“The quote in the subject line is from Hans Blumenberg’s magisterial and absurdly difficult book “The Legitimacy of the Modern Age”. I take it out and try to work with it when I’m stumped on something else and need my problems to look easier. It’s sort of a book about the relationship between rupture and progress, proposing that passive obstacles to theoretical curiosity had been restraining that foundation to modernity since the age of Socrates. Translated, the line above means, “It is curiosity, which draws the attention of the curious.” The enthusiasm for curiosity in the modern age is, if I understand it correctly, a self-assertion and not a break with the past.”
