reuleaux,
whom Heidegger was reading at the time.

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Kyklophorology

was no evidence that its author had any specific knowledge about its
topic.14 The specificity with which Blumenberg throughout his oeuvre discusses scientific and technological developmentshe is perfectly happy,
for example, to dash off a paragraph on the importance of spectroscopy
that sends his readers to the textbooks for hours15must be understood
as a rebuke of the expertise-free technology criticism of a Heidegger or a
Jnger (either Ernst or Friedrich Georg). More specifically, Ernst Jngers
semantic bravado and Heideggers substitution of etymological condensation for technical and scientific analysis motivate the ludicrously erudite
nature of Blumenbergs writings.16
The subterranean engagement with Heidegger also modulates the
argumentative path of The Genesis of the Copernican World. Written in
1975 and heroically translated into English by Robert Wallace in 1987, it
is perhaps Blumenbergs most intense and concentrated work. Not only
is genesis (Ursprung) a concept with deep ontological and theological
significance, but the Copernican turn, or revolution (Kehre), is also one
of those moments in the history of Western thought when the position of
subject and objectand thus the base structure of what Heidegger called
Gestellappears to be changing on a cosmic scale. Among other arguments, Blumenberg devotes some of the books most incisive pages to
the consequences the Copernican revolution had for the concept, experience, and measurement of timewithout mentioning either Heideggers
or Husserls name.17

14. See for example Hans Blumenberg, Die Verfhrbarkeit des Philosophen, in
Die Verfhrbarkeit des Philosophen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp.1006,
where he speaks of the famous lecture (though difficult to understand why) The Question
concerning Technology (ibid., p.104) and of the unspeakable Origin of the Work of
Art (ibid., p.106).
15. See the vignette Einsteins Dachdecker, in Hans Blumenberg, Die Vollzhligkeit
der Sterne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp.22728.
16. This characterization is from Joseph Leo Koerner, Ideas About the Thing, Not
the Thing Itself: Hans Blumenbergs Style, History of the Human Sciences 6, no.4 (1993):
2. The mixture of admiration (for Jngers observational and stylistic powers) and ironic
dismissal (for his lack of judgment and his grandiosity) are collected in Hans Blumenberg,
Der Mann vom Mond: ber Ernst Jnger (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007); Friedrich
Georg Jngers equally undeservedly famous book Die Perfektion der Technik (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2010) was written in 1939 but first published in 1946.
17. See the section The Heavens Stand Still and Time Goes On in Blumenberg, The
Genesis of the Copernican World, pp.433521.

160 Helmut Mller-Sievers

Adding to the background radiation of Genesis are debates in the historiography of science, which at the time of publication were dominated
by ThomasS. Kuhns work on shifts between previously incommensurable paradigms. As Blumenberg, writing concurrently with Kuhn, insisted
against the latters obliviousness, paradigm is a rhetorical concept with
far-reaching implications.18 With the detail and scope of his investigation, Blumenberg wanted to counter the schematicism, the lack of cultural
depth, and above all the neglect of the role of language and rhetoric in
Kuhns approach.19
And yet beyond these adversarial concerns, Genesis shows all the
qualities that are unique to Blumenbergs writing and that would become
more prominent as he produced with ever-greater urgency his enormous
oeuvre. Not the least of these features is the loose formal coherence of
the book: while thematically unified and centered on a specific date and
event, it is divided into six sections of differing length and intensity, and
some of the individual chapters already show a tendency toward the selfcontainment and anecdotal argumentation that would become the hallmark
of Blumenbergs later thinking and writing.20
The Genesis of the Copernican World analyzes Nicolaus Copernicuss
1543 treatise On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres (De revolutionibus
orbium coelestium), unfolds its astronomical and theological context, and
discusses its historical roots and fruits, reaching from Greek astronomy to
Friedrich Nietzsche and Joseph Roth.21 One way to gauge the importance
of the treatise is the question of what status should be accorded to Copernicuss proposal that revolution is the property of the earth as well as of the
heavenly bodies. Was it merely a hypothesis, as Osiander had claimed in
18.See Anselm Haverkamp, Paradigma Metapher
/
Metapher Paradigma, in
Anselm Haverkamp, ed., Die paradoxe Metapher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998),
pp.26886.
19. Kuhns pathbreaking The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1996) was preceded by his The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1957), to
which Blumenberg at times responds directly.
20. For the role of anecdote in Blumenberg and beyond, see Paul Fleming, The
Perfect Story: Anecdote and Exemplarity in Linnaeus and Blumenberg, Thesis Eleven
104, no.1 (2011): 7286.
21. A splendid view of the first edition of De Revolutionibus can be seen online at the
Rare Book Room website, at http://www.rarebookroom.org/Control/coprev/index.html.
For the English translation see Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolution of the Heavenly
Spheres, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995).

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his preface to the first edition, or was it the first instance of a scientific law,
derived from observation and computation? Furthermore, exactly what is
the relation between the revolutions that Copernicus proposesthat of
the planets and that of the earth? This question, Blumenberg points out, is
decisive for our understanding of Kants famous self-interpretation in the
preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787), where
the philosopher had claimed: Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all
revolved round the spectator, he [Copernicus] tried whether he might have
better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain
at rest. In the English translation, the preceding sentence reads: We
should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus primary
hypothesis, but a footnote gives the original German: ...mit den ersten
Gedanken des Kopernikus.22 While many commentators have discussed
Kants claim to have effectuated a Copernican revolution in philosophy,
Blumenberg asks whether Kant meant with first thoughts Copernicuss
thesis that the earth rotates around its axis or that the earth orbits around
the sun, and he argues rightly that between these motions there is a decisive but often overlooked difference. Indeed, it is from this difference that
the possibility and necessity of kyklophorology arises.
To fully understand the import of Blumenbergs question, we need to
turn briefly to Copernicuss treatise itself. Three motions were required
to accomplish the proposed simplification of what had become an overly
complex system of planetary motions. First is the daily rotation of the
earth around its axis in order to explain earths relation to the stars; second
is the annual motion of the earth on its orbit around the sun in order to
explain earths relation to the motion of the planets, in particular to the
lower planets Mercury and Venus; and third is a conical motion that
carries the north pole westward once a year in order to keep the earths axis
tilted in the right declination toward the sun.23 Although neither Kant nor
Blumenberg pay attention to this third motion, it reveals a decisive feature
22.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New
York: Saint Martins Press, 1965), p.22. Precisely the proof that De Revolutionibus was not
a hypothesis, and that only the extraneous Osiander preface declares it such, occupies an
entire chapter (Consequences of an Instance of Well-Meaning Misguidance: Osiander)
in Blumenbergs The Genesis of the Copernican World, pp.290315. The Kant discussion
is in What is Copernican in Kants Turning? in ibid., pp.595614.
23.See Copernicus, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, pp. 2730; and
Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, pp.15964.

162 Helmut Mller-Sievers

of Copernicuss astronomy, and of all astronomy before him: the planets

are being carried in their orbits by material spheres (and would therefore
tilt away from the focus after completing half their orbit). For Copernicus, and for all astronomers up to and including Kepler, the motions of
the planets are forced motions. They constitute a machine in which every
motion is transferred by contactthis is why the world is literally the
machina mundi.24 Only Newton and the developed theory of gravitation
as an instantaneous force operating across the void will finally dissolve
this machineat a price that Kant is trying to pay in the Critique of Pure
Reason.
The forced motion of the planets and the stars, Aristotle says in his
treatise On the Heavens, is in a circle ( ). For him, this is the
only rational and divine motion because in a finite cosmos (bounded by a
sphere) it does not have to revert, interrupt, and thereby contradict itself.25
Only the four elements of the sublunar sphere move in straight lines toward
their home place. Rotational motion returns back onto itself, elides its
own beginning, and thus furnishes a model of continuity and eternity in
which time and space are transformed into one another.
The primacy of rotational motion survived the irruption of contingency into the cosmos, as which Blumenberg famously interpreted the
Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, and it reached Copernicus through
scholastic and Neoplatonic traditions. So committed is Copernicus to rotation and circularity that he accepted considerable complicationscycles
and epicycles, which he criticized in other astronomers systemsto
preserve it. His derivation of rotation at the very beginning of On the
Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres combines scholastic syllogisms with a
Platonic surfeit of attributes: The world is spherical because that figure is
the most perfect of all as it is an integral whole and needs no joints [sine
compagine]. It has the best surface-to-volume ratio, the parts of the world
(the sun, moon, and stars) are spherical, and everything in the world tends
to be delimited by this form, as is apparent in the case of drops of water.
24. See the exhibition catalogue Machina mundi: Images and Measures of the Cosmos from Copernicus to Newton, bilingual ed., ed. Paolo Del Santo and Giorgio Strano
(Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2004), and Jrgen Mittelstra, Machina Mundi: Zum
astronomischen Weltbild der Renaissance (Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1995).
25.Aristotle, On the Heavens, 285b; See also Aristotle, Physics, in The Complete
Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984), 2:42746.

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The minor premise that the earth is spherical too is supported by nautical
and astronomical observations, but Copernicus needs a special chapter to
show that the ruggedness created by mountains and oceans equals out to
a perfectly smooth surface. The conclusion is that the movement of the
celestial bodies is circular [circularis]. For the motion of a sphere is to turn
in a circle; by this very act expressing its form [ipso actu formam suam
exprimentis].26 This conclusion is valid for both the planets and the earth.
By deriving both the motion of the heavens and the motion of the
earth from their form, Copernicus attempts to satisfy the demands for
homogeneity and simplicity, but in the process he elides the kyklophorological difference between them. Axial rotation is not the same as orbital
motion: planets (like the moon) can orbit without revolving around their
axes, and they can rotate (like the sun) without orbiting. One indication of
this differing status of axial rotation is given by the fact that Copernicus
has to counter the popular argument that a rotating earth would throw off
its inhabitants and distort the rectilinear fall of objects. Absent the argument from inertia, Copernicus simply counters these objections with the
claim that the diurnal motion is natural, not violent, and therefore need not
exhibit the centrifugal forces associated with sudden changes in motion.27
To put this elusive yet crucial differencewhich Aristotles blanket
term in a circle ( ) does not admitin another way: the diurnal rotation of the earth is a phenomenon of rigid body mechanics, and the
description of its motion requires tracing the path of at least three of its
points that are not on one line. The rotation of such a body is characterized
by the increase in rotational speed away from the axis of rotation: the axis
itself is (ideally) immobile while the periphery moves at maximum speed.
It was this internal relation that had fascinated Plato because it showed
that apparently contradictory qualities could coexist in the same body.28
And it was the same phenomenon that prompted Aristotle to exclude axial
rotation from celestial mechanics because he thought it was not a unitary
motion.29 This is why he, and his many interpreters up to Copernicus,
could only conceive of a construction in which the planets and the stars
were carried around their orbit on the periphery of hollow spheres, each
26.Copernicus, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, book 1, chs. 14.
27. Ibid., book 1, ch. 8.
28.Plato, Politeia, 4.436d.
29.Aristotle, Physics, 6.10.240b1517; mentioned also in Blumenberg, The Genesis
of the Copernican World, p.414.

164 Helmut Mller-Sievers

of which could have its own speed. The ether between them functioned
as both lubricant and transmitter of motion. Whether the planets and stars
also rotate around their axes remained undetermined.
The problem that this construction cannot eliminate is the fact that the
outer sphere has to revolve with unfathomable speed to complete a diurnal
rotationa predicament unbecoming to the stars and their proximity to
God. Copernicus turns it to his advantage by showing from observational
data that the distance to the stars is even greater than hitherto assumed,
that it would be absurd to expect the most dignified sphere to revolve at
such enormous speeds, and that therefore it is only reasonable to assume
the axial rotation of the earth to be the cause for the apparent rotation of
the heavens.
The introduction of axial rotation is, as Blumenberg notes, a true
innovation of the Copernican systemnot because no one had proposed
it before, but because it grants the earth a motion that belongs to the
terrestrial body primarily and directly.30 Neither the ether nor any other
material carrier causes this motion, and its mechanical derivation will
trouble cosmology into the twentieth century. Kants early masterpiece
The Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine
Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels), from 1755, is in no small part
driven by the attempt to give an account of the origin and transmission of
cosmic rotation.
For Blumenberg, the decisiveness of this innovation lies in the
transferthe re-occupation (Umbesetzung)it performs with regard to
the measurement and the status of time. In the Aristotelian cosmos the
revolving motion of the stars provided the background against which the
definition of timea number of changes in respect of the before and
after31could be conceived. Only the motion that returns to itself could
guarantee the continuity necessary to measure temporal change. Once
Copernicus arrested the sphere of the stars, continuity had to be generated by the diurnal motion of the earth. This transfer required not only the
additional argument that the earth can rotate continuously and homogeneously despite its rugged exterior surface; it also implied that the rotation
at the heart of the system is as regular as the one that contains it. This, for
30.Copernicus, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, p. 55; Blumenberg, The
Genesis of the Copernican World, pp.48990.
31.Aristotle, Physics, 4.219b.

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Blumenberg, is the true revolution at the heart of Copernicuss project: to

turn the time of the cosmos into the temporality of life on earth.32
Interestingly, Blumenberg identifies a factor that facilitates this transition: the emergence of clocks and their internal gear train. Time in the
age of clocksBlumenberg, in typically understated fashion, reads midthirteenth-century lodge books as the first indicators of the mechanization
of timeis no longer read off the face of the world, as it were, but produced by an intricate assemblage of internal wheels, springs, and cogs in
rotational motion. Mechanical clocks invert the relation of posteriority in
which the measurement of time depends on a somehow anterior motion
on which intervals are marked: Thus time is not measured as something
that has been present all along; instead, it is produced, for the first time,
by measurement, just as the term motion represents the interpretation of
a connection that consists of nothing but the appearance of a body and the
difference between its positions in space.33
Here too, then, in the deepest recesses of medieval theology and
technology, the technological history of the intellect (Technikgeschichte
des Geistes) and the intellectual history of technics (Geistesgeschichte
der Technik) intersect and change into one another. If the transfer from
world-time to life-time is effected in Copernicuss treatise by a literally
metaphorical argumenttranslating the formal attributes of the celestial
sphere to the terrestrial globeclocks at the same time are invested with
the remnants of cosmological and theological meaning. In the eighteenth
century, these two strands will unite in the Deist image of the divine
clockmaker.
The third, conical motion had revealed that the Copernican world was
conceived as a machine whose parts are connected by rigid linkages and
whose motions are forced and contiguous.34 Since the clock, modernitys
32. The argument is made explicitly in part 4 (The Heavens Stand Still and Time
Goes On) of Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, pp.433529. One of
Blumenbergs most concentrated books, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2001), is devoted to this difference in temporalities.
33.Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, p. 483.
34. The relation between the logic and constraint of linkages and the conception of
planetary motion is evident, for example, in the comparison between illustrations in Kuhn,
The Copernican Revolution, pp. 172 and 204, and the drawings in the last great atlas of
linked motion, John Hroness massive Analysis of the Four-Bar Linkage (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1951). The difference is that in Ptolemaic celestial mechanics, the variable distances are (impossibly) configured as three-bar linkages, whereas James Watt and, in great

166 Helmut Mller-Sievers

emblematic mechanism, encloses and hides from sight this mode of transferring kinetic energy, it allows the attention of philosophers and scientists
to turn toward the question of its energy source. Blumenberg points to the
fact that with clocks and their hidden mechanisms, the idea of a perpetuum
mobile emerges for the first time.35 One could equally point to the emergence of a new, theatrical discourse on machines, which in the wake of
Leonardo da Vinci seeks to exploit the apparent disproportion of cause
and effect in the assembly of so-called primitive machines.36 What this
encapsulation equally conceals, and what Blumenberg does not pursue in
Genesis, is the irreducible specificity of motion: in a closed system such
as the Aristotelian cosmos or the clocks mechanism, motion is always
either rotational or translational (i.e., straight-line) motion, or a mixture
of the two. The pendulum clock converts the translational motion of gravity into the rotational motion of its hands, and later mechanical clocks,
however sophisticated, are variations on this basic design. The focus on
the origin of motionon the divine or thermodynamic motorobscures
the logic and constraints of motion transmission, and thus obscures the
translation of kinetic attributes from the celestial to terrestrial machines.
This translation is literally a technical metaphor, the function of which
kyklophorology can elucidate by insisting on the onto-kinetic difference
between orbital and axial rotation.
Already Copernicuss first thoughts of conferring motus circularis
to the earth make it difficult to distinguish between axial rotation and orbital
motion. As we have seen, the initial deduction of this motion from the
perfection of the spherical form encompasses both the motion of planets in
their orbits and the earths motion around its own axis.37 Newtons rational
mechanics will count among its signal triumph the analysis of the orbital
motion of the planets as a compound of two translational forces, inertia
and gravity, and the reduction of all interaction of bodies to such cases
theoretical detail, Franz Reuleaux have shown that such variability can only be achieved
by four bars, one of which has to be fixated on a Gestell.
35.Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, pp. 55355.
36. Ibid., pp.47682. For machine theaters, see my Getriebelehre: Zur Klassifikation
von Maschinen um 1800, in Michael Eggers, ed., Von hnlichkeiten und Unterschieden:
Vergleich, Analogie und Klassifikation in Wissenschaft und Literatur (18./19. Jahrhundert)
(Heidelberg: Universittsverlag Winter, 2011), pp.25171.
37. This fundamental indifference between motions also persists in Copernicus, On
the Revolutions, book 1, ch. 9, where Copernicus ponders Whether many movements can
be attributed to the Earth, and concerning the Center of the World.

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as a straight-line impact on the center of mass may produce. Although

Newton was keenly aware of the effects of axial rotationhis prediction
that the earths shape is flattened at the poles is such an effectin his
exchange with Bishop Bentley he explicitly and happily stated that he has
no mechanical explanation for the causes of the axial rotation of heavenly bodies.38 The reluctance to count rotation among the rational motions
brings into evidence a basic yet startling fact: on the surface of the earth,
nothing spontaneously rotates around its axis. This non-deducible statement can be expressed in various permutations: the realm of nature is the
realm in which nothing rotates around its axis; or mechanical motion, as
motion within a finite frame, always requires rotational elements; or the
specific difference between the human body and the machine is the latters
continuous rotation; or mechanical tools, insofar as they utilize rotational
motion, cannot be conceived as projections of organs. The genesis of the
Copernican world, by bringing to the fore the difference between orbital
(i.e., compounded translational) and rotational motion, makes recognizable the technological centrality of continuous axial rotation.
In The Genesis of the Copernican World, Blumenberg uses the ontokinetic difference between rotations to exemplify the change in the
conception of time that heralds the coming of modernity. But in other contexts he is fully aware that axial rotation on earth decisively breaks with
the supposed continuity between natural phenomena and technical devices.
Axial rotation only occurs in machines. The clock is an early example, but
since its duty is only to indicate its own running, it could be understood
as an imitation and miniaturization of stellar motion. The machines that
begin to populate the European countryside in the eighteenth century
and then reshape the world of the nineteenth century no longer enjoy this
self-sufficiency; their duty is to perform work. They need to integrate
translation to provide a measure of work as well as rotation to guarantee its
continuity.39 The epoch of machines that begins with James Watts steam
engine only accentuates the radical discontinuity of mechanical motion
with natural and, in particular, organic motion. In one of his fundamental
38. ...the diurnal rotations of the Planets could not be derived from gravity but
required a divine power to impress them (Isaac Newton to Richard Bentley, February 11,
1693, in I.Bernard Cohen and Richard Westfall, eds., Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries [New York: Norton, 1995], p.335).
39. The exception is the mill, which derives rotation from rotation. Later kinematic
analysis will show that the gearing necessary to change a mills plane of rotation employs
contact surfaces that do translational work.

168 Helmut Mller-Sievers

and encyclopedic early essays, Imitation of Nature: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being (Nachahmung der Natur: Zur
Vorgeschichte des schpferischen Menschen), from 1957, Blumenberg
exemplifies the inner logic of mechanical development with the invention
of the airplane: Mans dream of flying has accompanied the history of
technology from Daedalus to Lilienthal. But only when the Wright Brothers gave up the attempt to imitate the wing beat of birds and instead used
the propeller as the airplanes motor did the airplane become technically
viable. In the development of the airplane, nothing is as essential and
characteristic as the use of the propeller [Luftschraube], for rotating elements are of pure technicity and can be derived neither from imitatio nor
from perfectio since nature knows no rotating elements. Would it be too
audacious to claim that the airplane is so embedded in the immanence of
technological progress that the day of Kitty Hawk would have come even
if never a bird had flown in the sky?40
The trajectory from the differentiation of motions in Copernicuss theory to the enclosed but entirely self-referential rotation of the clock, and
finally to the open and transitive rotation of the airplanes (and the ships)
propeller, provides the historical background against which the emergence
of technics can be situated. The Copernican world is one in which the
machina mundi contracts into the solid body of machines, and in which
the generation, transmission, and application of axial rotation becomes
the focus of engineering and technology. The Genesis of the Copernican
World shows that what Blumenberg in the earlier text had called the pure
technicity of axial rotation has a history that, like the histories delineated
in the Paradigms for a Metaphorology, can be traced by an investigation
into the history of rotational motions.41
Blumenberg briefly mentions the equivalence of rotational elements in
technics and metaphorical elements in rhetoric, of - and , of Technik- and Geistesgeschichte, of technological and intellectual
history, in the last of the Paradigms, entitled Geometric Symbolism
and Metaphorics. In order to ground the enterprise of metaphorology,
40. Hans Blumenberg, Imitation of Nature, p.22 (translation modified). With this
argument about the immanence of technological progress, Blumenberg (unknowingly)
joins Gilbert Simondon, whose 1958 dissertation Du mode dexistence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1989) makes this argument with all due technical rigor.
41. It is no accident that Franz Reuleaux, the great synthesizer of kinematics, would
introduce the notion of kinematics by demonstrating the difference between planetary
orbits and the relative motion of points on a solid rotating crank. See Franz Reuleaux,
Theoretische Kinematik (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1875), pp.3435.

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he recounts here the transition from symbol to metaphor in the paradigm

of the sphere. But he also contends that the motion of the sphere and the
function of the metaphor are equivalent. The origin of this tradition in
Plotinus, Blumenberg argues after a survey of the hierarchy of motions
in Neoplatonic thought, is of specific interest to us here because, in his
deduction of the circular movement of the sky from the cosmic souls imitation of pure Mind, the structure of the metaphor itself is metaphysically
hypostasized. In its nature, in the language of its being, the soul can neither grasp nor adequately replicate the Mind: its mimesis can hit its target
only in missing it, be true only by being different....For this is an exact
representation of the function of absolute metaphor, which springs into
a nonconceptualizable, conceptually unfillable gap and lacuna to express
itself in its own way.42 Like axial rotation, absolute metaphors have no
natural referent and therefore always seek to cover the mimetic void at
their center.
Kyklophorology thus would complement metaphorology as the
investigation into the history of technics as embodied rotation, as the nonmimetic, in-human response to the presence of the physical environment.
The history of machines, from the machine theaters of early modernity
to the classifications of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,
to the embedded kinematic logic of such engineers as Franz Reuleaux,
would become legible as the history of the generation, management, and
application of rotational motion within finite frames. In the language of
German engineers, these finite framesthose parts of the machine that
encase and stabilize rotating elementsare called Gestell.43 The history
of machines, then, has to be written as the history of the relation between
Gestell and rotation.
At the end of his chapter on the possible meaning of Kants reference
to Copernicus, Blumenberg comes to the conclusion that with Copernicuss first thoughts, Kant must have meant axial rotation but should
have meant orbital motion. The former, Blumenberg fears, would have
42.Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, pp.12122 (Blumenbergs italics).
43. Reuleaux gives a precise analysis of the Gestell and, what is more, of its oblivion:
In the practical working of machines, this casing [Gestell], this fixed link in the chain is
so veiled [verbrmt] by the outer workings and has so grown together with the parts of the
housing (in order to always only present [vorstellen] one solid piece) that observing its
simplicity is nearly [frmlich] impossible. Indeed, many mechanics walk around thinking
of beam and crank as if this mechanism only consisted in three parts: beam, connecting rod, and crank [Balancier, Pleuelstange, Kurbel] (Reuleaux, Theoretische Kinematik,
p.257).

170 Helmut Mller-Sievers

moved critical philosophy too far toward an idealist conception in which

phenomena such as the rising and setting of stars are but illusions caused
by the (unperceived) motion of the observer. The reference to the motion
of the planets would have had the advantage of presuming an irrefutable
motion of the planets, even if the exact form of that motion were in dispute. Unfortunately, Blumenberg writes, all that one can say is that
Kant should have thought of that. But he did not.44 Philosophically, this is
undoubtedly the right conclusion. But the pursuit of the first thoughts of
axial rotation also could have led to a philosophical critique of technics at
the very historical moment when the application of rotational force began
to change, perhaps to mutilate the face of the earth. Such a critique would
have to confront the question of whether there is a meaningful way to
speak about technics and technical procedures of the mind. In the first,
suppressed introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant had proposed
such a critique by showing how natural technics could be conceived: On
the Technics of the Power of Judgment as the Ground of the Idea of a
Technics of Nature (Von der Technik der Urteilskraft als dem Grunde
der Idee einer Technik der Natur).45 This thought is at the basis of Blumenbergs technological history of the intellect; it could also have given
rise to an intellectual history of technics as a critical history of rotation.

44.Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, p. 614.

45. Immanuel Kant, First Introduction to Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans.
Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), p.22. For a discussion of this appearance of technics at the heart of the critical enterprise, see Peter Fenves,
Technica Speciosa: Some Notes on the Ambivalence of Technics in Kant and Weber, in
Simon Wortham and Gary Hall, eds., Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber (New
York: Fordham UP, 2007), pp.85101.