self-affirmation of culture against the Christian tradition." Wolfhart Pannenberg, a student of Löwith, has continued the debate against Blumenberg. In his later works (Work on Myth, Out of the Cave) Blumenberg, guided by Arnold Gehlen's view of man as a frail and finite being in need of certain auxiliary ideas in order to face the "Absolutism of Reality" and its overwhelming power, increasingly underlined the anthropological background of his ideas: he treated myth and metaphor as a functional equivalent to the distancing, orientational and relieving value of institutions as understood by Gehlen. This context is of decisive importance for Blumenberg's idea of absolute metaphors. Whereas metaphors originally were a means of illustrating the reality of an issue, giving form to understanding, they were later to tend towards a separate existence, in the sciences as elsewhere. This phenomenon may range from the attempt to fully explicate the metaphor while losing sight of its illustrative function, to the experience of becoming immersed in metaphors influencing the seeming logicality of conclusions. The idea of 'absolute metaphors' turns out to be of decisive importance for the ideas of a culture, such as the metaphor of light as truth in Neo-Platonism, to be found in the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The critical history of concepts may thus serve the depotentiation of metaphorical power. Blumenberg did, however, also warn his readers not to confound the critical deconstruction of myth with the programmatical belief in the overcoming of any mythology. Reflecting his studies of Husserl, Blumenberg's work concludes that in the last resort our potential scientific enlightenment finds its own subjective and anthropological limit in the fact that we are constantly falling back upon the imagery of our contemplations. Works Hans Blumenberg is the author of: (1947) Contributions to the problem of the originality of the medieval-scholastic ontology (doctoral thesis, unpublished). (1950) The ontological distance. An investigation into the crisis of Husserl's phenomenology (habilitation thesis, unpublished). (1966) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1975) The Genesis of the Copernican World (1979) The Legibility of the World (1979) Work on Myth (1986) Lifetime and world time (1987) Care Crosses the River (1993) St Matthew Passion Works in English translation The Readability of the World. Trans. Robert Savage and David Roberts. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2022. . St. Matthew Passion. Trans. Helmut Müller-Sievers and Paul Fleming. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2021. . History, Metaphors, Fables: A