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The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) Paperback – October 21, 1985

by Hans Blumenberg (Author),‎ Robert M. Wallace (Translator)

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In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Löwith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the world from outside. Instead, Blumenberg argues, the idea of progress always implies a process at work within history, operating through an internal logic that ultimately expresses human choices and is legitimized by human self-assertion, by man's responsibility for his own fate.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

A great sweeping history of the course of European thought, built on the Hegel-Heidegger scale....

(Richard Rorty The London Review of Books)

It has been left for Blumenberg to write a major treatise on the metaphysical tradition which unites intellectual history with critical dissection of the concept of 'secularization': a concept that has served two generations of writers in their efforts to make sense of the modern world. What Blumenberg has done, to put it briefly, is to describe the disintegration of the medieval world-view as a consequence of latent contradictions already present in the scholastic tradition: ultimately in the synthesis of early Christianity and neo-Platonism inherited by the European middle ages. However, this formulation supplies only the feeblest sort of pointer to the importance of a work whose author is no mere historian but an original thinker in his own right, equipped with the sort of synthesizing faculty which was the pride of German scholarship in its great age.

(The Times Literary Supplement)

Modern science buried centuries of theological controversy. Hans Blumenberg has unearthed these controversies again, rethinking the dilemmas and dead ends of Christian dogma that provided the intellectual provocations for the scientific revolution.... But Blumenberg has not merely written a scholarly, nuanced, and illuminating study of the religious background to modern science. He has also written a philosophical book, a combative response to the dim Romantic suggestion more common in Germany than America, that the modern age 'as a whole' is somehow illegitimate.

(Stephen Holmes The American Political Science Review)

Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product details

Series: Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought
Paperback: 728 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press (October 21, 1985)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0262521059
ISBN-13: 978-0262521055
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 5 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #521,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #488 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Eastern > Buddhism > Zen > Philosophy
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philosophical historian

November 21, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Read this book right after "Work on Myth" which is my favorite Blumenberg work. Otherwise, I probably would have given five stars. Both books are slow reading. It's better to start with one of Blumenberg's shorter books like "Laughter of the Thracian Woman" or "Care Crosses the River". These books give you entry into his method of constructing his thoughts. Blumenberg's ideas are not difficult to grasp, even the counter-intuitive ones. But his exposition of ideas in his large works requires re-reading earlier passages. As a philosophical historian, Blumenberg can offer worldviews that you may already have intimations of and he crystallizes them for you.

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Avery

The hiding away of God

June 5, 2014

Format: Paperback

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 as 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.

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Sebastijan1982

Awful binding

December 19, 2010

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The book itself is interesting and quite difficult. But the problem is with binding. Practically all the papers fell out. I will have to bind the book again. I can't believe they sell book with such an awful binding.

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Saul Boulschett

the medieval origin of the modern age

June 15, 2001

Format: Paperback

The issue concerning the legitimacy of the modern age was more pressing for the Europeans than for the Americans, largely because of the latter's historic distancing from Catholicism and the tradition of scholarship funded by the catholic church. Thus for the American reader the very notion that the modern age may be "illegitimate" somehow may ring hollow, if not outright absurd. This book defends the status of the modern age against any suggestion that somehow it may be an aberration, a condition gone awry. The modern age, in all its seeming anti-religious tendencies fueled especially by the scientific drive for the truth, is the 'legitimate' heir to the tradition of taking literally to heart,"Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free". This book focuses on the philosophical foundations of Medieval theology and Nominalism that paved the way for secularization in the modern age. Blumenberg, with his astonishing scholarship and intellectual prowess makes it clear that, intentionally or not, much of what passed for pious and official christian theology during the middle ages actually had very little to do with "religion" per se (Christ's ethical teaching), and everything to do with Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle's, under the guise of church dogma. In serving theology, attributes of God in His omnipotence and omniscience were framed around the notion of absolutes, leading to unresolvable contradictions and paradoxes. For example, the idea that God should be omnipotent necessarily meant He ought to be capable of creating a rock so heavy that even He cound not lift it. This book is simply the most facinating and in-depth account of the strange doings of the Church Fathers in their relentless quest for the Truth. Blumenberg shows that it was ultimately the Church, in allowing astronomy as one of the topics to be studied, while forbidding others (curiosity itself was considered a sin, an 'extra-vagance', meaning, 'going outside the path'), provided the very possibility that led to secularization of the modern age. According to the author, the Church formulated its dogma primarily in response to and against Gnosticism, but failed in completely eradicating all the Gnostic elements, thus laying itself open to "infection" later on. The return of Gnosticism takes on the form of science, which makes a virtue of being clear about what it does not and cannot know, and questions the ground of any claim that arrogates omniscience. This work makes a compelling case for our age: For better or for worse, the fate of the modern age was decided a long time ago when the West became Christendom. ....

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Most recent customer reviews

Neglected masterpiece

A masterpiece that defies summaries and labels. While MIT Press has, thankfully, translated four of Blumenberg's books, he is not "seeping" into the culture in spite of...Read more

Published on August 9, 1999

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