Autoconservazione e inerzia. Blumenberg lettore di Spinoza e la costituzione della razionalità moderna

In the essay entitled Selbsterhaltung und Beharrung: Zur Konstitution der neuzeitlichen Razionalität (1969), Hans Blumenberg delved further into the idea of «self-conservation». Blumenberg reads the concept of self-affirmation as a philosophical condensation of the seventeenth and eighteenth century scientific debate on the principle of inertia, opposing it, following the meaning given by Spinoza to the verb perseverare. As a principle of Spinoza’s physics, the conatus is distinguished by its intransitive way of operating, indicating as it does an activity that indefinitely conserves itself, unhinged from God’s transitive conservatio of the world. As the principle itself underlying modern rationality, the inertia of perseverare compensates the reactive aspect of self-affirmation in the form of a power turned upon itself.