Reoccupying Metaphor: On the Legitimacy of the Nonconceptual

Hans Blumenberg’s magisterial defense of modernity against the reproach of secularization, elaborated most extensively in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966, 1974), develops both a distinctive method of philosophical history and the groundwork of a philosophical anthropology, predicated on the emergence of human self-assertion as theoretical curiosity. But as Blumenberg’s work attests more generally, this argument both devolves on and comprises an excursion into metaphorology, transposing the grounds of legitimation from dialectic to rhetoric. This paper explores the implications of such a metaphorical transfer, suggesting that Blumenberg not only presupposes a cryptic mode of poetics, but also (against its own anthropological intention) invests that poetics with the power to negate the category of the human as such.