[CRIT 11.1 (2010) 99-118] doi:10.1558/crit.v11i1.

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Critical Horizons (print) ISSN 1440-9917 Critical Horizons (online) ISSN 1568-5160

History or Counter-Tradition? e System of Freedom After Walter Benjamin

Wesley Phillips
Murcia, Spain wesleyjphillips@hotmail.com

Abstract: I seek to interpret Walter Benjamin in light of the system programme of German Idealism in order to confront an antinomy of contemporary radical thought. Benjamin has usually been regarded as an anti-Hegelian thinker of the exception. Reading him against the grain, I draw out a concept of counter-tradition that eschews the opposition of intra-historical progress and extra-historical exception. e philological inspiration is a book by Franz Joseph Molitor, a student of Schelling and teacher of Benjamin: e Philosophy of History, or, On Tradition. Keywords: Benjamin, Hegel, Schelling, History, Tradition, Exception.

e Antinomy of Radical

ought

is article comes out of speci c research motivated by a general problem. at being, what I take to constitute the antinomy of contemporary radical thought: panlogicism and exceptionism. Each conceives of the philosophical possibility for social change or self-realization in a divergent way to the other. After giving a brief de nition of these two positions, an alternative to the antinomy will be proposed. What is presented is the schema for what would constitute a more substantial study. Frederick Beiser de nes panlogicism as the doctrine that everything happens of necessity according to reason. Hegel is said to uphold panlogicism in the following manner: First, Hegel holds that the absolute is causa sui, existing from the necessity of its own nature alone. Second, Hegel also maintains that the absolute is all reality, having nothing outside itself to limit it. Both
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premises entail that everything exists by the necessity of the divine nature. If, per contra, we introduce something contingent into Hegels system, it would have to be outside the absolute, which would limit it and make it nite. Hegel therefore seems to be as committed to panlogicism as Spinoza, who holds that everything exists of necessity in the single in nite substance.1 Where Spinozas absolute substance is natural, Hegels is historical. History changes; is itself change. e nature of this change is, however, just as necessary for Hegel as it is for Spinoza: e History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom; a progress whose development according to the necessity of its nature, it is our business to investigate.2 Attempts to separate Hegels lectures on e Philosophy of World History (183031) from the rest of his system are inherently fraught.3 For the problems of panlogicism and history coalesce around the question of the system itself, as we shall see. In spite of his fundamental critique of Hegel, Marx shares with him a teleological view of history as social ontology. We recall these famous lines from the Preface to Marxs Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois method of production as so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society. e bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. is social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society.4 e historical logics of Hegel and Marx are divergent in their content, but not necessarily in their form the full controversy over which cannot be addressed adequately here. Su ce to say that Hegelian Marxism has long been out of favour within most philosophical circles, for political and for philosophical reasons. e subsumption of (pre-)history under a system, from the stand1. Frederick Beiser, Hegel (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 76. 2. G.W.F. Hegel, e Philosophy of History, J. Sibree (trans.), (Mineola: Dover, 2005), 19. 3. H.S. Harris, Hegel: Phenomenology and System (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1995), 5. 4. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Lewis S. Feuer (ed.) (London: Fontana, 1969), 85.
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point of the midst of (pre-)history, results in a contradiction that the same (pre-)history has made painfully clear. is contradiction points not to contingency in the abstract, but rather to the existence of historical su ering. Nevertheless a monstrous nevertheless this form of panlogicism retains the advantage over its alternative of grounding change within human, selfconscious activity: Men [Die Menschen] make their own history, Marx writes in e Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Such activity is, of necessity, the most di cult thing of all: but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. e tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.5 We shall return to this last, most remarkable remark. Turning to the other pole of the antinomy: It would not be controversial to characterize post-war French and Italian radical thought as anti-Hegelian, at least to the extent that it follows in the wake of Heideggers destruction of the history of ontology.6 Such thought nds its articulation for change, not in logically preordained progress, but rather in the exceptional event (Alain Badiou being the most celebrated living example; but I also have in mind the recent interest in Carl Schmitts concept of the exception, notably in the work of Giorgio Agamben). Philosophies of the event identify the problem of panlogicism, but at a price. For, panlogicism tends to be displaced by an exceptionism that exceeds the critical standpoint of experience. Exceptionism, a fetishization of the exception, lapses into the pre-critical time of the ever-same the same result as panlogicism: hence the antinomy. e existentially inclined exceptionist will no doubt contend that this objection is misplaced. e event is impossible without the facticity of nite experience. Exceptionist concepts of experience cannot, however, do justice to the question of historical experience, understood in the strong sense of Geschichte.7 is is revealed in Heideggers continuing and fascinating difculty over Hegel a di culty that is captured in the question: what is the Being of History? e con ict between panlogicism and exceptionism is waged on the terrain of the philosophy of history.
5. Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile, David Fernbach (ed.) (London: Penguin, 1973), 146. 6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans.), (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 41. 7. Where the Greek and Latin historia connotes storytelling and learning, Geschichte adds notions of destiny and aptness (Schicksal, Geschick).
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Walter Benjamin and German Idealism Walter Benjamin is uniquely situated on this terrain. On the one hand, his messianic historical materialism is a philosophy of the exception. But on the other hand, Benjamin is not the anti-Hegelian he is assumed to be.8 We know about Benjamins later appropriation of Marx. But what I have in mind here, as the necessary condition of that appropriation, is Benjamins a nity to the philosophy of German Idealism, taken as a programme. is a nity tends to have been obscured by scholarship into Benjamins appropriations of both neo-Kantianism and early German Romanticism. Where the latter is concerned, the system of art has taken precedence over the system of Science Wissenschaft without which the system of art tends toward aestheticism. Benjamin came to reject academic philosophy. What is at stake with the question of philosophy, however metaphysics, beyond academic philosophy is the possibility of systematic presentation. By system and systematic, I mean the critical (mode of ) presentation of the whole. By critical, I mean the question of the standpoint of experience. Benjamin does not always present in a philosophically critical manner. He has been interpreted as an exceptionist. If every second is the small gateway through which the messiah might enter, then no human knowledge can procure the event.9 How, then, is the event to be critically articulated, conceptualized, without ensnaring it before the event? I want to relate Benjamins sense of this problem of critical presentation to the original parting of ways between panlogicism and exceptionism in modern philosophy. Not as an arbitrary exercise in intellectual history, but rather as a sketch for the philosophically critical presentation at issue. Benjamin o ers insights into the debate between Hegel and Schelling, which, in turn, partly constitutes, to use Gillian Roses important phrase, the philosophical foundations of Marxism in this case, speculative historical materialism.10 ese foundations concern the critique of panlogicism rather than the critique of political economy. German Idealism can have little to say on the latter, contra Rose. At the same time, the critique of political economy requires the metaphysical articulation in order to be systematic; in order,
8. Cf. Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: e Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998), 1. 9. Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, in Selected Writings, vol. 4, Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings (eds) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19962006, 4 vols.), 397. 10. Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981), 2.
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that is, to make the claim on the whole that it seeks (beyond either classical economics or, for Rose, sociology). e origin to which I refer is not archaic. German Idealism provides a debate that, as a debate, is often more contemporary than todays antinomy. e ongoing project would be to bring Hegels speculative Science into dialogue with Schellings system of freedom. Hypothetically, the speculative system of freedom would constitute a logic of the exception. My strategic deployment of Schelling against Hegel is clear enough. Benjamins a nity to Schelling is less clear. is is perhaps due to the view put forward on the left from Engels to Lukcs that the split between Hegel and Schelling is a split between progressive and reactionary intellectual forces (according to which the Marxian Benjamin must be placed in the progressive camp).11 Schelling was, however, a latecomer to the Jena Romantics that greatly interested Benjamin. Lukcs acknowledges the shared objective idealism between Schelling and Hegel around 1800.12 But it is with Schellings middle period, after the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), that a relation to Benjamins thought ought to be explored. Lehre, Tradition, History Benjamin was well-versed in all of the thinkers to feature, explicitly or implicitly, in Schellings Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (or Freiheitschrift, 1809) from Jacob Bhme to Franz von Baader.13 e work of Franz Joseph Molitor, student of Baader and correspondent of Schelling, was of particular interest to Benjamin around the time of his writing On Language as Such and the Language of Man (1916). Gershom Scholem, for whom the essay began as a letter, reports that Benjamin was reading Molitors un nished e Philosophy of History, or, On Tradition ( ve volumes, 182757) at around this time.14 German Idealism formed the backbone of Molitors intellectual formation. He sent copies of his book to Schelling and Hegel. Molitors work invites us to situ11. Engels attacked Schelling in a series of pamphlets dating from 184142. He was, like many of his contemporaries, initially curious about Schellings succession of Hegels chair of philosophy in Berlin. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/anti-schelling/index.htm, accessed on 9 June, 2009; Georg Lukcs, e Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics, Rodney Livingstone (trans.), (London: Merlin Press, 1975), pt. IV. 12. Lukcs, e Young Hegel, pt. III. 13. Also Spinoza, Leibniz and Friedrich Schlegel. 14. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: e Story of a Friendship, Harry Zohn (trans.), (New York, NY: New York Review Books, 2003), 48.
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ate Benjamins re ections on history and tradition in the context of the Schelling-Hegel (-Marx) debate. is is because, in a speci c sense that remains to be shown, the antinomy of panlogicism and exceptionism maps on to the opposition of history and tradition. Where Molitor con ates history and tradition (the tautological or), we may add a question mark to his title (the oppositional or): history or tradition? Molitors Philosophy of History is, in fact, a philosophical history of religion: speci cally, a unique attempt to synthesize the Kabbalah with the New Testament. In his recent study on Molitor, Bram Mertens suggests that e Philosophy of History imbued Benjamin with an interest in tradition, understood as Lehre, which can be translated as doctrine, learning or study.15 Mertens compares Benjamins writings to rabbinic literature, in which tradition is seen as a viscous, multi-dimensional whole, in spatial rather than in temporal or linear terms, brought together under the concept of the Lehre.16 Benjamins later thought continues to be soaked in this spatial approach.17 His re ections on tradition are in no way con ned to the Jewish tradition. e connection of Lehre to tradition is clear: learning is a repeated handing down, from teacher to student, adult to child, generation to generation. is repetition is not tautological, but mimetic, since something is learnt on each occasion. Lehre recurs throughout Benjamins writings, usually within a constellation of the following concepts: tradition, experience, life, myth and philosophy. If history is linear and progressive, then tradition is spatial and simultaneous. Tradition names our connection to the dead, and even to the unborn. Conversely, progressive history slaughters the past from the standpoint of its victorious present (this applies structurally to the history of decline, since its past is equally lost). Benjamin calls this understanding of history historicism, but there is a sense in which historicism is but the intellectual symptom of a modernity already intoxicated by the idea of progress. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin would include Hegelian and Marxist panlogicism into his critique of historicism:18 as soon as it becomes the
15. Bram Mertens, Dark Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). 16. Mertens, Dark Images, Secret Hints, 100. 17. For instance, Benjamin writes of the interlacing of the history of the arcades with the whole presentation, the Arcades Project itself. Walter Benjamin, e Arcades Project, R. Tiedemann (ed), Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (trans.), (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 858. 18. Where Marxism is concerned, classless society is not to be conceived as the endpoint of historical development. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 402.
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historical process as a whole the concept of progress bespeaks an uncritical hypostatization rather than a critical interrogation.19 Hegel remains uncritical when he speaks from beyond possible experience: the ultimate result of history.20 Benjamins philosophy of history grapples with the contradiction of how a changed collective experience, as not present experience, can be presented from out of present experience. is would be the critical exception of experience and of tradition. Benjamin seeks the overcoming of historicism.21 His philosophy of history avoids the fate of relativism, however (Universal histories are not necessarily reactionary22) on account of its theological appropriation and, more importantly, its ontology of tradition. Where the former is concerned, we could cite e Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1928), in which Benjamin states that history appears in nature, as a petri ed primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face or rather in a deaths head.23 is postlapsarian view of history di ers from that of Hegel, in spite the shared in uence of Bhme. If there is no clear progress or decline, then the Fall is the self-perpetuating catastrophe up to the day of redemption. For Hegel, the Fall symbolizes both the alienation of humanity from the absolute and the progressive human recollection of the absolute: Erinnerung.24 ese distinctions are recalled in Molitors philosophical history of religions: messianism and incarnationism. (Neo-)Kantian Experience and Tradition e immediate problem of Benjamins philosophy of history is that it expresses two opposing conceptions of historical time catastrophe and tradition in equally non-linear, non-progressive terms. ere can be no gradual progress out of the time of Hell, la Hegel, but only, singularly,
19. 20. 21. 22. 23. Benjamin, e Arcades Project, 478. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 10. Benjamin, e Arcades Project, 460. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 404. e Origin of German Tragic Drama, John Osborne (trans.), (London: Verso Books, 1998), 166. 24. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, A.V. Miller (trans.), (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998), 492.
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an extra-historical and thereby exceptional event out of history (or, into history: there is an exception in Marx, in spite of his Hegelianism).25 Again, the problem is one of how the event can be critically articulated, without history understood as mediation. Can tradition provide the mediation? Hegel opposes his progressively incarnated time modernity as history to the mythic time of pre-modernity. Hellenic antiquity admittedly mediates the two: the Greek religion is, for Hegel and his contemporaries, already a seed of modernity; the tragic awareness of the contradiction between nite and in nite. It is left to us moderns to realize this fate, as spirit. Modernity becomes modern through mastery of the ancient masters. is is a founding tenet of the German Idealist programme.26 Benjamin both belongs and does not belong to this Promethean, humanist tradition. For, although preoccupied with the meaning of tradition, myth appears in Benjamins writings increasingly in the guise of a subordination that simultaneously demands the negation of the subordination. Again, the question arises: whence comes Benjamins historical materialist redemption [Rettung], or counter-movement to myth, if it is the case that he rejects progressive history and proposes, in its stead, another tradition? For does not Benjamin himself connect tradition to myth? Can myth overcome myth? Charging Benjamin with a proscription on progress, Jrgen Habermas concluded that rettende Kritik was conservative in an eminent sense.27 We could extend this de nition to tradition, of course. It is no coincidence, however, that Habermas falsely assumed that, by the 1930s, Benjamin had rejected the dogmatic concept of Lehre.28 If Habermas had read Benjamins Franz Kafka (1934), he would have found that the reversal [Umkehr] of Lehre constitutes Benjamins critical alternative to dogmatic progress whether Hegelian or, as in Habermas, Kantian. It is true that, in e Storyteller (1936), we read, experience [Erfahrung] has fallen in value.29 But this verdict is countered by an imperative to embrace modern perceptual bearers of experience, which bear experience by rupturing it. Appropriating the vitalist Schockerlebnis, Benjamin suggests
25. Benjamin, e Arcades Project, 843. 26. Cf. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Hlderlin and the Greeks, in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, Christopher Fynsk (trans.), (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 236 47. 27. Jrgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising Critique or Rescuing Critique, in Philosophical-Political Pro les, Frederick G. Lawrence (trans.), (London: Heinemann, 1983), 136. 28. Habermas, Walter Benjamin, 145. 29. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, H. Eiland & M.W. Jennings (eds). (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 4 vols.), 143.
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that Erfahrung is changed, not eroded.30 But this is a form of exceptionism, resulting from Benjamins radical neo-Kantianism. In his Programme of the Coming Philosophy (1918), Benjamin relates Erfahrung to Lehre. Each signi es learning. e Kantian concept of experience is critical only to the extent that it grounds subjectivity in human knowledge. But it is limited by its Enlightenment paradigm of knowledge. e task of the coming philosophy is to prove adequate for a new and higher kind of experience yet to come.31 Benjamin e ectively pursues a new table of categories. In place of Kants pure concepts, Benjamin suggests that the concepts be living appropriated from tradition. Benjamins anthropological critique of idealism is experimental, however. If the concepts are not pure, then in what sense is there a transcendental relation to, or of, empirical experience? Is this rather a logical relation, as it is in neo-Kantianism? And if a new table of categories were to be formulated, in what sense would this correspond to coming experience, given that the categories would be, in a clear sense, already given? at is to say, how can what humanity has been, traditionally, determine what humanity ought to be? What is important here for the moment is the fact that Benjamin holds on to the (neo-)Kantian structure of an experience determined by conditions for its possibility. Benjamin remains constrained by a Kantian concept of experience well into the 1930s, for the following reasons. As Hegel recognized, transcendental philosophy can have no history of experience, because the subject is deduced from a priori concepts; more generally (because Benjamin also contests that dualism), Hegel objects to the xed opposition of conditions of possibility as versus actuality. Hegel will instead pursue a Science of the experience of consciousness, as if to return Erfahrung to its etymological meaning: a journey (and hence, a history).32 Benjamin cannot take exception to neo-Kantian experience in the manner he would like to in a radical and critical manner. A transcendental structure cannot take exception to itself, not without invoking a third term that is beyond experience. Taking radical exception to a transcendental concept of experience with a transcendental concept of coming experience requires dogmatic exceptionism, since both are spatial. e same is true of tradie tone of e Storyteller nevertheless remains elegiac in comparison to other later texts. Benjamin nds a new beauty in what is vanishing, rather than in what is to come. Selected Writings, vol. 3, 146. 31. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, M. Bullock & M.W. Jennings (eds). (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 4 vols.), 102. I have altered enlightenment to Enlightenment. 32. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 56.
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tion and anti-tradition. Without mediation, we have either tautology a single spatial plane or an exceptional yet dogmatic shattering of one plane into the other. Experience, tradition and Lehre are connected by way of what Benjamin calls continuum.33 Once again, the continuum is not an empty repetition of the same. On the contrary, it is, in Kantian terms, the productive synthesis of manifoldness. e chain of tradition signi es that tradition is itself the chain, the generations its links.34 We cannot think experience outside of tradition, understood as collective experience (humanity as universal history). If the continuum were to be understood in the solely (neo-) Kantian manner, then Habermas would have been right to suggest that Benjamin oscillates between conservatism and dogmatism, for the reasons just outlined. Fortunately, Benjamins Umkehr can be interpreted in relation to the post-Kantianism of Hegel and Schelling, in a manner that includes a pre-emptive critique of neo-Kantianism. e Post-Kantian Programme Benjamins Programme of the Coming Philosophy echoes the Oldest System Programme of German Idealism a fragment discovered amongst Hegels papers by Franz Rosenzweig in 1918, the same year Benjamin wrote his Programme (this predates Benjamins personal acquaintance with Rosenzweig, however). Schelling or Hlderlin penned the 1796 Programme, but it contains the ideas of the young Hegel also, with them at the Tbingen Seminary. To read between its elusive lines, the System Programme acknowledges the unique opportunity thrown up by the French Revolution and Kants critical philosophy. But it equally complains, as Benjamin would over a century later, that the Aufklrer have forfeited coming historical wisdom in their purging of all religious and mythical knowledge. is Enlightenment critique is recalled in the de nition of theology in Benjamins Programme: the historically philosophical elements.35 What is needed, say the Tbingen students, is a new mythology a mythology of reason.36 In their collaborative Critical Journal of Philosophy (18011802), Schelling and Hegel would
33. 34. 35. 36. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 105. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 154. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 108. J.M. Bernstein (ed.), Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 186.

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esh-out some of their objections.37 e notion of a new mythology is central to the programme of German Idealism, as was indicated with respect to their self-understanding of modernity. e Tbingen trio object to a form of exceptionism here. In taking exception to the historically philosophical elements, Enlightenment falls into the dogmatism of anti-enlightenment. Given Benjamins comparable notions of myth and tradition, there may be a way through to a critical exception. e problem of the Aufklrung is directly connected to Kants so-called agnosticism: philosophically, the suspicion that the antinomy of reason must, in the end, side with in nity, leaving the system crippled by dualisms (since Kants standpoint of experience is paradoxically nite). is leads to attempts by way of Spinozism to ground the system in the absolute equally, however, the radicalization of Kants own unconditioned. Hegel and Schelling take this attempt in di erent directions, but they share the imperative to think the absolute in terms of knowledge, rather than as a dualism of nite (knowable) and in nite (unknowable). For Hegel, the absolute is known as spirit in its historical unfolding. For the early Schelling, the absolute is intuited in exceptional experiences of nature, art and religion. is anticipates panlogicism versus exceptionism in spite of the fact that Schellings proto-existentialism is neither Nietzsches nor Heideggers (post-) active nihilism, not least because the latter thinkers are not free of their own absolutes. Necessary Contingency? Schelling and Benjamin Schellings system of freedom marks a paradigm shift within the philosophical self-conception of the system, because it confronts the problem of panlogicism inherent to all systems hitherto Hegels included without, however, rejecting the system as such. Schelling de nes the problem of the system as follows: the only possible system of reason is pantheism; but pantheism inevitably is fatalism.38 Panlogicism was already an issue of Schellings System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Kant opened up the problem of the contradiction between
37. In Faith and Knowledge (1802), for instance, Hegel restricts Kantian, subjective Idealism to the ordinary human intellect [gemeinen Menschenverstandes]. is understanding is rooted in the end of a Protestant Enlightenment culture. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ hegel/index.htm, accessed on 7 September, 2009. 38. F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters, in Philosophy of German Idealism, Priscilla HaydenRoy (trans.), Ernst Behler (ed.), (New York, NY: Continuum, 1997), 221.
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necessity and freedom contingency. Schelling took over Kants politically optimistic resolution: there is, of necessity, progress towards a universal constitution.39 e System is itself a progressive history of consciousness; a model for Hegels Phenomenology.40 But unlike Hegel, Schelling upholds, alongside the ideal of history, an emphasis upon freedom as Willkr. Schelling is not only interested in negative or voluntarist freedom, however, because the universal constitution, as brought about by the species, signals positive, political freedom in the sense of Freiheit. It is the relation between negative and positive freedom that is the problem here, as it will be in the Freiheitschrift. In the System, Schelling has two models for reconciling freedom and necessity in history to avoid, that is, both individualism and fatalism. e rst is to think of history as a play, in which the individual actors are its co-authors.41 e second is the unconscious. Necessity, as providence, is hidden in the collective unconscious and is actualized in the free, conscious activity of individuals. e unconscious circumvents subjectivist voluntarism, because the unconscious is anterior to subjective consciousness. Schelling relies upon his absolute indi erence of subject-object: Hegels night in which all the cows are black.42 e panlogicism of the early Schelling is clear: the tension between freedom and necessity is taken away with the preconceptual intuition of their pre-established harmony. Nothing evades this providence, because all acting is something communal, whereby all the acts of men are guided towards one harmonious goal.43 ere are no non-harmonious acts. Hegels critique of absolute intuitionism in the Phenomenology was directed against Schellings followers more than Schelling himself.44 e absolute cannot be known immediately, since immediacy is already mediated. Absolute knowing is brought about through the labour of the negative in the totality of its determinations. is totality is, however, as with
39. F.W.J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, Peter Heath (trans.) (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 199. 40. Schelling con ates tradition and progressive history. But like Benjamin, this as inter-generational: every succeeding individual should start in at the very point where the preceding one left o , and thus that continuity should be possible between succeeding individuals, and, if that which is to be realized in the progress of history is something attainable only through reason and freedom there should also be the possibility of tradition and transmission. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 200. 41. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 210. 42. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 9. 43. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 207. 44. Cf. H.S. Harris, Hegels Ladder, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1997), vol. 1, 356.
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Schellings absolute synthesis of all actions, in the service of a greater positivity: history. What is crucial about Schellings subsequent system of freedom is that, as if taking on Hegels attacks, the absolute is no longer intuited at least, not in a harmonious manner. e Concept the intelligibility of the absolute is not taken for granted. is is because Schelling no longer discerns irrevocable progress in the historical world. In Schellings treatise On Freedom and in Benjamins essay On Language, we nd attempts to address the problem of contingency systematically (in Schelling, it appears as the problem of the existence of evil and disease). What is more, Schelling and Benjamin each respond with a philosophy of melancholy Schwermut and Trauer respectively as the systematic mediation of freedom and nature in history (as, that is, a concept of negation).45 Where Benjamin writes of the untimely, sorrowful and unsuccessful nature of history, Schelling similarly asks, Does not everything bear witness to a fallen world?46 We recall that the composition of On Language, in which Benjamin writes of the sadness [Trauer] of nature, is contemporaneous with his reading of Molitor, Schellings student.47 In both Schelling and Benjamin, there is a prescient attempt to acknowledge the meaninglessness of historical suffering; that is, to include the contingent without valorizing contingency as the meaning whether in terms of existentialism or in terms of Hegels sacri cial slaughter-bench of history.48 Schellings treatise On Freedom is, however, already moving towards existentialism, insofar as it tends to merely hypostatize Kants antinomy. Freedom is indeed determinate in nature, but not in history. Schelling and Benjamin are in that case subject to the Hegelian critique of transcendental idealism. Freiheit remains a regulative idea. eir melancholy Science becomes an in nite, not historical task. In the Trauerspiel study, there is no critical event that would break out of the unending allegory. Adorno inherits this problem in his 1932 lecture, e Idea of Natural History, as well as in Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer, 19447). Unlike Adorno, Benjamin would become self-conscious of the problem of the in nite task always an ethical and not political task. In material relating to On the
45. Behler, Philosophy of German Idealism, 271. 46. Cited in Jrgen Habermas, Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schellings Idea of a Contraction of God and its Consequences for the Philosophy of History, in e New Schelling, Nick Midgley & Judith Norman (trans.), (London and New York, NY: Continuum, 2004), 55. 47. Cf. Wesley Phillips, Melancholy Science? Critical eory and German Idealism Reconsidered, in Telos 155 (New York, NY: forthcoming, June, 2011). 48. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 21.
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Concept of History (1940), Benjamin calls neo-Kantianism the school philosophy of the Social Democrats, they who obscured the German left, opening the gates to Hitler.49 In a similar auto-critique and again, as if responding to Hegel Schelling moves away from ethical towards historical freedom. Rather than separation from the absolute perpetuating itself in nitely, Schelling now speaks of ages of the world. For all three drafts of Die Weltalter, Schelling only ever wrote the rst of the three periods: the past. e present and future were always yet to be written. Judging from his jibe at Hegels panlogicism, there is a reason for Schellings fragmentary mode of presentation: From time to time the opinion is ventured that the most complete dialectic is to be regarded as Science itself; but this reveals a restricted outlook, inasmuch as the very existence and necessity of the dialectic proves that the true Science has not yet been found.50 e not yet is the fundamental problem of the critical system, in that the system must necessarily include (its) contingency in order for contingency to be at all. Benjamin thus begins his Epistemo-Critical Prologue with these words: It is proper to philosophical writing to stand anew, with each in ection, before the question of presentation. Although in its completed form philosophy will be Lehre, such completion does not lie within the power of its pure thought to confer. Philosophical Lehre is based upon historical codi cation. Lehre exceeds the pure thought of the rationalist system, but is at the same time a living system of its own. Historical codi cation is that which cannot be deduced more geometrico, as in Spinoza. e nished form of philosophy [seiner abgeschlossenen Gestalt] has the sense of an Aufhebung of philosophy.51 For Schelling and for Benjamin, the to come, the not yet, is neither expected, as in panlogicism, nor relinquished to a higher order of nothingness, as in exceptionism. Instead, as Schelling states, the future is intimated.52 e not yet need not be never, as it is with the in 49. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 401402. 50. F.W.J. Schelling, e Ages of the World (Second Version), Judith Norman (trans.), (Ann Arbor, MI: e University of Michigan Press, 1997), 116. Translation altered. 51. Benjamin, e Origin of German Tragic Drama, 27. Translation altered. 52. F.W.J. Schelling, e Ages of the World ( ird Version), Jason M. Wirth (trans.) (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), xxxv.
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nite task. ere is a notion of progress here, in that tradition and myth intimate at their other: history. e elephant in the room, however, is the possible con ation of two contingencies: past su ering and future possibility. Such a con ation would result in a form of idealism just as positivist as Hegels, for past su ering would be made meaningful; valorized from the standpoint of the system as the condition for the possibility of possibility itself. is problem touches upon Horkheimers critique of Benjamins idea of history as incomplete; the idea that all past su ering will be redeemed.53 We too must reject Benjamins theological thesis, but equally ask about the philosophical standpoint of Horkheimer. Concept, Existence, Speculative Science In order to explicate Benjamins virtual role in the German Idealist debate, we would have to relate Schellings prioritization of existence to Hegels prioritization of the Concept. In his nal letter to Hegel, responding to the Phenomenology, Schelling confesses not to have understood Hegels Concept [Begri ], suggesting instead that Hegel surely means idea.54 When he later faults Hegels negative philosophy for having subsumed Being under the Concept, Schelling continues to misapprehend the speculative nature of the Begri . For, in the Preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel opposes his speculative [begreifende] thinking to the super cial [begri os] talk about the identity of ought and Being.55 Allied to this is the suspicion that Schellings later prioritization leaves the Parmenidean principle of identity in di erence as untouched as it is in Hegel. For his part, Hegel misapprehends speculative historical phenomenology by not acknowledging the not yet as the existence of the Concept of history. e middle Schelling can accommodate this insight, given the above passage: the very existence [Daseyn] and necessity of the dialectic which for Hegel is the movement of the Concept proves that the true Science (historia) has not yet been found. Not yet, but not never. Can Schellings historia become Geschichte?

53. Cf. Max Horkheimer, Critical eory, Matthew J. OConnell et al. (trans.) (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), 26 & 251. 54. Cf. Harris, Hegels Ladder, 42. 55. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 3336.
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Ages of the World? History is not yet. Schelling and Benjamin thus problematically search for the future in myth in a tradition that never was. Again, it is crucial to relate these re ections to the project of a mythology of reason (the Concept being the concern of practical knowledge as the collective selfconsciousness of freedom). In the third draft of Die Weltalter, Schelling substitutes his historia for anamnesis. Benjamins own Platonic redemption [Rettung] continues into the Arcades.56 But how is the future to be intimated in collective memory? And which collective? Adorno was justi ably sensitive on this point especially when, in his Exposs for the Arcades, Benjamin related the classless society to Jungs collective unconscious. Jung studied the later Schelling, who in fact emphasized the plurality of myth (mythology is not a matter of just one people, but rather of many peoples) as human tradition, whilst at the same time privileging ancient Greek, Judeo-Christian and Indian myths.57 Adorno was more sympathetic to Benjamins re ections on myth in Franz Kafka, written just a year before the rst Expos, in which a contrast is again drawn between two historical times: If Lukcs thinks in terms of historical ages [Zeitalter], Kafka thinks in terms of cosmic epochs [Weltalter].58 I cannot establish whether Benjamin was conscious of Schellings Weltalter. But Benjamin shares an understanding of myth and tradition with Schelling with two crucial di erences. First, Schelling con ates Weltalter and Zeitalter into a developmental series of potencies. e not yet will be: this constitutes Schellings absolute idealism. Schelling does not then confront the problem of their dissonance, picked up on by Adorno in his response to Benjamins draft: the antithesis [of Zeitalter and Weltalter] cannot be exploited fruitfully simply as a contrast, but only in a dialectical manner.59 Adorno does not, however, get to the heart of this dialectical manner. e second di erence between Schelling and Benjamin is that, for the latter, Kafkas pre-history is pre-mythic.60 Benjamin must cut cosmic time o from history, without tying it to myth, because he wants to overcome the
56. Benjamin, e Origin of German Tragic Drama, 46. 57. F.W.J. Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, Mason Richey & Markus Zisselsberger (trans.), (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 46. 58. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland & G. Smith (eds). (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 4 vols.), 795. 59. T.W. Adorno & Walter Benjamin, e Complete Correspondence, 19281940, Nicholas Walker (trans.), (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 68. Translation altered. 60. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 799.
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myth in history. is is displayed in Kafkas distorted characters, along with what is distorted.61 e risk of this otherness of history is that of the supermythical especially given Benjamins interest in Bachofens hetaerism.62 Again, we must emphasize the mythology of reason. Benjamins concept of tradition allows for this emphasis. On the Concept of Counter-Tradition Tradition is internally divided between catastrophe and redemption. According to Benjamin, capitalism appropriates the use-value of tradition, producing a cynical tradition (although, to be precise, capitalism displaces one cynical tradition for another. Tradition is always cynical in that it has never yet been universal history).63 is cynical (ex-)appropriation is necessarily incomplete, since experience as pure exchange-value would correspond to the total absence of human life (Heideggers Nicht-mehr-da-sein, which leaves open the possibility of non-human life elsewhere). It is only because cynical tradition is (a) tradition because, that is, experience can experience its expropriation that an-other, counter-tradition, becomes presentable. Die Tradition der Unterdrckten, cited in On the Concept of History, is translated into English as the tradition of the oppressed.64 But as esis XVII makes clear, unterdrcken has the sense of to suppress as well as to oppress. e suppressed past65 is the suppressed tradition; the historical time is itself suppressed, awaiting its actualization. is is in no way to deny the actuality of the historically oppressed though heroizing the victims would be a problem but rather to conceptualize the suppressed tradition in accordance with Benjamins Umkehr: the reversal, but more literally countering of Lehre. is puts a non-exception-ist emphasis upon Benjamins call for a real [wirklich] state of emergency. Counter-tradition is wirklich, not an exception to the exception; not, in fact, anti-tradition.
61. Benjamin uses this term in his letter to Scholem of 20 July 1934, to characterize the Last Judgments projection into world history. Scholem, G. and W. Benjamin, e Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 19321940, Gary Smith and Anson Rabinovich (trans.), (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 128. 62. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 808809. 63. I refer to Benjamins distinction between utopian and cynical elements in the 1935 Expos for his project on the Paris arcades. e Arcades Project, 7. 64. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 392. 65. e historical materialist recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it di erently) a revolutionary chance in the ght for the suppressed past. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 396. Translation altered.
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Rather, counter-tradition is a tradition of its own: Men make their own history [ihre eigene Geschichte]. It is likely that Benjamins Esposs were partly inspired by e Eighteenth Brumaire. e Arcades Project is itself, among other things, a history of nineteenth-century Paris. More fundamentally, the contradictions of old and new, myth and revolution, are as central to Benjamin as they are to Marx. Mythology can be either revolutionary or reactionary; exalt the new struggles or parody the old.66 Benjamin con gures this opposition of old and new into the dialectical image: With the July Revolution [of 1830], the bourgeoisie realized the goals of 1789 (Marx).67 On the other hand, Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective unconscious in which the new is permeated with the old.68 Is this dialectic of myth equally a dialectic of tradition? e parody of the old, always as if it were new, is the cynical appropriation of tradition (capitalism as natural process). But the new permeated with the old is something else. Marxs tradition of the dead generations, weighing like a nightmare on the minds of the living, becomes Benjamins suppressed tradition. And this constitutes an all-important response to the above problem of contingency. e contingency of su ering, of catastrophe, has co-existed in parallel to its near-opposite: life, experience, and even tradition. Benjamin is not pessimistic about die Menschen, even at the very end. It is the contingency of happiness, not su ering alone that opens up the necessary contingency of the not yet. In Kafkas stories, Benjamin nds a Lehre without Scripture [Schrift].69 is Scripture is not Scripture, Benjamin explains to Scholem, but, life.70 Hence, this Lehre is a countering of traditional religion. Benjamin reads Kafka as a countering of Lehre.71 Not life before the law, but Lehre before life. Benjamin attempts to follow through on his early programme for coming experience.
66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. Marx, Surveys from Exile, 148. Benjamin, e Arcades Project, 8. Benjamin, e Arcades Project, 4. Cf. Scholem and Benjamin, e Correspondence, 12627. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 815. Scholem & Benjamin, e Correspondence, 135.

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Conclusion By way of conclusion, ber den Begri der Geschichte, Benjamins chosen title,72 should be read as a critique of the Concept of history in both senses of the genitive: the Concept is already the Concept of history. is critique means understanding counter-tradition as including the contingent existence of the Concept (hence also, On the Concept of History). e Concept is not the pure thought of panlogicism, but rather the properly begri ich. It is the presentation of speculative historical materialism. e Concept of history is not logical in the sense of historys formal subsumption beneath it. It is logical in another, non-formalist manner. e Umkehr of life into Schrift is what Kafkas parables endeavour to bring about, Benjamin claims. e critical exception writes its own Concept.
Wesley Phillips wrote his doctoral thesis on Adorno and Heidegger at Middlesex University, London.. He is currently working as an independent scholar and is the author of Melancholy Science? Critical eory and German Idealism Reconsidered, in Telos 155 (New York, forthcoming, June 2011).

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72. As opposed to the apocryphal

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Caygill, H. 1998. Walter Benjamin: e Colour of Experience. London: Routledge. Habermas, J. 1983. Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising Critique or Rescuing Critique. In Philosophical-Political Pro les, F.G. Lawrence (trans.). London: Heinemann. Harris, H.S. 1995. Hegel: Phenomenology and System. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Harris, H.S. 1997. Hegels Ladder (2 vols.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Hegel, G.W.F. 1998. Phenomenology of Spirit, A.V. Miller (trans.), Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Hegel, G.W.F. 2005. e Philosophy of History, J. Sibree (trans.), Mineola: Dover. Heidegger, M. 2000. Being and Time, J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 1989. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, C. Fynsk (trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lukcs, G. 1975. e Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics, R. Livingstone (trans.). London: Merlin Press. Marx, K. 1973. Surveys from Exile, D. Fernbach (ed.). London: Penguin. Marx, K. & F. Engels. 1969. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Lewis S. Feuer (ed.). London: Fontana. Mertens, B. 2007. Dark Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition. Bern: Peter Lang. Rose, G. 1981. Hegel Contra Sociology. London: Athlone. Schelling, F.W.J. 1993. System of Transcendental Idealism, P. Heath (trans.). Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Schelling, F.W.J. 1997. e Ages of the World (Second Version), J. Norman (trans.). Ann Arbor, MI: e University of Michigan Press. Schelling, F.W.J. 1997. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters. In Philosophy of German Idealism, P. Hayden-Roy (trans.), E. Behler (ed.). New York, NY: Continuum. Schelling, F.W.J. 2000. e Ages of the World ( ird Version), J.M. Wirth (trans.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Schelling, F.W.J. 2007. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, R. Mason & M. Zisselsberger (trans.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Scholem, G. 2003. Walter Benjamin: e Story of a Friendship, H. Zohn (trans.). New York, NY: New York Review Books. Scholem, G. & W. Benjamin. 1989. e Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 19321940, G. Smith & A. Rabinovich (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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