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

peer reviewed / 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.