Abstract

In the long aftermath of such modernist suspicions about the still dominant "official" Enlightenment culture, the very title of the recently translated book by Hans Blumenberg is a bluntly direct invitation to controversy--The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. For Blumenberg, when Giordano Bruno, condemned to burn at the stake in 1600, defiantly turned his face from a crucifix offered him as a last chance at redemption, the heroic gesture should be seen as just that, heroic and historically decisive, a rejection of the reality of the Incarnation, and the expression of a decisively new form of thought. "The Nolan" did cross a real threshold that separates modernity from pre-modernity. The new, for Blumenberg is new, not belated, and what's more heretical still in our post-Nietzschean, post-Heideggerean world, better than the old. The "self-assertion" of modernity is, in a simple word, "legitimate."