TWENTIETH CENTURY
PHILOSOPHY:
Intellectual Heroes and Key Themes
LECTURES
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
The pariah as rebel.
The hope of the hopeless.
Message in a bottle.
Absolute free.
Genealogy as critique.
Human flourishing.
THE HOPE OF THE HOPELESS
1. PRISMATIC THINKING
How to do justice to the tensions between
experiences and reflections?
2.ARCADES AND REPRODUCTIONS
What is the relation between art and
society?
3. MEMORY AND SADNESS
Should the past be a part of the present?
1.
PRISMATIC THINKING
WALTER BENJAMIN
BIOGRAPHICAL DATA:
 1892: Born July 15, in Berlin.
 1902-1912: Visits a secondary school.
 1912-1915: Studies philosophy in Freiburg and Berlin.
 1914: President of a student association.
 1915-1917: Studies philosophy in München; becomes a
friend of Gerhard Scholem.
 1917: Marriage to Dora Pollak.
 1917-1919: Studies philosophy in Bern.
 1918: Birth of his son Stefan; becomes a friend of Ernst
Bloch.
 1919: Phd summa cum laude.
 1924: Starts an affair with Asja Lacis.
 1925: Can’t defend his habilitation thesis.
 1929: Cooperation with Bertolt Brecht.
 1933: Starts to work for the ‘Institut für
Sozialforschung’ (of the Frankfurt School).
 1939: For a while in a concentration camp Clos St.
Joseph in Nevers.
 1940: Died September 27, in Port-Bou.
MAJOR WORKS
 Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik
(1919).
 Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (1924).
 Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928).
 Einbahnstraße (1928).
 Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (1932 [published
posthumously]).
 Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit (1936).
 Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1940 [published
posthumously]).
 Das Passagen-Werk (1927-1940 [unfinished and published
posthumously]).
HEURISTIC VALUE
1. Literature (Bertolt Brecht amongst others).
2. Philosophy (Theodor W. Adorno amongst
others).
3. Media Studies (Martin Seel amongst others).
4. Literary studies (George Steiner amongst
others).
5. Art (Dani Karavan amongst others).
6. Theology (Gerhard Scholem amongst
others).
PHILOSOPHICAL STYLE
 Dominant genre in Benjamin’s philosophy > essay
[tradition initiated by Michel de Montaigne].
 Different intellectual activities > essay, translations, radioprogrammes.
 Style > constructions of rearranged fragments, stories, etc.
 Philosophy as a sensuous representation of the truth.
 Prismatic thinking > correspondence between the micro
cosmos and the macro cosmos, i.e. the disclosure of the
world via a focus on its particular elements.
 Combination of Marxism and Jewish mysticism.
 Marxism > historical materialism.
 Jewish mysticism > messianism.
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
 Marxism > emancipatory politics based upon the study of
the historical transformations of the material circumstances
in which people live.
 Benjamin tries to understand these transformations via the
study of specific oppositions: experience vs. adventure;
storytelling vs. the dissemination of information; auratic
art vs. non-auratic art.
 These oppositions are not absolute, but should be used to
scrutinize the dialectical mediation between them.
 Whereas reflection is a core concept in traditional
philosophy, Benjamin argues that the concept of
experience should have the same status.
 Philosophy is about the tensions between experiences and
reflections.
 Point of departure in Benjamin’s philosophy: reflection (a
la Kant’s critical inquiry) on ones own experiences.
ADVENTURE AND EXPERIENCE
 Benjamin argues that it is important to make a distinction
between adventure and experience.
 Adventure (Erlebnis) > that what an actor can control;
isolated events registered en passant; belongs more to a
modern society with a dispersed attention.
 Experience (Erfahrung) > that what cannot be controlled;
impressive events that sink in; belongs more to a
traditional society with a concentrated attention for
human and non-human beings.
 Experience is repressed by adventure.
 An increase of the replacement of storytelling by the
dissemination of information.
TRADITIONAL
CULTURE
MODERN
CULTURE
Countryside
City
Unique experiences
Similar adventures.
Concentration
Distraction
Adaptation to the
surroundings
Confrontation with the
surroundings via shocks.
Reflections
Reflexes
Sustainability
Volatility.
THE REHABILITATION OF THE
ALLEGORY
 Benjamin’s philosophy is a critical reflection of the
transition from a traditional to a modern culture.
 He argues that an allegoric perspective is inevitably in
order to understand this transition.
 This implies a deconstruction of the hierarchy between the
symbol and the allegory in traditional aesthetics.
 Due to romanticism (±1800) the symbol is declared as
vivid and the allegory as dead.
 Traditional aesthetics > the essence of a piece of art is an
idea shown as a symbol that reconciles the immanent and
the transcendent, the profane and the sacral.
 In his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [Origin of the
German Morning-Play] Benjamin rehabilitates the
allegory.
THE ALLEGORIC PERSPECTIVE
 Benjamin’s analysis of the German mourning-play of the
17th century helps him to criticize traditional aesthetics.
 Because a symbol reconciles the immanent and the
transcendent it cannot do justice to the ruptures and the
mourning that is inherent to history.
 Allegory > the representation of an immaterial world of
ideas by a material world of things (for instance an abstract
idea as time represented by a grey old man with a scythe
and an hourglass.
 It’s up to those who perceive an allegory to give meaning
to the lifeless human and non-human beings that are
represented.
 The allegory gives - in comparison to the symbol – a wider
scope of different interpretations.
BEYOND TRADITIONAL AESTHETICS
 The allegory that underlies the German
mourning-play undermines the
beautiful appearance (schönen Schein)
of traditional aesthetics and gives
expression to melancholy.
 Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia (1514)
can be interpreted as a critique of
traditional aesthetics, because it
transcends the beautiful appearance
and reflects on the meaning of things
past.
 With her allegorical gaze on the lifeless
things the angel tries to figure out what
the meaning of the passing time is.
 Her melancholy (i.e. sadness) is in
sharp contrast to the reconciling
perspective of traditional aesthetics.
2. ARCADES AND REPRODUCTIONS
THE ARCADES PROJECT
Benjamin applies the allegoric perspective
himself in is magnum opus: the Arcades Project
(Das Passagen-Werk).
It is an analysis of the city life of Paris in the
19th century.
The iron-and-glass covered arcades are the
result of Haussmann’s renovation of Paris.
Prismatic aspect > the inner-outer world of the
arcades mirror the world at large.
THE CAPITAL OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
The Arcades Project consists of
fragments, quotes, short essays
about what Benjamin called
‘the capital of the “nineteenth
century’.
Focus on the ruptures in the
cultural history of the city
should clarify the differences
between the traditional and the
modern society.
A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT
 The Arcades Project is a history of the present (cf.
Foucault), because it unravels the origins of the crisis
people have face nowadays.
 It is a materialist historiography with a political intent that
relates ‘then’ and ‘now’.
 The experience of metropolitan capitalism by the flaneur,
the prostitutes, the gambler the merchants and others who
visited the arcades unravels what many people have to face
in the present.
 The present is a time of transition and crisis.
 Benjamin wants the reader of the Arcades Project to
experience the crisis of experience.
 It is the commodity form that more and more human and
non-human beings got that underlies the crisis of
experience.
RUPTURES
The history of the present should show the
ruptures, i.e. the (dis)continuities in culture.
Modern culture > the urge of a permanent
renewal of everything.
Charles Baudelaire > the poet who gives
expression to this urge.
Dialectical images have to show the
disruption of modernity.
These images present the destructive and
utopian features of modern culture.
THE LOST AURA
The world of art changed because of modern
reproduction techniques.
Examples: photography and film.
Technical reproducibility > new possibilities for
collective experiences.
Traditional art lost its aura.
Aura > the manifestation of the uniqueness of a
piece of art.
Modern art lacks the aura of the original.
AESTHECIZED POLITICS
The relation between art and politicis changed.
The differentiation of cultural spheres: art,
morality and science.
Shift in the relation between art and politics.
Aestheticized politics > de-differentiation.
Example: Stalinism and Fascism.
Stalinism and Fascism try to reintroduce auratic
art.
However, art should be “completely useless for
the purposes of fascism.”
3. MEMORY AND SADNESS
TWO FORMS OF CRITIQUE
 Jürgen Habermas argues that Benjamin’s philosophy
consists of two forms of critique:
1. Making someone conscious about something.
2. Saving something.
 The first form of critique has two directions:
1. Is > telling the truth.
2. Ought > telling how the world should look
like.
 The second form of critique has also two directions:
1. Save what shouldn’t be lost.
2. Giving a voice to human dignity.
MESSIANISM
Marxism is infected by the ideology of
progress.
The historical time should not be based on the
traditional scheme of past, present and future,
but on the relations between ‘then’ and ‘now’.
Benjamin has a messianic understanding of
history > the dream of a fulfilled infinity yet to
come.
Aim: “to bring the present into a critical state.”
ANGELUS NOVUS
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’
shows an angel looking as though he is about
to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his
mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is
how one pictures the angel of history. His
face is turned toward the past. Where we
perceive a chain of events, he sees one single
catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and
hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would
like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught
in his wings with such a violence that the
angel can no longer close them. The storm
irresistibly propels him into the future to
which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm
is what we call progress.”
POLITICS OF MEMORY
Antidote to the belief in historical progress
> a politics of memory.
Central question: which responsibility do
we have towards those who suffered in the
past?
‘Eingedenken’ > to replace oneself in the
position of those who suffered because of
marginalisation, repression and
exploitation.
“It is more arduous to honour the memory of
the nameless than that of the renowned.
Historical construction is devoted to the
memory of the nameless.”
Walter Benjamin
RECOMMENDED
1. Das Passagen-Werk (1958) [translations
in several languages].
2. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner
technischen Reproduzierbarkeit
[translations in several languages].
3. Susan Buck-MorssElisabeth, The
Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and
the Arcades Project (1989)].