Experience and Infinite Task

Knowledge, Language and Messianism in the Philosophy of Walter Benjamin

Tamara Tagliacozzo

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786600431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Kritische Theorie

This book examines the philosophical thought of the young Walter Benjamin and its development in his later work. Starting from his critique of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Hermann Cohen, the author traces the relationships among Benjamin’s theories — developed in tandem with his friend Gershom Scholem — of knowledge, language, ethics, politics, the philosophy of history and aesthetics, all linked to the Judaic theme of messianism and language as a realm of redemption. She delineates a horizon in which the concept of experience as structure, philosophical system and “infinite task” ( On the Program of the Coming Philosophy, 1917/18 ) evolves into a concept of the origin as monad ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1925), merging finally into the historical concept as monad and dialectical image ( On the Concept of History, 1940). Tagliacozzo asserts that the concept of experience as structure and symbolic system, derived from his critical interpretation of Kant and Neo-Kantianism, develops into a conception of thought founded on a theological language of revelation.

Chapter 1

Philosophy of Language and Critique of Knowledge

THE ENCOUNTER WITH KANT, NEO-KANTIANISM, AND HUSSERL

In a Curriculum Vitae (CV) written at the beginning of 1928 for unknown purposes, Walter Benjamin indicates Plato and Kant as the foundational reference points for his philosophical formation during his college years, and regards Husserl and the representatives of the Marburg School as the interpreters, continuers, and innovators of the Platonic and Kantian tradition: “In particular, I read and reread Plato and Kant, then the philosophy of Husserl and the Marburg school.”¹

In a contemporaneous CV, which served as a model for the first, Benjamin expresses himself in almost the same terms but without naming Husserl,² while in a still earlier CV, presented to the University of Frankfurt together with his qualifying thesis of 1925,³ he lists representatives of the “Neo-Kantian” and Husserlian schools among the professors under whom he studied in Freiburg, Berlin, Munich, and Bern: “In particular I followed professors Cohn, … Rickert … in Freiburg, Cassirer, Erdmann … and Simmel in Berlin, Geiger in … Munich, and Haberlin … [and] Herberz … in Bern.”⁴

During the summer semesters of 1912 and 1913 Benjamin studied philosophy at the University of Freiburg, taking courses with Heinrich Rickert and Jonas Cohn,⁵ and in 1913 he read Husserl’s essay, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft (1910—Philosophy as rigorous science) in the review “Logos.” Between 1913 and 1915 he studied at the University of Berlin under Ernst Cassirer, Benno Erdmann, and Georg Simmel⁶ (and attended lessons and talks by Hermann Cohen at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin)⁷ and at the University of Munich, where during the winter semester of 1915–1916 and that of summer 1916, he took the course on Humboldt taught by the Privatdozent (Associate Professor) in Finno-Ugric languages, Ernst Lewy, and lessons on Kant’s Critique of Judgment given by the phenomenologist Moritz Geiger⁸ (who, along with Rickert and Lewy, will be the only university professors to have an influence on him).⁹ In the Geiger seminar Benjamin met Felix Noeggerath, a student of philosophy, of India, and of Indo-Germanic languages, who had studied in Marburg, and was completing his doctoral thesis. Together the two frequented the seminar on pre-Colombian civilization in Mexico conducted at the home of the Americanist Walter Lehmann, which the poet Rilke also attended.¹⁰ Between November and December, 1915, Benjamin read Geiger’s Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses (Contributions to the phenomenology of aesthetic enjoyment),¹¹ and at the same time “Husserl’s difficult text on the foundations and principles (of his philosophy) [Husserls schwere, prinzipielle Grundlegung],”¹² which Scholem identified as the Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913—Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy),¹³ but which may refer rather to the Logische Untersuchungen (1900–1901—Logical Investigations).¹⁴ An unedited manuscript by Benjamin from 1917 to 1920 contains in fact a list of texts, among which are present both Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie and his Logische Untersuchungen.¹⁵ This list indicates Benjamin’s interest in phenomenology but also shows that he continued the Kant studies in Munich, which he had begun in 1912–1913 in Freiburg and Berlin. He continued to reflect on the gnoseological principles of Kant’s philosophy, which became important when he met Noeggerath, as the basis for discussions with him on mythology, the philosophy of history, and other philosophical and mathematical problems, with reference to Kant and the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), which Noeggerath discussed in his doctoral thesis, Synthesis und Systembegriff in der Philosophie. Ein Beitrag zur Kritik des Antirationalismus (Synthesis and the Concept of System in Philosophy: A Contribution to the Critique of Anti-Rationalism).¹⁶ Benjamin, who in 1918 will ask Scholem to ask the University of Erlangen for his friend’s dissertation,¹⁷ was amazed by the vast culture of Noeggerath, whom he considered a “genius,” a culture Benjamin described as “universal,” seeing in his thought a unification and deepening of the mythological thought of George and Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft:

In the beginning I was truly amazed by his absolutely universal formation, since he concentrates on the foundation of a philosophical system from a highly meaningful point of view, and simultaneously … on philological studies and the proof of Fermat’s theorem … [He] has had a philosophical formation in personal contact with George, a contact he maintains to this day, and in Marburg. It is all based on a unification and deepening of the Critique of Pure Reason and George’s thought… . I am busy reading one of … [Geiger’s] philosophical works, and also reading Husserl’s difficult text on the foundations and principles [of his philosophy] [Husserls schwere, prinzipielle Grundlegung].¹⁸

Benjamin’s reception of Husserl and the Marburg School has been emphasized in recent years by numerous contributors.¹⁹ Two scholars in particular, Uwe Steiner and Peter Fenves,²⁰ have put into relief—a novelty in the context of Benjamin studies—the weight of both Kant and Husserl in Benjamin’s early writings on the theory of knowledge, on the theory of language, in his project of taking up and revising Kantian philosophy in his essay On the Program of the Coming Philosophy (1917–1918), and in his subsequent work, even after The Origin of the German Mourning Play. Fenves has furthermore explored the presence, in Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem, of themes of mathematical and Fregean logic.²¹ It must be said, however, that Italian scholars have studied Benjamin’s reception of Kant and Husserl since the beginning of the 1980s.²² Already in 1975, Massimo Cacciari had referred to Husserl in Alcuni motivi di Walter Benjamin (da “Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels” a “Der Autor als Produzent”) (Some motifs in Walter Benjamin [from “Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels” to “Der Autor als Produzent”]), stressing the link between Benjamin’s formalizing tendencies and contemporaneous tendencies in mathematical logic:

The form of the Logical Investigations dominates the Preface to the Ursprung … . Subjectivity has intention beyond its own psychic content, giving ideal objectivities, essential necessities that define the space of a precise formal ontology… . This pure formalizing tendency, in direct reference to contemporary tendencies in mathematical logic, [is present] … in Benjamin’s Preface. It is once again a matter of defining a fixed system of forms, a formal ontology, that encompasses a priori the space of any specific interpretation. Concrete critical work is founded on this ideal syntax… . In Husserl, the subjective dimension and the concrete linguistic “act” are understood as correlates of … a formal ontology, continuously intending it… . [In] Benjamin … ideas find their own intentioned psychological correlates in representation and at the same time phenomena are “saved.”… Intentionality concerns these forms (of representation) only, not their object (ideas)… . Philosophical phenomenology defines the transcendental structures of subjectivity in terms of forms intending ideal objectivities.²³

To understand the influence on Benjamin of Kant and Husserl, of mathematical logic, of the logical and messianic doctrine of Herman Cohen, and also the Judaic theological doctrine that Benjamin receives from his friend Gershom Scholem, we must examine the essay on language Benjamin wrote at the end of 1916. In November of that year, Benjamin announced to Scholem his almost completed “On Language as Such and on Human Language,”²⁴ complaining that he was still not ready to approach the relationship of language with mathematics, and that of mathematics with thought and Judaism:

In this essay, it was not possible for me to go into mathematics and language, i.e. mathematics and thought, mathematics and Zion, because my thoughts on this infinitely difficult topic are still quite far from having taken final shape… . From the title … you will note a certain systematic intent, which, however, also makes completely clear for me the fragmentary nature of its ideas, because I am still unable to touch on many points. In particular, the consideration of mathematics from the point of view of a theory of language, which is ultimately, of course, most important to me, is of a completely fundamental significance for the theory of language as such, even though I am not yet in a position to attempt such a consideration.²⁵

The work is Benjamin’s response, Scholem explains, to a “rather long letter” from Scholem to Benjamin:

about the relationship between mathematics and language, … [in which I had posed] a number of questions on the subject. His long reply to me, which he broke off in the middle, was later reworked into his essay Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen [“On Language as Such and On Human Language”]… . He handed me a copy in December 1916 upon his return to Berlin, designating it as the first part, to be followed by two more.²⁶

The essay delineates a theological theory of language linked to Judeo-Kabbalistic themes that had matured through Benjamin’s exchanges with Scholem, a scholar of philosophy, logic, mathematics, and Judaism (although Benjamin takes up neither logic nor mathematics). Starting in 1916, Scholem often discussed logic with Benjamin (and in 1917, a mathematical theory of truth)²⁷ and spent the winter semester of 1917–1918 at the University of Jena, where he studied mathematics and philosophy and attended courses and seminars given by Bruno Bauch (on the logic of Rudolf Hermann Lotze and on Kant’s Introduction to the Critique of Judgment), by the phenomenologist Paul F. Linke, and by Gottlob Frege. He read Kant (the Critique of Judgment and Prolegomena) as well as texts on Kant, Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Frege’s The Foundations of Arithmetic, writings by Paul Bachmann and Louis Couturat,²⁸ and the Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (Lessons on the Algebra of Logic) by Ernst Schrӧder:

Philosophy in Jena was rather irritating to me… . On the positive side, I was drawn to two very dissimilar teachers. One of these was Paul F. Linke, an unorthodox pupil of Husserl, who induced me to study a major portion of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen [Logical investigations], about which Benjamin had only an indistinct impression from his Munich period. The other was Gottlob Frege, whose Grundlagen der Arithmetik [Foundations of arithmetic] I was reading along with related writings by Bachmann and Louis Couturat (Die philosophischen Prinzipen der Mathematik). I attended Frege’s one-hour lectures on “Begriffsschrift” [interpreted logical calculus].²⁹

Scholem enthusiastically described to Benjamin the impression that Kant’s Prolegomena made on him but he was not equally satisfied with Bauch’s seminar on Lotze. In a final paper, Scholem described his differences with both Bauch and Lotze regarding mathematical and symbolic logic, ideas Scholem developed as part of an effort to arrive at a pure language of thought, side by side with his reflection on mystical symbology (especially on kabbalistic theories of language):

At that time I was greatly interested in mathematical logic—ever since I had discovered Schroeder’s Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik [Lectures on the algebra of log...