What is Philosophy, Benjamin?
Walter Benjamin begins The Origin of German Tragic Drama with an “epistemo-critical prologue” in which, before he presents his idea of the baroque, he articulates his conception of philosophy, the activity by which he represents ideas and conceptualizes phenomena (such as the baroque).[1] Benjamin does this by charting a dichotomy, in which he situates philosophy clearly on one side. Philosophy, Benjamin clarifies, is “not [. . .] a guide to the acquisition of knowledge” but is “the representation of truth” (28). While mathematics tends towards the “elimination of the problem of representation” (thereby renouncing “that area of truth towards which language is directed”), “philosophical writing [presumably having to do with language. . .] must continually confront the question of representation” (27). Unlike the concept of the system that, in a syncretic fashion, connects “separate kinds of knowledge” (thereby acquiring universalism)[2] to catch a truth that comes from outside, (28), philosophy “in its finished form [. . .] assume[s] the quality of doctrine” (27), which has “didactic authority” (28). Philosophy, in other words, is for Benjamin the activity that, through language, represents truth, in an immanent process in which it gains the status of doctrine (something that in itself has authority, without the need for external verification).
Benjamin illustrates these principles at work through the treatise (“without which truth is inconceivable” (28)), what can be thought of as the beginnings of a doctrine, philosophy commencing its work. The treatise, Benjamin describes, lacks the authority of the doctrine (since it is still in development) at the same time that it dispenses with mathematical proof (since mathematics is not philosophy’s method) (28). “The only element of an intention [. . . that the treatise has, Benjamin explains,] is the authoritative quotation” (28).[3] True to philosophy, the “method [of the treatise] is essentially representation,” which, Benjamin elaborates, is “a digression,” a method that lacks “uninterrupted purposeful structure” (28). The “process of thinking” involved in the treatise, in other words, is one that “makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object” (28). Benjamin also calls this method contemplation, which is characterized by the “continual pausing for breath,” as the philosopher “pursu[es] different levels of meaning in its examination of one single object [in which the philosophical activity . . .] receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification for its irregular rhythm” (28).[4] The aim of this “contemplative mode of representation [. . .] is not to carry the reader away and inspire him with enthusiasm” but to “force[. . .] the reader to pause and reflect” in a detached manner (29). [Marx, of course, criticizes precisely such contemplative philosophy as complicit with the state (of things).]
The things or tools that philosophy works with are what Benjamin call ideas (29). To clarify what they are, he distinguishes truth, which “bodie[s] forth in the dance of represented ideas,” from knowledge (29). Knowledge, Benjamin describes, “is determined by the fact that it must be taken possession of” (29). As such, its method is not representation but the acquisition of the object targeted to be known (29). Knowledge acquires its object when the knower gets to know individual phenomena, collecting knowledge about them (30). These individual phenomena, Benjamin notes, are not unified in themselves. To be fully known, then, a secondary process is called for in which the knower “derive[s . . .] a coherence [. . . of these separate phenomena] in the consciousness” (30). Knowledge, in other words, requires a secondary process (the conscious derivation of coherence) in addition to the direct knowing (or perception) of individual objects. Because of this, the unity gained by knowledge, Benjamin evaluates, is not immediate. It is moreover only a conceptual unity, where “the concept is a spontaneous product of the intellect” (30) and not of the experience that precedes that intellectualizing (perhaps even rationalizing) process (characterized as this primary experience is by individual (and not unified) phenomena). [Husserl is charting the same mechanism when he makes the call to go back to phenomena, except Husserl’s “phenomena” does not relate to knowledge but to direct experience; Benjamin, of course, makes a very different move from Husserl when, rather than staying with phenomena, he connects them to ideas, as explained below.]
In contrast, Benjamin defines truth as “self-representation,” describing it as deriving “from an essence” (30). Benjamin explains that “all essences exist in complete and immaculate independence, not only from [reality], but especially, from each other” (37). Unlike individual phenomena (what knowledge works with), then, essences are unified and complete in themselves. Being more specific, Benjamin states that truth deals with ideas, which “are simply given to be reflected upon” (30). As such, ideas, unlike concepts, have a “unity of essence,” where essences have “supreme metaphysical significance” (30). It is, Benjamin clarifies, the “harmonious relationship between such essences [i.e. ideas. . . that] constitutes truth” (37). Because of the essential nature of its materials/components, then, “unity is present in truth as a direct and essential attribute” (30). Representation is thus immanent to truth and while “knowledge is open to question, [. . .] truth is not” (30). It is precisely this—truth, not knowledge—that for Benjamin philosophy is concerned with. [Thus in a way Benjamin aims to overthrow the tradition begun by Descartes that made epistemology the first philosophy.]
Reading Plato, Benjamin then presents “truth—the realm of ideas—as the essential content of beauty” (30) (emphasis added).[5] Benjamin clarifies that “truth is not a process of exposure which destroys the secret [of beauty], but a revelation which does justice to it” by being “the guarantor of the existence of beauty” (31). By content, then, Benjamin does not mean something exposed. Rather, it is something “revealed in a process which might be described metaphorically as the burning up of the husk as it enters the realm of ideas, that is to say a destruction of the work in which its external form achieves its most brilliant degree of illumination,” i.e. the revelation (truth) that leads to illumination (beauty) (31). This to Benjamin demonstrates even more so how truth is not the object of knowledge, that philosophical truth is not scientific truth, and that philosophical truth “applie[s] to the world of ideas instead of empirical reality” (32).
Nonetheless, by connecting beauty with truth, Benjamin is able to connect ideas with empirical reality.[6] Benjamin does this through what he calls phenomena, the same things that knowledge begins with. This time, however, as they are dealt with for their truth (rather than for knowledge of them), these phenomena “do not [. . .] enter into the realm of ideas whole, in their crude empirical state, adulterated by appearances, but only in their basic elements, redeemed, [. . .] divested of their false unity so that [. . .] they might partake of the genuine unity of truth” (33). Truth accomplishes this by, like knowledge, making use of concepts, which “effect the resolution of objects into their constituent elements” (33) and as such “through their mediating role [. . .] enable phenomena to participate in the existence of ideas” (34). Concepts, Benjamin clarifies, play “this same mediating role [. . . in] the representation of ideas,” which “are not represented in themselves, but solely and exclusively in an arrangement of concrete elements in the concept,” which is what “lend[s an idea] actuality as such a configuration” (34). Phenomena and ideas, then, are, in philosophy, connected to each other by the concept in a process in which phenomena gain truth and ideas are actualized.[7] Thus the idea (which “belongs to a fundamentally different world from that which it apprehends”) is, through the mediation of the concept, related to the representation of the phenomenon (note: the representation of the phenomenon, not the phenomenon itself) (34).
This is the context that sheds light on Benjamin’s metaphoric description, “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars” (35). The objects are the empirical phenomena (the stars) while the way that they are arranged (as in a constellation) are the ideas (the “virtual arrangement, [. . . the] objective interpretation” of phenomena (34)). This is how ideas are not the concepts or laws (or even representations) of phenomena; instead, ideas are related to the “representation of phenomena” (34) as the virtual order (the constellation) in which phenomena are arranged. “Whereas phenomena determine the scope and content of the concepts which encompass them, [. . .] the idea, the objective interpretation of phenomena—or rather their elements—determines the relationship [of the elements of phenomena] to each other” (35). This relation between the constellation and the stars is of course accomplished by the concept.[8] Concepts group phenomena together, thereby creating divisions between phenomena or between elements of a phenomenon (35). It is precisely these divisions that allow ideas to be actualized,[9] there being an arrangement (ideas)—a constellation—only when elements (of phenomena)—stars—are divided from each other—separated, as it were, to be arranged (this time, with ideas) in truth. It is in this way that concepts accomplish “at a single stroke: the salvation of phenomena [by them being thought of in their truth and not in their false unity] and the representation of ideas [this time, although they are complete and essential in themselves, actualized]” (35).[10]
Despite the connection, ideas and phenomena remain radically different from each other in their nature (one is a virtual arrangement, the other an empirical object).[11] Benjamin makes one final move to make the connection more concrete, to confirm it. Benjamin does this by asserting that “the idea is something linguistic, [. . .] that element of the symbolic in the essence of any word” (36). Language serves, as it were, as the middle ground between something ideational and something phenomenal. By making the idea linguistic, then the idea (something ideational) is able to be related—linked—to the phenomenal (e.g. by words supported by ideas speaking of or referring to things). True enough, from the beginning Benjamin asserts that philosophy, unlike mathematics, operates with language (36). With this Benjamin sums up his definition of philosophy. “It is the task of the philosopher,” Benjamin writes, “to restore, by representation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given self-consciousness, and that is the opposite of all outwardly-directed communication” (36). “Ideas are displayed, without intention, in the act of naming, and they have to be renewed in philosophical contemplation” (37). “And so, in the course of its history, [. . .] philosophy is—and rightly so—a struggle for the representation of a limited number of words, which always remain the same—a struggle for the representation of ideas” (37).
While Benjamin does make the connection between the idea and the phenomena, it seems that for him philosophy is first and foremost concerned with ideas, emphasizing it far more than phenomena. Phenomena, it must be recalled, refer to both entities known and entities materially existing (presumably it has to exist materially before it can be known). Benjamin, as discussed above, criticizes what is known as something that falls short of what is true. Phenomenology thinks of the phenomenon as, rather than what is known, what is directly experienced before the apparatus and frameworks of knowledge are even activated and is thus, for Husserl for example, all that philosophers can take as indubitable. If phenomena were redefined this way, would Benjamin still make the charge that they are not true? In terms of (the phenomenon as) the materially existent, it is not really clear what Benjamin thinks of it. Would he criticize it as, like what is known, something that, unlike the idea, is not true? How grounded in the material is Benjamin’s conception of philosophy? Would this Benjamin be someone that Marx, the dialectical materialist, would criticize as a practitioner of contemplative—and thereby complicit (rather than active, revolutionary)— philosophy? Representation, of course, has also been a target of critique by poststructuralist thought. Is not a conception of philosophy as the self-representation of truth too static and generalizing—essentialist, as Benjamin would himself perhaps say—not to mention that it always represents the same, i.e. itself? What about what Benjamin calls concepts—can not philosophy be more focused on them, i.e. on the creation of concepts, as Deleuze and Guattari espouse, rather than the representation of some essential truth (that is already true)?
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 1998. Print.
[1] In effect, before he even works, Benjamin lays down the groundwork.
[2] Systematic completeness, according to Benjamin, but “attempts to ascertain the truth in mere cognitions and cognitional patterns” and has at its core a “methodological inconsistency” (33). “Systems have no validity except where they are inspired in their basic outline by the constitution of the world of ideas” (33).
[3] Benjamin will later relate the treatise, the beginnings of philosophical investigation, to the truth, which, he describes, “does not enter into relationships, particularly intentional ones. The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent in the concept, is not the truth. Truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it. Truth is the death of intention” (36).
[4] Benjamin adds that “the value of [the distinct and disparate] fragments of thought [that result from this] is all the greater the less direct their relationship to the underlying idea” (29).
[5] In contrast to a previous assertion of the immanence of self-representing truth, Benjamin suggests that “truth is beautiful: not so much in itself, as for Eros,” i.e. “for whomever seeks it” (31).
[6] This illustrates Benjamin’s assertion that while the artist “sketches a restricted image of the world of ideas, which, because it is conceived as a metaphor, is at all times definitive,” and while “the scientist arranges the world with a view to its dispersal in the realm of ideas, by dividing it from within into concepts,” “the philosopher [. . .] practi[ces] the kind of description of the world of ideas which automatically includes and absorbs the empirical world,” going beyond the merely empirical through representation (32).
[7] Benjamin clarifies that this connection is not a process in which the idea incorporates or contains the phenomenon, but one in which the idea becomes the phenomenon’s “objective, virtual arrangement, [its] objective interpretation” (34).
[8] Ideas “remain obscure so long as phenomena do not declare their faith to them and gather round them” (35). Phenomena only have false unity to begin with (33).
[9] Benjamin writes that “ideas come to life only when extremes are assembled around them,” ideas being “the representation of the context within which the unique and extreme stands alongside its counterpart” (35).
[10] It is in this way that Benjamin explains that “the most general references which language makes” are not concepts or averages, but ideas (35); whereas “empirical [phenomena . . .] can be all the more profoundly understood the more clearly it is seen as an extreme,” as separated (35).
[11] Benjamin reiterates that ideas are “not among the given elements of the world of phenomena” (35). It is not an “object of vision” (35) or appearance, truth being ideal and devoid of intention (36). “The proper approach to [truth] is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it” (36). “The structure of truth [. . .] demands a mode of being which in its lack of intentionality resembles the simple existence of things, but which is superior in its permanence. Truth is not an intent which realizes itself in empirical reality; it is the power which determines the essence of this empirical reality. The state of being, beyond all phenomenality, to which alone this power belongs, is that of the name” (36).
