TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY: Intellectual Heroes and Key Themes

1. TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY: Intellectual Heroes and Key Themes

2. LECTURES • The pariah as rebel. • The hope of the hopeless. • Message in a bottle. • Absolute free. • Genealogy as critique. • Human flourishing.

3. THE HOPE OF THE HOPELESS

4. 1. PRISMATIC THINKING How to do justice to the tensions between experiences and reflections? 2. ARCADES AND REPRODUCTIONS What is the relation between art and society? 3. MEMORY AND SADNESS Should the past be a part of the present?

5. 1. PRISMATIC THINKING

6. WALTER BENJAMIN BIOGRAPHICAL DATA: • 1892: Born July 15, in Berlin. • 1902-1912: Visits a secondary school. • 1912-1915: Studies philosophy in Freiburg and Berlin. • 1914: President of a student association. • 1915-1917: Studies philosophy in München; becomes a friend of Gerhard Scholem. • 1917: Marriage to Dora Pollak. • 1917-1919: Studies philosophy in Bern. • 1918: Birth of his son Stefan; becomes a friend of Ernst Bloch. • 1919: Phd summa cum laude. • 1924: Starts an affair with Asja Lacis. • 1925: Can’t defend his habilitation thesis. • 1929: Cooperation with Bertolt Brecht. • 1933: Starts to work for the ‘Institut für Sozialforschung’ (of the Frankfurt School). • 1939: For a while in a concentration camp Clos St. Joseph in Nevers. • 1940: Died September 27, in Port-Bou.

7. MAJOR WORKS • Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (1919). • Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (1924). • Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928). • Einbahnstraße (1928). • Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (1932 [published posthumously]). • Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1936). • Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1940 [published posthumously]). • Das Passagen-Werk (1927-1940 [unfinished and published posthumously]).

8. HEURISTIC VALUE • Literature (Bertolt Brecht amongst others). • Philosophy (Theodor W. Adorno amongst others). • Media Studies (Martin Seel amongst others). • Literary studies (George Steiner amongst others). • Art (Dani Karavan amongst others). • Theology (Gerhard Scholem amongst others).

9. PHILOSOPHICAL STYLE • Dominant genre in Benjamin’s philosophy > essay [tradition initiated by Michel de Montaigne]. • Different intellectual activities > essay, translations, radio-programmes. • Style > constructions of rearranged fragments, stories, etc. • Philosophy as a sensuous representation of the truth. • Prismatic thinking > correspondence between the micro cosmos and the macro cosmos, i.e. the disclosure of the world via a focus on its particular elements. • Combination of Marxism and Jewish mysticism. • Marxism > historical materialism. • Jewish mysticism > messianism.

10. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM • Marxism > emancipatory politics based upon the study of the historical transformations of the material circumstances in which people live. • Benjamin tries to understand these transformations via the study of specific oppositions: experience vs. adventure; storytelling vs. the dissemination of information; auratic art vs. non-auratic art. • These oppositions are not absolute, but should be used to scrutinize the dialectical mediation between them. • Whereas reflection is a core concept in traditional philosophy, Benjamin argues that the concept of experience should have the same status. • Philosophy is about the tensions between experiences and reflections. • Point of departure in Benjamin’s philosophy: reflection (a la Kant’s critical inquiry) on ones own experiences.

11. ADVENTURE AND EXPERIENCE • Benjamin argues that it is important to make a distinction between adventure and experience. • Adventure (Erlebnis) > that what an actor can control; isolated events registered en passant; belongs more to a modern society with a dispersed attention. • Experience (Erfahrung) > that what cannot be controlled; impressive events that sink in; belongs more to a traditional society with a concentrated attention for human and non-human beings. • Experience is repressed by adventure. • An increase of the replacement of storytelling by the dissemination of information.

13. THE REHABILITATION OF THE ALLEGORY • Benjamin’s philosophy is a critical reflection of the transition from a traditional to a modern culture. • He argues that an allegoric perspective is inevitably in order to understand this transition. • This implies a deconstruction of the hierarchy between the symbol and the allegory in traditional aesthetics. • Due to romanticism (±1800) the symbol is declared as vivid and the allegory as dead. • Traditional aesthetics > the essence of a piece of art is an idea shown as a symbol that reconciles the immanent and the transcendent, the profane and the sacral. • In his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [Origin of the German Morning-Play] Benjamin rehabilitates the allegory.

14. THE ALLEGORIC PERSPECTIVE • Benjamin’s analysis of the German mourning-play of the 17th century helps him to criticize traditional aesthetics. • Because a symbol reconciles the immanent and the transcendent it cannot do justice to the ruptures and the mourning that is inherent to history. • Allegory > the representation of an immaterial world of ideas by a material world of things (for instance an abstract idea as time represented by a grey old man with a scythe and an hourglass. • It’s up to those who perceive an allegory to give meaning to the lifeless human and non-human beings that are represented. • The allegory gives - in comparison to the symbol – a wider scope of different interpretations.

15. BEYOND TRADITIONAL AESTHETICS • The allegory that underlies the German mourning-play undermines the beautiful appearance (schönen Schein) of traditional aesthetics and gives expression to melancholy. • Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia (1514) can be interpreted as a critique of traditional aesthetics, because it transcends the beautiful appearance and reflects on the meaning of things past. • With her allegorical gaze on the lifeless things the angel tries to figure out what the meaning of the passing time is. • Her melancholy (i.e. sadness) is in sharp contrast to the reconciling perspective of traditional aesthetics.

16. 2. ARCADES AND REPRODUCTIONS

17. THE ARCADES PROJECT • Benjamin applies the allegoric perspective himself in is magnum opus: the Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk). • It is an analysis of the city life of Paris in the 19th century. • The iron-and-glass covered arcades are the result of Haussmann’s renovation of Paris. • Prismatic aspect > the inner-outer world of the arcades mirror the world at large.

18. THE CAPITAL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY • The Arcades Project consists of fragments, quotes, short essays about what Benjamin called ‘the capital of the “nineteenth century’. • Focus on the ruptures in the cultural history of the city should clarify the differences between the traditional and the modern society.

19. A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT • The Arcades Project is a history of the present (cf. Foucault), because it unravels the origins of the crisis people have face nowadays. • It is a materialist historiography with a political intent that relates ‘then’ and ‘now’. • The experience of metropolitan capitalism by the flaneur, the prostitutes, the gambler the merchants and others who visited the arcades unravels what many people have to face in the present. • The present is a time of transition and crisis. • Benjamin wants the reader of the Arcades Project to experience the crisis of experience. • It is the commodity form that more and more human and non-human beings got that underlies the crisis of experience.

20. RUPTURES • The history of the present should show the ruptures, i.e. the (dis)continuities in culture. • Modern culture > the urge of a permanent renewal of everything. • Charles Baudelaire > the poet who gives expression to this urge. • Dialectical images have to show the disruption of modernity. • These images present the destructive and utopian features of modern culture.

21. THE LOST AURA • The world of art changed because of modern reproduction techniques. • Examples: photography and film. • Technical reproducibility > new possibilities for collective experiences. • Traditional art lost its aura. • Aura > the manifestation of the uniqueness of a piece of art. • Modern art lacks the aura of the original.

22. AESTHECIZED POLITICS • The relation between art and politicis changed. • The differentiation of cultural spheres: art, morality and science. • Shift in the relation between art and politics. • Aestheticized politics > de-differentiation. • Example: Stalinism and Fascism. • Stalinism and Fascism try to reintroduce auratic art. • However, art should be “completely useless for the purposes of fascism.”

23. 3. MEMORY AND SADNESS

24. TWO FORMS OF CRITIQUE • Jürgen Habermas argues that Benjamin’s philosophy consists of two forms of critique: 1. Making someone conscious about something. 2. Saving something. • The first form of critique has two directions: 1. Is > telling the truth. 2. Ought > telling how the world should look like. • The second form of critique has also two directions: 1. Save what shouldn’t be lost. 2. Giving a voice to human dignity.

25. MESSIANISM • Marxism is infected by the ideology of progress. • The historical time should not be based on the traditional scheme of past, present and future, but on the relations between ‘then’ and ‘now’. • Benjamin has a messianic understanding of history > the dream of a fulfilled infinity yet to come. • Aim: “to bring the present into a critical state.”

26. ANGELUS NOVUS “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

27. POLITICS OF MEMORY • Antidote to the belief in historical progress > a politics of memory. • Central question: which responsibility do we have towards those who suffered in the past? • ‘Eingedenken’ > to replace oneself in the position of those who suffered because of marginalisation, repression and exploitation.

28. “It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.” Walter Benjamin

29. RECOMMENDED • Das Passagen-Werk(1958) [translations in several languages]. • Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit [translations in several languages]. • Susan Buck-MorssElisabeth, The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989)].