Modernism Between Benjamin and Goethe

Matthew Charles

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350267374
• eBook ISBN: 9781350013957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism

Widely regarded as one of the foremost cultural critics of the last century, Walter Benjamin's relation to Modernism has largely been understood in the context of his reception of the aesthetic theories of Early German Romanticism and his associated interest in avant-garde Surrealism. But this Romantic understanding only gives half the picture. Running through Benjamin's thought is also a critique of Romanticism, developed in conjunction with a positive engagement with the philosophical, artistic and historical writings of J. W. von Goethe. In demonstrating the significance of these Goethean elements, this book challenges the dominant understanding of Benjamin's philosophy as essentially Romantic and instead proposes that Goethe's Classicism, conceived as the counterpoint to Romanticism, permits a corrective to the latter's deficiencies. Benjamin's Modernist concept of criticism, it is argued, is constituted in the movement between these polarities of Romanticism and Classicism. Conversely, placing Goethe's Classicism in relation to Benjamin's practice of literary criticism reveals historical tensions with Romanticism that constitute the untimely – indeed, it will be argued, cinematic – Modernism of his work. Adopting a transcritical approach, this book alternates between Benjamin and Goethe in relation to the experiences of colour, language and technology, assembling a constellation of philosophical and artistic figures between them, including the writings of Kant, Nietzsche, Cohen, Deleuze, Koselleck, Klages, and the work of Grünewald, Marées, Klee, Turner, Hulme, Eisenstein, Tretyakov, and Murnau.

1

Criticism, transdisciplinarity and transcriticism: Walter Benjamin and the Kantian tradition

Walter Benjamin desired, at the outset of his career, to be the ‘foremost critic of German literature’; a century later, he is regarded as one of the foremost cultural critics of European capitalist modernity.¹ The writings he produced at the beginning of the twentieth century, and indeed the subsequent reception of his work in the intervening period, involved a series of translations of ideas between disciplines, genres and modes of writing (in print as well as for radio), which oscillate between cultural, political and religious perspectives as Benjamin himself travelled between Germany, France, Russia, Denmark and Spain. This shifting of ideas, perspectives and experiences was central to the transdisciplinary nature of Benjamin’s ‘philosophizing beyond philosophy’,² characterized in terms of a dynamic movement across existing disciplinary boundaries that is pragmatically rooted in a problematizing – and simultaneously aimed at the transformation – of everyday experience.³

This transdisciplinary impulse is inherent to the internal dynamics of the concept of critique (Kritik), which is so central to the German tradition of critical theory that Benjamin inherited, indebted as it is to the philosophical criticism of Kant, the literary criticism of Romanticism, and the economic criticism of Marx. Confronted with the metacritical problem of its own self-sufficiency, the practice of critique – whether philosophical, literary or economic – is driven beyond the conventional borders of its own disciplinary constitution, drawing on the content of experiences paradigmatic for other – whether past, current or future – fields and disciplines.⁴

Benjamin’s aim to be the foremost critic of German literature necessitated, he believed, a philosophical-historical reconstruction of the practice of literary criticism itself, one that he developed from within the context of Kant’s philosophical method of critique. In his early writings associated with ‘On Perception’ and ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’, Benjamin regards the redevelopment of the Kantian system as a task which, having been partially initiated by neo-Kantianism, was to be completed by the ‘coming philosophy’.⁵ His subsequent attempt to investigate the philosophical history of the problem of criticism (Kritik), announced in his dissertation on ‘The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’, transforms the philosophical concept of criticism in Kant by examining it from the perspective of literary and art criticism, most notably in his writings on German Romanticism and Goethe.

In particular, it will be argued, the philosophical concept of criticism is examined from the perspective of journalistic criticism, implied in the centrality of the journal (most notably the Athenaeum) to the philosophical form of Early German Romanticism, but explicit in Benjamin’s reflections on journalism and the crisis of literature in his announcement for the journal Angelus Novus, where ‘both critical discourse and the habits of judgement stand in need of renewal’ in order to ‘restore criticism to its former strength’ through a journal characterized by translation, discontinuity and ephemerality,⁶ as well as in his writings associated with Karl Kraus’s journalism and with the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility. Whereas Friedrich Nietzsche had identified the debasement of genuine culture with modern journalism, characterized by its ephemeral politicality (literally du jour), levelling down of aristocratic distinctions and barbaric corruption of artistic style,⁷ Benjamin suggests that ‘it is at the scene of the limitless debasement of the word – the newspaper, in short – that salvation is being prepared’.⁸

Although Kant’s dense philosophical writings appear to be a strange starting point for the reconstruction of journalistic-literary criticism, the central argument of this chapter is that the notion of philosophical critique (Kritik) that Benjamin develops from Kant, and that Kant introduces into the German language, was already an inherently transdisciplinary one, to the extent it was inherited from the British tradition of literary criticism that emerges in response to a crisis – one connected to the rise of public exhibitions and public journalism – concerning the standards of the judgement of taste in the mid-eighteenth century. The concept of critique that Benjamin utilizes is inherently transdisciplinary in this double sense: it possesses its own inner dynamism, a conceptual impulse to movement that stems from the negative moment of criticism itself, and this transdisciplinary impulse is evident in the history of the concept itself.

The present chapter elaborates on this recovery of a transdisciplinary concept of criticism in Benjamin’s early engagement with Kant and the neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen by expanding on three central features: first, the association of philosophical criticism with the experience of aesthetic judgement (literary criticism) and, second, the emphasis on the transversal movement associated with the antinomical (transcriticism). What Benjamin’s transformation of the Kantian concept of criticism sought to do in renewing its literary and journalistic potency, it will be argued in this chapter, was to reconnect ‘critique’ to its origins in a mode of judgement capable of criticizing, indeed characterized by, aesthetic sensibility and specifically the spatial movement of parallax. This includes a third moment, or movement, involving the dissociation of criticism from all modes of teleological judgement, which leads to an emphasis on the contingency of the ephemeral (contingent criticism). This provides the framework for the chapters that follow, which specifically locate the modernism of Benjamin’s philosophical concept of criticism in the contingent interstice opened up in the transversal movement between romantic and classical literary criticism.

Literary criticism and aesthetic judgement

In Benjamin’s early writings, the malign influence of the modern state upon institutions of education is regarded as having transformed them into primarily professional apparatuses in which the ‘community of learning’ and the ‘original unity’ of the disciplines in the ‘idea of knowledge’ have been abandoned.⁹ Benjamin regards the possibility of a liberation from such deformed existence to be ‘the exclusive task of criticism [Kritik]’. As his subsequent essays ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’ and ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’ make evident, the concept of criticism that he evokes here is that which becomes prevalent in German Idealism in the wake of Kant and is taken up in various forms by Early German Romanticism in the late eighteenth century and by neo-Kantianism in the late nineteenth century.

As the Kant scholars Hans Vaihinger and Norman Kemp Smith have both observed, however, Kant’s introduction of the term ‘critique’ (Kritik) into German, most likely from his reading of Elements of Criticism by Henry Home (Lord Kames), derives from the common use of the term ‘criticism’ in eighteenth-century English to denote the standards of taste in literary and artistic judgement, as earlier used in the poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope.¹⁰ Kant’s delineation of an aesthetic kind of judgement in the Lectures on Logic links it specifically to what, Kant says, Home more correctly called criticism, understood as providing the ‘norm (model or standard for passing judgement), which consists in universal agreement’, but which can never become, as the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten attempted, a science.¹¹ Logical judgement, conversely, is founded not on mere criticism but on ‘a science or doctrine, provided that one understands by doctrine a dogmatic instruction from principles a priori’ as a ‘canon (law)’ that subsequently serves for criticism ‘as the principle for passing judgement on all use of the understanding in general . . . in regard to mere form’.¹² Science provides the canon for epistemological criticism, as a set of laws for judging the correctness of logical kinds of judgement, whereas, as Home correctly observed, criticism is a kind of judgement that itself provides the standards for taste.

Home’s concern with deducing the rules of taste, despite the fact that taste seemingly involves subjective feelings of pleasure or displeasure and is prone to cultural and historical change, is perhaps reflected in his insistence on speaking not of the elements of criticism but of elements and his writing a chapter that is not ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, as his cousin Hume would do, but is devoted to some ‘Standards of Taste’, emphasizing the partiality of his project. In his Elements of Criticism from 1762, Home emphasizes the cultivation of judgement in accordance not merely with the external standards provided by nature or the classical poets, as Pope and before him Dryden had done, but with the inner standards provided by a common sense.

Significantly, establishing the elements of criticism had acquired a vital significance for Home and Kant because the emergence of journalistic criticism for guiding a new public judgement of taste coincided with the simultaneous disintegration of the relevance and standards inherited from classicism, usually associated with Aristotle’s Poetics, rediscovered in the Renaissance and evinced in Dryden and Pope’s use of the term to insist on a return to nature and the ancients. This crisis took place within the context of the emergence of often anonymous journalistic art criticism in the exhibition pamphlets, newspapers and magazines that accompanied the ‘development of regular, public exhibitions of contemporary art in Paris and London in the mid-1700s’.¹³ Home himself had, in the late 1730s, planned a literary and political periodical with his distant cousin, the philosopher David Hume.

Home’s Elements of Criticism had argued that although it is generally accepted that there is no disputing about taste because it concerns that which is subjectively agreeable or disagreeable, we nonetheless speak equally of the existence of good and bad taste as the universal basis of criticism in the arts, and so the universality of taste must have a foundation in a providentially given human nature, upon which the conviction of a common standard or common sense must be based. Although Kant’s transcendental account of a sensus communis in the third Critique is in part indebted to this British tradition, his critical version moves beyond Home’s idea of a shared ‘good taste’ in deducing a notion of universal assent as a necessary condition for the judgement of beauty itself. For in assuming a providentially given foundation for judgement, Home’s concept of criticism becomes dependent on a ‘crude teleological naturalism’, which ‘does not direct individual judgement through reason, but nevertheless determines it according to rational ends’, providing a standard for taste that is ‘felt but not known in the act of judgement’.¹⁴ Consequently, Kant ‘denied the title of philosophy to the British theory of taste because it did not properly account for the universality and necessity of its judgements’, equivocating between ‘sense’ and ‘reason’ in ‘dissolv[ing] reason into the unknowable yet unnegotiable conviction behind the discrimination of sense’.¹⁵ This not only confused ‘the sensible and intellectual capacities, committing in Kant’s eyes the amphiboly of sensualizing the concepts of the understanding’, but in doing so unphilosophically relied on a providential teleology of the human constitution.¹⁶

The antinomy of taste that Kant eventually develops in the Critique of the Power of Judgement is therefore situated between this British tradition of the criticism of taste and the German science of aesthetics inaugurated by Alexander Baumgarten, distinguishing the reflective kind of judgement identified with criticism from the logical kind identified with science and in its two distinct parts systematically distinguishing and addressing the relationship between aesthetic judgement and teleological judgement. Kant’s solution reveals how the discrimination of perfection or lack of perfection involved in aesthetic judgement cannot concern the spatio-temporal intuitions of sensibility itself but rather the ‘form’ of accord between intuitions of sensibility and concepts of cognition in judgement that Home left unresolved. Yet the basis for this accord between sensibility and understanding, those ‘two stems’ of human cognition, ‘which perhaps spring from a common root, though one unknown to us’, remains, notoriously, a fundamental problem within Kant’s system as well.¹⁷

However, this entangled problem of the various standards of judgement and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Perverse antiques
• 1 Criticism, transdisciplinarity and transcriticism: Walter Benjamin and the Kantian tradition
• 2 Weak messianism in German Romanticism
• 3 Strong aesthetics in Goethe’s tender empiricism
• 4 Pure content: the ephemerality of colour
• 5 Pure expression: the critical violence of language
• 6 Pure history: the untimeliness of technology
• Conclusion : All that is ephemeral … becomes an event
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page