Blumenberg Response 1 - Something Like a World Order

Brad Levine

Care Crosses the River Response 1

The back of Hans Blumenberg’s Care Crosses the River describes the work as a, “collection of short meditations on various topics.” At first glance, it seems to be just a totally random assortment of overly intellectual and difficult to understand philosophical anecdotes (if that’s the correct word). However, upon further review, the book is still very complicated, but, when a particular section catches the reader’s interest, it isn’t as random. Personally, some of the sections, especially the one relating to maritime emergencies, did not make any sense to me and did not hold my interest. It wasn’t until the section about world order that I started to understand what Blumenberg might have been trying to say.

The section Something Like a World Order got me thinking about what a world order actually is. Naturally, my mind went right to the term “new world order” which, to me, implies radical changes of dictator-like proportions. After reading, I started to rethink my original definition and saw that there might not be such thing as a world order and the idea of world order is just another way to think about everyday life and the progress that goes along with it. I first thought about this when reading King Pyrrhus-Life as a Detour. On page 97 it talks about King Pyrrhus and his desire to conquer the world before he retires. Blumenberg wonders why Pyrrhus would want to do that since, “The extreme case of conquering the world seems to be a useless detour, a foolish way to attain with the greatest of difficulties something a king could have more easily than all others without this effort.” This quote made me think about the nature of life especially when it comes to wealth. A person with nothing will take all the detours they can to get money or power, but a person who has will skip the detours and go as far as they have to in order to keep and expand upon their wealth and power. So this need for a world order is not necessarily a need for something new, but a need for those in power to stay in power.

Also, the story about King Pyrrhus brought the idea of technological progress to mind. Like King Pyrrhus, we as a culture can’t seem to get enough even as the technology and scientific accomplishment continues to grow exponentially. This section Visibility also gave me this idea by talking about the world outside the Earth. To me this means that society always wants to go above and beyond what we understand in order to feel accomplished even if it means going beyond the bounds of the planet both figuratively and literally. There is so much out there and no matter what, we are always going to ask for more. Every time there is some kind of new technological or scientific breakthrough it, in a way, leads to a new world order because things are never the same and it’s only a matter of time until we as a culture look for the next big advancement. So while Blumenberg was looking for something like a world order, all he had to do was look at life to see the truth about what is a world order every day.