The ideal of optics and the compacity of life : an account of Blumenberg's views on Modernity and Myths

This chapter argues that addressing Blumenberg’s relationship with modernity involves an exploration of his work on vision and visuality. In the first section, I show that Blumenberg’s depiction of the modern age as the epoch of geometrical optics strongly impacts on his conception of restricted rationality. In the second section, I bring together Blumenberg’s account of modern restricted rationality with Herder’s opposition between visuality and tactility. I then reframe this Herderian opposition in the context of Blumenbergian anthropology. In the third section, I argue that Blumenberg’s conception of visuality is to be put into dialogue with his monumental Work on Myth and, from this perspective, offer a reading of Kafka’s Der Bau, as a performance of Blumenberg’s conception of the very process of myth-building.