There is a great and confusing irony in what many regard as the culmination of the post-Enlightenment Western European tradition, the culmination of modernity. Sometime in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the story goes, the radically new rather suddenly seemed surprisingly old, outdated because self-deceived, unjustifiably self-satisfied, really an expression of an older, religious consciousness or of a premodern, even primitive will to power, or of an ancient forgetting of Being. In such a context, to be truly modern (here the confusion and the irony) was to be “modernist,” to have seen modernity to its conclusion and to find it incapable of fulfilling its promise of a new beginning. As painter, or poet, or composer, or thinker, one could stand resolutely on the other side of a great historical abyss, across from which one could now see the continuity of say, Socrates and Bacon, or Augustine and Descartes; the historical collapse of the option they all represent; and could say good-bye to the whole territory.

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 blundy direct invitation to controversy– The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.