The Readability of the World / / Hans Blumenberg.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2022
• VerfasserIn: Blumenberg, Hans,
• MitwirkendeR: Roberts, David,; Savage, Robert,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: signale|TRANSFER: German Thought in Translation
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (426 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- 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