The Fall of Language

Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning

Alexander Stern

• Editorial: Harvard University Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780674240636
• Categoría: Philosophie
• Categoría: Sprache in der Philosophie

In the most comprehensive account to date of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language, Alexander Stern explores the nature of meaning by putting Benjamin in dialogue with Wittgenstein. Known largely for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature, Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. This early work is famously obscure and considered hopelessly mystical by some. But for Alexander Stern, it contains important insights and anticipates—in some respects surpasses—the later thought of a central figure in the philosophy of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein.As described in The Fall of Language, Benjamin argues that "language as such " is not a means for communicating an extra-linguistic reality but an all-encompassing medium of expression in which everything shares. Borrowing from Johann Georg Hamann's understanding of God's creation as communication to humankind, Benjamin writes that all things express meanings, and that human language does not impose meaning on the objective world but translates meanings already extant in it. He describes the transformations that language as such undergoes while making its way into human language as the "fall of language." This is a fall from "names"—language that responds mimetically to reality—to signs that designate reality arbitrarily.While Benjamin's approach initially seems alien to Wittgenstein's, both reject a designative understanding of language; both are preoccupied with Russell's paradox; and both try to treat what Wittgenstein calls "the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language." Putting Wittgenstein's work in dialogue with Benjamin's sheds light on its historical provenance and on the turn in Wittgenstein's thought. Although the two philosophies diverge in crucial ways, in their comparison Stern finds paths for understanding what language is and what it does.

Part I

BENJAMIN’S PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

1

The Metaphysics of Meaning

WHAT FOLLOWS in this chapter is an exposition of the metaphysical background of Benjamin’s early theory of language. I clarify, interpret, and advocate on behalf of the starting point around which Benjamin’s theory is organized. The crucial concepts here are language as such—the name Benjamin gives to the linguistic character of all reality—and the Adamic name, which serves as an ideal for the human translation of this reality. I leave for Chapter 2 a discussion of Benjamin’s account of the character of actual human language and limit my discussion here to the metaphysical framework for that account.

Part of the exposition here will involve reconstructing and developing these concepts, without distorting them, in such a way that they are made more independent of the expression they find in Benjamin’s writing. The theological, “mystical,” or “magical” register in which Benjamin expresses his thought is crucial, but it has perhaps made his philosophy of language easy to ignore or dismiss, at least from a certain perspective. Benjamin, as I’ve already suggested, does not mean by these terms that language has robust magical features, whatever that might mean, or that language can only be understood through faith, but instead uses them to foreground the condition of profound and fundamental ignorance we find ourselves in vis-à-vis language. It is in effort to bring that ignorance into view, and in so doing to bring language itself into view, that Benjamin refers to its magic.

The chapter is divided into four sections. The first briefly introduces language as such. The second section is a digression into Benjamin’s idiosyncratic Kantianism and his critique of the empiricist metaphysics he finds in Kant’s conception of experience. Language as such is motivated by Benjamin’s continuation of the Hamannian project of reorienting Kantian philosophy around language. I argue in the third section that the theological concept of condescension, as it is conceived of by Hamann, plays a decisive role in Benjamin’s understanding of language as such. The fourth section introduces the idea of a name as Benjamin understands it—that is, as constitutive of an ideal, Adamic form of human language from which real human language is fallen.

I draw mainly in this chapter and Chapter 2 from Benjamin’s early work in the 1910s and early 1920s, prior to his book on Trauerspiel. My exposition is organized around “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”1 (1916). Other texts discussed include “On Perception” (1917), “The Program of the Coming Philosophy” (1918), and “On the Task of the Translator” (1921), as well as fragments on language from his notebooks. I will make reference in Chapter 2 to later essays, including “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933) and “Problems in the Sociology of Language” (1935).

1. Language Everywhere

As I suggested in the introduction, the question of language tends to focus on the relationship between words and objects. How do words refer to objects or states of affairs? This question, taken straightforwardly, assumes a good deal of background that is perhaps not immediately evident. At the very least, it seems already to commit itself to some notion of objects independent of the names we give to them and, on the other hand, words of various kinds “picking out” these objects. The objects may be composed of real, physical, mind-independent stuff that is indifferent not just to our names but also to our perception of them, or they may be phenomena—impingements on various components of our sensory equipment—which after long-term acquaintance we elevate to the status of objects. Whether real or merely phenomenal, the objects are independent of the words and would, one presumes, exist whether or not the words picked them out. The question of how words refer to objects thus already separates what it is for us to have an object from what it is for us to name one.

This conventional initial distinction between word and object should be kept in mind as we approach the far less intuitive distinction on which Benjamin chooses to base his philosophy of language, that between language as such (Sprache überhaupt) and the language of humankind.2 Benjamin does not mean to deny the existence of the conventional distinction but to question its priority. To put it another way, Benjamin will answer the question of how words refer to objects not by trying to explain how the gap between word and object is bridged, but by explaining how that gap is created by human language in the first place.

Benjamin begins by broadening the concept of language to include, first, all human spiritual or intellectual (geistig)3 meanings and then, shortly thereafter, “absolutely everything” (GS 2:140 / SW 1:62). What he means is not that everything must be thought of in terms of human language, but rather that human language, to be understood correctly, must be regarded as a particular kind of a broader communicative medium—it must be seen as a particular kind of language. By human intellectual meanings, Benjamin means the experience and expression involved in, for example, art. Works of visual art or music communicate meaning even when written or spoken words are not involved. Of course in cases like this or others Benjamin mentions here—justice, religion, technology—words are not far away. They “underlie or found” these languages of intellectual meaning. Even when words are not explicitly involved, they are in the background, making the practice possible in the first place, and also potentially present, waiting in the wings to subject the artwork to interpretation, for example. When we talk about the language of music, we refer to the means it uses to express meanings and the meanings it expresses. These meanings can also be expressed in words, that is, be made more explicit in interpretation or criticism. But, for Benjamin, the language of music, which has to do with the experience of the meaning of a musical piece, cannot be fully captured by words. Benjamin is using the word “language” to apply to practices and experiences that communicate meanings, whether or not these meanings are subsequently communicated or fully communicable in words.

The view that certain human practices have a communicative significance not captured by word usage, while not uncontroversial, corresponds to a familiar, if vague use of the word “language.”4 In any case, Benjamin immediately takes this thesis a step further and contends that the tendency toward communication of meanings—or “communicability” (Mitteilbarkeit)—inheres not just in human practices but in “absolutely everything.” This notion that there is something linguistic about nature independent of the mind of humankind is, no doubt, considerably harder to countenance. Nevertheless—and this is perhaps part of Benjamin’s rhetorical strategy—if we do find the use of the word “language” permissible in reference to the experience of art or music, it becomes difficult to see how we could bar it from the experience of nature.5 Here is Benjamin’s justification for the complete expansion of the concept of language:

There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of all to communicate their meanings. This use of the word “language” is in no way metaphorical. For to think that we cannot imagine anything that does not communicate its spiritual nature in its expression is entirely meaningful; the greater or lesser degree of consciousness that is apparently (or really) involved in such communication cannot alter the fact that we cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything. (GS 2:140–41 / SW 1:62)

Even if one accepts that Benjamin means by language something very different from what is ordinarily meant, including the expression involved in things like art and technology, it is natural to object when this kind of expression is attributed to natural objects as well. Even if it is granted that we cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything, this does not mean that language is not absent from that thing. It is perfectly intuitive to think that objects (or sensations) exist independently of the language we apply to them in thought or word. Such language-free objects, after all, are all that animals and young children seem to have at their disposal. From a common-sense perspective, Benjamin appears to have made the elementary mistake of attributing the contributions of the subject to the objects themselves. But he has, within the space of a few paragraphs, adjudged the distinction between consciousness and mind-independent reality to be impertinent here, and replaced it with a linguistic universalism.

In order to motivate Benjamin’s contention, before delving deeper into “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” it is necessary to turn to his engagement with Kant and his view that an empiricist, subject-object epistemology contaminates the Kantian project. In “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” and “On Perception,” Benjamin regards Kant’s attempt to overcome empiricism as unsuccessful and argues that fulfilling Kant’s ambition requires the turn to language Benjamin takes up in the earlier “On Language as Such.”

2. Overcoming Kant and Empiricism

It should be noted at the outset that Benjamin’s interpretation is based on an interpretation of Kant promulgated by neo-Kantians of the time. Especially important for Benjamin were Hermann Cohen and his book Kant’s Theory of Experience. Cohen argued that Kant had taken mathematical natural science as his paradigm for experience and disputed what he considered overly physiological interpretations of Kant prevailing at the time.6 For my purposes, the accuracy of the interpretation of Kant is not at issue, but suffice it to say that Benjamin’s critique—whether or not he realized it at the time7—is directed against a particular understanding of Kant’s project. My goal, in any case, is not to defend Benjamin’s interpretation of Kant, nor his criticisms of Kant (though both are defensible). It is, rather, to show how Benjamin’s early theory of language arises over concerns with an empiricist epistemological paradigm he regards as widespread and sees infecting Kantian epistemology despite Kant’s own attempts to overcome it.

In these essays Benjamin makes three closely related criticisms of Kant. First, Kant’s narrow conception of knowledge in accordance with Newtonian science engenders an equally narrow conception of experience. Second, despite an attempt to overcome an empiricist epistemological division between subject and object—which Benjamin regards as an unproductive metaphysical presupposition—Kant’s epistemology relies on it to detrimental effect. Finally, Kant’s epistemology conflates experience and knowledge of experience. Despite these shortcomings and the unwitting adoption of too much empiricist theoretical machinery, the framework or “typology” of Kantian transcendental philosophy remains, Benjamin writes, indispensable for the critique of a higher form of knowledge that he proposes to undertake.8 These criticisms of Kant continue a line of criticism that stretches back to Hamann. Benjamin’s solution is not to dispose of the whole Kantian project but to reorient it around language.

Under the interpretation Benjamin adopts, Kant takes as his paradigm of experience the limited mathematizable experience of science. Specifically, Newtonian science constitutes the central premise of the first Critique. The a priori nature of the forms of intuition and the categories are an answer to the question of how experience must be structured given that we are capable of gaining scientific knowledge. For Benjamin, Kant has hereby privileged the absolute certainty of knowledge over the “integrity of ephemeral experience” (GS 2:158 / SW 1:100). In order to systematize our knowledge of the bare experience of space and time and the objects in it, Kant must separate this experience from moral, religious, and aesthetic experience. The mathematizable experience we are left with, Benjamin writes, is “experience virtually reduced to a nadir, to a minimum of significance.” “Indeed,” he continues, “one can say that the very greatness of [Kant’s] work, his unique radicalism, presupposed an experience which had almost no intrinsic value and which could have attained its (we may say, sad) significance only through its certainty” (GS 2:159 / SW 1:101). This is not to object to Kant’s project per se, but to call into question its purposefully limited scope and its purposeful fragmentation of experience. In order to engender what he regards as a more suitable, holistic conception of experience, Benjamin will begin from a broader conception of knowledge.

Intertwined with this reductive concept of experience, Benjamin argues, is an epistemological division between subject and object. It is not the accuracy of a distinction between subject and object that is in question. As empirical subjects, we confront objects outside us. Benjamin objects, however, to the entrenchment of the distinction in epistemology. On the empiricist model of epistemology, knowledge is construed as content extracted from the flow of experience. Knowledge is experience refined or elevated to the level of certainty. The crux of Benjamin’s critique of empiricism is that the idea of an individual subject in possession of knowledge of objects is a metaphysical presupposition, based on a misleading analogy between knowing and experiencing. That empirical consciousness, perceivi...