To Gillel Treiber and Barbara Galli in appreciation
"Thus as Kafka puts it, there's an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. This statement [to Max Brod] really contains Kafka's hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity"- W. Benjamin
"Philosophy still exists only because the moment to have understood it, has passed" - T. Adorno
"The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk" - G.W.F. Hegel
I
-
In order to speak about Benjamin's hope one is irreparably condemned to turn his attention toward an unseen moment, a moment that can never be experienced - the moment of time. This is of course singularly paradoxical, albeit in the uncanny sense of the fox[1]; in the burrow surrounded by zoo visitors that feed him compliments fished out of a rather bloody tank, the fox ponders on the "how", dealing a deadly blow to Diotima and unknowingly returning to the cave only in order to find a way out, ultimately achieved through an awful lot of Messianic cheating to sadly winding up at the very same entrance with the rest of the blind with their bayonets and sculptures of dead nature. The rest of the world, outside the burrow ponders on the "what", and woundrously lets the chips fall wherever they may, because when you ask the question of what something is, insofar as it is then you're already asking questions about "how"; in such a naturally naive way that brings the fox closer to the Bible than to the philosophers and there the fox meets Eliot, together they go hunting in the fields of a millenial folk story.
-
Yet we must leave the fox in order to speak about hope and better to start with the wisdom of dictionaries; Hope: the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best. Surprisingly enough events didn't turn out for the best and what was wanted could in fact be had, just to follow with the demise at the surprise of not quite loving the end result of the want,
-
"The priest desires. The philosopher desires
And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.
It is desire at the end of winter, when
It observes the effortless weather turning blue.....
It knows that what it has is what not
And throws it away like a thing of another time
As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep." [2]
-
But it this desire anew that loosens the ungrounding path of hope - a certain linguistic freedom, it is the momentum of the image of happiness, elsehow imposed upon us by the inexorable toll of averageness in eventful experiences, poorly mystical and rather meaningless, uncomposite paintings and roaring sights from the vantage point of time, the unmeasurable that contains once world-time: "History is just one fucking thing after the other"[3].
-
II
-
For Benjamin this is exactly the moment of redemption, the "absolute present" of Rosenzweig and Kafka, the moment of the event which stands both outside time but within its own limits: "Sun will not overstep his measures; otherwise the Erynies, ministers of Justice, will find him out"[4]. Redemption happens in the present, it is an "event", a present event that "takes place", and altogether constitutes both a story of creation and a story of revelation; "For being has the immanent meaning or revelation as well as of creation. Revelation is the creation of reason"[5]. At this point one can return to the burrow and mend the method of "access", the way through. The fox has pointed out the importance of the "how", insofar as it is, of things in opposition to the "what" which lives in sempiternal anxiety because in the moment of its reflection, insofar as it is, it is already lost and irretrievable: "In Jedem Falle gilt: wenn wir in bezug auf die Philosophie fragen: Was ist das?, dann fragen wir eine ursprüngliche greichische Frage"[6].
-
That is exactly "how" in the crowd of vixens and other smaller foxes that built their burrows around the Seine, was rightly pointed out that an "event" in actuality has no past[7].
Yet it is this "Geschende"[8] where one gate closes and a second opens. As the event occurs in which a transformation is experienced (the passage of one ego to the other, i.e. reason and will, thinking and will) the moment unfolds in its present and "creates a presence from an essence"[9]. It is this metamorphosis what nauseates our philosophers, "The term happens is important to Rosenzweig. His primary philosophical question is not "What is the essence of a thing?" but instead "What happens? What story is being told? What world story is unfolding?[10]", the source of their endless hope. This hope is not an eschatology of "soothsayings" but rather the fullness of our present time in its most extreme impossibility; for Benjamin there's an image of happiness in the experience of the world and this image is undeniably tied to memory, to a certain form not of the past as a "stumbling block" along the threads of time but as "past-experience" which once again stands "gleichzeitig" inside and outside time, in a constant flux and recreation of human verticality and horizontality that is counter-imaged in a letter of Kafka:
-
"Had you not been lying on the ground among the animals, you would have been unable to see the sky and the stars and wouldn't have been set free. Perhaps you wouldn't have survived the terror of standing upright. I feel much the same; it is a mutual dream you have dreamed for us both"[11].
-
I'm indebted to Aviva Zornberg for the interpretation of this text which she attributes to a Biblical world view in tune with Rosenzweig and that others have attributed to a fragmentary view of Modernity, including myself. Redemption is both a creation and revelation story and together with hope they happen in the present, not unlike happiness; "In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption... the past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption"[12].
-
I believe Benjamin speaks here not of the concrete linear past but of the past experience that in itself as it unfolds heads towards the future in that "the narrative art regains the significance it had in the mouth of Schezerade: to postpone the future[13]", said Benjamin when speaking of Kafka's stories. Postponing the future is where the illusion of hope remains at stake and this can be executed only through past experiences, of the narrative thereof. One of the key definitions of Modernity stems from this process and at that in a Hegelian manner, "Modernity - the sense that the present is discontinuous with the past - is an illusion and this illusion creates modernity itself. What has changed is social memory; we have disconnected most of our practices and ideas from our collective memory of their origins and meanings."[14] And this discostinuous present contains the future, weakly so because it lives on the expectation of its possibility together with the hope of its impossibility. The future shall never arrive because "The time is out of joint / O cursed spite / That I was ever born to set it right / Nay! come, let's go together"[15] proclaims the cheerful Hamlet. This is what Arendt termed "the sempiternal moment" between past and future and wherein the human condition lies, interpreted by Heller to cast some light on the advent of the postmodern "unreflective" man.
-
III
-
Benjamin's hope has very little to do with Christian eschatology and much to do with Messianism, as echoed in the work of his contemporary Ernst Bloch, a foremost athestic theology who shared a great part of Benjamin's philosophical heritage and this can be easily demonstrated by one of his statements, taken up by the post-Christian theologians Harvey Cox and Jurgen Moltmann, albeit in very different manners; "The Church is the community of the future, eternally dissatisfied with the present"[16]. Both resound in a very "secular" language which isn't strictly secular as it might have been the same language of the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "The day will come in which people will again be called to pronounce the word of God in a way that the world will be changed by it. There will be a new language, perhaps quite unreligious, but as liberating and elevating as the language of Jesus"[17], he's also said to have a certain fondness of the sentence "Hast thou hoped for salvation?", I think if I remember correctly that was the main question one was expected to be asked in the Day of Judgment. This obviously comes very close to Marx but if one were to follow Schelling's Ages of the World (which profoundly influenced Rosenzweig, specially important is Gillian Rose's assessment of the Ages of the World in Rosenzweig's system[18]) this essentially seems to be Schelling's greatest insight from his familiarity with the works of the Kabbalists.
-
In Benjamin there's a fascinating image and counter-image in between the ideas of historical materialism and the young Hegelians together with Jewish mysticism, what compels one to read from close-by his extreme long and dense German sentences and with closer inspection one finds him doing a totally phenomenal kind of hermeneutics because they work in two different layers and can't be labelled under the religious or secular language. As many young Jewish thinkers of his time he stands outside a collapsing system of metaphysics but goes beyond most of them in speaking about the "metaphysics" of the experience, a true paradoxicality in a manifold sense; as he calls for the "match" of historical materialism with theology, and by theology not meaning the Western tradition of philosophical theology but merely the net of metaphysical security that in German Idealism had bestowed man with a good-feel of being totally at home in the world following the enthroning as doubt[19] as this same world's major patron.
-
He turns toward path-ways very unlikely Hegelian, for example through his concern with images which break apart from the extreme abstraction that Hegel's system subject "persons" under and that set forth the basis of Kierkegaard and Rosenzweig's critique, in Hegelian philosophy the image is not to be sighted in its particularly but only in its spirit which has been made already universal, even when Benjamin does say that "historicism culminates in universal history[20]" but it is a rather obscure passage and on account of this, difficult to determinate what he actually meant to say.
-
All in all, Benjamin believes in the image and is determined to describe it with an almost phenomenological inclination, turning from philosophy (a comprehensive whole, in the old sense) toward theory (obviously an influence from the method of the social sciences) because the theory is one among many and it "sees" something, consequentially developing a "view" of it[21]; furthermore his metaphysics of experience are presented as a form of inter-spherical (namely, one that blurs the boundaries between everyday life, philosophy, the arts and thought in particular) aesthetics, even theological aesthetics accomplishing what a certain theologian of our age expressed: "When beauty becomes a form which is no longer understood as being identical with being, spirit, freedom, we have again entered the age of aestheticism, and realists will be then right in objecting this kind of beauty"[22].
-
At this juncture the theologian's concern is with the metaphysical foundations of ethics and echoes far from Benjamin who is no ethical solipsist, but Benjamin does believe in the mere "possibility" of whichever powers that be and that's the perplexing source of his Angst, of his amazement in the Greek sense (the fox spoke about the three ages of the world, antiquity as the age of "amazement", the middle ages and rennaissance as the age of "security" and modernity as the age of "doubt") but comically doubtful before the amazement itself, an aspect alien in every respect to the stale nature of the Greek tragedy yet not so of the German tragedy as he tries to go on and prove in his seminal work "The Origins of the German Tragedy". Benjamin's belief in this possibility is enlightening today in the age of the "postmetaphysical fallacy[23]" by which the endless mourning before the "metaphysical security" turns out dull because the bereaver is seemly to have never been such. This hope in whichever form it comes does echo rather pessimistic but it is its weaving thread itself what secures the possibility of unredeemed political philosophies, of undualistic or dualectic images of theology and aesthetics where the estrangement of man from himself as such as to consider those realms totally adrift and aloof from his worldly experience. He turns toward the image and says "The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. "The truth will not run away from us[24]".
-
This is thoroughly in accord with a particularly relevant thinker, Arendt and her letter to Mary McCarthy on the tapestry of truth, "The chief fallacy is to believe that Truth is a result which comes at the end of a thought-process. Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought, thinking is always result-less. That is the difference between "philosophy" and science: Science has results, philosophy never. Thinking starts after an experience of truth has struck home, so to speak. The difference between philosophers and other people is that the former refuse to let go, but that they are the only receptacles of truth. This notion that truth is the result of thought is very old and goes back to ancient classical philosophy, possibly to Socrates himself. If I am right and if it a fallacy, then it probably is the oldest fallacy of Western philosophy. You can detect it in almost all definitions of truth, and especially in the traditional one of "aedequatio rei et intellectus" [the conformity of the intellect to the thing known]. Truth, in other words, is not "in" thought but to use Kant's language, the condition for the possibility of thinking. It is both, beginning and a priori"[25]. Truth is the precondition and not necessarily the immediate cause (as in Kant) of this metaphysical experience, unlike the fox whereby the "Vorlauf" (running behind the past) immediately throws you into the Nothingness together with your averageness and your possibility of the uncanny.
-
This is of course problematic when thinking of National Socialism, which apparently wasn't seen by Benjamin as something occupied with "truth" but a rather shocking encounter in between technology and modern men (or at least this is what Arendt said) and this naivete sprang from a terribly boredom to deal with the actual Nazi and propaganda literature under the influence of futuristic Italian thinkers. She claims the fox to have experienced the same problem, but it is unlikely so from his concept of true in relation to art and technology that was presented in less known writings and as I've argued somewhere else, his insistency in maintaining ontological freedom by eliminating the past-experience of the event and constituting "Being-in-the-world" as something entirely universal[26] (a different version of Minerva's Owl) against all odds, even despite Kafka, who never read him.
-
IV
-
To conclude, Benjamin's hope at its very surface can't be glimpsed at without stumbling upon his unsurmountable sadness, and at that his Messianism resounds with Prophetic candor, not unlike that of Stefan Zweig's play "Jeremiah" and his "project" of Modernity is enlightened by a quotation of Flaubert, "Few will be able to guess how sad one has to be in order to resucitate Carthage"[27], namely that this Modernity (as a world) is the unlikeliest of all possible enterprises jumping from one paradox to the other and being locked in the "House of Beings" (language)[28] wherein the estranged man dwells, Modernity can't come without a certain melancholy and mourning over the lost "past" which if it's to believe in itself, has to forfeit. For Benjamin Modernity isn't a particular way to do philosophy or a world-view but a "storm of progress"[29] that attempts to "change the life"[30], which obviously "evented" before the greatest catastrophe and turned us inwardly into the age of self, whereby the reality of the world turned into a blurry untainted landscape, nonetheless Benjamin aches under the spell of the absolute present where for him the only remote possibility of hope lies, "Thus as Kafka puts it, there's an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. This statement [to Max Brod] really contains Kafka's hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity"[31]. Out of this hopeless aspiration is begot the fear that the world might at once be destroyed (the best of all possible worlds), it is an immediate confrontation with reality that dissolves the paradox and the image and counter-image, only the sketches are left untouched but somehow later they burn down, water down, let down.
-
Yet he keeps the Kafkian serenity in the narrative, the personal unhindered encounter in between the everyman and his fate, pivot wherein everything struck home for him and in the deliverance from the cores of everyday in the fashion of the most terrible plights he couldn't but release his most absolute confidence in the future, as though the prisoner who in the abject impossible present thinks but about the most distant possibilities in a remote future[32], as though the ultimate love commandments would include a poetizing of the world[33]; a return... "Love itself is our death to the world, and our lifee with God. For if it is death when the soul leaves the body, how it is not death when our love goes forth from the world? Therefore love is as strong as death"[34]. The impossibility of his own life casted gray on his hope and by proxy turned into a saga of Prophetic consequence, as though a man directed to encounter his unknown destiny by his very own will with the most absolute credibility in his insecurity with a liberating voice in the redemptive tense, the present.
-
"The refugess were supposed to return to France by the same route the next day... During the night Benjamin took his life, whereupon the border officials, upon whom this suicide made an impression, allowed his companions to proceed to Portugal. A few weeks later the embargo on visas was lifted again. One day earlier Benjamin would have gotten through without any trouble, one day later the people in Marseilles would have known that for the time being it was impossible to pass through Spain. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible"[35]. Thus arrived Benjamin's final station, at the end of a succession of long parades of despair moments and anguish, the last remnants of the serenity didn't linger about for too long and it all went up in smoke when the chips were down, this is the whimsical secret behind Kafka's stories for him... No one surrenders in advance as in the plays of Sartre, the characters surrender to an absolutely empty channel with a tad of boredom; for Kafka they're struggling and opening doors which close behind them until the very last moment whereby the story closes at the very limits of human understanding and not even then it is clear on whether one's allowed to quit hoping. As his friends knew, he would hope until the very last moment and that was the ultimate experience of the time, of the present, the irreparable, the paradoxical, the transformation.
-
His Messianism retains the impossibility and the spirit of the times, a rather funny pessimism that laughs about itself and in doing so retains its faith altogether. Because one simply can't give up, when as in Lasker-Schueler the boundaries between one's life and philosophy or poetry are no longer there and the world is experienced like Friedrich Gentz, "Gentz gave himself to the world immediately and directly, and it consumed him. His hedonism was only the most radical way open to him to let the world consume him"[36]. No gaps are left in between God, man and the world in the most radical form of bridging the gap between past and future: Living eternally in the present moment, which the time has lost sight of, crashing right before the unreflective vertigo. It is this absolute present and not any glorious past or distant Utopian future what leaves the door open for the Messiah.
-
"If someone comes and declares "This will be the historical redeemer of mankind, I know its name" - then we might easily identify him as the prophet of the false Messiah. The prophet of the true Messiah remains silent. He does not know. But he knows one thing - that one should not say that the Messiah will never come. One should never let the empty chair be occupied by a pretender (and every occupant is a pretender), but it is better if one does not remove the empty chair. My conviction, or rather my feeling, suggest that I leave the chair there, in the middle of the room at the head of the table, where it remains all the time exposed in its emptiness. The chair speaks to denizens of the absolute present honestly only in its emptiness. My intuition suggests that only emptiness is fullness for the moderns, that there is no other kind of "hope beyond hope", at least not for those who assume the position of reflected postmodernity[37]".
-
And this is the very same struggle by which the old Israelites overthrew the magic powers that be, claiming that they have in fact no basis; all in all the struggle remains one of "no longer and not yet" since the Bible and beyond, with the richest wells of images that could boldly feed one's world-time with the happy mementoes of a life-time, experiences, encounters, exchanges. It's not an empty faith but rather the most extreme possibility of it and as it was in Hegel, Modernity relies on "Daimon" (the postmodern God, "time") to mend its shortcomings because philosophy is thought, not spirit. Lastly the struggle of Modernity remains by large that of Monotheism and this is something that Benjamin clearly knew as he wrote the last paragraph of his theses on the philosophy of history, a brutal encounter with reality:
-
"The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance--namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for Enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter"[38].
-
Firstly on the surface his disappointment looks like this:
-
"The joy of propietorship was strong in me, and I'm glad
To have felt it. To walk through my garden, to have guests
To discuss plans for building, like others of my profession
before me
This pleased me, I admit it. But now seven weeks seems
enough.
I left without regret, or with only slight regret. Writing this
I already found it hard to remember. When I ask myself
How many lies I would be ready to tell to keep this property
I know it is not many. Therefore I hope
It was not bad to have this property. It was
Not a small thing, but
There are greater"[39]
-
Yet this unfailing trust in the present is where his modernity and his ultimate sadness lie, but no less his hope which accounts for about the very same. One of his friends can well portray this in a way that might have appealed to the spirit of the times:
-
"Walter Benjamin"
-
"Dusk will come again sometime.
Night will come down from the stars.
We will rest our outstretched arms
In the nearnesses, in the distances.
Out of the darkness sound softly
Small archaic melodies. Listening.
Let us wean ourselves away,
Let us at last break ranks.
Distant voices, sadnesses nearby.
Those are the voices and these the dead
Whom we have sent as messengers
Ahead, to lead us into slumber."[40]
-
For Arendt, her Messianism lies at the meaningfulness of the untold, of the silence, the serenity, because as Rosenzweig said, only death is a big hysterical laughter and life a silent serenity as when the Prophets died in the most bewildering calm, walking into life again, "all that is creative in man stems from a seed of endless discontent"[41]. In Benjamin, his hope and his Messianism could be painted with the genius of Goethe: "Don't look for anything behind phenomena, they're the things themselves".
-
Templar: We must, we must become good friends; not seldom has the searcher's eye found more than he desires.
Nathan: The genuine beggar is the genuine king. [42]
-
Notes
-
[1] Heidegger, in Arendt's "Heidegger the Fox". "Denktagbuch", entry of 1953.
[2] Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction".
[3] Allan Bennet, "History Boys".
[4] Heraclitus, frag. 94 [Plutarch].
[5] H. Cohen, "Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism". c.4.
[6] M. Heidegger, "Was heisst die Philosophie?"
[7] speaking of the Heideggerian school of French philosophy after 1945.
[8] "Happening, taking place, occuring, event-ing".
[9] G. Steiner, "Real Presences".
[10] B. Galli, "Poetics of Time in Rosenzweig & Kafka", conference paper.
[11] F. Kafka to Felizia
[12] W. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", II
[13] W. Benjamin, "Illuminations"
[14] Richard Hooker
[15] W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, 5
[16] E. Bloch, "The Principle of Hope"
[17] D. Bonhoeffer, "Letters and Papers from Prison"
[18] G. Rose, "Mourning becomes the Law: Philosophy & Representation"
[19] Cartesian doubt, the founding principle of both subjective and objective Idealism.
[20] W. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", XVII
[21] A. Heller, "A Theory of Modernity", Intr.
[22] H.U. Von Balthasar, "Theological Aesthetics", v.I, intr.
[23] G. Rose.
[24] W. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", V.
[25] H. Arendt/M. McCarthy, "In Between Friends: The Correspondence".
[26] M. Heidegger, "Was heisst die Philosophie?"
[27] W. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", VII.
[28] Heidegger
[29] W. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", IX.
[30] Agnes Heller
[31] W. Benjamin, "Illuminations".
[32] E. Levinas on Leon Blum.
[33] F. Rosenzweig, "The Star of Redemption".
[34] St. Augustine, "Tractate on the Gospel of St. John".
[35] H. Arendt, "Men in Dark Times".
[36] "Friedrich Gentz", H. Arendt, "Essays in Understanding".
[37] A. Heller, "A Theory of Modernity", c.1.
[38] W. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", B.
[39] B. Brecht, "On Reading when I was rich", Poems of the Crisis Years, 1929-1933.
[40] H. Arendt, 1942
[41] A.J. Heschel
[42] G.E. Lessing, "Nathan the Wise".
No comments:
Post a Comment