The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) by Hans Blumenberg

The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) Reviews

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  Avery

  This is a tome readable in style but monstrous in size and engaging in high level skepticism of philosophical narratives. Blumenberg's task is to show that modernity did not have its origin in the secularization of religious traditions. On the contrary, it began with a desire to pry into the unknown, to know for oneself what was hidden -- with a Gnostic theological grounding that makes God hidden from the world.
  
  "The modern age began, not indeed as the epoch of the death of God, but ad the epoch of the hidden God, the deus absconditus-- and a hidden God is pragmatically as good as dead. The nominalist theology induces a human relation to the world whose implicit content could have been formulated in the postulate that man had to behave as though God were dead. This induces a restless taking stock of the world, which can be designated as the motive power of the age of science." (346)
  
  The original sin of modernity is thereby not to be found in any medieval mistake, but dates back to the original attempt to hold back Gnosticism in the early Church, which failed in the blossoming of a new civilization. The mind that thinks to climb a mountain and see its height, like Petrarch, or the mind that ignores ignores the natural warning of darkness and descends into the depths of a cave, like Da Vinci, is already a Faustian mind enaged in "overstepping of limits".
  
  Looking to the writings of the early moderns, Blumenberg concludes: "This is no 'secularization' of man having been created in God's image. The function of the thought emerges naked and undisguised and makes its historical derivation a matter of indifference: Knowledge has no need of justification; it justifies itself; it does not owe thank for itself to God; it no longer has any tinge of illumination or graciously permitted participation but rests in its own evidence, from which God and man cannot escape." (391)
  
  Yet Blumenberg does not come down in favor of this Gnosticism. He recognizes what was lost with the traditional world with a clarity unparalleled and surpassing that of more famous anti-modern writers.
• 
  Kevin Karpiak

  Provocative appproach to studying modernity. If you can read it from cover to cover, you're of a different stock than I.
• 
  Kevin

  My rating is limited by what I was able to pull out of the book, which will have to be returned to again and again. I see enough here and have learned enough from it already to warrant this. It's a dense and challenging work, and heavy sledding for me as medieval thought is a weak spot in my learning, one which I have tried to shore up somewhat in the past year. If this is the case with you, I suggest a primer on the contours of Gnosticism and of nominalism at a minimum, for these are touchstones Blumenberg hits again and again.
  
  I was attracted to the work initially by a sustained interest in what constitutes an age, and in this case, what Blumenberg considers to be constitutive of the modern age--what elements inform the "epochal threshold" to use his terminology, from medieval to modern. It is instructive for me to have such a study derive its thrust from the ideational development of key arguments from the middle ages rather than a rehashing of the facile depiction of enlightenment rationality emerging out of the darkness almost sui generis, with Descartes.
  
  This is also a polemical work, for Blumenberg directly challenges the conventional wisdom made famous by Karl Lowith that the modern age is a secularization of Christian eschatology. [I will have to cut this short and augment this review at a later date, for it will require more thought and rigor than I can devote to it now. Such a treatment will, at a minimum, touch upon Blumenberg's functionalist hermeneutic, specifically as it applies to his notion of the "reoccupation" of old problems and their constituent demands onto new and incongruous situations.] I will simply finish by saying that I found Part Three of this work, where Blumenberg traces a history of the phenomenon of theoretical curiosity from Socrates to Freud to be both interesting and challenging.
  
  In closing, I will simply reiterate that this work demands much of its reader, but that IMHO the effort is rewarded. It's quite a journey.
• 
  Arthur Drury

  I finally picked this book up because Meghan O'Gieblyn mentioned it in connection with the interesting relationship between late medieval nominalism & the emergence of modernity. However, a big surprise: the real payoff is a better understanding of Roberto Unger. RU said somewhere that he has been importantly influenced by Nicholas of Cusa. I was never able to make much sense of that. But, HB's chapters on the Cusan & the Nolan clarify a great deal.
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  Luke Echo

  Jesus.. he does go on. The concept of re-occupation is clearly a significant problem for the concept of 'politcal theology' or Agamben's 'signature' but Part III, IV are a bit unwieldy. I don't know if I will make it through the rest.
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  Bernard English

  The most rewarding aspect for me was his analysis of the implications of astronomical discoveries for discoverers, the Church and Europeans in general. Before I go back to these chapters, I'll need to review the history of early modern astronomy as I suspect others would too.
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  AskHistorians

  Blumenberg's well thought out discourse on the evolution of scientific exploration from the late 1800s' idea of universal knowledge to the mid-century's patented scientific thought.