INSIDE THE ROMANTICIST EPISTEME 61 characterised by its anthropocentrism and celebration of a break with the past, the romanticist celebration of human will, autonomy, of an emerging human spirit, the mystique of the artistic self-creation and individual genius etc., marks the consummation of that cultural system. The romanticist celebrations of the self grounded and irreducible expression of human creativity have in innumerable guises been the constant critical companion of positivist, materialist, teleological and other universalist schemes.2 Hence, I venture that current debates always-already are posited upon the tension between these two epistemes, or, rather, mutually reproducing discursive fields whose recurrent intermixtures and re-differentiations remain a crucial intellectual deep structure of modern western thought. THE CONCEPTUAL GRAMMAR OF ROMANTICISM In his admirable work The Legitimacy of the Modern Age Hans Blumenberg proposes to see the ostensible continuities in intellectual history across otherwise radical ruptures in the socio-historical fabric as the effect of the inheritance of problematics already structured by intellectual labour of an earlier age. Every epoch in vents a set of dominant discourses and intellectual problematics which, Blumenberg argues, do not simply evaporate as the socio-historical world changes. They remain in intellectual history as traces, as problematics, as intellectual positions—maybe left vacant as older beliefs or ideologies loose validity—but still present as 'a mortgage of prescribed questions that cannot simply be set aside or left unoccupied . .. The modern age's readiness to accept as its 6wn obligation to pay off goes a long way towards explaining its intellectual history'.3 Blumenberg terms this movement towards answering the questions posited by a previous generation or age as 'reoccupations' of the vacant positions in the intellectual landscape. Although Blumenberg's main concern is to explain more precisely how modern ideological discourses break off from and yet are deeply structured by Christian eschatology and cosmology, I believe the logic he outlines betweeh 'positions' and incessant 'reoccupations' also can be applied to the intellectual trajectory of modern philosophy and epistemology in the social sciences. Modernity was a n'ever coherent project, and Enlightenment rationalism was neither unified nor uncontested. Modernity, which is the name we ex post give to the effects of contingent historical combinations of disjunctive economic, social and cultural processes in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards, was almost from the outset marked by a split intellectual horizon. Rationalist classicism and romantic historicism emerged as competing epistemological fields, partially overlapping, feeding upon each other, while simultaneously hardening each others stances. The field of oppositions developing