Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin

library(dot)lol/main/912B97F19DDFE0F52D26FA819440B240
aka On the Concept of History
www.marxists(dot)org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
Debate over Benjamin’s conception of history was for many years preoccupied with the question of whether it is essentially ‘theological’ or ‘materialist’ in character (or how it could possibly be both at once), occasioned by the conjunction of Benjamin’s self-identification with historical materialism and his continued use of explicitly messianic motifs (Wolhfarth 1978; Tiedemann 1983-4). This was in large part the polemical legacy of the competing influence of three friendships-with Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno and Bertolt Brecht-applied to the interpretation of Benjamin’s final text, the fragments ‘On the Concept of History’ (‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, popularly known as the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’). Scholem promoted a theological interpretation, Brecht inspired a materialist one, while Adorno attempted to forge some form of compatibility between the two. Yet the question is badly posed if it is framed within received concepts of ‘theology’ and ‘materialism’ (the paradox becomes self-sustaining), since it was Benjamin’s aim radically to rethink the meaning of these ideas, on the basis of a new philosophy of historical time. This new philosophy of historical time is the ultimate goal of Benjamin’s later writings. It appears most explicitly, under construction, in ‘Convolute N’ of The Arcades Project, ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’; it is applied to art history in the 1937 essay ‘Eduard Fuch, Collector and Historian’; and is manifest in a condensed, rhetorically political and problematic form in ‘On the Concept of History’. It derives from a dual critique of the ‘vulgar naturalism’ of historicism and the deferral of action involved in the associated Social Democratic concept of progress (Kittsteiner 1986). It gives rise to a conception of historical intelligibility based on ‘literary montage’ as the method of construction of ‘dialectical images’ (AP, 460-1). And it culminates in a quasi-messianic conception of revolution as an ‘interruption’ of history or an ‘arrest of happening’: “Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately achieved interruption” (SW 4, 402).
Benjamin took as one of the main ‘methodological objectives’ of his Arcades Project “to demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of progress”, taking as its “founding concept… not progress but actualization” (AP, [N2, 2], 460). He had both philosophical and political reasons for this. Philosophically, Benjamin saw the conventional idea of progress as projecting into the future a conception of time as ‘homogenous’ and ‘empty’ epitomized by the attempt of Ranke’s historicism to represent the past “the way it really was” (SW4, 395; 391). This is a conception of time based on the temporal continuity of past, present and future, ‘in’ which events occur and are understood as causally connected. It is naturalistic in so far as it acknowledges no fundamental temporal-ontological distinction between past, present and future time; it has no sense of time as the ongoing production of temporal differentiation. Time is differentiated solely by the differences between the events that occur within it. In particular, it fails to grasp that historical time (the time of human life) is constituted through such immanent differentiations, via the existential modes of memory, expectation and action. In this respect, there are affinities between Benjamin’s philosophy of time and Heidegger’s (Caygill, 1994).
The political consequence of the temporal naturalism underlying the idea of ‘progress’ is conformism. For Benjamin, paradoxically, this applied in particular to the German Social Democrats’ understanding of communism as an ideal, in the neo-Kantian ethical sense of the object of an ‘endless task’:
Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity. (SW 4, 402)
In other words, the concept of progress is demobilizing; and Marxism had become infected by the ideology of progress. However, rather than positing an existential alternative, in the manner of Heidegger’s ‘resolute decision’, Benjamin set out to construct novel conceptions of historical time and historical intelligibility based on the relationship, not between the past and the present, but between the ‘then’ and the ‘now’, as brought together in images of the past. Each historically specific ‘now’ was understood to correspond to (in a Baudelairean sense), or to render legible, a particular ‘then’.
plato.stanford(dot)edu/entries/benjamin/#ImaHisCul

[@RedRosa]

I love the pictures so much!

[@PessimistAudiobooks]

@@RedRosa Thanks for saying so! But they are really nothing compared to Paul Klee's Angelus Novus. In fact I used clipdrop's AI to generate images similar to Klee's piece, the true masterwork. Since then I have moved away from AI art and become quite critical of it.

[@marceltopawian]

hey, thank you so much for this reading.❤️

[@PessimistAudiobooks]

Thanks for listening :)

[@likesecondnaturetome3061]

This is an incredibly valuable piece. In an era where everybody meekly criticizes teleological thinking without actual success in getting rid of it, Benjamin offers the real way forward.

[@PessimistAudiobooks]

Benjamin definitely made a significant contribution to the critique of teleological thinking. Have you read “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” by Louis Althusser? Althusser goes in depth on philosophical alternatives to teleology, such as Heidegger and Lucretius, and briefly mentions other alternatives such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. It's a great essay, I think you would enjoy it.