I Hurt, Therefore I Am: Descartes with Blumenberg (and Job)

Abstract

In my chapter, I read Descartes as a modern Job and see the Cartesian process of methodical doubt as the case of what Jewish theology calls “lamentation”: An existential outburst of doubt and anxiety, which inevitably leads to crisis in the relation between God Creator and his creature. The only thinker to spot this presence in Descartes was Hans Blumenberg. In the crucial chapter of The Legitimacy, “Theological Absolutism and Human Self-Assertion”, which culminates in the famous nominalist reading of Cartesian hyperbolic doubt, Blumenberg portrays Descartes as the first modern man in search of self-assertion-with or without God.