Hans Blumenberg’s Metaphorological Critique of Secularization

Abstract

Classical secularization theory has fragmented, weakening its teleological claims, yet a methodological problem remains: how can recurrent correspondences between theological and secular formations be explained without presupposing that a religious substance survives historical change? This article reconstructs Hans Blumenberg’s response as, in the first instance, a metaphorological critique. Metaphorology is treated not as the interpretation of decorative language but as a form of historical semantics that uncovers the nonconceptual models through which concepts acquire orientation and normative force. Applied to “secularization,” it reveals that the formula “B is the secularization of A” remains governed by a concealed juridical background metaphor of property, expropriation, debt, and rightful ownership. This metaphor converts genealogy into a verdict on legitimacy before historical analysis has begun. Against that model, Blumenberg’s concept of reoccupation replaces the transposition of theological substance with the recurrence of functional positions within historically changing systems of questions and answers. The article brings this metaphorological–functional framework into dialogue with multiple secularities and nonreligion studies, arguing that Blumenberg’s “vacant answer positions” and the sociological notion of “reference problems” articulate complementary forms of problem-oriented analysis, the one explaining why positions persist, the other supplying the comparative cases. Revisiting Blumenberg’s account of modern self-assertion, it further argues that his strongest contribution is not an exclusive genealogy of modernity but a constraint on what genealogical descent may legitimately establish. The article thus recasts metaphorology as a methodological audit of the figurative models embedded in historical explanation, and treats reoccupation as a comparative and empirically testable heuristic rather than a universal law. The resulting approach enables religious studies to analyze sacred–secular transformations as changes in orientation, function, and response—continuity without identity, novelty without an absolute beginning, and comparison without substantialism.