Blumenberg Response 1

I enjoyed Blumenberg’s book more than our first assignment, as I thought it was easier to follow and a lot of lines and thoughts stood out to me more while reading this. What Blumenberg really made me realize is that simple (or even complex) metaphors can express a person’s emotions in a way that stating something in plain text cannot. Sometimes I even found them easier to understand than stating something plainly. Blumenberg states on page 76 “…metaphors, however, remain informative by displacements and disfigurations that can still be added to them and that let the force of a particular individual be grasped…”. This sentence summarized what I mostly took away from reading this book. 

In “The Suspicion of Meaningless” under What is Perhaps Lost he says, “only by naming signs of deficiency does one think to know what linguistic expressions containing the element ‘meaning’ signify, as if nothing were more understandable”. He also says here that trying to provide meaning to something could produce problems, but metaphors make a lot of meanings “graspable”. I appreciated the way Blumenberg explained this.

This section relates to another section of the book later on. In “Names Prescribe Burdens and Losses” also under What is Perhaps Lost, Blumenberg says that placing names on things really affect how someone feels. For example, no one really knows what the meaning of the word “stress” is. I thought this was interesting, as it can sometimes be true. People will place blame elsewhere because they feel so “stressed out” due to life’s many responsibilities, but is it the work that makes us stressed or is it out fault for not being able to handle it properly? He then goes on to say that a researcher found stress to be nothing more than “the bundle of stimuli and demands that keep life going” and “refusing this bundle produces a generation of lethargic moochers on other generations”. I’m not sure if this description would necessarily classify as a “metaphor” but I still felt he made a good point in talking about his feelings on the word stress.

He then goes on to say a similar thing about the terms “frustration” and “midlife crisis”. Because someone gives a title to how he/she is feeling, they use it as justification to react in certain, maybe sometimes negative, ways.  Reading this particular passage in the book related to something else I just learned in the human development course I am currently taking. I learned that the word “frustration” is not literally translated in all languages. This was brought up in some discussions we had last week when talking about literature and truth. However, although it does not literally translate in other languages, it does not mean that people in other cultures do not feel this emotion. Because we, as English speakers, are able to place words to certain emotions it sometimes takes a psychological turn and makes us feel a certain way only because we think we do. (I’m not entirely sure if what I’m saying makes sense, because I’m having trouble trying to word it.)

This thought of mine relates to what we are currently discussing because although metaphors are used to emphasize a person’s point or thought, in my opinion they are not always truly reflective of life and reality due to a person placing “names” and falsely judging their own feelings. There could also be a discrepancy between feelings and words based on whether something is “meaningless” compared to if it’s given a name. If you can give something a name or title, it does not require much thought or comprehension afterwards. In this sense, names and metaphors help us understand things better in a way that does not require a lot of thinking all of the time.