Abstract

Hans Blumenberg’s late idea of thoughtfulness, which the philosopher presented as an acceptance speech on the occasion of the Sigmund Freud Prize for Scientific Prose awarded to him in 1981, formulates a (seemingly) simple claim: thoughtfulness means a reduction of the self-evident – beyond the limiting horizon of methodological regulations and conceptuality. But how can we dismantle what is self-evident? How can we describe what is reminiscent of the life-world in the preliminary stage of a concept? This article takes up these open questions and, based on them, attempts to take thoughtfulness seriously as a poietic form of thinking. It becomes clear that Blumenberg’s thoughtfulness is not merely the (self-)reflective reaction to the »speech situation« of a philosophy committed to unambiguity. Rather, it relies – conversely – on the philosophical production of ambiguity.