Marrou, Élise
Self-portrait of Blumenberg as a Viennese therapist. De nobis ipsis silemus
- 2016.
80
In this article, I claim that Wittgenstein is not merely an interlocutor among others for Blumenberg, but one of his doubles. I show how the author of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age appropriates and integrates the main lines of Wittgenstein’s thought into the construction of his own phenomenological method. To that end, three axes are distinguished (from the three periods of Wittgenstein’s oeuvre) and analyzed: the Tractatus’s definition of the world, the treatment of indeterminacy ( Unbestimmtheit) in the use of concepts and the anti-Cartesian re-qualification of certainty. I argue that these elements offer a mirror image of Blumenberg’s phenomenological enterprise, an “etching” of his hermeneutics, nothing less, all and all, than a self-portrait.