Having just finished The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, I made a list of some of the dichotomies he treats. There are a lot of them, and the major headache of the book came from trying to keep their shifting relations in mind all at once. Blumenberg isn’t the sort to ever claim a definitive sequence or priority of concepts and their interactions, so the various ideologies treated in the book, from Platonism all the way to Feuerbach and (briefly) Freud, each create their own correlations between these concepts. Occasionally, some of the dichotomies collapse entirely, as with Nicholas of Cusa’s attempt to reconcile the finitude of the Incarnation with the infinity of God.

  • Gnosticism vs Scholasticism (especially voluntarism)

  • Holism vs subject/object duality

  • Immanence vs transcendence

  • Progress vs stasis/circularity

  • Perfection vs imperfection

  • Infinite vs finite

  • Knowledge vs morality

  • Knowledge-seeking vs happiness

  • Curiosity vs resignation

  • Geocentrism vs Copernicanism

  • Completeness vs incompleteness

  • Public vs private/secret/invisible

  • Autonomy vs indifference

  • Platonic realism vs nominalism

  • Form vs substance

Some disparate philosophies get combined on one side or another at times. Skepticism, stoicism, and Epicureanism, contra Hegel, are all treated as forms of resignation against pursuing knowledge.