Walter Benjamin's Philosophy
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Walter Benjamin's Philosophy

Destruction and Experience

Andrew Benjamin, Peter Osborne, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Osborne

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eBook - ePub

Walter Benjamin's Philosophy

Destruction and Experience

Andrew Benjamin, Peter Osborne, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Osborne

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This collection explores, in Adorno's description, `philosophy directed against philosophy'. The essays cover all aspects of Benjamin's writings, from his early work in the philosophy of art and language, through to the concept of history. The experience of time and the destruction of false continuity are identified as the key themes in Benjamin's understanding of history.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781134679218

1 Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destruction of Tradition

Howard Caygill
It is there that I shall find Heidegger on my path, and I expect some sparks to fly from the clash [l’entre-choc] of our two very different ways of viewing history.
(Benjamin, letter to Scholem, 20 January 1930)
The imagined meeting of Benjamin and Heidegger would be an apt subject for a modern allegorical painting, perhaps by Kitaj with the title l’entre-choc. Two iconic figures meet in a rancid Heimat landscape punctuated by distant ‘factory’ chimneys and traversed by a gleaming Autobahn. Surrounded by a cluster of emblems drawn from Judaism, Catholicism, and the ‘contemporary mass movements’ of Communism and Fascism, they contemplate a bullet-scarred bust of Hölderlin. And between them flash the sparks from the collision of their ‘two very different ways of viewing history’.
Such an image would illustrate the extent to which the differences between Heidegger and Benjamin are traversed by broader political and religious oppositions, with the one figuring the unrepentant beneficiary of the National Socialist regime and the other its exiled and terrorized victim. Yet there is a danger of this image becoming a sentimental idyll, a ‘left melancholic’ alibi for not examining the possible complicity between their two views of history. Nor is the danger of a Manichean separation of Benjamin and Heidegger averted by simply harmonizing their opposition, whether through the liberal equanimity of intellectual history or the neo-Marxist resolution of a dialectical opposition. Such approaches to the staging of the opposition prescribe in advance the terms on which Benjamin and Heidegger will or will not meet, and in so doing forgo the sparks thrown up by their l’entre-choc. They also sacrifice the light which these sparks might cast upon prevailing assumptions about the relationship between history, politics and art under modernity.
The clash between Heidegger and Benjamin’s thought cannot be described in terms of a ‘debate’ – there was no institutional space in which Benjamin and Heidegger could engage in a liberal ‘exchange of views’. Benjamin’s comments on Heidegger’s work were uniformly hostile, and never directly addressed the author: he planned in 1930 to establish a reading group with Brecht which would ‘demolish Heidegger’ (Briefe, 514) and a year later claimed to prefer the ‘preposterous and uncouth analyses of Franz Mehring’ to the ‘profound description of the realm of ideas undertaken by the Heideggerian school’ (p. 524). Nor is there any evidence of Heidegger’s critical engagement with Benjamin’s work. And yet in spite of this absence of ‘debate’ the encounter of Benjamin and Heidegger’s thought is of crucial importance not only for understanding the development of Benjamin’s thought but also for understanding the directions taken by German philosophical and political radicalism during the 1920s and 1930s.
The thematic parallels between Heidegger and Benjamin’s thought are striking. Both were critical to the point of hostility of prevailing neo-Kantian and Hegelian liberal progressive philosophies of history, and both engaged with a constellation of themes which included ‘tradition’, ‘origin’, ‘technology’ and ‘art’. Both explored these themes within the context of an analysis of the grain of everyday experience in modernity: Heidegger in the analyses of Division 1 of Being and Time and Benjamin in the ‘Arcades Project’. Finally, both sought to comprehend the changes in the modern political occasioned by what Benjamin described as the ‘tremendous shattering of tradition’ and its ‘intimate connection with the contemporary mass movements’ (Benjamin 1935: 223). Their accounts of these changes stressed the role played by technology in the emergence of a political realm riven by the opposition between the mass movements of the left and the right.
The thematic similarities are complemented by a chronological parallel between their writings and publications. These began in 1916 with Benjamin’s critique of Heidegger’s Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft (The Concept of Time in the Science of History) (1916) and to a lesser extent Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungs-lehre des Duns Scotus (Scotus’s Doctrine of the Categories and Signification) (1916). Heidegger’s development of the themes of tradition and temporality announced in these early works and their systematic critique by Benjamin set the stage for the composition and publication of their contemporaneous masterpieces Being and Time (1927) and The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) (1928). The same set of themes was to resurface almost a decade later in the two classic meditations on art, politics and technology written in 1935 – Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ and Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.
These thematic and chronological parallels are not coincidental but issue directly from Benjamin’s initial critique of Heidegger’s philosophy of history in 1916. Central to this critique is a severe difference with Heidegger over the nature of tradition. Benjamin’s insistence upon the destructive character of tradition and its relation to history and subjectivity established the terrain not only for his critique of Heidegger but also for the development of his thought as a whole. This first entre-choc in 1916 thus formed the matrix for the subsequent differences which were to emerge between the two thinkers.

TRADITION AND HISTORICAL TIME

The dedication to The Origin of German Tragic Drama reads
Entworfen 1916 Verfasst 1925
Damals wie Heute meiner Frau gewidnet
and translates as ‘Sketched 1916 Composed 1925 Dedicated then as now to my wife’. ‘The ‘sketch’ of 1916 has survived in the six fragments mentioned in a letter to Herbert Belmore late in 1916. They were written over the summer of that year, beginning with ‘The Happiness of Classical Humanity’ and ‘Socrates’ written in June. These were followed by the three fragments written over the summer months, ‘On the Middle Ages’, ‘The Mourning-Play and Tragedy’ and ‘The Significance of Speech in the Mourning-Play and Tragedy’ (I follow Gillian Rose’s felicitous translation of Trauerspiel as mourning-play). The series of fragments was concluded in mid-November with the consummate commentary on Genesis 2–3: ‘On Language in General and on Human Language’. The significance of these fragments for understanding Benjamin’s thought cannot be overstated. Together they form the matrix not only of the Trauerspiel book and the associated essays on language and translation prior to 1925, but also of the ‘Arcades Project’ and its paralipomena from the 1930s.
The fragments of 1916 are also significant with respect to the entre-choc between Benjamin and Heidegger. In a letter to Gershom Scholem dated 11 November 1916, Benjamin refers Scholem to the Heidegger essay ‘The Concept of Time in the Science of History’ which was first given as a venia legendi lecture in Freiburg on 27 July 1915 and was published in the first half of 1916 in the Zeitschrift für Philosophic und philosophische Kritik, vol. 161. Benjamin seems to have read this essay during the summer, and the last four fragments show clear signs of a critical engagement with it. The programmatic sketch for his Trauerspiel book, and indeed for his authorship as a whole, thus emerged from a critique of Heidegger.
Benjamin’s comments on Heidegger’s essay are far from complimentary: he told Scholem ‘it shows precisely how not to deal with the matter. A terrible piece of work, which you should perhaps look at, if only to confirm my suspicion, that most of what the author says about historical time is nonsense (which I am in a position to judge) but also, to confirm that what he says about mechanical time is wrong too!’ (Briefe, 130–1). Yet this categorical rejection of Heidegger’s early work on time conceals the extent of Benjamin’s critical engagement, and indeed the several points of agreement between them.
Superficially, Heidegger’s text appears as an academic exercise in neo-Kantianism, but one with several novel twists which point forward to the subsequent development of his thought. Heidegger begins with the received neo-Kantian distinction of the natural and cultural sciences, proposing to compare the concepts of time which are used in each of them. Still in a neo-Kantian vein, he examines the ‘function’ of the concept of time which is proper to the goals of the two sciences.
The first part of the essay examines the function of time in modern natural science. Heidegger describes the ‘goal’ of modern science as the expression of the ‘unity of the physical image of the world [Weltbild], the tracing-back of all appearances to the mathematically established laws of general dynamics, back to the laws of motion of a still undetermined mass’ (Heidegger 1916: 363; 5, translation amended). In physical science, the concept of time functions as a mathematical measure, as the fourth-dimensional variable t added to the three-dimensional system of Cartesian co-ordinates x, y, z. This requires that the ‘sensible-intuitive qualities of a defined phenomenon are eliminated and transformed into mathematical ones’ (Heidegger 1916: 365; 6) and that ‘time then become an homogeneous ordered series of points, a scale, a parameter’ (pp. 366; 6). With these arguments Heidegger anticipates his later analysis of the mathematization of modern science in What is a Thing?, but the emphasis in the 1916 text is on developing a concept of historical time by means of a comparison with the concept of time used in physical science.
In his discussion of the function of time in history, Heidegger establishes many of the tropes which will inform his later discussions of history, tradition and origin. He admits that there is little consensus among historians over the goal of history, but draws out those ‘moments’ of the science of history which elucidate the function performed in it by the concept of time. Two of these moments are substantive. They concern the historical object and the relation of past and present. The next two moments are methodological. In them Heidegger reflects upon the concept of time implied in the testing of historical sources and the construction of historical narratives. The fifth and final moment brings out the understanding of time presupposed by historical chronology. From all this Heidegger concludes that the historical concept of time is qualitative, but on the way to this unremarkable conclusion he makes several important and suggestive points which were later developed more fully.
Heidegger claims that the object of history is humanity ‘not as a biological entity, rather to the extent that its spiritual-physical accomplishments embody the ideal of culture’ (pp. 368; 7). The idea of culture is realized through Kulturschaffen (creation of culture), which appears on occasions to be itself the agent of history. Yet at the moment when Heidegger is describing it in terms of an ‘objectification of spirit in the medium of time’ a dissonance enters into his account:
This Kulturschaffen in its fullness and variety proceeds in time, it passes through a development, underlies the most varied forms of recasting and retrieval, and gathers what is past in order to work it through further, or to combat it.
(pp. 368; 8, translation amended)
In the first part of the sentence Heidegger prosecutes a logic of objectification; in the second he intimates a differential view of time and history. In the remainder of the essay, the second view increasingly prevails.
When Heidegger describes the object of history as the temporal objectification of spirit, he reduces time to a neutral medium of objectification. However, when he broadens his analysis to include the relation between past and present he gains some fresh insights into the phenomenon of historical time. He does not then succumb to a pseudo-Hegelian synthesis of past and present in the continuous present of the ‘objectification of spirit’ as in the first half of the sentence cited above, but instead pursues the paradox of historical time intimated in its second half. The claim that the present must gather what is past in order to work it through further or combat it intimates a new, differential notion of historical time. The historical object is always separated from the present by an interval of time, but it is precisely this interval that allows it to be retrieved and worked through or resisted again. It is time that makes the past into what Heidegger will later call an ‘endowment’, but this is time not as a medium for unifying past and present but as a difference that divides them.
Time separates the present from the past as well as bringing the past into the present. The present of the past was ‘other’ to our present, and yet it is not ‘incomparably other’. There is a ‘temporal rift between the historian and the object’ and for history to be possible this rift must be both overcome and preserved. This movement is identified by Heidegger as the main ‘goal’ of history, and he intimates that it is only possible through the paradoxical function of time, which brings the past into the present while ineluctably consigning it to the ‘past’. Time, in the later language, both presences and withdraws the past; it performs the work of carrying over the past to the present while also making it something other than the present.
Various perplexities follow from the simultaneous presencing and withdrawing of the past through time, and these are explored by Heidegger in his reflections on historical methodology. These reflections are beset by the anxiety of the ‘labyrinth of errors’ opened by viewing time as both presencing and absencing the past. Heidegger is particularly intrigued by the problem of the authenticity of historical sources provoked by this movement. If the past exists only for the present but not entirely in it, what then is the past, is there an authentic past, or is it but the forged coin of the present? This problem is explored in an excursus on historical source criticism, the guaranteeing of the ‘authenticity’ of received sources. Time once again plays an equivocal role: it raises the possibility of forgery, while supplying the touchstone for a genuine source; it is the condition both for the authenticity and inauthenticity of a source.
Heidegger maintains that sources – documentary and other – are ‘stamped’ by their time, especially by the legal and cultural forms which for him comprise their ‘time’. Such past structurings of time are visible to the present, and the authenticity of a source may be established by comparing it with the structuring of time characteristic of the epoch in which it is supposed to have arisen. Here Heidegger retrieves his earlier argument for Kulturschaffen as the source of the structuring of time. If a source is incongruent with what has become known as ‘its time’, then it is suspect. He cites the pseudo-Isadorean decretals as an example of an exposed forgery, concluding that a source’s ‘value as evidence depends on how far removed it is in time from the historical fact to which it is to testify’ (pp. 372; 9). The trope informing Heidegger’s analysis is becoming clearer – time enables historical truth to be established while simultaneously distancing and undoing its claims.
Time also obeys this structure in the methodological discussion of historical narrative. Presenting the past as a historical object allows once present events to become elements of a narrative, while at the same time removing them from any possibility of narrative by locating them in their proper epoch. The narrative is of the present, but claims to present the past. Time is both the condition of a true narrative and the prime threat to its authenticity. A similar trope obtains with Heidegger’s analysis of historical chronology, the calibration of time in terms of days, weeks, years. This he says is a condition for historical understanding, yet also an obstacle, since historical events obey a qualitative temporality which cannot be contained by chronology. The latter calibrates the presencing and withdrawing of time from the standpoint of an eternal present in which every moment is identical, but cannot capture differences in the qualitative experience of time.
Although couched in the numbing idiom of academic neo-Kantianism, Heidegger’s analysis of historical time is already far beyond it. It points to a radical understanding of time as tradition, that is, as a passing on of the past to the present which is also the present’s constitution of its past. It regards historical time or tradition as deeply equivocal. It is both the ‘passing on’ and ‘carrying over’ of a historical object or heritage, and that which opens the dangerous intervals of time across which the heritage must be carried. Furthermore, while it is the guarantee of a genuine ‘heritage’ – a past owned by a present – it also undermines the truth and validity of the past in the ac...

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