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Hans Blumenberg

13 July 1920-28 March 1996

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An Accident is the rule rather than the exception. A shipwreck is the 'legitimate' result of seafaring. A happily reached harbor feels deeply problematic.

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Being is defined as everything, but everything unknowingly. To gain access to the world is not to enter into a relation of 'receiving' but of 'giving'.

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Curiosity is, for the Stoics, problematic. Rather than an open-minded and open-eyed contemplation of the world, they counseled a preventive refusal to seek the truth at all.

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Curiosity is, for the Stoics, the disastrous drive that misleads us into violating the boundary settlement between the human and the divine sphere.

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An Epoch is a the place from which one looks out at things rather than a realist claim about periodization.

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Life is a contingent set of propositions which manifests itself as a linguistic framework imposed on thought.

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Light is not the opposite of darkness, but, in the essence of light, darkness is destroyed and overcome.

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Man is a being who becomes himself as the principle of a structural formation that emanates from him. He is not a being that adapting itself to some fixed world that obligingly presents itself.

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A Metaphor is a fossil that indicates an archaic stratum of the trial of theoretical curiosity.

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Metaphor is first of all a disturbance. Every metaphor endangers the 'normal harmony' of the structure of consciousness.

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Metaphor is resistance to harmony whereby consciousness is the constantly successful organ of self-restitution.

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Metaphor is that faculty that is able to capture what is not present in the qualities of, say, a meadow when viewed objectively. It is however, also not the subjective and phantastic addition made by an observer.

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The Modern is reflective of a subtle distinction between the wrongheaded idea of a continuity of the mere secularizing of religious substances and the correct idea of a continuity of problems approached by religion.