Abstract
The aim of this article is to compare Blumenberg’s reflections on the problem of technicisation in Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter Aspekten der Phänomenologie (1963) with some of his reflections on technology more than ten years earlier, in an article entitled Das Verhältnis von Natur und Technik als philosophisches Problem (1951). In this way, the paper questions some fundamental aspects of Blumenberg’s phenomenological reflection on the problem of the Lebenswelt (world of life), suggesting how this concept serves to ground anthropologically that process of destruction of the presumed naturalness of the world that Blumenberg had previously defined in relation to the crucial historical role of Christianity. In such way, the article will explain the structural use of the theological metaphor (the paradise, the fall, the “absolutism” of reality) for Blumenberg’s anthropological phenomenology, and it will describe it as a consequence of the attempt to deconstruct any thesis of secularisation that considers modernity indebted to its Christian roots.