Legitimacy of the Modern Age? : Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt

Abstract

The opposition between religiosity and secularism is the key to both a discourse-historical epochal threshold and the question of the self-understanding of Western modernity. The controversy between Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg constitutes one episode in the long-term, many-faceted debate over secularization. At the core of the controversy is the question of how modern science on the one hand and rational law on the other hand can be differentiated as autonomous realms. At the same time, the anthropological framing conditions for a technologized life world are here at issue. Carl Schmitt began the controversy in the afterword of his last book, which criticized Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age in a basic way. Political Theology II thus also became Schmitt’s testament, in which he formulated instructions about how to read the continuity and identity of his life and work.