Hans Blumenberg, “Light as Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by D. M. Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30–54. Blumenberg recounts the long history of the use of metaphors of light and dark, and the shifting associations each carried. Many creation myths and religious texts ascribe light to good, creation, and existence; darkness is associated with bad, nothingness, and absence. The historical associations of light are also explored through the use of caves to express isolation, ranging from Plato's cave of false reality, to the Gnostic light of divine revelation in the monastic cell, to the light of truth and reason versus the darkness of ignorance in the Enlightenment.
