His last works, especially "Care Crosses the River" (Die Sorge geht über den Fluss), are attempts to apprehend human reality through its metaphors and involuntary expressions.
Hans Blumenberg finished his university entrance exam in 1939 at the Katharineum zu Lübeck, as the only student receiving the grade Auszeichnung ("Distinguished").
[3] Consequently, the theme of finite life and limited time as a hurdle for scholasticism recurs frequently in Part 2 of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (German: Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 1966).
Blumenberg's work was of a predominantly historical nature, characterized by his great philosophical and theological learning, and by the precision and pointedness of his writing style.
According to Blumenberg, metaphors of this kind, such as "the naked truth", are to be considered a fundamental aspect of philosophical discourse that cannot be replaced by concepts and thus brought back essentially to logic.
Inspired by (amongst others) Ernst Cassirer's functional perspective on the history of ideas and philosophy, and the concomitant view of a rearrangement within the spiritual relationships specific to an epoch, Blumenberg rejects the substantialism of historical continuity — fundamental to the so-called "theorem of secularisation" – according to which the conceptual systems of modernity are not considered something new, but a simple becoming mundane of the theological principles of Scholasticism.
[6] 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.
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.