Abstract

This article compares Sartre’s and Blumenberg’s theoretical approaches to the phenomena of shame and human attention, especially with reference to Sartre’s ontological and Blumenberg’s anthropological notion of visibility. In Sartre’s ontological view, our visibility as such gives rise to shame whereas Blumenberg maintains that this phenomenon can be adequately dealt with only with respect to specific (and contingent) anthropological conditions. Consequently, Blumenberg’s post-phenomenological philosophy of human visibility does not proceed any longer ‘back to the things themselves’. Instead, it draws on anthropological descriptions of what it means to become visible in our mundane existence. In this respect, everything depends on our attention and on our attention to attention as such.