Luther and Modernity: Reiner Schürmann’s Topology of the Modern in Broken Hegemonies

Prevailing philosophical genealogies of modernity trace its origin to Descartes's metaphysics of representation. This is true of both Hegel and Heidegger. By contrast, Reiner Schurmann's Broken Hegemonies links modernity to the theological thinking of Martin Luther. I ask what is at stake philosophically in this difference. What Schurmann's reading shows is that, under the figure of a passive transcendentalism, Luther inaugurates the epoch in which self-consciousness reigns as an ultimate principle. The broader importance of Schurmann's reading is to identify a "recessed" and "obedient" side of modernity —a side tragically and covertly linked to its more familiar self-assertive side. Schurmann's re-situating of modernity allows a crucial corrective to many contemporary efforts at a critique of the modern. In particular, it suggests that to restrict one's critique of modernity to the critique of representational or egological consciousness (as happens for example in Heidegger, Levinas and Marion) is to run the risk of a repetition of its obedient, recessed side.