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; “Über 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 it.  The 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.