Philosophical-Political Profiles

Jürgen Habermas

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780745694863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

"At the hands of a minor talent, profiles are often flat, two-dimensional outlines of a thinker's intellectual physiognomy. At the hands of a master like Jürgen Habermas, they can become something far more substantial and profound. With astonishing economy, Habermas sketches his impressions of the giants of recent German thought, several of whom were his personal mentors. For those of his readers accustomed to the demandingly abstract level of his theoretical work, the results will prove a welcome surprise. Without sacrificing any of the rigor and brilliance of those longer studies, he displays a remarkable ability to combine depth with brevity. Philosophical-Political Profiles not only adds a new dimension to our understanding of the intellectual odyssey of Germany's leading contemporary thinker but also provides a series of stunning insights into the thought of the generation that preceded him."
Martin Jay, University of California, Berkley "With enormous sensitivity, judiciousness, and critical insight, Habermas engages in dialogue with many of the leading German-trained intellectuals of our time-including Heidegger, Jaspers, Löwith, Bloch, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Arendt, Gadamer, Scholem, and others. These essays range over the most central and vital issues of contemporary life. Whether dealing with Jewish mysticism or critiques of modernity, Habermas is always illuminating and incisive. These essays can serve as an excellent introduction to his thinking. They also help to situate his theoretical work by revealing his deepest concerns."
Richard Bernstein, The New School for Social Research

Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique (1972)

Benjamin is relevant even in the trivial sense: In relation to him there is a division of opinion. The battle lines drawn during the short, almost eruptive period of the influence of Benjamin’s Schriften¹ in Germany were presaged in Benjamin’s biography. The constellation of Scholem, Adorno, and Brecht, a youthful dependence on the school reformer Gustav Wyneken, and later closer relations with the surrealists were decisive for Benjamin’s life history. Scholem, his most intimate friend and mentor, is today represented by Scholem the unpolemical, sovereign, and totally inflexible advocate of the dimension in Benjamin that was captivated with the traditions of Jewish mysticism.² Adorno, Benjamin’s heir, partner, and forerunner all in one person, not only introduced the first wave of the posthumous reception of Benjamin but also put his lasting imprint on it.³ After the death of Peter Szondi⁴ (who doubtless would have stood here today in my place), Adorno’s place was taken mainly by Benjamin’s editors, Tiedemann and Schweppenhäuser.⁵ Brecht, who must have served as a kind of reality principle for Benjamin, brought Benjamin around to breaking with his esotericism of style and thought. In Brecht’s wake, the Marxist theoreticians of art H. Brenner, H. Lethen, and M. Scharang⁶ put Benjamin’s late work into the perspective of the class struggle. Wyneken, whom Benjamin (who was active in the Free School Community) repudiated as a model while still a student,⁷ signalizes ties and impulses that continue on; the youthful conservative in Benjamin has found an intelligent and valiant apologist in Hannah Arendt,⁸ who would protect the suggestible, vulnerable aesthete, collector, and private scholar against the ideological claims of his Marxist and Zionist friends. Finally, Benjamin’s proximity to surrealism has again been brought to our attention with the second wave of the Benjamin reception that took its impetus from the student revolt; the works by Bohrer and Bürger, among others, document this.⁹

Between these fronts there is emerging a Benjamin philology that relates to its subject in a scholarly fashion and respectably gives notice to the incautious that this is no longer an unexplored terrain.¹⁰ In relation to the factional disputes that have nearly splintered the image of Benjamin, this academic treatment furnishes a corrective, if anything, but surely not an alternative. Moreover, the competing interpretations have not been simply tacked on. It was not mere mysterymongering that led Benjamin, as Adorno reports, to keep his friends apart from one another. Only as a surrealistic scene could one imagine, say, Scholem, Adorno, and Brecht sitting around a table for a peaceful symposium, with Breton and Aragon crouching nearby, while Wyneken stands by the door, all gathered for a debate on Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia or even Klages’s Mind as Adversary of the Soul. Benjamin’s intellectual existence had so much of the surreal about it that one should not confront it with facile demands for consistency. Benjamin brought together motifs that ordinarily run at cross purposes, but he did not actually unite them, and had he united them he would have done so in as many unities as there are moments in which the interested gaze of succeeding interpreters breaks through the crust and penetrates to where the stones still have life in them. Benjamin belongs to those authors on whom it is not possible to gain a purchase, whose work is destined for disparate effective histories; we encounter these authors only in the sudden flash of relevance with which a thought achieves dominance for brief seconds of history. Benjamin was accustomed to explaining the nature of relevance in terms of a Talmudic legend according to which “the angels—new each moment in countless hosts—(were) created so that, after they had sung their hymn before God, they ceased to exist and passed away into nothingness.” (GS II p. 246)

I would like to start from a statement Benjamin once turned against the procedure of cultural history: “It [cultural history] increases the burden of treasures that is piled on the back of humanity. But it does not bestow upon us the power to shake it off, so as to put it at our disposal.” (F, p. 36) Benjamin sees the task of criticism precisely in this. He deals with the documents of culture (which are at the same time those of barbarism) not from the historicist viewpoint of stored-up cultural goods but from the critical viewpoint (as he so obstinately expresses it) of the decline of culture into “goods that can become an object of possession for humanity.” (F, p. 35) Benjamin says nothing, of course, about the “overcoming of culture” [Aufhebung der Kultur].

1

Herbert Marcuse speaks of the overcoming of culture in a 1937 essay, “The Affirmative Character of Culture.”¹¹ As regards classical bourgeois art, he criticizes the two-sidedness of a world of beautiful illusion that has been established autonomously, beyond the struggle of bourgeois competition and social labor. This autonomy is illusory because art permits the claims to happiness by individuals to hold good only in the realm of fiction and casts a veil over the unhappiness of day-to-day reality. At the same time there is something true about the autonomy of art because the ideal of the beautiful also brings to expression the longing for a happier life, for the humanity, friendliness, and solidarity withheld from the everyday, and hence it transcends the status quo: “Affirmative culture was the historical form in which were preserved those human wants which surpassed the material reproduction of existence. To that extent, what is true of the form of social reality to which it belonged holds for it as well: Right is on its side. Certainly, it exonerated ‘external relationships’ from responsibility for the ‘vocation of humanity,’ thus stabilizing their injustice. But it also held up to them the image of a better order as a task.” (Negations, p. 120) In relation to this art, Marcuse makes good the claim of ideology critique to take at its word the truth that is articulated in bourgeois ideals but has been reserved to the sphere of the beautiful illusion—that is, to overcome art as a sphere split off from reality.

If the beautiful illusion is the medium in which bourgeois society actually expresses its own ideals but at the same time hides the fact that they are held in suspense, then the practice of ideology critique on art leads to the demands that autonomous art be overcome and that culture in general be reintegrated into the material processes of life. The revolutionizing of bourgeois conditions of life amounts to the overcoming of culture: “To the extent that culture has transmuted fulfillable, but factually unfulfilled, longings and instincts, it will lose its object.… Beauty will find a new embodiment when it no longer is represented as real illusion but, instead, expresses reality and joy in reality.” (Negations, pp. 130 ff.)

In the face of the mass art of fascism, Marcuse could not have been deceived about the possibility of a false overcoming of culture. Against it he held up another kind of politicization of art, which thirty years later seemed to assume concrete shape for a moment in the flower-garlanded barricades of the Paris students. In his Essay on Liberation¹² Marcuse interpreted the surrealist praxis of the youth revolt as the overcoming of art with which art passes over into life.

A year before Marcuse’s essay on the affirmative character of culture, Benjamin’s treatise The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (I, pp. 219–251) had appeared in the same journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. It seems as if Marcuse only recast Benjamin’s more subtle observations in terms of the critique of ideology. The theme is once again the overcoming of autonomous art. The profane cult of beauty first developed in the Renaissance and remained valid for 300 years. (I, p. 224) In the measure that art becomes dissociated from its cultic basis, the illusion of its autonomy disappears. (I, p. 230) Benjamin grounds his thesis that “art has escaped from the realm of ‘beautiful illusion’ ” by pointing to the altered status of the work of art and to its altered mode of reception.

With the destruction of the aura, the innermost symbolic structure of the work of art is shifted in such a way that the sphere removed from the material processes of life and counterbalancing them falls apart. The work of art withdraws its ambivalent claim to superior authenticity and inviolability. It sacrifices both historical witness and cultic trappings to the art spectator. Already in 1927 Benjamin noted that “what we used to call art only starts 2 meters away from the body.” (GS II, p. 622) The trivialized work of art gains its value for exhibition at the cost of its cultural value.¹³

To the altered structure of the work of art corresponds a changed organization of the perception and reception of art. As autonomous, art is set up for individual enjoyment; after the loss of its aura it is geared to reception by the masses. Benjamin contrasts the contemplation of the isolated, art-viewing individual with the diffusion of art within a collective, stimulated by its appeal. “In the degeneration of the bourgeoisie, meditation became a school for asocial behavior; it was countered by diversion as a variety of social behavior.” (I, p. 238) Moreover, in this collective reception Benjamin sees an enjoyment of art that is at once instructive and critical.

I believe I can distill from these not completely consistent utterances the notion of a mode of reception that Benjamin acquired from the reactions of a relaxed, and yet mentally alert, film-viewing public:

Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the viewer to contemplation; before it the viewer can abandon himself to his own flow of associations. Before the movie frame, he cannot do so.… In fact, when a person views these constantly changing (film) images, his stream of associations is immediately disrupted. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which like all shock effects needs to be parried by a heightened presence of mind. Because of its technical structure, the film has liberated the physical shock effect from the moral cushioning in which Dadaism had, as it were, held it. (I, p. 238)

In a succession of discrete shocks, the art work deprived of its aura releases experiences that used to be enclosed within an esoteric style. In the mentally alert elaboration of this shock Benjamin notices the exoteric dissolution of a cultic spell that bourgeois culture inflicts on the solitary spectator in virtue of its affirmative character.

Benjamin conceives the functional transformation of art, which takes place the moment the work of art is freed “from its parasitic dependence on ritual,” as the politicizing of art. “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.” (I, p. 224) In the claim of fascist mass art to be political, Benjamin, like Marcuse, sees the risk in the overcoming of autonomous art. Nazi propaganda art carries out the liquidation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Translator’s Introduction
• Does Philosophy Still Have a Purpose? (1971)
• The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers (1961)
• Karl Jaspers: The Figures of Truth (1958)
• Martin Heidegger: The Great Influence (1959)
• Ernst Bloch: A Marxist Schelling (1960)
• Karl Löwith: Stoic Retreat from Historical Consciousness (1963)
• Theodor Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity—Self-Affirmation Gone Wild (1969)
• Arnold Gehlen: Imitation Substantiality (1970)
• Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique (1972)
• Herbert Marcuse: On Art and Revolution (1973)
• Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power (1976)
• Hans-Georg Gadamer: Urbanizing the Heideggerian Province (1979)
• Gershom Scholem: The Torah in Disguise (1978)
• End User License Agreement