The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

Download or read book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age written by Hans Blumenberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1985-10-21 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Löwith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the world from outside. Instead, Blumenberg argues, the idea of progress always implies a process at work within history, operating through an internal logic that ultimately expresses human choices and is legitimized by human self-assertion, by man's responsibility for his own fate.