Sunday, November 22, 2020

Reflecting on Reflective Judgments and Kant's Attempt to Reconcile His First and Second Critiques

Immanuel Kant famously argued that the categories of cause and substance could only apply to the world of empirical experience.  The pure concepts of the understanding unite the manifold of intuition in ways that deliver to us objects and events in space and time causally connectable to other objects and events.  

To attempt to think metaphysical reality using the categories of cause and substance is, for Kant, to misapply these  concepts beyond the bounds of their proper application.  When these concepts no longer apply to intuitions -- that is to the spatio-temporal particulars resulting in the application of "pure forms of sensibility" of space and time to the realm of things in themselves -- then their use eventuates in a "transcendental subreption" or "transcendental illusion" of thinking metaphysical reality must be structured in the ways in which our thinking conceives this reality. 

By the conclusion of the First Critique, Kant's readers realize that he has indeed provided the necessary philosophical framework to underpin Newtonian mechanics. Instead of holding that substances and causes are in the world apart from human cognition -- and thus being susceptible to the skeptical arguments of David Hume -- Kant places them solidly within the human epistemological domain. While whatever exists apart from us, exists apart from our awareness, perception, conception and language, the empirical order clearly does not. Apart from human beings, there would be no spatio-temporal particulars and no substances which our concepts synthesize from the manifold of sensibility.  The phenomenal world, the only world we can know empirically, is nicely ordered causally because we ourselves apply the category of causality and accordingly order the world causally before we empirically investigate it.  

Kant believes that the only way to save empiricism -- and thus to be an empirical realist -- is to be a transcendental idealist.  If space, time, substantiality and causality were not denizens of our epistemic equipment, the skeptical arguments would finally win the day, and the universality and necessity trumpeted by Newton in his mechanism could never be ultimately justified. In order to have a nature like Newton's, one needed to adopt a transcendental position like Kant's. 

So the story at the end of Kant's First Critique is that nature is closed under the operation of physical causality.  Physical entities, and the events in which they are ingredient, are causally related among themselves. There are no uncaused physical events, and no physical events causing non-physical events. There is no "free play" in the universe. In order to save Newtonian mechanics, Kant gives us an underlying determinism of a mechanical kind. The world of nature must conform to a deterministic mechanism, because our epistemological equipment process the world in this way.  All this is clear. 

But Kant did not want to stop writing books after the Critique of Pure Reason.  In his Critique of Practical Reason, he argues that the things in themselves, which are only mediatedly accessible through knowing the phenomenal world in the First Critique, are immediately and nominally accessible through an encounter with duty and the moral law in the Second Critique. Now the realm of freedom, responsibility and dignity are opened to human beings; we already are living noumenal reality in our moral experience.  While Kant banishes freedom in the First Critique, he gives it back in the Second Critique. The practical postulates of God, immortality and freedom of the Second Critique have no echo in the First Critique.  While the latter is the precondition for encounter with the moral law itself, both God and immortality are postulates needed for a complete moral theory, a theory in which the summum bonum is obtainable, i.e., the "highest good" wherein those doing their virtue and thus "worthy of happiness," can be, in fact, recipients of that happiness. 

Prima facie, the results of the first two Critiques seem to be in tension with each other.  How can a human being with a body possibly have free moral experience when the bodies in and through which that moral experience is had are denizens of the phenomenal realm and its mechanistic determinism? Nobody can do the right thing, it seems, without an act that is somehow physically expressed.  One cannot help a little old lady across the street without a body.  One cannot bring about the good if one cannot bring about anything at all. If nature is the realm of the bodily, and human beings have bodies and presumably act in and through them, then how can one ever do that which is better than some other act. If the phenomenal realm is the realm of "one cannot do other than one did do," and empirical reality is coextensive with the phenomenal, and if human freedom is "one can do other than what one did," then how can freedom be exercised for coporeal human beings?  If one do other than what one does do, then deterministic mechanism is false, and if physical entities cannot do other than what they do, then human freedom is impossible. 

Fortunately, Kant wrote another book, one that is not read as often by philosophers these days, but nonetheless must appear within the top 100 of philosophical classics. This book is entitled Der Kritik der Urteilskraft, translated as The Critique of Judgment, though a better translation would have been The Critique of the Power of Judgment.  In the Introduction to this book, Kant claims that he wishes to reconcile the two earlier Critiques, and introduces the notion of a reflective judgment.  Unlike a determining judgment which operates determinately to think a given particular under a given universal, the reflective judgment is one wherein their is freedom to think a universal on the basis of the particular.  It provides, as it were, some "free play" in understanding the particular.  After introducing this, Kant launches into a wide-ranging and very famous discussion of the notion of beauty and related concepts, followed by a discussion of teleology and purpose in their relationship to the aesthetic.  Many readers become frustrated in the The Critique of Judgment because it does not seem that Kant ever gets around to providing a sustained argument for what is promised: a reconciling of the results of the first two Critiques.  

It is possible, however, to provide an overview of his intended "solution." The relevant sections of the Critique are these: #8 and #9 in the Introduction, and #70 - #85 in the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment and the Methodology of Teleological Judgment.   

In #70 Kant distinguishes reflective and constitutive antinomies.   

  • Thesis of reflective judgment: "All production of material things and their forms must be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws."
  • Antithesis of reflective judgement: "Some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." 
  • Thesis of constitutive judgment: "All production of material things is possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." 
  • Antithesis of constitutive judgment: "Some production of material things in not possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." (Pluher, 267, KU 367).

 Kant points out the the thesis and antithesis of a constitutive judgment are antinomies or contradictories, i.e., the truth of one entails the falsity of the other.  In other words, they cannot both be true at the same time.  But Kant does not believe that the first two statements are contradictory: 

But if we consider instead the two maxims of a power of judgment that reflects [i.e., the first thesis and antithesis above], the first of these two maxims does in fact not contradict [the second] at all. For if I say that I must judge all events in material nature, and hence also all the forms that are its products, in terms of merely mechanical laws as to [how] they are possible, then I am not saying that there are possible in terms of mechanical laws alone (i.e., even if no other kind of causality comes in).  Rather, I am only pointing out that I ought always to reflect on these events and forms in terms of the principle of the mere mechanism of nature, and hence ought to investigate this principle as far as I can, because unless we presuppose it in our investigation [of nature] we can have no cognition of nature at all in the proper sense of the term" (267-68, 387-88).

What is going on here?  

Clearly, Kant is understanding a reflective judgment to be quite different than a determining or constituting judgment.  In the First Critique, Kant had laid out the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such -- an experiencing of empirical nature in Newtonian ways -- as the determining judgments under which intuitions fall.  The result is a mechanistic determinism.  But does Kant's move to a reflective judgment allow him to escape the charge that just as there is a contradiction between the thesis and antithesis of a constitutive (determining) judgment, so there is a contradiction between the thesis and antithesis of a reflective judgment? Is this not a case of what is good for the goose is good for the gander? 

The key to holding that there is no antinomy in the reflective judgment rests upon the ability of the thinker to recognize that the reflective principles in question are heuristic, that far from "carving the beast of reality at its joints" (Plato), they simply are principle by which we might think nature. We attempt to see nature as entirely deterministic, but it is possible that that we adopt a different principle for regions of our empirical investigations.  (Think of how difficult it would be actually to give a mechanistic/deterministic account of beavers building a dam.  One could not use the category of final causality or employ any implicit purposeful functionalistic explanations, e.g, the beavers are acting this way "in order to" bring about some state of affairs.)  It might allow us to understand more about nature to employ the reflective judgment that "some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws." Something more is needed. 

Kant reconciles the two reflective judgments because there is supersensible ground allowing both judgments to be used heuristically, if not descriptively.  Kant writes: 

If we are to have a principle that makes it possible to reconcile the mechanical and the teleological principles by which we judge nature, then we must posit this further principle in something that lies beyond both (and hence also beyond any possible empirical presentation of nature), but that nonetheless contains the basis of nature, namely, we must posit it in the supersensible, to which we must refer both kinds of explanation" (297, 412). 

But what is accomplished here?  It seems that the thesis and antithesis of the antinomy of reflective judgment still form a contradiction.  Yet Kant is suggesting that this clear and present contradiction is "taken up" by the reality of the supersensible of which the thesis and the antithesis are partial grasps.  So the supersensible substrate supports a coincedentia oppositorum in a way not unlike how God could only be thought in the mystical traditions through dialectical formulations.  'All P is J' and 'Some P is not J' are contradictories and cannot be other.  However, these contradictions are somehow sustained in the ground of the supersensible.  We are permitted to use either because the nature of the supersensible cannot be articulated by either.  When one says them both, one learns something about that which cannot be known.  

The fundamental problem of philosophy since the time of Decartes has been this: "How is human freedom possible in a determinstic physicalist universe?" Kant is taking on this big question and saying that the problem is one of thinking how it is possible, not it being possible.  It is possible after all, because it is actual.  The supersensible substrate is worked up mediately in the First Critique, more immediately in the Second, and these varying accounts put together in the Third.  We can't do metaphysics, so cannot carve this "beast of reality."  We will always end in antinomies when we do.  But nonetheless the supersensible grounds the possibility of corporeal entities acting freely.  Purposefulness in nature attests to an opening by which freedom can be instantiated in a physical system.  

Kant says that the antinomies of reflective judgment are not antonomies because the truth of one does not entail the falsity of the other.  He might have better started to index judgments to standpoints. Clearly, the antinomies are contradictories for us and how we must think the universe. They are contradictory coram hominibus.  But they are not contradictory from the standpoint of the supersensible. That is, they are not contradictory coram deo -- if we might  apply that term here.  Kant knew that ultimately the tools of human understanding and thinking simply were inadequate to think reality as such.

Saturday, October 10, 2020

Covid 19 and the Church

In my last post I discussed the phenomenon of hyperreality as it pertains to the Coronavirus. Clearly, there are elements of the real in what is happening today. There is a virus that can make some people quite sick; it can even on occasion lead to death. This is reality.

But history will likely not judge what happened in 2020 in terms of the pathology of the virus. What happened in 2020 was a coordination by the governments of the world to enact draconian measures in response to the threat of the virus, measures incommensurate with that threat. Businesses around the world have been shut down, schools closed, routine medical treatment ended, beaches and parks blocked off, mask wearing prescribed, personal freedoms compromised, and the hospitality industry completely decimated. The pain of all of this blends so seamlessly into the underlying Covid threat that it appears to people as one thing. Nobody is responsible. Covid-19 causes all of this.
The Covid-19 panic of 2020 has hit the Church very hard. Traditionally, to be a Christian has meant to be connected corporeally with a community. While the Church continued to gather during the Black Plague, somehow Covid-19 has given it an excuse to no longer bring its people together corporeally. Once can, of course, watch church on YouTube.
To be clear, many churches have tried to meet during the Panic of 2020. But their meeting has sparked moral outrage. How can these people get together and spread the virus? The hyperreal world in which we now live believes that going to church and risking the spread of the virus puts others at risk, and thus it is morally wrong. How could one do this to one's neighbors?
At the beginning, watching church on TV is not so bad, I suppose. One does not have to get the kids ready; one can stay in one's PJs and watch the liturgy. But, of course, Joan is providing special music and we don't like how she sings so we fast forward through that. And congregational singing really does not work watching church, so we fast forward through that. Those long pauses between liturgical events we can skip, and singing the liturgy in one's PJs does not really work . . . So we listen to the readings and catch the sermon. It is 30 minutes or less! The three hours of getting ready for church, driving there, experiencing it, talking to people afterwards, and driving home has now become 30 minutes.
But one can read the lessons on one's own and maybe even find a couple of nice sermons on-line on the text. One really does not need to listen to one's own pastor. In fact, there are thousands of pastors across the world one might find on-line, and one could listen to them. Maybe one does that at 11:00 Sunday night. In fact, one might get up on Sunday morning, forget one's mask, go fishing and take one's Bible and read the texts -- or not.
If anybody believes that the Church has not been deeply hurt by lock downs, they are not thinking clearly. Estimates are that up to 33% of people will not go back to church once they are out of the habit of going. Indeed, if pastors so easily gave up on corporeal gatherings, maybe corporeal gatherings are really not that important after all. Every time church leadership suggest that actually getting together at church is not ultimately necessary, they sign to all that the whole institution of church-going might simply be one thing among other things. If one can be a responsible Christian by staying home and watching church on YouTube for 30 minutes, then why go back again?
So the hyperreality of the Covid Panic of 2020 has accomplished something that has not happened before. While the Church always met through the reality of wars and much deadlier plagues, today's Covid-19 hyperreality has given it permission to simply stay on the sidelines and honor the mandates of health officials.
But a church on the sidelines witnesses to all that the threat of physical sickness is, after all, much more important than spiritual sickness; it tells everyone that the life and death matters of the spirit are secondary to physical health and well-being. It declares that what is going on at Church is "really not that important."
The hospitality industry has been decimated by the hyperreality of the Covid Panic of 2020. They might recover someday. The Church, however, has been even more deeply affected, and I am not sure it will recover -- at least in the North Atlantic countries. I don't see how many small congregations who have shut their doors in the name of the public good will have the requisite capital and tenaciousness to open their doors again. After all, if our ultimate concerns are able to be halted by a this virus, then maybe they are really not that important. Maybe Feuerbach and Marx were on to something when claiming that religion is finally ideological and expressive of our fundamental alienation.
It is, after all, a matter of causality. It makes all kinds of sense to quit gathering together in Church if viruses have causality and God does not.

Hyperreality and the Covid Panic of 2020

I want to address the postmodern notion of hyperreality in relation to the current Covid-19 panic. Hyperreality occurs when consciousness is no longer able to distinguish a simulation from reality. What is real, and what is fictional blend together seamlessly so one cannot ascertain where reality ends and fiction begins, and vice versa. Since physical reality and virtual reality -- and perhaps human intelligence and artificial intelligence -- become mixed up, people often find themselves actually preferring the virtual and artificial to the real.
The Covid-19 panic plague of 2020 is real, of course, to some degree. Sometimes people do die from the illness, and some people with the illness get very sick. One can do the numbers and see some effect on world health during this outbreak. Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that if everybody were to wear a mask, the incidence of transmission might fall by some not clearly defined percent. (It would be great to have real numbers!) So there are elements of the real in the Covid Panic of 2020. People die, people get sick, some are sick enough to go to the hospital, and universal mask-wearing might lower the incidence of transmission. This is reality.
Now let us move to the virtual, the artificial and the fictional. While decisions in previous outbreaks were made in the context of the other affairs of humanity, e.g., people marrying, people dying, people going to school, people running businesses, people running for public office, the situation this time is very different. Very early on draconian measures were adopted by governments throughout the world to combat this "threat," measures that often limited the freedom of individuals to deal with the "threat" in their own way. Routine medical care was shut down for millions of people as clinics and hospitals waited for the hordes of infected patients to come. But, in general, the apocalyptic run on hospitals never materialized. The education and play of children was curtailed even though they were at very low risk. Businesses were locked down by governments arbitrarily in the name of the public good. A new morality developed. "Do you wear a mask?" If yes, you care about people. If no, you don't.
Never before in human history has an outbreak been hyped like this. People began to fear, and they even begin to hate those who don't fear. The actual threat of the illness is not at all commensurate with the response, it seems. But this cognitive dissonance does not affect most people, because most simply live the hyperreality of the Covid plague, a reality where one must do whatever is possible to save human life.
The French social philosopher Jean Baudrillard introduced the phenomenon of hyperreality. Consider Walt Disney productions -- at least in its heyday. Clearly, Disney movies are simulations of the real. But Disney's emphasis on dreams and childhood became, says Baudrillard, the American dream itself. The "outside world" of which the Disney world simulates is now merely a simulacrum. The symbolism and signification of the Disney world does not track reality, but becomes the preferred world in which people live. Once this happens, the outside world is made the simulacrum; it itself becomes a mere simulation of the world of dreams and childhood.
This is what has happened. The Covid 19 panic driven by the media and cable news has circled the globe and the hyperreality of a "Covid Pague" has replaced for many what is really happening "out there." The narrative of the virus and its devastating effects is preferred by many to the much more mundane world of a new virus which can be deadly at times. Lock downs, moral shaming and pride, and protecting the public replace the much more mundane story of what is happening on the ground. In our hyperreal land, the President has the power evidently to cause the virus or stop it.
You can live the hyperreal if you want to, folks. It is supported by the media and clearly presupposed by many of our politicians. It is, after all, rather exciting to have a hyperreal war rather than a real one. Not many die in the former, and yet one still can "live the war." It is also more exciting to live a hyperreal plague than the mundane real one. After all, in reality the Covid 19 virus is likely to finish at less than 1/150 times as deadly as the 1918-19 flu worldwide. Over and against the commonplace, it is stimulating to "live the plague," to think and act in all ways as if it were extremely deadly. Living the plague makes it much easier to change the world profoundly in the face of "humanity's greatest menace."
Baudrillard simply has this nailed. I hope you see it. Please don't nail the messenger.

Tuesday, August 04, 2020

How Big is ILT?

The Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) is continuing to grow. In the fall of 2019, ILT had117 active students with a headcount of 82 and a full-time equivalency (FTE) of 58. Headcount was at 85 in the spring semester 2020 with FTE edging above 60. ILT defines "active students" as those taking courses in the last three semesters that have not withdrawn. Many of our students take courses only one semester a year, so our headcount over the year is slightly over 100. 
We should see headcount and FTE growth this fall (2020) of about 30%, much of which is coming from our PhD program and our new B.A. curriculum. So how does ILT compare in size with its competitors?  
ILT ranked in the Fall of 2019 as the 9th largest Lutheran seminary in North America. You might be interested in the sizes of Lutheran seminaries by headcount. I was and compiled the list below. It was difficult to find all of this information, and on a couple I had to do some guessing. I want to be accurate, so if anybody sees an error, please let me know. FTE comparisons show much the same as headcount comparisons as far as the ranking of institutional size. 
This fall (2020) ILT will almost certainly become the 8th largest Lutheran Seminary in North America. We have some lofty goals, one of which is to grow ILT 25% a year for the next 10 years. Whether this is achievable depends in large part on whether our undergraduate program grows. We won't be able to include that growth as seminary growth, of course, but we do plan on growing the seminary itself into the Top Five over the next few years. 
There are many reasons for our growth during the generally declining theological market. The fact that we have done online education rigorously since our inception means that students who are increasingly going online for their theological education -- some of this movement is driven by the covid-19 panic--are looking at us seriously and liking what they see. After all, we have a great faculty and some exciting programming. 
Here is a list of North American Lutheran seminaries by headcount in the fall of 2019.
  • Concordia Seminary (LCMS) 592
  • Luther Seminary (ELCA): 465
  • United Lutheran Seminary (ELCA): 357
  • Concordia Theological Seminary (LCMS): 314
  • Warburg Seminary (ELCA): 218
  • Trinity Episcopal School of Ministry (Anglican) 176 (I include because the North American Lutheran Seminary is a part of this seminary.)
  • LSTC (ELCA): 164
  • Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary (WELS): 157
  • Martin Luther University (ELCIC): 97
  • INSTITUTE OF LUTHERAN THEOLOGY: 82 
  • Lutheran Theological Southern (ELCA): 68
  • Trinity Seminary (ECLC): 64
  • Bethany Theological Seminary (Brethren): 58 
  • Pacific Lutheran (ELCA): 49
  • Lutheran Brethren Seminary: 40 (2016)
  • Free Lutheran Bible College: 25
  • ALTS (AALC): 25??
  • LTS Saskatoon (ELCIC): 20
  • Bethany Lutheran Theological Sem (ELS): 16
  • Concordia Lutheran Ontario (LCC): 14
  • Concordia Lutheran Edmonton (LCC): 9
We look to the future knowing that it is fully redeemed and complete. May God grant that we at ILT continue to live that future today in creativity and faithfulness!    

    Saturday, August 01, 2020

    Why Reason is Ineffective

    People watching the protests (or riots) on TV, or accessing live streams from people's phones on YouTube, likely see groups of people walking the streets, shouting slogans, throwing objects, setting fires, etc. They see the protestors disrupting society and occupying parts of cities. In all of this viewing, there has been no occasion, that I recall, in which there have been press conferences on the part of the protestors in which they succinctly, rationally and unambiguously state their demands and give reasons why they are making these demands.

    The national news media, in general sympathetic to some of the overall anti-capitalist aims of the protestors, ask few critical questions as to why the people are protesting. The protestors are thus given an epistemic pass: they apparently do not need to justify in the logical space of reasons why they are behaving the way they are. They do what they do without seemingly sensing an obligation to give reasons why they are doing what they do. A visit to the Black Lives Matter website where their "campaign focus" is provided states no reasons for the positions they advocate, but simply lists the following issues of concern:
    • Racial Injustice
    • Police Brutality
    • Criminal Justice Reform
    • Black Immigration
    • Economic Injustice
    • LGBTQIA and Human Rights
    • Environmental Conditions
    • Voting Rights and Suppression
    • Healthcare
    • Government Suppression
    • Education 
    • Commonsense Gun Laws 
    Having a position on all of these is, of course, what comprises party platforms. One could argue that there is racial injustice and police brutality by reporting statistics that show that there actually is police brutality, that is, that there is a significant number of acts that the police do that are, in fact, brutal, and that a significant portion of these brutal acts are perpetrated against the Black community. After pointing out the existing problem, a party platform would normally offer a more or less actualizable solution to the problem.

    Reasonable people adjudicating any issue first want a description of the problem, a showing that the problem actually exists, before they then offer a normative solution to the problem by providing an account of what ought to be done given the fact that the problem exists. Presumably, the onus is on those wanting to change society to show that the problems of which they are concerned actually exist. Accordingly, to proceed rationally with respect to these issues would be to establish through statistical means the truth of these claims within American society:
    • There is racial injustice. 
    • There exists police brutality. 
    • There is an unjust criminal justice system. 
    • The current laws and practices with regard to Black immigration are unjust. 
    • There exists economic injustice. 
    • Human rights are violated with respect to LCBTQUIA. 
    • Current environmental conditions are dangerous. 
    • Significantly relevant voter suppression and voting rights transgressions exist. 
    • The healthcare system is unjust or not functioning correctly. 
    • There is widespread government corruption. 
    • Current education is inadequate or not otherwise not rightly occurring. 
    • Current gun laws do not conform to common sense.  
    To establish any of these rationally means, inter alia, that one cannot rely on the fallacy of anecdotal evidence. One cannot point to a few particular instances of ~X in showing that in general ~X is the case. One needs to show over large populations using relevant statistical techniques that ~X does hold of a population.

    After describing the problem -- showing that it obtains and has the contour it has -- then one would have to lay out various possible solutions to the problem, showing that one solution would, if adopted, mitigate the problem. One would need to defend one's solution against other possible solutions normatively, and then offer one's solution as a general prescription for the societal ill at issue. In offering the solution, one must take in effect its "side effects." There are all kinds of drugs that would work for many people, but that kill some. To be reasonable in recommending a solution to a social problem, one would have to show how enacting the solution does not ultimately have more deleterious social consequences than not so enacting it.

    But none of this seems to be happening. It is almost as if the alleged societal ills should be self-evident to anyone whose intellect is not clouded by prejudice, scilicet, the prejudice of one's own capitalistic and racially privileged position. The ills seemingly cannot be seen by those who are citizens of the "old order," an order of class, race, gender, and species relying on distinctions and hierarchies. The old can't see what is self-evident because it evidently does not have the eyes to see nor the ears to hear.

    There is thus no epistemic criterion by which we might arrive at the self-evidence of the points in connection. While BLM or those protesting would not say it this way, they believe there is a spiritual problem in America. Those of us in the system have our perceptions, conceptions, awareness and language determined by that system. We exist withing a schema of understanding or world that cannot but judge the truth claims assumed on the BLM website as having insufficient evidence. We can neither see these claims as buttressed sufficiently by evidence nor as being solvable by the courses of action recommended. We have a spiritual malady; we are not woke; we cannot see. But those who are economically and socially disadvantaged can glimpse that towards which we are blind. This is why they must protest.

    The protesters wish to speak a prophetic voice in and amid the day-to-day activities of men and women in early 21st century America. Just as Jesus and the prophets short-circuited the language-games of the men and women of their age by pointing towards transcendent truth, so the new New Left in America looks beyond the epistemic games of the bourgeoisie towards that which transcends such games. Whereas the Old Testament prophets looked to God as the ultimate arbitrator of what should be the case in criticizing the prevailing social order, the new New Left in our streets look to another what is, they point to an underlying determinism, true in itself, that ultimately justifies their behavior in trying to bring down the prevailing social order.

    For many in America, the protests on our streets are simply inexplicable. They don't see the reasons why the protests are happening, nor what the protestors really want to change and achieve. This is because most in America do not really understand the rather sophisticated theory underlying the social protests we are seeing. (Most protestors likely don't understand the theory either, but that is a different story.)

    In order to understand this I want to use the distinction of the philosopher Wilfred Sellars between the manifest image of the world and the scientific image. The manifest image is our everyday view of the world. We live in a world of macrophysical objects that have particular phenomenal qualities, e.g., colors, shapes, textures, etc., a world in which there are persons, that is, human agents who can reason, act freely, and thus have a responsibility for the actions they initiate. Our manifest image of the world is the world as it seems. In this seeming world, people justify their actions by pointing to the reasons that explain them. This world is deeply teleological; it is filled with purpose. The best explanation of why I drove to the airport and stopped by the airport entrance at 2:15 Saturday afternoon is that I believed that Smith was coming in on the 2:05 plane from Chicago, and that I desired to see Smith. Such a world is filled with what are sometimes called folk psychological ascriptions; we regularly explain our behaviors in terms of our beliefs and desires.

    Our manifest image of the world is the image of the everyday world in which we immediately and deeply dwell. Such a world was explored with great success by the phenomenologists, especially Martin Heidegger who argued that the everyday world in which we are already embedded, is the world in which Being, though it is often occluded, can ultimately reveal itself. This is the world of primordial meaning in which we find ourselves before we ever become philosophers or scientists.

    The scientific image of the world, however, is the world we discover in the natural and social sciences. It is a step away from the immediacy of the manifest image of the world. It is deeper than what is manifest because it reveals the ultimate causal map of the world. Whereas color is part of the manifest image of the world, from the standpoint of the scientific image, all that exists is electromagnetic wave propagation of certain frequencies. The scientific image of the world attempts to uncover the ultimate "stuff" of reality and the laws governing behaviors among these ultimate "stuffs." For instance, quarks of many flavors relating themselves to each other in varying ways constitute hadrons, of which protons and neutrons are fundamental kinds. Hadrons acting with leptons of various kinds, notably electrons, constitute the structure of the atom, that out of which everything else is comprised.

    If you are a biologist your scientific image of the world does not contradict that of the physicist, but it concentrates on other aspects of the deep underlying structure that drives the movements and dispositions of objects within the manifest image. As a biologist you might be interested in DNA, genetic mutations, and the synthesis between Darwinian natural selection and modern genetics generally, and you might be prone to explain manifest human behavior by pointing to deeper level causal explanations in terms of natural selection and adaptability.

    Sellars believed strongly in science and thought that ultimately we understand rightly when we understand scientifically. To my knowledge he did not write on German social theory, and it would be interesting to see what he would say about the scientific image that putatively underlies the views of the new New Left, the image that seemingly grounds their oracular pronouncements about society and ultimately justifies their deepest claims: Capitalistic society must be overturned if people are to be truly emancipated for life within a just social structure. What is this image?

    In order to understand this we must think about parts and wholes and ups and downs. Considerations of parts and wholes within philosophy is called mereology. Accordingly, mereological considerations deal with the relationships between parts and wholes, and the ontological status we afford to each. What is the being of the whole and can the being of the whole be accounted for on the basis of the being of the parts? The question simply is this: If we could accurately describe all of the parts, and all of the relevant laws governing the behavior of the parts, have we given a suitable description of, and explanation for, the whole? Reductionists claim that the being of the whole (or aspects of that being) can in some way be explained by the being of the parts (or aspects of that being).  There are many kinds of reductions, of which the following is a partial list. 
    • Ontological reduction is the strongest, claiming that the whole is nothing but the parts. 
    • Causal reduction claims that causal relations among the wholes can be explained by, or might simply be, the casual relations among the parts. 
    • Semantic reduction claims that the very meaning of the whole is nothing but the meaning of the parts.  
    • Type ontological reduction claims that the being of whole types, e.g., general properties, is nothing but the being of particular types in particular relations. For example, the being of the mental event "thinking of Alice" just is the being of some set of brain events.
    • Token ontological reduction claims that the being of whole entities is completely realized in the being of particular entities in relationships. Accordingly, while the mental act "thinking of Alice" cannot be biconditionally linked to any particular set of brain events, the individual occurrence of so thinking is nonetheless physically realized by some set of brain events or other. 
    The question before us is the relationship between the whole of the realm of social entities and properties and the parts of those entities that ultimately comprise them. The manifest image of the world is one where there are people of various classes, genders, races, etc., making arguments in public space about what ought to be done for the public good. The scientific image, however, is one of that which makes up this manifest doing. At the manifest level, there are free moral agents that make rational arguments in logical space about all types of things. They might make rational arguments about gun control based upon statistical information and ethical value. But this manifest image is explained by, and is ultimately a function of, more primordial relationships holding between more basic entities with different types of properties.

    Using merological language can be helpful, of course, in trying to grasp what the ultimate stuffs are that operate to make the manifest world do what it does. More useful, I think, is the language of levels. I want to distinguish lower-levels of description or being from higher-levels descriptions or being, and draw a function from the lower-level to the higher-level as follows: Two lower-level states indiscernible with respect to one another will entail an indiscernibility of states at the higher-level. There is no higher-level difference without a lower-level difference. It is simplest to illustrate this with respect to the mind-body problem.

    The higher-level is the level of our psychological states, e.g., our thoughts, hopes, dreads, feelings, particular perceptions, etc.  The higher-level is our mental world and the immediacy of experience we enjoy with respect to it. The lower-level consists of our brain states, the neural firings and flow, synapse formation, C-fiber stimulations, or whatever are the most basic objects over which neuroscientific theories now quantify. To say that the lower-level determines the higher-level, is to say that the neuro causally explains activities at the higher psychological level. Neuroscience advocates, in general, the lower-level determination of the higher-level. The distribution of psychological properties can be understood as a function of the distribution of neuro-properties. Two brains identical with respect to their neuro-states would have minds identical with respect to their psychological states. To capture this asymmetric dependency relationship between the higher and the lower, the language of supervenience is used. The higher-level supervenes upon the lower-level if and only if on every occasion of the instantiation of lower-level states indiscernible with respect to each other, the higher-level would have states indiscernible with respect to each other as well.

    We might generalize the example above with respect to the physical sciences. Chemistry supervenes upon physics because there would be no discernibility among upper-level chemical property distributions if two lower-level physically indiscernible instantiations where to occur. The fundamental physical thus determines the chemical. Moreover, this relationship is transitive. If the fundamental physical determines the chemical, and the chemical determines the biochemical, and the biochemical determines the biological, and the biological determines the physiological (of which brains are part), and the physiological determines the psychological, then the fundamental physical determines the physiological. If the neurophysiological thusdetermines the mental, one could say that the fundamental physical actually determines thought itself. 

    All of what I said is in some sense part of the scientific image of the world with respect to the natural sciences. We might quibble about certain features of the story, but the story has been with us long enough that we are not deeply troubled by it. After all, Descartes taught us that while bodies are governed by deterministic laws, nonetheless souls are somehow free in the "steering" of those bodies. He was not able to give a successful account of how this was possible, and so the problem was bequeathed to Kant who argued that the deterministic is the way that humans must know the physical empirical order.  However, since duty is immediately encountered in human experience, we are permitted to believe and act as if there were freedom. Late 19th century Neokantian inspired images of the world spoke of the distinction between the realm of nature (with being and cause) and a realm of spirit (with value and freedom). We still deal, of course, with the problem of how the macro-level mind with its complicated psychological properties is possible in a physical universe instancing physical properties very much different from those properties displayed by mind.

    It is clear, however, that we somehow have gotten used to the problem of how human agency is possible in a physical universe. We continue in America to have public forums where, until recently, reason was assumed to be able to justify political positions held and we thought ourselves reasonable free to act so as to change the world. In other words, despite our theoretical problems with determinism, a Lockeian bottom up view of the social order was still in place.  Human beings could meet together, reason together, and upon a common basis of what was natural for human beings (e.g., in accordance with their various rights), argue for, advocate, and bring about social transformation.  While this basic Lockeian view did not want to reduce the autonomy of human decisions to fundamental physical law, many advocates of this approach certainly assumed that the higher-level property distributions of a society were a function of lower-level property distributions in this way: Individuals were conceived to be autonomous moral agents who in their external relatedness with other human individuals could make decisions and carry out behaviors that would affect the higher-level property distributions of the society. Accordingly, justice could be instantiated at the higher-level if some set of properties at the lower-level were themselves instantiated. Simply put, if individual human agents were placed in some set of relationships with respect to each other, then society -- an higher-level entity -- would be just.  If not, the society would be unjust.  Accordingly a just society supervenes upon the relationships sustained among individuals comprising it.  (Note the mereological relationship here.) 

    But the Lockean view of things has been under attack for a very long time. This attack was most forcefully made by mid-nineteenth century materialism as it was appropriated by thinkers like Feuerbach and Marx. Many people today hear the term "Marxism" and think of the horrors of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. It is estimated, in fact, that Marxist-inspired communism is responsible for over 100,000,000 deaths in the 20th century alone. But I don't want us to detour into a considerations of the effects of Marxism on the twentieth century, but simply to look at the underlying picture of the world advocated by Marxist presuppositions and assumptions.

    The idea is that there is an underlying scientific image of the world that provides the causal explanation of human behaviors at the manifest level. For Marx, material conditions at the underlying scientific level determine the distribution of properties at the manifest level. Since human reasoning, human agency, human responsibility et al, is at the manifest level, the basic claim by Marxism is that the Lockeian conception of the world is a manifest image of which there is a deeper structural explanation. This means, inter alia, that reason itself, including epistemic justification and warrant, is itself explainable by virtue of deeper material conditions. For Marx, these lower-level determinants were economic. Money and its movement explains, i.e., determines the existence of, human value and thought. Accordingly, human value and thought supervene upon the material economic conditions of society. Our philosophical and political positions are thus ideological, they are determined by, and thus expressions of our particular location within the field of money and its movement. The guys at the country club hold a different set of values and think differently than the women sewing garments 12 hours a day in the old textile mills. 

    While the nineteenth-century world of Marx might seem quaint to most, and while many might believe that his theories were actually disproved by the fact that the proletariat did not rise up spontaneously in opposition to the bourgeoisie and violently end their rule after WWI, Marxist thought was regenerated in many ways in the twentieth century through the work of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School in Germany, and at the New School of Social Research at Columbia University in New York City. There are first-rate scholars attached to these movements, and the last thing anybody should say is that these thinkers are naive. They are, in general, quite sophisticated in their philosophical orientation and method, and they do succeed in providing penetrating insights on great number of social issues.

    All of them did notice, of course, that the predicted revolutions in Europe did not happen as Marx had predicted, and all were concerned to adjust Marxist-inspired theory to fit the actual facts. Accordingly, they were noticeably less materialist than Marx and his ilk, and were much more open to thinking that class consciousness was determinitive of thought and value rather than class itself. They argued that there were deep structures of oppression within modern capitalist societies that caused human suffering, that humans could be emancipated from this suffering, and that the normative prescriptions they offered about how this emancipation could take place were themselves an important part of this transformation.  In other words, they wanted both to understand what basically drives social values and thinking and to transform those societies by offering more just trajectories of future development.

    These thinkers were neo-Marxist because they held that capitalism itself is a deeply flawed way of organizing society, especially the "monopoly capitalism" of post-war western industrial capitalism, with its commidification of all aspects of our society, including art itself.  (The protestors on the streets today would not want to know what one of the giants of the Frankfurt School, Theordor Adorno, would say of the music to which they listen.)  These thinkers were united that capitalism, and the consciousness of exclusion that arise from it, is determinative of the social ills of post-war society itself. Another way is needed, they thought. 

    So far I have only talked about the classic model of bottom up causation, that is, that the distribution of the properties of the higher level (often the whole) is determined by the distribution of the properties at the lower-level (often the parts). But Marxist and Neo-Marxist thought has always sought to transform society, and thus they are committed to the much more philosophically suspect notion of top-down causation. Simply put, they must hold that the social order itself caused by lower level property distributions can produce a consciousness that is itself causally efficacious in changing the distribution of properties at the lower-level. In other words, certain people (or sets of people) can somehow achieve a correct view of things that allows them properly to change the lower level property distributions to bring about long-term positive societal effects!

    We might call this the paradox of the woke. If the thought and value of people are themselves wholly determined by class consciousness or class inclusion, how is it possible for the woke to achieve the requisite epistemic standpoint to achieve wokeness? How is wokeness possible, if wokeness itself is determined by underlying economic and social conditions? 

    The answer is simple: It can't!  It's impossible. Since the argument by the woke for their wokeness is itself wholly determined by material conditions or material consciousness, the content of their woke thinking cannot literally be true or false, but merely an ideological expression of that deeper level class location and consciousness from which it emerges.

    Maybe the woke instinctively know this. If the game of reason-giving and moral responsibility-taking is itself determined by lower-level class, race, gender, etc. consciousness and location that they do not occupy, then they cannot play the game at all. To play the game is to abandon being woke.

    At the end of the day, the woke must be as silent as Abraham in trying to justify the murder of Isaac. He heard a voice. Was it of God? Abraham must remain silent, says Kierkegaard, because in explaining his openness to murder his son, he is either a madman or a ghastly man. There can be no comprehension by Reason of why Abraham would hear God saying what He said.

    This same seems true of the woke. He or she cannot state his or her position nor argue for it without presupposing the particularity of that position, without exposing that position to the relativism and perspectivalism of all positions that issue from, and are thus determined by, a particular class location and consciousness. The woke can only explain their position by not explaining it. They can show it, but not say it. To say it would be to admit that it cannot be universally true. To avoid the paradox they must simply remain silent.

    And so they do. They wait for a new spirit to arise that does not look any longer to warrant, reason and individual responsibility. As they tarry in their wait, they can point to that which they cannot speak, for speaking undermines what they say.

    We can speak, however. They can't remember how to hear, of course, but we can speak. Maybe others can hear. Liberal America is not of the same spirit as that which is dawning. They don't know it, and since many of them can still speak, they still believe they can speak to those who are approaching. But this will not be possible. So let us all together who can still speak, speak.

    Remember that scarcely anybody thought a little corporal could seize power in Germany. The Nazi movement was lampooned and laughed at by the cultural elite. But something like what happened then could happen here, if we don't talk to each other. The new New Left cannot speak, but only show. Those of us who are Christians know the Word has power.  The Old Way is the way of the Word. Let us not sacrifice the power of the Old for the nameless void that marches today on our streets. Let us call a thing what it is, and not be frightened into not speaking. We must understand that those who cannot speak want the rest of us to be mute as well. 


    Thursday, July 23, 2020

    Walter Benjamin: Brilliant Insights of a Maverick Life

    Introduction

    In this series of short postings, I want to examine some of the seminal figures of the Frankfurt School.  While these "introductions" are neither comprehensive nor sufficiently deep, I hope they do succeed in providing expositions useful to the general reader. My goal is to get some of the main ideas of a thinker on the table, and grapple with the his or her major themes as they relate to our present socio-politico context. There is no attempt at completeness in what follows, and many scholarly sine qua nons are sacrificed. My goal is modest: I simply want to give those interested some insight into what these thinkers believed.

    The first figure we shall examine is the German-Jewish philosopher, sociologist, art/literary critic, and essayist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Mostly ignored in his own time, Benjamin has enjoyed increasing notoriety since the publication of key translated versions of his works beginning about two decades after his death.

    Benjamin's thought is eclectic and difficult to characterize. For instance, although he does not often deal explicitly with theological concerns in his published work, he nonetheless claims that just as a blotter is saturated with ink, so too is his work "saturated" with theology.  Moreover, as Benjamin wrote to Max Horkheimer in 1937, his philosophy "is something that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological, little as it may be granted to us to try to write if with immediately theological concepts" (Walter Benjamin and His Theology, eds. Coby Dickinson and Stephene Symons, Fordam Scholarship online 2016).

    Benjamin's penchent for being theologically concerned without explicitly doing theology has analogs in the many fields and conversations with which he was involved. Influenced by idealism, romanticism, Jewish mysticism, and Marxism, Benjamin writes essays dealing with issues in art criticism, cultural criticism, literary criticism, translation theory, sociology, history, political messianism, philosophy, and more. He writes not primarily with the "expert voice" of the specialist, but with the passion and insight of a highly-educated thinker, ranging over many areas of study with facility and insight, ceding to posterity the task of developing his often brilliant and penetrating observations. 

    Benjamin is today recognized as an important thinker concerned both with literature and modern aesthetics, particularly the effects of new technology on the ontology of art and aesthetics generally. While not a faculty member at the Institute for Social Research, he was nonetheless associated with it throughout his life, and many of his ideas are fruitfully understood within the context of Neo-Marxist thought.  Famously, Benjamin struggled to interpret what he believed was the unavoidable material meaning of the world as somehow an anticipation of a messianically-redeemed reality.

    Sketch of a Life

    Walter Bendix Schoenflies Benjamin was born in 1892, grew up in Charlottenburg and Gruenewald, both of which then were outside the city limits of Berlin, and died outside Paris in 1940. He was the oldest of three children in a mostly non-observant Ashkenazi Jewish family that was fully assimilated into German culture. His father was an investor in Berlin owning inter alia skating rinks, and his uncle William Stern developed the concept of the IQ test. 

    Benjamin attended the Kaiser Frederich School in Charlottenburg beginning in 1902 and graduated ten years later. At the age of 13 Benjamin spent some time at a boarding school in Thuringia, where he formed an intellectual bond with Gustav Wyneken, a liberal education reformer.  After graduation, Benjamin studied philology at the Albert Ludwick University in Freiburg with the neo-Kantian Hans Rickert before returning to matriculate at the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he attended lectures by the sociologist George Simmel. Although Benjamin consistently distanced himself from political Zionism, he did embrace early on a type of "cultural Zionism," which he saw as both a recognition and promotion of the highest values within European culture. He wrote: "My life experience led me to this insight: the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of the spiritually active . . . For Judaism is to me in no sense an end in itself, but the most distinguished bearer and representative of the spiritual."  (See Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: A Intellectual Biography, New York: Verso, pp 26-7, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin.) 

    Due to his association with Wyneken, Benjamin was a significant figure in the German Jewish wing of the German Youth Movement.  His early work appeals passionately to "the youth" as "a metaphysical category of spiritual purity and historical consciousness" (Max Pensky, "Walter Benjamin," Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd Ed., Edited by Michael Kelly, Oxford University Press, 2014). 

    Exempted from military service in 1914 because of extreme myopia, Benjamin broke with Wyneken over the latter's praise of the valuable ethical experience World War I was providing German youth. A year later he met and became friends with Gerhard Scholem in Berlin, learning from Scholem the tradition of Kabbalism and gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation of Judaism generally. Benjamin then moved to Munich to complete a philosophy degree, studying with Heinrich Woelfflin and meeting the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Thereafter, in 1916 he transferred to the University of Bern where he met both Ernst Bloch and his future wife Dora Sophie Pollack.  

    In 1919 Benjamin was awarded a PhD. from Bern, Switzerland, writing a summa cum laude dissertation, "The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism." He used ideas in his dissertation for his next project, an essay on Goethe's novella, The Elective Affinities.  Benjamin failed later, however, to get his habilitationsschrift past a committee at the University of Frankfurt, partly because it did not easily fit into an established discipline, and maybe because of a negative opinion of it given by Max Horkheimer, the future Director of the Frankfurt School of Social Research.  The work was called Urprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ("The Origin of the German Mourning-Play"), which Benjamin withdrew rather then having it formally rejected. With this act he voided any chance of acquiring an academic position in Germany.  The work was later published in 1928, gaining enough favorable attention that Theodore Adorno, one of the prominent thinkers of the Frankfurt School, offered a seminar upon it in 1932-33. 

    Benjamin later met the Bolshevik theater producer Asja Lacis on the Italian island of Capri and this relationship proved intellectually productive for both. Benjamin's One Way Street and his unfinished Arcades Project both exhibit modernist experimentation. The Marxist turn in Benjamin's thought was developed by his subsequent study of George Lukac's History and Class Consciousness. The early 1930s saw Benjamin at work on two projects; the first with Ernst Bloch and Bertrolt Brecht attempted to found a left-wing periodical, and the second employed Brecht's theatrical didacticism in creating his own radio broadcasts. Because of the rise of Nazism, Benjamin fled Germany in 1933 along with many other Jewish intellectuals.   

    The Frankfurt School migrated to Columbia University in New York in 1933 and became the "New School of Social Research." Through the influence of Theodore Adorno, the New School provided Benjamin some modest financial support and opportunities for publishing. However, the editorial board of the School made revisions to some of Benjamin's key publications of the period, such as his famous, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility." 

    In 1939 war broke out and Benjamin found himself fleeing Paris in 1940 in the face of the advancing German army. Although his contacts at the New School had helped him procur an American visa, he lacked the requisite visa to exit France, and thus tried to enter Spain as an illegal refugee. Unfortunately, he was turned back at the border, and realizing the likely fate of German Jews in Vichy France, he committed suicide by ingesting large amounts of morphine at the hotel town of Port Bou on September 27, 1940. Two events of his death sum up much of the trials of his life: 1) The day after Benjamin committed suicide because the border had been closed, the border again reopened and those who had been traveling with Benjamin were allowed to cross; 2) Walter Benjamin's name was transposed at his death from 'Walter Benjamin' to 'Benjamin Walter' and he was buried in the consecrated section of the Roman Catholic cemetery outside of town.  

    Early Work on Language

    Benjamin was deeply influenced by Kant in his youth. He was not, however, convinced of Kant's starting point that had assumed the existence of a disinterested subject over and against the objectivity of the world of experience. Instead, Benjamin focused on the reality of language, finding the divine at work within it. In his 1916 Ueber Sprache ueberhaupt und ueber die Sprache des Menschen, Benjamin recalls Hamann's musings on creation as the physical imprint of the Word of God, claiming, "there is nothing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language" (See Peter Osborne and Matthew Charles, "Walter Benjamin," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/). 

    Benjamin's early work is quite interesting. About the same time as he was writing Ueber Sprache, Benjamin was wrestling with some logical themes in the unpublished fragments, Das Urteil der Bezeichnung (GS VI: 9–11) and Lösungsversuch des Russellschen Paradoxons (GS VI: 11).  (See Alexei Procyshyn, "Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of Language," Philosophy Compass 9(6): 368-381, June 2014.)  

    Clearly, the 24-year old Benjamin is acquainted with Russell's paradox and how unchecked reflexivity generates either non-terminating regresses or outright paradoxes. Russell famously pointed out that the so-called axiom of comprehension could not hold unrestrictedly in set theory. This axiom had claimed that any set of conditions applied to any well-formed set properly produces another well-formed set.

    But consider the set of all sets and the following condition on this set of all sets: the set of all sets that are not members of themselves.  This condition seems innocuous enough. After all, there are some sets that are members of themselves and other sets that are not members of themselves. But what about the set of all sets that are not members of themselves? Is this set a member or not a member of itself?  Russell points out that if the set is not a member of itself, then it is a member of itself, and if the set is a member of itself, then it is not a member of itself. Paradox threatens to doom set theory itself.

    Benjamin read Russell and seemingly agreed with him that one can eliminate the problem of reflexive predication by introducing a hierarchy of types. Such a hierarchy would preclude self-referential paradoxes by distinguishing objects from predicates, and from predicates of predicates (Thierry Coquand, "Type Theory" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/type-theory/).  Benjamin further reasons that if this is true, then phenomenology itself has a problem.  It is phenomenology, after all, that believes that one regularly has recourse to higher-order generalities in grasping lower-level particulars, a recourse presupposing ultimately an identity between the higher and lower.

    According to Benjamin, the threat of unrestricted reflexivity seems to preclude any identity between the higher and lower.  In these unpublished and incomplete works, Benjamin suggests that Russell-style paradoxes relate to distinctions among "judgments of reference," "predications," and "judgments of meaning" (Ibid.).  The three form a hierarchy: the first individuates objects, the second makes claims about them, and the third analyzes the claims made in the former predications.

    Benjamin understands the first judgment as purely denotative (almost in a Kripkean sense) and understands predicative judgments as having sense and making truth claims. Accordingly, reference is neither a predicate nor can predication establish it (Procyshyn, 370).  The situation is this: While establishing reference makes no appeal to meaning, predicative expressions do attribute properties to their referents, properties that judgments of meaning can properly explicate. Meaning thus only arises in analyzing the truth-claims of predication, analyzing, as it were, the attribution of some property P to some referent x. There is thus some semantic assent in moving from predicative judgments to judgments of meaning. 

    We might think of this in terms of an object language where the primitive terms of the language are rigidly tied to bearers. We can claim that a bearer has a certain attribute, or alternately, is a member of a certain class. If x has property P -- we write this as 'Px' -- then we have made an assertion in our object language.  However what this all means, awaits a higher-level interpretation. Our metalanguage provides such an interpretation, allowing us to make claims about the relationships holding among the expressions in our object language and the domain to which that language maps. 

    Consider Russell's classic example wherein 'barber' is defined as one who shaves all those, and only those, who do not shave themselves. So does the barber himself shave himself?  If the barber shaves himself, then he is indeed one who does not shave himself. Conversely, if the barber does not shave himself, then he shaves himself. 

    Benjamin's "solution," although failing to address the entire problem Russell envisions, is first to construe 'barber' as a term designating a particular object. This judgment of reference is entirely distinct from a predicative expression. Because 'barber' names an object in a judgment of reference, saying that the barber is a barber (the predicative expression) is only to say that one who shaves all and only those not shaving themselves is instantiated. Since the first judgment has no semantic content, predicating 'barber' of 'barber' does not generate a paradox. The referring expression no longer includes itself as a property within its own extension. The actual paradox, Russell admonishes, is generated because the propositional function B, 'one who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves', takes itself as its own argument. Benjamin's "solution" simply ignores the problem of the self reference of propositional functions. 

    But Benjamin's response to Russell is not the issue here. What is more interesting is how Benjamin applies his conclusion that judgments of reference, predicative expressions, and judgments of meaning are different types to phenomenology. In another paper from the same time entitled Eidos und Begriff, Benjamin claims that one must also distinguish among different types in phenomenology, i.e. among the concrete particular, the concept, the essence, and the concept of the essence. Accordingly, against the phenomenologist Linke, Benjamin argues that eidetic objects cannot be immediately given (Procyshyn, 371).     

    The insight pertains to the levels of experience and reflection. Phenomenology seeks in reflection to uncover a primordial Gegebenheit (givenness). Accordingly, if a set of properties is instantiated in experience, it must be instantiated in reflection, and vice-versa. If phenomenology is to succeed, there must be some symmetry between reflection and experience. Unfortunately, just as the relation between judgements of reference and predicative expressions is asymmetrical, so too is the relation between experience and reflection. Reflection triggers a semantic transformation on experience, i.e., the content of the experience cannot be the same content as that present in the reflection on that experience. There is a difference in practice and context between reflection and immediate experience.  Simply put, there is no extensional equivalence among a particular, the concept of that particular, the essence that particular instantiates, and the concept of the essence that particular instantiates. 

    Benjamin concludes from this that a term referring to a thing's concept signifies differently than a word referring to a thing's essence. Why is this? The concept of a particular includes its spatio-temporal location, while the concept of an essence does not. This means that the eidos (essence) of a singularly actual object cannot be the eidos of that singular actuality: "Ein Eidos aber von einem singulär-tatsächlichen Gegenstand ist niemals Eidos auch des Singulär-tatsächlichen daran" (Benjamin, GS VI, 31).

    This distinction between the singularly actual object (singulär-tatsächlichen Gegenstand) and the singular actuality of it (Singulär-tatsächlichen daran) is of fundamental importance for Benjamin. While the essence of an object's singular actuality pertains to the object's individuating properties, the essence of a singular actual object is in an important sense not graspable. Why is this?  It is because the actual object qua object is a denizen of the spatio-temporal, while the abstract essence never is (Procyshyn, 372). Accordingly, objects cannot be eidetically given. The concept of an object can be construed either as a concept of the actual object itself, or as a concept of that by which the object is individuated. While the second construal pertains to the abstract structure of the object, the first concerns the spatio-temporal situation wherein the concept names or refers to the concrete individual. The givenness of the first cannot simply be assumed of the second and vice-versa. After all, the concept by which an object is individuated has semantic content, whereas a name directly referring to that object does not.  

    Benjamin develops his insights on the distinction between reference fixation and meaning attribution, and that between the concept of the singularly actual object and the singularly actual itself, further in his Ueber die Sprache essay where he distinguishes between the sprachliche and geistige Wesen (linguistic and spritual essence) of language. While the linguistic essence of language pertains to the singularly actual object, language's spiritual essence concerns the object's singular actuality itself and the potential for action that the object has for the human agent. The spiritual essence of language, for Benjamin, concerns the object, the agent for which the object has meaning, and the entire communicative context of the language. Benjamin further argues that expressions count as language if they communicate a spiritual content (Procyshyn, 374). 

    Language, for Benjamin, is what communicates the spirtual, not by agency of a cognizing subject, but rather because the possibilities inhering in the objects themselves are constituents of a given context and directly apprehended. The spiritual essence of language concerns the action potential of an object, that is, it concerns what the object affords to the agent. The act of naming here unites the namer with objects situated in the world, i.e., objects that afford to the agent their possibilites for use. "Das sprachliche Wesen der Dinge ist ihre Sprache."  Procyshyn summarizes the point this way:

    Benjamin’s ‘geistige Wesen’ thus identifies a set of abilities or affordances whose expression remains relative to the interactions and environment in which it is found. Synthetically rephrased, Benjamin’s ‘language as such’ is synonymous with an ontology of intensively structured singularities, a metaphysics of meaning, wherein the complex interactions among languages entail a distinction between the singular being (its sprachliche Wesen) and its expressive power relative to us (its geistige Wesen). This difference in turn is a function of our own intensively infinite language, and the modes of participation it makes possible (375). 

    Ingeniously, Benjamin discusses the transition from a pre-lapsarian to post-lapsarian language as the fall from what a singularly actual object affords to us, to the making of claims about it, that is, treating the singularity of its actuality explicitly. 

    Post-lapsarian language is thus characterized by words communicating something other than themselves. The culprit is judgment and the categories of good and evil. Such judgment transforms language from its expressive essence into a fallen instrumentality. Accordingly, the fall is a fall into abstraction. The immediacy of the concrete is lost, and things are mediated through judgment and abstraction. The language of things is not any longer directly  mediated by the language of humans. 

    Benjamin's essay Ueber Sprache was never published in his lifetime, but contain motifs which he develops in his later thinking. It makes a number of rather surprising claims and is filled with sometimes profound insights. I have tried below to list what I take the central claims of the essay to be, leaving sprachliche Wesen (linguist being or essence) and geistiche (spiritual being or essence) untranslated. (See Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol 1., 1913-1926, 62-74; “Ãœber Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen”, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II-1, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1991, pp. 140-157, http://www.sciacchitano.it/Pensatori%20epistemici/Benjamin/%C3%9Cber%20Sprache%20%C3%BCberhaupt.pdf.
    • All expression is language.  Language is expressive of that which communicates itself in it, not with that which can be communicated through it (in der Sprache mitteilt und nicht durch die Sprache).  Since nothing is communicated through language, there is nothing outside of language to limit what is communicated within it.  All language thus "contains its own uniquely constituted infinity" (64).  Benjamin seems here to be foreshadowing a later theme in post-structuralist and postmodernist thought, that is, can language ever signify the non-linguistic? 
    • All language communicates itself (jede Sprache teilt sich selbst mit) (63). For example, the language of the lamp is the lamp in communication (die Sprache dieser Lampe [ist] die Sprach-Lamp, die Lampe in Mitteilung, die Lampe in Ausdruck).   
    • The "sprachliche Wesen of all things is their language"(63).  Language communicates the linguist essense of things (Die Sprache teilt die sprachliche Wesen der Dinge mit.) 
    • On the other hand, human beings communicate their own geistiche Wesen in language. They do this by "naming all other beings" (64).
    • "The sprachliche Wesen of man is his language" (64). Since the geistliche Wesen of man is language itself, human beings cannot communicate themselves through language, but only in language.  
    • This geistige Wesen of language is distinct from its sprachliche Wesen, yet is deeply connected to itThe geistige Wesen and sprachliche Wesen become identical only in communication (Mitteilung).  While language communicates the sprachliche Wesen of things, it can also communicate the geistiche Wesen when the latter is included in the sprachlice Wesen. 
    • It it is the sprachliche Wesen of man to name things" (64). "God's creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks" (65). "The incomparable feature of human language is that its magical community with things is immaterial and purely geistiche, and the symbol of this is sound. The Bible expresses this symbolic fact when it says that God breathes his breath into man: this is at once life and mind and language" (67). 
    • Creation takes place in the word and God's sprachliche Wesen is the word. Human language reflects the word in name. But "the name is no closer to the word than knowledge is to creation. The infinity of all human language always remains limited and analytic in nature, in comparison to the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word" (68).
    • The true nature of things is found in the realm of the singularly actual object. When we name, we name concretely and immediately, not through concept and description. Human beings thus come closet to divine language in this activity of naming. Naming is what divine language does. Yet in the name, the geistiche Wesen of the human communicates itself to God (65). 
    • While God made things knowable in their names, human beings name them according to knowledge (68). Accordingly,"man is the knower in the same language in which God is the creator. God created him in his image; he created the knower in the image of the creator" (68). One is reminded here of Russell's distinction of knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Naming singular entities can occur without description, but human knowing of these entities demands a conceptual knowing of that by which they are individuated; it demands description. The highest geistiche Wesen appearing in religion, according to Benjamin, depends solely on human beings and on their language. But art as a whole, including poetry, rests not on the ultimate essence of the spirit of language but on the spirit of language in things (dinglichem Sprachgeist), even in its consummate beauty. "Language, the mother of reason and revelation, is its alpha and omega," says Hamann (67).  The language of art must touch the particularity of the artwork. 
    • Language mediated through abstractions is alienated from the primacy of naming. "The theory of proper names is the theory of the frontier between finite and infinite language. Of all beings, man is the only one who names his own kind, as he is the only one whom God did not name" (69).  Benjamin explains, "by giving names, parents dedicate their children to God; the names they give do not correspond . . . to any knowledge, for they name newborn children. In a strict sense, no name ought . . . to correspond to any person, for the proper name is the word of God in human sounds" (69). Clearly, there can be no correspondence of name to bearer if the name is devoid of semantic content.  Benjamin continues, "the proper name is the communion of man with the creative word of God" (69).  The word cannot be the essence of the thing because the thing in itself has no word. It is rather created by God's Word and known in name by a human word (69).  Since the proper name immediately affixes to its bearer, its connectedness lies outside the province of human semantics and epistemology.  The naming then is not ultimately an autonomous act of human beings, but is done theonomously in the divine, creative Logos.  
    • "There is no such thing as a content of language; as communication, language communicates a geistliche Wesen -- something communicable per se" (66).  The relationships among objects, definable functions, predications, perceptions (involving a percepient) exist and are available to an expressive language, one that understands things in their essence.  It is not singular naming that communicates the spiritual essence of the human, but rather the higher order operations that take names as relata, or as arguments in functions, or as instantiations of properties, or construe them as extensions of predicates. 
    • The spiritul essence of language is one where the expressive power of language can become a mere means; it can become a judgment language.  Judging and normativity in general is what fallen humans do with language.  Benjamin explains: "Knowledge of good and evil abandons name; it is a knowledge from outside, the uncreated imitation of the creative word. Name steps outside itself in this knowledge: the Fall marks the birth of the human word, in which name no longer lives intact and which has stepped out of name-language, the language of knowledge, from what we may call its own immanent magic, in order to become expressly, as it were externally, magic. The word must communicate something (other than itself). In that fact lies the true Fall of the spirit of language. The word as something externally communicating, as it were a parody-by the expressly mediate word-of the expressly immediate, creative word of God, and the decay of the blissful Adamite spirit of language that stands between them" (71).  This difficult passage seemingly points to the loss of a paradisical immediacy of naming. Encountering beings as tokens of types drives one outside the Garden of primal naming. After all, such an encounter presupposes that human words, that is, the machinery of human language itself, now articulates worlds. Accordingly, the babble of mediated human languages with their built-in ontologies constitutes a fall away from the immediacy of Adamic naming. 
    • "The knowledge of things resides in the name, whereas that of good and evil is, in the profound sense in which Kierkegaard uses the word, "prattle," and knows only one purification and elevation, to which the prattling man, the sinner, was therefore submitted: judgment. . . . This judging word expels the first human beings from Paradise; they themselves have aroused it in accordance with the immutable law by which this judging word punishes-and expects-its own awakening as the sole and deepest guilt. In the Fall, since the eternal purity of names was violated, the sterner purity of the judging word arose" (71). 
    • The Fall has a threefold significance.  1) In stepping outside the purer language of name, human beings make language into a means and . . . a mere sign. The result is the plurality of languages; 2) In exchange for the immediacy of name that was damaged by the Fall, a new apparent immediacy arises, i.e., a judgment that can no longer simply rest in itself; 3) The origin of abstraction too is tied to the Fall. . . "for good and evil, being unnameable and nameless, stand outside the language of names, which man leaves behind precisely in the abyss opened by this question" (71-72).  
    • Bourgeois language is instrumental. Since it is a means to another end it is alienated from its own intrinsic end. While capitalism presupposes the normativity of alienated language, non-capitalistic social organization can reclaim something of the immediacy of the Adamic naming that has been forever lost. 
    • Through judgment language deteriates from expression into a mere means.  Benjamin writes, "the immediacy (which, however, is the linguistic root) of the communicability of abstraction resides in judgment. This immediacy in the communication of abstraction came into being as judgment, when, in the Fall, man abandoned immediacy in the communication of the concrete-that is, name and fell into the abyss of the mediateness of all communication, of the word as means, of the empty word, into the abyss of prattle" (72). He continues, "after the Fall, which, in making language mediate, laid the foundation for its multiplicity, linguistic confusion could be only a step away. . . . .Signs must become confused where things are entangled. The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence" (72). 
    • All higher language is a translation of lower languages which rest ultimately in primal naming.  The structure of each distinct language is like the meaning of a password, and the password itself is the language of nature. "The language of an entity is the medium in which its giestiche Wesen is communicated. The uninterrupted flow of this communication runs through the whole of nature, from the lowest forms of existence to man and from man to God. . . Man communicates himself to God through name . . . and to nature he gives names according to the communication that he receives from her, for the whole of nature, too, is imbued with a nameless, unspoken language, the residue of the creative word of God, which is preserved in man as the cognizing name and above man as the judgment suspended over him" (und der Natur gibt er den Namen nach der Mitteilung, die er von ihr empfängt, denn auch die ganze Natur ist von einer namenlosen stummen Sprache durchzogen, dem Residuum des schaffenden Gotteswortes, welches im Menschen als erkennender Name und über dem Menschen als richtendes Urteil schwebend sich erhalten hat), (74).  
     
    Aesthetic Reflections

    While the general trajectory of Benjamin's early work can seem occasionally obscure, it is clear that he is working to expand the Kantian spatio-temporal forms and the pure categories of the understanding, i.e., quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (subsistence, causality, reciprocity), and modality (possibility, necessity, actuality), to include other types of experience, e.g., historical, artistic, religious, linguistic, psychological, etc. The effect of all of this is to destablize the sharp divide between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between the realm of nature and that of freedom. In reflecting on the common ground of the nature/freedom difference, Benjamin muses that it might be possible to think a certain "nonsynthesis of two concepts in another" (Howard Eiland & Michael Jennings, Selected Writings 1, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, p. 106). This notion of the Idea as a constellation of extremes plays a significant role in Benjamin's later thought.

    In his 1919 dissertation, The Concept of Art History in German Romanticism, Benjamin averts to Fichte's notion of reflection in connecting the idea of art to various artworks. Fichte had highlighted the capacity of thought to think its own thinking. In this way, the activity of thinking becomes the content of what is thought. As thinking thinks its own thinking, there is an immediate consciousness by the subject of its thinking. Benjamin wants to recover the concept of immediacy without thereby positing a problematic intellectual intuition (intellectuelle Anschauung).  His reflections here are clearly influenced by his earlier "solution" of the Russellian paradox. 

    Kant claimed in the First Critique that the form of thinking must operate upon some non-thinking content -- the domain of particular percepts -- if knowledge is to be attained. An intellectual intuition, on the other hand, is a type of spontaneous thinking that creates in its thinking the "givenness" that is thought. Thus no appeal to the sensuous is needed in the act of knowing. While Fichte later makes extensive use of  intellectual intuitions in his Tathandlung, the identity of that fact (object) with the act of its thinking (subject), the notion of an intellectual intuition is more deeply associated with Shelling's philosophy of identity where in an "unmittelbare Erfahrung" (immediate experience) thinking is "weder Sub- noch Objective" (Shelling, Werke II,9).

    Benjamin is interested in how to think the Romantic concept of the Absolute as it is concretely exemplified. How is it possible that the infinitude of the Absolute is present in and through concrete historical works? He is particularly interested in how judgments within the discipline of art criticism are possible. In criticism, the form of art becomes content for a higher type of thinking, a thinking which connects this concrete form via continuity and identity to a higher form in the Idea of art in itself. 

    In his dissertation Benjamin argues that within Romanticism an immanent criterion for critical reflection emerges from the art work itself, a criterion that allows the work to be raised to a higher level of existence, that of the Idea. However, he realizes that a merely immanent criterion is problematic because it does not allow for comparison among works of art as to which is actually aesthetically superior. Each is precious and carries within it the germ by which it is evaluated. The problem for art criticism within German Romanticism is the absence of the moment of critical (negative) judgment. The question is how to reconcile the unconditioned absolute idea of the work with conditioned actual artworks, when the criterion of unconditioned artistic reflection arises from the conditioned artworks themselves. 

    In his 1924 work on Goethe, Elective Affinities, Benjamin reflects upon the "truth content of the work of art" and how it relates to the "material content" of the artwork at the origin of the work's history.  Art criticism, thinks Benjamin, must penetrate beyond the anachronism of its material content and thereby grasp what is true in it. The artwork's truth must be grasped within the context of its historical reception and transmission. The immanent criterion of the artwork, however, guarantees that the critic must deal with the actual work, not merely the author behind the work.

    The content of truth is found not in the work's technique but in its form, in its linguistic expressiveness that links to life itself. Critical reflection upon a work must include a moment of refractive dissonance. What becomes important is not the similarity between the Idea and the artworks exemplifying it, but the difference among them. In its mimesis of its object, the art work evinces a violence to it. It is, after all, different from it in many ways. Benjamin denies any that the Christian-mystical tradition offers any resources for the reconciliation of these differing moments, and instead points to a paradoxical glimmer of hope symbolized by the image of a shooting star (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/#ImaHisCul).

    Reflections on the One and the Many

    Benjamin applies his conviction that Romantic criticism involves the emergence and development of immanent criteria out of the distinct, particular form of the artwork to the Trauerspiel (mourning-play) of the 16th and 17th centuries. In his failed habilitationsschrift, published in 1928 as the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Benjamin argues that the content (Gehalt) of the play is not myth, but rather historical life (p. 62).  In this deeply interesting work, Benjamin is concerned with understanding the Trauerspiel not as a tragedy, but as a type of allegory. Just as the baroque itself is a naturalization of the religious structure of history, so is the allegorical a spatialization of the temporal structure of eschatology (Osborne & Charles). Allegorical expression has as its object the very conventionality of the historical in all of its insignificance and indifference.  

    An understanding of the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" of the work is requisite if one is properly to understand the work as a whole. The prologue attempts, on the one hand, to justify the theory of criticism Benjamin is using in his monograph, while on the other hand, it seeks to recover a concept of allegorical experience that is amenable to modernity (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/#BioSke0).  Benjamin argues that neither a history of art nor a philosophy of art approach can alone grasp fully the work of art. The first, concerned with historical lineage, has no adequate concept of essence, and the second concerned with essence has no adequate concept of historical lineage. What is needed is a radical rethinking of both philosophical aesthetics and art history.  

    Benjamin is concerned to take seriously the reality of that which is named by terms like 'tragedy' or 'Renaissance'. He is not a nominalist, and thus needs in some way to give an account of aesthetic genres that can avoid some of the pitfalls of metaphysical realism. 

    Benjamin understands that artistic works are very particular, and that there forms cannot be dissolved into an undifferentiated unity. So again emerges the previous question: How does the supersensuous immanently appear within the sensuous. How is the Idea available in and through its finite forms, without compromising the reality of the Idea nor blurring (and thus diluting) the particularity of essences embodying that idea? This is, of course, the great question of German Romanticism: How is the infinite qua infinite available in and through the finite qua finite?  How does one think this relationship without falling either into medieval nominalism or realism?  The first path grants ontological status to particulars and makes the universal merely a classifictory abstraction. The second way ascribes true being to the universal and sees particulars as merely instantiations of that being. Is there a way that both are real? Underneath his ruminations one again glimpses the shadow of his earlier distinction between the singulär-tatsächlichen Gegenstand and the Singulär-tatsächlichen daran. Just as descriptions cannot "pick out" the particularity of the referent the way a singular name does, so too the Idea cannot "get at" the particular.  Benjamin wants to grant both the Idea and particular essences ontological status.

    Benjamin offers a number of possibilities for thinking the Idea in relation to its particular artistic forms, one being that of an astrological constellation. The idea is that truth is "vergegenwertigt im Reigen der dargestellen Ideen," that is, "truth is present in the encircling dance of represented ideas" (OGT 29, in Osborne and Matthew).  Accordingly, an astrological constellation is revealed through the stars it groups together. The constellation is to its stars as the Idea is to particular artistic forms. Accordingly, the Idea is revealed in and through the forms which it itself groups together. 

    Furthermore, according to Benjamin, the Idea's representation is not identified simply with actual artistic phenomenon of a given period but with the subsequent development of the artistic phenomenon in later times. This is true of the Origin of the mourning-play as well. Origin (Ursprung) differs from a mere coming-to-be (Entstehung) because only in it is there an "essential inner history of the 'life of the works and forms'" (Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 45-7 referenced in https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/#BioSke).  In the distinction between the Ursprung and the Entstehung, we find perhaps reverberations of the geistiche Wesen and sprachliche Wesen.  In the representation of the Idea as Origin, the particularity of the phenomenon is redeemed. Criticism attempts to lay out the philosophically-assembled historical constellation of the phenomenon and in so doing preserve this phenomenon.  Its role is thus messianic

    Reflections on Art and Capital

    After the failure of his habilationsschrift, Benjamin had to support himself by more popular writing, oftentimes the review of books and theater performances, publishing both in the Literarische Welt and the Frankfurter Zeitung.  Living and working in Frankfurt, Benjamin met and sustained a long correspondence with Theodore Adorno.  During this period of his life, Benjamin also visited Moscow and wrote a sympathetic journal about his experiences there. 

    1928 saw the publication of his Einbahnstrasse  (One-Way Street), a collection of travel experiences and street observations.  In 1929 Benjamin began writing for radio and met Bertolt Brecht, who clearly had a profound life-long impact on Benjamin. His series of essays on Brecht were published posthumously in 1966 as Versuche ueber Brecht

    The last ten years of his life were very productive. He wrote, but did not publish, Das Passagen-Werk translated as The Arcades Project (1999), a compilation of quotations and images relating to 19th century Paris. In this period he also wrote a series of essays on Baudelaire, developing the latter's idea of the flaneur, a difficult term to translate, but which connotes modern society as ruled by consumption rather than production. In 1936 he wrote his most famous work, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproducibarikeit, translated as "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."  The work defends both photography and cinema as a way of politicizing aesthetics rather than understanding both as an"aura" of traditional art.

    The historical framework of the Arcades Project is the "crisis of experience" of capitalist modernity.  His work in some ways seeks redemption; it seeks to redeem the concept of experience through an experience of that concept of experience. The present crisis, grounded in the past, provides a glimpse into a utopian future which could bring history itself to an end. The crisis has two trajectories of top-down political organizations: fascism and communism. Benjamin was sympathetic to the latter, and wanted to analyze the present crisis in ways that could point to a redeemed future. 

    Benjamin believes that the possibilities of art with respect to the present crisis is that it can either be a "fetish of doom" or a "key to happiness" (SW 2, 321, in https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/#ImaHisCul).  In order to see this, we should look at his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"(https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf).

    In this work, Benjamin describes how the mechanical reproduction of a work of art actually devalues the aura of the it's artistic uniqueness. A Benjamin quote from Paul Valery's, "The Conquest of Ubiquity" lays out the problematic at the beginning of the article:
    Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.
    Benjamin's notion of an aura is tied to an original artefact's aesthetic authority, to its autheticity, to its physical uniqueness in space and time. Since the particularity of the original work includes its spatio-temporal location, reproducing the work dimishes its aura.  Just as the original "cult value" of a religious statue decreases when it is widely exhibited, so too is the cult value of the exibited statue further decreased when mechancially reproduced.  Such mechanical production, however, can increase the artefact's "exhibited value."  Benjamin finds in this transformation a certain promise: "The work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions" ("Cult vs. Exhibition / section II."Samizdat Online. 2016-07-20, http://www.samizdatonline.ro/cult-vs-exhibition/). 

    But an art work's uniqueness is not merely determined by the horizon or it orgination, the horizon of it's reception plays a determinative role as well. The work of art's embeddeness within a trajectory of tradition further separates the original work from any mechanical reproductions.  Mechancial reproduction of art thus changes how art is perceived ad even what art is.  But, for Benjamin, this opens up new possibilities for art.  It can be politicized, either in the direction of a "fetish of doom" or in the direction of a "key to happiness."  In either direction, however, Benjamin is aware of the loss of traditional subjectivity in experiencing art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility.  What does it mean to be ourselves after we are absorbed in inauthentic and politicized images? (See
    https://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/summary-the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction/.)  Throughout the essay Benjamin seeks to diminish any usefulness of the "new functions" of art to fascism. 

    Benjamin's work on Baudelaire continues to attrack considerable scholarly interest.  He finds in Baudelaire's essay, "The Painter," a description of the modern, (modernite').  Benjamin believes that ultimately "the modern" eternalizes transitoriness itself (Osborne & Matthews).  In his reading, the fundamental experience of the modern is the transformation of historical time itself through the form of commodification.  Benjamin writes of Baudelaire:
    A single repetitive and dissociated formal temporal structure is detected beneath the rich array of phenomenological forms presented in Baudelaire's poetry: “the price for which the sensation of the modern could be had: the disintegration of the aura in shock experience”. (SW 4, 343, translation amended; GS 1.2, 653,
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/#ImaHisCul). 
    Benjamin believes that the possibilities available for the experience of history are changed by the modern. The modern tends to disconnect experience from it historical traditions. Yet within the modernity's homogeneity there is a restlessness that points beyond history to something else. There is an eschatological dimension at work, a messianic structure to history itself.  It is as if the post-lapsarian reality of the alienation of language and history in modernity of his earlier work, now points forward (backward?) to a paradisical reality, wherein the particularity of concrete experience is available again in a non-alienating naming ultimately pleasing to God. 

    History

    Benjamin has to be one of the most successful failed academics of the twentieth century. Hannah Arendt edited and introduced a collection of Benjamin essays in 1968 entitled Illuminations, a book that inaugurated the trajectory of Benjamin's posthumous reputation in the English-speaking world. This reputation was advanced further by Terry Eagleton's 1981 book Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, which highlighted Benjamin's penchant to read history "against the grain," a strategy for critical theory in the postmodern age. 

    Benjamin always seems to be reflecting on some coincedentia oppositorum, whether it be in his reflections on language, on art, on experience, or on history generally.  How, for instance, does one square a materialist reading of history with the interruption or inbreaking into history seemingly required by his messianic ruminations?  His final work Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte ("On the Concept of History") appears open to various readings, some more material, some more "theological." But Benjamin was not content simply to understand history in accordance with these traditional categories.

    According to Peter Osborne and Matthew Charles, the ultimate goal of Benjamin's late writings was a new philosophy of historical time altogether (See https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30534-8/fulltext).  He wished to forge a new conception by rejecting both the vulgar naturalism of historicism and the deferral of action linked to social progress.  Benjamin suggests that historical intelligibility be conceived along the lines of a "literary montage" of dialectical images. The quasi-messianic understanding of revolution is thus an "interruption" of history or an "arrest of happening" (Ibid.).  “Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately achieved interruption” (SW 4, 402).

    In the Arcades Project, Benjamin opts for a historical materialism that rejects the notion of progress, substituting "actualization" for such a notion. Although Benjamin disliked Heidegger's philosophy, he does understand time here in ways not unlike Heidegger. Benjamin rejects the vulgar notion of time as a continuum of points some of which are past, some future, and one is the present. Against this homogenization of time, Benjamin opts for a temporal differentiation depending ultimately upon the events lying within it. The time of human life rests in human existence, in the existential modes of memory, expectation and action. So it is with history. 

    The notion of progress involves an extrapolation of vulgar time from the past to the future.  Such a view eventuates in termporal naturalistic conformism.  Genuine new possibilities remain unthought and unlived. Thus the concept of progress underlying Marxism itself becomes demobilizing.  The historical is not about what has been, what is, and what will be, but rather it concerns the now, the then, and the yet.  The now's relation to the then is not ultimately temporal for Benjamin, but bildlich (figural).  History can be understood through dialectical images among the horizons of present, past and future.  Historical intelligibility presents itself through montages. Dialectical images destabilize the tradition by the interruptive force they impart to experience through the instantaneous temporality of the Jezstzeit. The image is ein Aublitzendes (flash) blasting that opens the continuum of history. 

    Benjamin is interested clearly in the ontology of the reception of a work of art or image. As the work of art is encountered on the present horizon, it is sorted, as it were, into either its "fore-life" of "after-life."  The event of reception is accordingly constitutive of the very being of the art work.  Benjamin is most interested in uncovering the conditions of production underneath the cultural values of the work's "fore-life." 

    What are we to make of all of this?  Clearly, Benjamin was influenced by the Marxist materialistic reading of history.  Material conditions do determine the trajetory of historical development.

    But Benjamin was always interested in questions of the One and the many.  What is the end of history, after all, and upon what grounds should this teleological end be identified with the final determistic outcome of the dialectics within history?  In order to get a glimmer this End, Benjamin employs the rhetoric of the Messianic. If the End of history cannot be identified with any set of events within history, then does not history in some sense point beyond itself to something more fundamental, perhaps to an Overbeckian Urgeschichte?  He does, after all, search for such a primal history in his Arcades Project (See Norbert Bolz and Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamins Urgeschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts).

    Furthermore, the relationship between the above motifs and Benjamin's earlier distinction between the innocent immediacy of naming and the fall into abstract mediacy in judgment  -- and the distinction between the spracliche Wesen and geistiche Wesen -- is likely a very fecund area for exploration. Assembling all these motifis into a coherent narrative of Benjamin's intellectual development may not, however, ultimately prove very helpful.   

    There are many themes in Benjamin upon which I have not touched, nor have I read deeply enough all of the works I have mentioned in the themes I have treated. When writing an overview of a thinker for a blog or a course -- this blog serves these two functions -- one does not often have sufficient time or motivation to dig deeply. I do think, however, that I might have uncovered enough to show how deeply interesting this thinker is. I do find Benjamin fascinating and I hope to return to him, if granted the time and opportunity so to do.