The hermeneutic scepticism of Hans Blumenberg and the metaphor of legibility and decipherment in the Baroque thought of Baltasar Gracián

Abstract

The general aim of this paper is to study the relations established between the metaphor of the legibility of the world, as developed by Hans Blumenberg in his hermeneutic metaphorology, and the notions of "encrypted world" and "decipherment", as presented in a general way in the baroque thought of Baltasar Gracián, and more specifically in his work El Criticón. In order to do so, it will be necessary to emphasise the anthropological and rhetorical turn that Blumenberg's philosophy entails. Metaphor and myth, as the central axes of this turn, imply the distancing of reality from any kind of absolutism and the possibility of turning the world into something accessible and legible. In the same way, in Gracián's Hispanic baroque, the world has been subjected to an emptying of meaning, becoming enveloped in a halo of deception that encrypts it and calls for the philosophical, moral and vital task of deciphering it. This paper assesses the connections and divergences between these two hermeneutic approaches.