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Abstract
Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth presents several difficulties to attempts at interpretation. First, it is a work that includes both the development of a theory of myth and the reception of myth, and the analysis and interpretation of historical texts from which these theories were developed and which illustrate them, but often without announcing its intentions or signaling when it is switching from the one to the other. Second, Blumenberg tends to avoid providing stable definitions for many of his key terms. His theory of myth posits that myth was developed to deal with something indefinite in the experience of the world, and I argue in this dissertation that this indefinite character is related to this tendency: his terms require a degree of elasticity in order to illuminate and reveal the phenomena he takes as his objects. Finally, Work on Myth, like his other large works, are dense and multi-valent works, works in which one might find many centers, interpretations of which can be taken in many directions. The interpretation I propose attempts to chart one course through this work by locating a center of his theory of myth and its reception in the concept of ‘significance,’ which cannot be defined. I show how Blumenberg grounds this theory of myth in an anthropology, a theory less of human nature that the conditions that allow human life to be possible. Further, I provide an account of two aspects, drawn from various parts of this work, of the coordination between the development of myth and the development the human species, to illustrate Blumenberg’s account of myth’s function. In the second part of the dissertation, I provide three readings in which Blumenberg develops the concept of significance, showing the way it responds to aspects of the experience of the world that are and remain indefinite, providing a structure that is necessary for the human way of life.