The Transformation of Purpose: Blumenberg and the Legitimacy of Modernity (Part 2)

Reading Part II, Chapter 5 of Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Part 1 of this essay covered his take on Descartes and the emergence of the cosmos as 'producible.' This essay, Part 2, takes up Kant as a pivotal figure — pivotal because the movement from medieval morality as personal alignment with a purposeful cosmos to the assertion of purpose as a feature of human reason is traceable within a single career. Part 3 will address the legacy of Malthus'sEssay on the Principle of Population (1798).

Across these essays I am tracing something simpler and faster-moving than Blumenberg's own vocabulary: a form of intelligence that learns to move faster than nature — to anticipate and alter events rather than wait on them. We still live inside the infrastructure this intelligence built, from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. What's less clear is whether we still know how to run it, or even want to. We may not even know what intelligence is for.

The Unfinished Cosmos

If Descartes rendered the cosmos 'producible', Kant took this a large step further by rendering it 'unfinished’. For Kant in the 1755 cosmological works, God's perfection is ongoing and never inactive. To think otherwise would mean picturing an omnipotence that voluntarily shuts itself off at some arbitrary point. Perfection, on this account, is progressive — never complete, always striving toward the next level. For Blumenberg, this is a crucial moment in Modernity's notion of 'inevitable progress.'

But we're not there yet. This progress structures the cosmos, not human history: if the cosmos is achieving its own perfection, mankind is simply along for the ride, and moral orientation means accepting that perfection, whether complete or still in progress. Only from the far side of the self-assertion threshold Blumenberg is elaborating does this look like limited agency — at the time, it wasn't a deficiency measured against some fuller scope of action still to come. It was simply what alignment meant.

For Blumenberg, this Kant (before the Critiques) still operates within the morality of acceptance and alignment—'an essentially contemplative role in a teleologically determined world' (213):

All nature, which involves a universal harmonious relationship to the self-satisfaction of the Deity, cannot but fill the rational creature with an everlasting satisfaction, when it finds itself united with this primary source of all perfection. Nature, seen from this centre, will show on all sides utter security, complete adaptation. (Blumenberg quoting Kant, 213)

Blumenberg's Kant effects a fundamental reorientation of the medieval worldview in that he passes through this reorientation himself, within a single career. The Critiques don't mark a hard break so much as a repositioning: purposeful action moves from a feature of the cosmos to the fundamental feature of human reason:

Kant’s critique concentrated all directed, purposeful processes in man’s rational action, and this meant that the world could participate in this sort of directedness only by becoming a substrate subject to man’s purposes. (214)

We are accustomed to telling the Enlightenment story as an Age of Reason, but that obscures the more important story: it is not reason but purpose, used twice in this crucial sentence, that is the locus of change. And purpose does not simply relocate, as if the same concept just changed address — it reverses orientation. As a feature of the cosmos, purpose was centripetal: a given order that humanity needed to understand and align itself with, converging on man as its intended reference point. As a feature of human reason, purpose becomes centrifugal: no longer something read off a pre-given order, but the capacity that allows humanity to participate in the creation of order. For the intellectual leadership of medieval Europe, purpose was still centripetal—the organizing feature of a cosmos authored by God. If it was relevant to human experience at all, it was limited to accepting one's place within it—'all one can do is either adapt oneself to this order or violate it, determining thereby nothing but one's own happiness or unhappiness' (215).

Purpose was not something a human could independently assert without the moral and existential risks of going against fate—until self-assertion made its case as a legitimate player in the cosmos, a move traceable, in compressed form, across Kant's own career.

The Problem of Purpose

When purpose moves into human rationality rather than remaining a given feature of the cosmos, its most urgent problem is self-justification. Reason, having taken over purpose from the cosmos, now has to make its own grounding a foundational concern of the Enlightenment—what Blumenberg calls the 'modern age's will to a rationality that grounds itself'‘. Untethered from a purposeful cosmos as its source of meaning, reason confronts the possibility of its own meaninglessness.

We should be careful about an all-too-easy story we tell ourselves about human consciousness: that it is always seeking meaning and purpose, and that when one source of meaning is exhausted, it inevitably and naturally starts the search anew. This story assumes consciousness has a fixed, meaning-seeking essence—a facile belief that reason always seeks meaning and, once the medieval cosmos no longer supplies it, must simply find it elsewhere. Blumenberg's account is more complex than this. Humanity is under no inherent obligation to be a meaning-seeking creature.

The collapse of a cosmos full of inherent purpose could have led to the abandonment of meaningful purpose altogether. Mankind could simply have found itself in a meaningless cosmos and learned to live with it. This is not hypothetical: Blumenberg himself takes up this alternative elsewhere in the book, in a chapter comparing nominalism and Epicureanism, where he argues that Epicurean self-assertion aims at neutralizing the threat the cosmos poses, not at reshaping it toward human purposes. Epicurean reason is self-assertive enough to argue the gods and death out of their power to terrify—but it never turns that self-assertion outward into a demiurgic project of remaking the cosmos. Epicureanism undid the centripetal orientation of a teleological cosmos oriented toward mankind, but it didn't automatically replace it with the centrifugal orientation of demiurgic power. The turn from one to the other, in other words, was not inevitable—an untethered cosmos could have stayed untethered. Modernity took the other path.

What's missing from Epicureanism, then, is not human self-assertion but self-assertion turned toward construction—a consciousness that treats the world as material to be shaped toward purposes it makes up on its own. That combination is what the Enlightenment will end up taking.

This ethical school lingers into the Modern Age, but its refusal of the centrifugal turn—neutralization without construction—never took broad hold of the larger arc of Western history.

By contrast, the Judeo-Christian narrative that insists history has purpose and meaning remained a stronger influence—not because its content survived, but because its position did. This is Blumenberg’s ‘reoccupation’ at work: the medieval conviction that history must add up to something persists, even as the source of that meaning is replaced. The source is now human reason itself, a self-assertive, 'demiurgic' power in its own right. If this power is to be meaningful and not just stochastic and chaotic, it needs to see the world around it as the result of relatively regular and stable processes that can be deciphered and directed by self-assertion.

Reason grounds itself by replaying a cycle: the transformation of cosmic purpose into human purpose. Blumenberg recounts this cycle in a single characteristically dense sentence:

…human self assertion does not restrict itself to holding its own and fortifying itself against the late-medieval disappearance of inherent purposes; rather it [human self assertion] keeps this process in motion, as a leveling of the pre-given world structure, in order to obtain a ‘ground level’ upon which to proceed with its rational constructions. (218)

The 'leveling of the pre-given world structure' is not a one-and-done moment in history. The late-medieval cosmos of inherent purposes does not collapse in a single instance. When Blumenberg says that human self-assertion 'keeps this process in motion,' he means that leveling is itself an ongoing activity, enacted over and over as self-assertion advances—not a threshold crossed once and left behind.

This ongoing leveling is what I'm calling fate-to-nature: the continuous work of treating the world's processes as decipherable, so that whatever in them resists human purposes can be found and exploited—either to prevent an unwanted outcome or to construct a wanted one. The 'ground level' Blumenberg names is not fate-to-nature itself but its yield: the cleared, legible material that leveling produces and that construction and prevention then act on.

Conclusion to Part 2: Fate and Nature

Kant’s Critiques relocate purpose as a feature of human reason operating with the unfinished world ‘as its own immanent rule that up until then had been projected onto nature’ (214). In other words, the unfinished world of his 1755 works represented the background setting of a universe perfecting itself as an automated process. By the end of the century, the unfinished world became ‘material at man’s disposal’ (214).

This is the crucial shift that defines Modernity for Blumenberg. It’s not that nature becomes the passive repository of laws and processes. It becomes the ‘substrate subject to man’s purposes’. Nature becomes the name the Modern Age gives to the loosening of fate. This is what makes human self-assertion into the motor of history. To be sure, it remains fate when its effects must be accepted because they can’t be altered ahead of time.

The cycle of fate-to-nature will be the eternal recurrence of the Modern Age. It drives our endless investments and improvements in technology as at the means of that self-assertion. But because technical development is caught in that recurring cycle, it easily takes on a life of its own, and we can easily feel like we are its products rather than the other way around.