Hans Blumenberg in the cave. Towards a “sociological” solution of an absolute metaphor

This paper concerns a particular image, namely the cave, whose various versions recur throughout the history of Western thought. Hans Blumenberg spent great effort analyzing this metaphor and its byways, drowning from it the endless meanings of an anthropological condition. Object of the present article is to deepen Blumenberg‘s approach, and to propose a genealogy of it, which it will help us to discover other caves and, perhaps, a kind of exit. Yet this exit is not an intellectual individualistic escapism, but a practical political Stimmung, that is attention.