The difficulties of Enlightenment through their metaphors

Abstract

In this paper we try to resume José Luis Villacañas’s analysis on the “difficulties with Enlightenment”. From various texts belonging to Hans Blumenberg’s Nachlaβ, we outline a metaphorology of the difficulties of Enlightenment as an answer to the mystery of its persistent failure. We consider also the variations and amendments of the Enlightenment project in Husserl’s and in own Blumenberg’s cases. Both proposals, however, also failed. Nevertheless, in Blumenberg’s further philosophical reworkings of that failure we can found, in our opinion, one of the most important intellectual achievements of this specific and late Enlightenment tradition: in the phenomenological anthropology of consciousness as a theory of reception and ethics of memory.