ABSTRACT
Hans Blumenberg argues that the Enlightenment philosophers unequivocally accepted Descartes’ approach as foundational, and incorporated it in to their own account of the historical corning in to being of ‘rational self-consciousness’. The Modern age from the Enlightenment to the present is characterised as the age in which ‘reason’ the ‘natural vocation of man definitively prevailed’. Blumenberg points out some of the difficulties of the history of the foundations of the Enlightenment and the Modern age. The ‘analysed’ subject as Foucault suggests is the transparent subject par excellence! Moreover the analysis is undertaken by restoring to the analysand their true biographical history. In this chapter, the author argues that in today’s debate there is a blind spot in relation to the subject that does not allow the subject to be put into question. He traces this back to the emergence of the history of ideas in the work of Collingwood, Lovejoy and Freud.
