Sparks Will Fly

Benjamin and Heidegger

Andrew Benjamin, Dimitris Vardoulakis, Andrew Benjamin, Dimitris Vardoulakis

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781438455068
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Despite being contemporaries, Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger never directly engaged with one another. Yet, Hannah Arendt, who knew both men, pointed out common ground between the two. Both were concerned with the destruction of metaphysics, the development of a new way of reading and understanding literature and art, and the formulation of radical theories about time and history. On the other hand, their life trajectories and political commitments were radically different. In a 1930 letter, Benjamin told a friend that he had been reading Heidegger and that if the two were to engage with one another, "sparks will fly." Acknowledging both their affinities and points of conflict, this volume stages that confrontation, focusing in particular on temporality, Romanticism, and politics in their work.

PART ONE

Knowledge

ONE

ENTANGLEMENT—OF BENJAMIN WITH HEIDEGGER

Peter Fenves

The Thesis

This chapter seeks to establish a single thesis: Heidegger and Benjamin became entangled with each other in the summer of 1913, when they both attended the lectures and seminars of the neo-Kantian philosopher, Heinrich Rickert, who framed his newly introduced system of value philosophy around two cardinal concepts: “bare life” (bloßes Leben), which is indifferent to values, and “completed life” (vollendetes Leben), in which all the regions of value are fulfilled. Because Benjamin and Heidegger, each in his own way, reject the notion of “completed life,” there can be only bare life, and the sphere in which the term completion is applicable must be sought elsewhere—where life, as it were, is on the hither side of all values.

The Experiment

The concept of entanglement is different from that of influence. The latter derives from images of fluent and “local” communicability that ancient astrology, Aristotelian physics, and classical mechanics all share in common; by contrast, the former is one of the basic concepts of quantum theory, perhaps even its defining concept. In brief terms, the difference between classical and quantum theory is that the former presupposes continuous motion in space and time, whereas the latter recognizes only discrete quanta of mass-energy in space-time. Just as the use of the astrological-Aristotelian and classical-mechanical concepts of influence for the purpose of representing the relation among utterances (from poems to advertisements) emphasizes certain of its characteristics while suppressing others, so, in this study, only a few characteristics of the quantum-mechanical concept of entanglement are applied to the relation between two thinkers, namely Heidegger and Benjamin. This is not to say that entanglement here is “only a metaphor,” above all because the quantum-mechanical concept, first articulated in the correspondence between Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, is itself the result of a transference of usage from the original fields of its application to a completely new one, in which some characteristics of the older usage are emphasized, others suppressed. This study is experimental: it aims to discover in what way, and how far, the concept of entanglement can supplement and even under certain conditions replace that of influence.¹

Image and Method

The image Benjamin uses to describe the relation between his mode of envisaging history and Heidegger’s is drawn from physics. Writing to Gershom Scholem in January 1930, Benjamin describes the potential encounter as a “scintillement de l’entre-choc” (GB, 503). A preliminary rationale for the use of the term entanglement emerges out of this image. Just as physics is the field of study from which Benjamin presents his potential interaction with Heidegger, so it can be the source of the term from which the analysis of their relation can proceed. And at no time does Benjamin offer a competing image of their relation. In his view, circa 1930, their concepts of history are similar to charged particles, which explode on contact with each other. In accordance with this image, the aim of this chapter is to discover the source and course of their charge. It begins with the place and time where they may have actually encountered each other, if only obliquely, and proceeds to describe the complementary character of their initial differences. The body of the chapter then consists in a delineation of five discrete moments in which the lines of their thought are correlated despite their distance and in the absence of any common “influence” that could be responsible for these correlations.

To maintain the experimental character of this method, the correlations are not explored in detail but, rather, described so as to emphasize the proximity of their lines of thought and the divergence of their sense and direction.

Complementary Differences

Two of the basic characteristics of the quantum-mechanical concept of entanglement are emphasized here. For entanglement to take place, two “bodies” must interact with each other at a certain moment and form a single “system,” but—this is the second characteristic—the condition with which they initially interact cannot be so influential that it determines the subsequent correlations. The correlations remain surprising, as though the two bodies, separate though they may be, somehow kept in contact with each other in the absence of any viable means or medium of communication. In the case of Heidegger and Benjamin, the moment can be broadly described in terms of a place and a time: Freiburg during the summer of 1913. In a letter Heidegger wrote to Heinrich Rickert soon after the publication of Sein und Zeit he describes this summer as a “Glanzzeit” (bright and shining time).² In letters of the period Benjamin says something similar: “The [summer] semester [of 1913] thus ends beautifully. I know of no other like it—I will under no condition lose sight of this time, which will be fruitful in the years to come” (GB 1: 160). During this “bright and shining time” Heidegger and Benjamin begin to form a single system because of the very differences that distinguish them. Among these differences, the following are particularly important: one is Catholic, the other Jewish; one is from an obscure town in Baden, the other from a wealthy district of Berlin; one remains close to his hometown during his academic studies, except when he willingly serves in the German military, whereas the other matriculates at the universities of Berlin, Freiburg, and Munich, before crossing the border to Bern, where he waits out the War; one completes his doctorate in July of 1913, while the other is only at the beginning of academic studies. Finally, whereas Heidegger in 1913 is beginning to distance himself from a staunchly antimodern version of Catholicism that had hitherto determined his relation to academic life, Benjamin is solidifying his association with the radical wing of the Freien Studentenschaft led by Gustav Wyneken, whom he describes as his “first teacher” (GB 1: 108). These differences can be called complementary because they span the extremes of the academic environment in which the two found themselves. It is even possible to identify a figure in which the complementary character of their differences coalesces: Anton Müller, co-editor of the Freiburger Bote, which was the Catholic newspaper for the Breisgrau area and published articles by Heidegger’s mentors at the university. Coming from Heidegger’s “cultural milieu,” Müller becomes, for Benjamin, the “third” who solidified his friendship with the poet Friedrich Heinle, whom he first met at a bar in Freiburg and whose suicide a year after their joint departure from Freiburg produced an irrevocable break in Benjamin’s life, comparable to Heidegger’s break with Catholicism.

And the precise moment in which Heidegger and Benjamin became entangled can be identified with the two places where they may actually have interacted with each other: the lecture hall and seminar room where Heinrich Rickert taught in the newly constructed philosophy building during the summer semester of 1913. The complementary character of the differences between Heidegger and Benjamin extends to their relation to Rickert: Heidegger found in the foremost representative of southwest neo-Kantianism a guide to the “spiritual” power of modern philosophy, which he had dismissed as “ungodly,” and Benjamin probably decided to study in far-off Freiburg primarily because of Rickert, who was more closely associated with the “free student-body” movement than any other prominent professor of philosophy.³ Rickert, in short, showed Heidegger a possible way out of his Aristotelian-scholastic “orientation,” while promising Benjamin a plausible way into the philosophical foundation of the “spiritual” movement with which he identified himself. In neither case, however, did Rickert’s thought indelibly impress itself upon their subsequent work. Even among representatives of neo-Kantianism—to say nothing of phenomenology, which both of them intensely studied in subsequent years—Rickert was of secondary importance. The work of Emil Lask played a far more decisive role in the path that led Heidegger to Sein und Zeit, and much of Benjamin’s early work can be understood as a “critical altercation” with the Marburg School in general and Hermann Cohen in particular.⁴ Rickert did not so much influence their subsequent lines of thought as crystallize the “system,” in which his erstwhile students became entangled.

Lectures Toward a New System

Heidegger and Benjamin became entangled elements of a single “system” on encountering the outlines of Rickert’s “system of philosophy,” which he first revealed in the summer of 1913. In brief terms, Rickert’s system has the following characteristics: it is “value philosophy,” which is not concerned with the nature of the subject or the object but with the articulation of the sphere in which meaning resides, a sphere divided into separate “regions of value”; it is “open,” which means that the system not only does not foreclose future changes in “cultural life” but, on the contrary, presupposes its endless development; and its cardinal concept is that of “perfection,” “consummation,” or “completion” (Vollendung), which Rickert generally hyphenates so as to emphasize the equal significance of its two elements, “fullness” and “ending.” To delineate the regions of values, he distinguishes social values from asocial ones and then identifies three independent levels of “com-pletion” (Voll-Endung): “in-finite totality,” “com-pleted particularity,” and “com-pleted totality.” Multiplying two by three, Rickert thus arrives at six possible “regions of value.” Whereas the first level of “com-pletion” defines the spheres of both moral action and scientific knowledge, philosophy straddles the latter two, insofar as every philosophical system is doubtless particular, while nevertheless claiming and perhaps even attaining totality. The “peculiar situation” of the philosopher, as Rickert presents it in the summer of 1913, is that of holding onto the system under construction against the “current of development”—an act of resistance to the flow of cultural history that can be justified only under the condition that the philosopher is fully convinced that he is “more comprehensive and more unified than his predecessors.”⁵

The proximate purpose of Rickert’s lectures and seminars in the summer of 1913 is twofold. On the one hand, he seeks to defend and develop the idea of a philosophical system against those, like Nietzsche, who accuse system-builders of intellectual mendacity, and on the other, he wishes to dissuade his students from mistaking the Lebensphilosophie of Nietzsche and Bergson for genuine philosophy.⁶ Whereas the lecture series is largely concerned with the first aim, the accompanying seminar on Bergson’s metaphysics is primarily focused on the second. The polemical direction of Rickert’s courses has a constructive purpose, for he seeks to replace Nietzschean and Bergsonian Lebensphilosophie with his own Philosophie des Lebens (philosophy of life). Whereas the former is a matter of “intuition” (Bergson) or “poetic invention” (Nietzsche), the latter is fully systematic and purely conceptual. The openness of the system, moreover, makes it immune to the commonly voiced complaint that philosophy cannot capture the infinite richness of historical life. The fundamental error of contemporaneous vitalism, according to Rickert, lies in its indiscriminate promotion of “bare life” (bloßes Leben), which “is value-neutral [wertindifferent].”⁷ The aim of the “philosophy of life,” by contrast, lies in constructing the concept of “voll-endetes Leben” (completed, consummated, or perfected life), in which all six regions of values are fulfilled.

There is no record of what was said during the seminar; but the University of Heidelberg Library Archive has in its possession a largely complete typescript of the lecture, which begins with a discussion of both the difficulty and the necessity of constructing a “new discipline” of “completed life.” The earlier sections of the lecture are concerned with social life, particularly as they relate to eros and sexual difference, while the final sections outline the lineaments of the “religion of fullness” (Religion der Fülle), which culminates in a demonstration of the superiority of Protestant Christianity. In a retrospective summary, Rickert then concerns himself with the traditional problem of theodicy, which he summarizes in the term world misery (Weltelend). How, he asks, can we seek to complete our life in an incomplete, imperfect world? His system of value philosophy does not provide an answer to this question but is nevertheless capable of constructing a coherent justification for an “affirmation” of life and is therefore in a position to overcome the unhappy alternative of either “theoretical or practical nihilism,” each of which is paradoxically committed to the affirmation of “absolute nihilism,” that is, death. “We must learn to think entirely differently,” he declares, “if we want to philosophize at all. We take this as our point of departure: we are, and we want to be. Furthermore, we want freely to complete ourselves, and we want to understand how completion is possible.” At end of the lecture, Rickert discloses the “final riddle”: there is an absolute and ineluctable distinction between “timelessly valid values,” equivalent to the “eternity of the divinity,” and the temporality of humanity, “in which values must gradually be realized.” Far from being a hindrance to philosophy, however, this riddle is its source and the ultimate rational for the philosophy of “completed life.”

Letters in Relation to Rickert’s Lectures

The complementary differences between Heidegger and Benjamin can be seen in their respective responses to the lectures and seminar they attended together. For Benjamin, the lecture series is “interesting, though problematic,” whereas the seminar scarcely sustains his interest. Heidegger, by contrast, expresses greater interest in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: “Sparks Will Fly”
• Part I. Knowledge
• Part II. Experience
• Part III. Time
• Part IV. Hölderlin
• Part V. Politics
• Biographical Notes
• Index
• Back Cover