A historical perspective on the sciencesbrings into view controversies, and some beliefs and methodological con-victions that retrospectively turn out to be false—among Blumenberg’scharacteristically colorful picks are Augustine writing that “the stars werecreated for the consolation of people obliged to be active at night,” and“Linnaeus’s opinion that the song of the birds at the first light of morningwas instituted as consolation for the insomnia of the old.”84

In “collaboration with his Zettelkasten,”61 Blumenberg worked to por-tray these tensions between different and changing historical meanings ofscientific inquiry.

Hesaid, “We have to know what we are doing in order to be able to askwhether it is what we should be doing.

13 Blumenberg’s anthropological writings, mainly an attempt to reconcile phenomenologywith the tradition of philosophical anthropology, have been gathered in Blumenberg,Beschreibung des Menschen: Aus dem Nachlass, ed. Manfred Sommer (Frankfurt: Suhr-kamp, 2006). This publication has led to a surge of reinterpretations of his work throughthe lens of these anthropological writings; see Rebekka A. Klein, ed., Auf Distanz zurNatur: Philosophische und theologische Perspektiven in Hans Blumenbergs Anthropolo-gie (Wu ̈ rzburg: Ko ̈ nigshausen & Neumann, 2009).

Blumenberg’s near-obsessive reliance on this writing machinery

he limited hisdiscussion of Kuhn to a short article crediting Georg Christoph Lichtenbergwith a much more sophisticated concept of “paradigm.” 9

Regarding his work on the sciences, Blumenberg did not facilitate hisreception within the Anglophone tradition by engaging much with it. Hemay have initiated the translation of The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsinto German,

for instance, he accused Mon-taigne of having “used up” a quote from Lucretius by employing it to illus-trate a minor paradox, rather than saving it, as Blumenberg deemed“compulsory,” for his major argument regarding the failure of states. 3

There is a box stored in the German Literature Archive in Marbach, thewooden box Hans Blumenberg kept in a fireproof steel cabinet, for it con-tained his collection of about thirty thousand typed and handwritten notecards.1

Blumenberg's Zettelkasten - 30,000 entries in 55 years, i.e. almost 550 per year, which is not that much - obviously served the material management for books that he had planned and the collection of documents for theses that he had in mind, without that the reading work for it was completed.

Before we begin, please note that this piece assumes intermediate familiarity with Zettelkasten and its original creator, the social scientist Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998).

Your post says nothing at all to suggest Luhman didn’t “invent” “Zettelkasten” (no one says he was only one writing on scraps of paper), you list two names and no links

“Sibi scribere: The reasonable author writes for no other posterity than his own, for his own old age, in order to take pleasure in himself even then,” Blumenberg quotes Nietzsche (here, 83).

Filed on a card under the key word cogitare, Blumenberg quotes Kant: “Thinking is conversation with oneself… Listening inside.”

Hans Blumenberg carefully read Luhmann’s piece on ‘Communication with note card boxes’ in 1981. He compared their respective systems, and did not fail to record that he had “collaborated” with his own Zettelkasten for forty years, compared to Luhmann’s mere twenty-six.

Two hundred years later, Blumenberg’s note cards, each of them number-stamped by him and thus carrying along a trace of their temporal order of origin, could be moved and rearranged continuously in ways that weren’t open to the entries confined to the bound pages of Lichtenberg’s books. Blumenberg relied on the new connections and constellations generated within his Zettelkasten throughout his life as a writer.