Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age: Part III, Chapter 11, "The Integration into Anthropology: Feuerbach and Freud"

With the triumph of theoretical curiosity, Blumenberg sees its field of objects expanding from nature to other realms.

The rise of a species of popular curiosity is introduced through anecdotes of the tribulations of Alexander von Humboldt.

Feuerbach -- fundamental conception is "knowledge drive" -- temporal rather than spatial conception of the unknown which man's curiosity seeks to uncover -- anticipation. Hyperbolic and exaggerated formulations serve the function of making knowledge possible. Theology as a hyperbolic anthropology. Immortality as displacement of the gaining of knowledge within history to a quasi-spatial state of perfection in which no further knowledge remains to be achieved.

Immortality as conceived of by the Enlightenment and German Classicism seeks to bridge the gap between what will be known by mankind and what can be known by an individual man. Feuerbach insists on retaining consciousness of the gap. For Feuerbach, individuals are only agents in the progress of knowledge, not the loci of its completion. Individuals sense the gap between what they know and what can be known and feel a drive to close it, even though this cannot be completely achieved.

For Feuerbach, man's knowledge drive is not concerned with things beyond human comprehension, it is concerned with what man can know but doesn't yet know.

Feuerbach uses story of Copernicus' desire to actually see Mercury to illustrate function of reason and knowledge as an anticipation of feeling and sense rather than as a completion of them.

Need as correlate of action and fulfillment for Feuerbach. Knowledge drive seeks to possess its object, at least imaginatively -- this is a specific form of the happiness drive, which seeks power and ownership. Happiness drive as the "drive of drives."

Freud - curiosity as redirection of fundamental libidinal impulse -- in example of Leonardo, both a sublimation and an obsessive regression from primary sublimation (of libido into artistic creation).

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: Chapter 1, "Off Center"

There is greater political polarization almost entirely because the Republican Party has become more extreme at all levels: the base of party activists, the rank and file congressional membership, the presidency, and the top political bosses and consultants. There has not been a corresponding trend among Democratic Party activists and members of Congress. Democratic activists have not become particularly more liberal, and Democratic members of Congress only slightly so.

Nor is there a corresponding trend among the public at large. Polling shows that the public has grown neither more polarized nor more conservative. Furthermore, the polling data probably understates the gap between the increasingly radical Republican party and the electorate. This is because of the somewhat narrow range of issues polled and because of the ability of focused Republican political campaigns to shape opinion on a few issues.

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: Introduction

Republicans have won recent elections by very narrow margins. Public opinion is evenly divided. Nevertheless, Republicans have succeeded in enacting an ideologically extreme agenda.

Traditional view is that the large proportion of politically moderate voters would weed out political extremists. But Republicans no longer fear the median voter, because voters are increasingly in the dark about the content of policies. Media coverage focuses on personalities, and the Republican Party controls the legislative agenda and designs its policies with the objective of concealing their real effect on the public. The policies are also designed to shape and restrict future policy choices by stealth. (The authors call these twin innovations "backlash insurance.") The winnowing of political hopefuls is increasingly in the hands of a small minority of rich contributors and highly organized ideological groups. Along with the rise of safe seats, this makes intraparty competition the main concern of many Republicans, thus driving them to more extremist politics. The Republican Party leadership has also successfully centralized authority within the party.

Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Part III, Chapter 10, "Curiosity and the Claim to Happiness:Voltaire to Kant"

Descartes' objectivization of theoretical curiosity, turning it into an impersonal process, severs the link between the quest for knowledge and individual happiness. The search for knowledge takes on, for the individual (as Nietzsche was later to insist), the character of renunciation. Descartes still saw the process of inquiry itself as discovering the conditions for human happiness in the near future, since he envisioned the totality of knowledge as finite. But the relation becomes more problematic when, as in Voltaire, possible knowledge is taken to be unlimited: then knowledge can be seen as never providing a complete material basis for happiness, which in any case is primarily a matter of correct behavior rather than total knowledge.

Maupertuis was the exponent of an organized and aggressive curiosity. He conceived and organized research projects of vast scope. He envisioned curiosity driving not just the collecting and recording of unusual things and events, but also the creation of them. He also proselytized against limits to investigations, even urging experiments on human beings.

Maupertuis' cosmology, like Leibniz's, views the world as a continuum of beings. But for Maupertuis this order has been destroyed by losses and extinctions. Maupertuis theory of curiosity follows from this. If the continuum of beings still existed and was accessible, then knowledge of the nature of reality would be immediate and observational. Man's insatiable curiosity is the consequence of this lack of immediate accessibility of the order of beings (and also of the inaccessibility of all things in time because of man's finite existence).

For Rousseau, the conflict that Voltaire sees between man's happiness and his unlimited pretensions to knowledge simply does not exist in man's original state. He depicts a natural condition that is not afflicted by curiosity, where consciousness is so immediate that the level of knowledge required for curiosity does not exist. There is a mystery here about what could disturb this equilibrium and begin the spiral of curiosity and knowledge. In any case, it is a picture that lacks critical force because Rousseau acknowledges that the process of curiosity, once set in motion, is irreversible.

Rousseau's pragmatic view of truth -- taking off from Democritus' image of truth having taken up hiding in a well -- there are many paths to error, so the pursuit of truth is more likely to fail than succeed, and it is likely that the truth would not be well used in any case.


Hermann Reimarius gives positive value to truth's lack of perspicuousness. He holds that this encourages effort and work to make discovery, which is better for man's character. Similar s Hume, who sees the exertion involved in the pursuit of truth as productive of pleasure in its own right, more than any result from the pursuit.


Lessing, following this path, holds out ceaseless striving for truth rather than contemplation as the ideal of human fulfillment. Curiosity (along with ambition) is the stimulus for this striving, and thus premature revelation of truth to others, which stunts their curiosity, is an actual hindrance to fulfillment.

Lichtenberg sees man as adapted to asking and pursuing causal knowledge of nature, but unable to grasp ultimate nature either of the external world or himself. The value of the pursuit of knowledge lies in the discovery of this boundary and the use of this discovery to orient understanding to the things over which man can actually have power.

Kant takes the boundary or limit of reason as itself the pre-eminent object of reason. The appetite of reason takes it beyond the limit of what it is capable of knowing (this is 'passive,' which is to say uncritical, reason). Enlightenment consists in the self-imposition on reason of limits to its aspirations, to exclude objects that are outside its grasp. At the onset of his critical phase, Kant is optimistic about a fairly rapid triumph of public enlightenment. He comes to see this expectation as premature, and increasingly accommodates himself to a public regulation of reason.

Kant demolishes the Augustinean dichotomy between self-knowledge and theoretical curiosity. He sets the understanding of the bounds and conditions of human knowledge itself as the object of theoretical curiosity.