‘Indirect’ or ‘Engaged’: A Comparison of Hans Blumenberg's and Charles Taylor's Debt and Contribution to Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract

SummaryThis article presents and compares aspects of Charles Taylor's and Hans Blumenberg's seemingly opposing views about agency and epistemology, setting them in the context of the tradition in German ideas called ‘philosophical anthropology’, with which both align their thinking. It presents key strands of this tradition, from their inception in the late eighteenth century in the writings of Herder, Schiller and others associated with anthropology to their articulation by thinkers such as Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen and Karl Löwith in the early twentieth century. The main issues here are: man's status as part of nature or as ‘radically divorced’ from nature; the possibility of objective knowledge of man versus the epistemological status of human ‘meaning’; the view of knowledge as abstraction versus ‘concrete’ or ‘lived’ experience. Within these parameters the article contrasts Taylor's emphasis on ‘engaged’ agency, embedded in discourses, bodies and predispositions, with Blumenberg's sense of our ‘indirect’ relation to reality: ‘delayed, selective, and above all “metaphorical”’. It concludes that each position may be traced back to a key strand in philosophical anthropology: the one emphasising man's unique freedom, the other that sees man's grasp of reality as uniquely interwoven with a background of meanings.