Walter Benjamin's First Philosophy

Experience, Ephemerality and Truth

Nathan Ross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000345476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Teoria critica

This book provides a study of Walter Benjamin's first philosophy in two senses: it focuses on his early philosophy as a source of insight into his later works, and it explores his thinking about the nature of truth, method, experience, the relation of body and mind, and the limits of human knowledge.

While most attention is paid to Benjamin's later works, his writings from roughly 1914-1925 explore philosophical themes and develop a critical method. This book argues that this early work founds a series of original and lasting questions and insights. Benjamin understands experience as a broken continuum of diverse forms of spiritual expression, each of which is ephemeral. This leads Benjamin to a series of thought figures: the notion of language as a medium of experience; a philosophy of perception based in the natural history of the human body; an emphasis on mimesis as a faculty of creative assimilation; and a discovery of memory as a power for excavation of meaning in past experience. This book demonstrates that the need for a new understanding of the metaphysical structure of experience, as well as a new conception of truth, play a special role in shaping Benjamin's subsequent work.

Walter Benjamin's First Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on the thought of Walter Benjamin, 20th-century Continental philosophy, comparative literature, and modern German thought.

1 Benjamin’s Questions

Benjamin’s first philosophy is written primarily in two voices: one is programmatic, while the other is fragmentary. The programmatic voice is reaching towards a new set of questions, without promising an answer, fearlessly seeking to uncover open space that has been ignored, without limiting itself only to questions that it can resolve. The fragmentary voice, on the other hand, provides theses that could be seen as answers to the questions posed by the programmatic texts. Yet the theses are fragmentary, in that they seem too direct, too deprived of any context or explanation: the theses mostly present a juxtaposition of concepts that have to be thought together in a constellational manner to be understood. Given the alternately programmatic and fragmentary nature of Benjamin’s early first philosophy, it is hard to distill a theory in a systematic manner. But this chapter will take a first, preliminary step to deciphering the pattern of this mobile project: it will lay out the questions and problems that animate Benjamin’s early thinking, and provide hints at how this program remains latent in Benjamin’s later work.

Benjamin’s text ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’ is most indicative of his tendency to pose original questions to which he does not yet have a solution, but which orient him towards new philosophical discoveries.¹ This text might seem to represent a failure in a philosophical sense: Benjamin certainly never wrote a systematic text that answers all of the demands laid out in this text. As Fenves notes, Benjamin’s ‘Program’ is a somewhat unique text in the history of philosophy in the following respect: there are other texts that declare themselves to be prologues to a future philosophy, such as Kant’s Prolegomena, Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, but they generally act more as trailers for a movie that has already been made, as incitements or abbreviations for an already developed work, whereas Benjamin’s ‘Program’ does not have any finished work as its basis.² Indeed, some of the demands it makes might seem so ambitious that no theory could do justice to them. In one of the most sustained treatments of this ‘Program’ in the secondary literature, Howard Caygill places it right at the center of Benjamin’s thinking, but he prefaces his treatment not only by calling the program a ‘failure,’ arguing that it orients Benjamin towards a kind of philosophical nihilism from which he would not escape.³ In contrast to Caygill, I will argue that even if Benjamin does not ever fully follow through on the ‘Program,’ it poses questions that make it possible for Benjamin to think in a highly original way about core philosophical concepts, and rather than growing nihilistic, to found philosophical values that sustain his thinking. Indeed, Benjamin’s words about Kafka’s largely fragmentary, posthumous writings could be applied to his own writings at this point: “Perhaps all of these studies (i.e. fragmentary texts) amounted to nothing. But they came very close to that nothing which alone makes it possible for something to be useful.”⁴ In his unique affinity for Kafka’s tendency to produce brilliant fragmentary works and leave them unpublished, Benjamin seems to articulate a method he could identify with based on his own work: the idea of reaching a certain kind of insight through what he calls ‘study,’ a fragmentary, patient process of unfolding various ideas without regard to their completion, a discipline of blocking off a certain conceptual path in order to find another one. This process may result in failure, or in ‘nothing,’ but this nothing cannot be overlooked so quickly. In philosophical terms, the ‘nothing that alone would be useful’ is the space created by asking questions and thinking in a provisional way.

Indeed, this discipline of asking open-ended philosophical questions plays a crucial role in Benjamin’s conception of philosophy as an activity. In one of his earliest writings, an essay called ‘The Life of Students,’ Benjamin explains the uniquely philosophical role of students within the university, because they are able to ask questions that cut across disciplinary boundaries and because their pursuit of knowledge is not yet constrained by professionalization, which often confines knowledge to seeking after finished, instrumental results. He calls this youthful spirit of non-professionalized, unconstrained and unbounded inquiry philosophy, and he argues that without such youthful philosophy, the university becomes ossified into a mere apparatus of state power.⁵ It is precisely to the extent that the young do not yet know what they will do with what they are learning that they can take up a philosophical attitude towards it. The idea of youth is for Benjamin a symbol of the very nature of philosophy, a point which is articulated by Fenves in his treatment of Benjamin’s early ideas about university education in comparison to those of his contemporary Heidegger: “Instead of (Heidegger’s) ‘com-pleted particularity,’ Benjamin introduces the concept of an ‘immanent state of perfection,’ in which fulness is already at its end and therefore appears only in the most finite … transient things.”⁶ In the ability of youth to ask open-ended questions, to remain undaunted by the experience of others, Benjamin finds an ‘immanent state of perfection,’ an ideal or a model of what it means to find fulfillment in the conditions of finite thought.

As I will argue in this chapter, Benjamin himself would soon disavow having a ‘program’ in his thinking,⁷ and yet he would continue to be guided by the questions posed in this program. In the ‘Program,’ these questions take the following forms: What does it mean to have an experience for its own sake? Even if experience presents the occasion for scientific (i.e. empirical) knowledge, what is it in the process of experience that does not enter into such knowledge? What are the different modes or forms of experience, and how do they fit together into a continuum? How is it possible to account for the transient or ephemeral nature of experience within the framework of philosophical thought? What if truth is not a property of acts of knowing, but of experience? How does this kind of experience enter into language, and what notion of language would such a notion of experience provide? These questions clear a certain space for thinking in a new way about experience. As Fenves argues, the central problematic of Benjamin’s early ‘Program’ can be circumscribed as follows: “To develop a concept of experience that is fundamentally distinct from that of knowledge, without thereby becoming a concept of Erlebnis.”⁸ For Benjamin, a true philosophy of experience thus seeks to chart a path between two different philosophical appropriations of the notion of experience, that of enlightenment epistemology and that of ‘life philosophy,’ both of which subject experience to a kind of reduction, the one by making it a mere means, the other by making it a mere effect of an underlying cause.

‘The Program of the Coming Philosophy’

Benjamin’s ‘Program’ departs from a stark claim about the philosophy of the enlightenment, culminating in Kant: this philosophy depends on experience to provide the material or impetus for knowledge, but it does not ever pose the question of what it means to have an experience. It does not seek an exhaustive or deep knowledge of experience, but rather looks at experience in an instrumental, or what Benjamin calls a ‘superficial’ manner. He writes of the enlightenment’s notion of experience: “As an experience of the world, it (experience) was reduced to the lowest order.”⁹ Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason uses experience as a safeguard to protect cognition against metaphysical dogmatism, and perhaps more importantly for Benjamin, the critical project in its entirety even provides a general typology indicating that there are different modes of experience (ethical, scientific, aesthetic). This latter point of classifying and distinguishing different forms of experience remains for Benjamin a defining goal of the ‘coming philosophy.’ But he argues that “(Kant) undertook his work on the basis of experience reduced to a nadir (Nullpunkt), to a minimum of significance” in that he “presupposed an experience which had almost no intrinsic value and which could have attained its sad significance only through its certainty.”¹⁰ Experience is significant for Kant because it grants us a basis of tangible certainty that we could not find in mere thinking or speculation. In positing this relation between experience and cognition, Kant does not consider the problem of experience in its own right, for example, by asking whether there are not aspects of experience that withdraw from cognition. By defining experience in this manner as a guard against empty thought, experience is robbed of its own marrow; that is, it is taken as a simple baseline common experience, rather than a fully generative set of possibilities. It only becomes knowable as a means to certainty, but it has no intrinsic value. Benjamin’s early philosophy will consistently distinguish between ‘means’ and ‘medium,’ between the use of language as a tool and the richness of language as a medium of experience.

Benjamin posits an essentially temporal reason why the focus on knowledge limits the ability of Kantian philosophy to grasp the true nature of experience: knowledge is a result, a product that stands, while experience is transitory. He writes:

The problem faced by Kantian epistemology, as by all epistemology, has two sides, and Kant only managed to give a valid explanation of one of them. First, there was the question of the certainty of knowledge that is lasting, and second, there was the question of the integrity of experience that is ephemeral.¹¹

There are aspects of experience that can be distilled as a product that stands, but the stream itself is not reducible to this product. Kant seeks after what Benjamin calls the justification (Rechtfertigung) of a mode of experiential understanding, which of course relies on what is ‘fertig’—the validity and transferability of the finished, the product that stands up to flux and change. In focusing so exclusively on the side of experience that can become a product of certain knowledge, Benjamin ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Benjamin’s Practice of Philosophy
• 1 Benjamin’s Questions
• 2 Benjamin’s Experience
• 3 Benjamin’s Body
• 4 Benjamin’s Truth
• Conclusion: From First Philosophy to Critique
• Bibliography
• Index