Walter Benjamin on the Concept of History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Monday 15 July 2024 is the 132nd anniversary of the Birth of Walter Benjamin (15 July 1892–26 September 1940), who was born in Berlin on this date in 1892.
Walter Benjamin was one of the Bajazzi that Jacob Burckhardt warned us against. In my episode on Burckhardt I quoted part of a letter Burckhardt wrote to Hermann Schauenburg on 28 February 1846. Bajazzi are theater clowns. (Thomas Mann wrote a short story title Der Bajazzo, which has been translated as “The Clown.”) This is what Burckhardt wrote:
“Just wait and you will see the sort of spirits that are going to rise out of the ground during the next twenty years! Those that now hop about in front of the curtain, the communist poets and painters and their like, are mere Bajazzi, just preparing the public. You none of you know as yet what the people are, and how easily they turn into a barbarian horde. You don’t know what a tyranny is going to be exercised on the spirit on the pretext that culture is the secret ally of capital, that must be destroyed. Those who hope to direct the movement with the help of their philosophy, and keep it on the right lines, seem to me completely idiotic.”
What Burckhardt got wrong was the time scale, which, you could argue, is particularly galling for an historian to get wrong. Burckhardt talked about the next twenty years, which, from the date of the letter, would take us into the late 1860s, but it would be another generation or two after this that the bajazzi really started coming out of the woodwork.
In any case, Walter Benjamin said almost exactly what Burckhardt said that the bajazzi would claim, that is, they would say that culture is the secret ally of capital. Benjamin’s final complete manuscript, mailed to Hannah Arendt a few months before he killed himself, is a short work of sufficient ambiguity that it has inspired a growing commentary on what exactly Benjamin meant to say in the piece. This short essay, written manifesto-style in the form of numbered theses, has been translated several times, as “On the Concept of History,” “Theses on the Concept of History,” and as “Theses on the Philosophy of history.”
Many have been fascinated by this final work by Benjamin, and it is a strange essay in many respects. It’s laid out manifesto-style, as a series of numbered statements, like Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto. But in spite of, or maybe because because of, this feint toward explicitness of statement, its curiously elusive and elliptical formulations have been like a riddle that has invited and continues to invite a multiplicity of interpretations. Many books have been written about this short work, and there are many hour-long Youtube videos of Benjamin enthusiasts offering their take on this work. But to get back to Burckhardt’s anticipation of Benjamin, in Thesis VII Benjamin wrote: “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” This is about as close of a paraphrase as can be imagined of Burckhardt’s claim that, “the pretext that culture is the secret ally of capital, that must be destroyed,” and Burckhardt saw this coming in the 1840s, a century before the fact.
Those who were responsible for the disposition of Benjamin’s remains thought that this line from Thesis VII was so important that they put it on his tombstone, where it can still be seen today, with the text in German and Spanish, so Burckhardt was prescient and Benjamin was a visionary, even if he was also a clown, for being the one to realize Burckhardt’s prediction in fact. And, of course, Benjamin wasn’t alone, and hasn’t been alone.
There are many today who praise Benjamin to the skies and can’t say enough good things about him. This doesn’t surprise me. I’m sure that many people today see themselves in Benjamin, as his kind is to be found everywhere these days. It’s not difficult to understand the appeal. Benjamin was significantly ahead of his time. In many ways Benjamin was a visionary in the worst conceivable way.
Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, also translated as Origin of the German Trauerspiel) was Benjamin’s habilitation, and it has an interesting story. The establishment academics to whom he submitted the work didn’t know what to make of it, so they urged Benjamin to withdraw it, and he did. Literary critics dabbling in philosophy would become much more common decades later, especially after Derrida, but in 1925 when the work was submitted it must have seemed more than a little eccentric. Also Benjamin’s methodology focused on a plethora of minor figures rather than upon a few famous examples, which prefigured Foucault’s working method. There is a sense in which Benjamin’s work made 20th century literary theory possible, and he made Foucault possible, and he made Derrida possible.
While Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” is the go-to work for Benjamin’s views on history, he also found a vision of history in the German tragic drama that he examined in his withdrawn habilitation. Many philosophers and literary critics have found deeper themes in tragedy. Hegel’s favorite reading was said to be Greek tragedies, and the essays on Shakespeare by English critic G. Wilson Knight examine mythological and metaphysical themes in tragedy. Benjamin also found a vision of history in tragedy, thought the tragedy he turned to was German Trauerspiel. This vision of history is expressed in the following passage:
“The religious man of the Baroque… holds fast to the world because he feels himself being driven along with it toward a cataract. There is no Baroque eschatology; and precisely for that reason there is a mechanism that multiplies and exalts everything earthborn before it is delivered over to its end. The beyond is emptied of everything in which even the slightest breath of world can be felt, and from it the Baroque extracts a profusion of things that tended to elude every formation and at its high point brings them to light in drastic form so as to clear a last heaven and to place it, as vacuum, in a condition to swallow up the earth one day with catastrophic violence.”
And here again:
“Where the Middle Ages exhibits the precariousness of worldly events and the transitoriness of the creature as stations on the path to salvation, the German trauerspiel wholly buries itself in the desolation of the earthly estate. Such redemption as it knows will lie more in the depths of these vicissitudes themselves than in the fulfillment of a divine plan of salvation. The repudiation of eschatology in religious plays is characteristic of the new drama throughout Europe; nevertheless, the headlong flight into a nature without grace is specifically German.”
Benjamin also explicitly invokes philosophy of history a couple of times in the work, as in this following:
“…the modern stage offers no tragedy resembling that of the Greeks in the slightest. By denying this state of affairs, such theories of the tragic testify to the presumption that it still must be possible today to compose tragedies. That is their essential, hidden motive, and a theory of the tragic calculated to shatter this axiom of cultural arrogance was therefore considered suspect. Philosophy of history was excluded. If, however, philosophical-historical perspectives should prove to be an indispensable part of a theory of tragedy, then it is clear that the latter can be expected only where research furnishes insight into the situation of its own epoch.”
Elsewhere in the work Benjamin would make a passing reference to a Restoration philosophy of history — “The secular drama would necessarily have been affected still more obviously by the Restoration philosophy of history…” — but he makes no attempt at a formulation or an exposition of this philosophy, reasonably enough as it would have taken him far from the argument of the work. What comes across from this intermingling of tragedy, philosophy, history, and what Benjamin called “philosophical-historical perspectives,” is that there is always a conception of history embedded in the productions of culture.
As it turns out, this is a problem, as we saw in the earlier quote that, “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” That is to say, the conception of history embedded in the productions of culture is a barbarous conception, and Benjamin believes it incumbent upon himself and all good people to oppose this barbarous conception of history. Thesis VII from “On the Concept of History” which is the source of this famous line, has more to say on the same; it starts with a criticism of French historian Fustel de Coulanges:
“Addressing himself to the historian who wishes to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that he blot out everything he knows about the later course of history. There is no better way of characterizing the method which historical materialism has broken with. It is a process of empathy. Its origin is indolence of the heart, that acedia which despairs of appropriating the genuine historical image as it briefly flashes up. Among medieval theologians, acedia was regarded as the root cause of sadness.”
For Benjamin, Fustel de Coulanges represents what can be called bourgeois history, and historical materialism has decisively broken this kind of history. Throughout Benjamin’s theses, always in the background there is a critique that is never made fully explicit, but which, in light of Benjamin’s Marxism, could be called his critique of bourgeois history, and what we could even call a bourgeois philosophy of history. What Benjamin wants to tear down and destroy is not only bourgeois society, but also the bourgeois history that he sees as unpinning bourgeois society — as though, following Marx himself, bourgeois history is the ideological superstructure that is invoked to defend and to justify the economic base that is bourgeois society. So bourgeois history, and bourgeois historians like Fustel de Coulanges have to go, and they have to be replaced by historians who are class warriors, and who will therefore respond to history in the correct way.
What is the correct way to respond to history? Benjamin invokes acedia, derived from the ancient Greek akidía, which came to mean listlessness, and which was seen as a vice in the Middle Ages, and one to which monks were particularly prone — a kind of medieval Weltschmerz. Benjamin’s imagined historical class warrior feels sad about the oppression that has been the condition of the proletariat down through the ages, and so he feels acedia because of his empathy for victims of past oppression.
We find another clue about what Benjamin considers to be the correct way to respond to history in Thesis VI, where Benjamin writes:
“The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.”
I’ve done a couple of episodes on Chrisopher Hill’s Marxist historiography, which to me exemplifies what Benjamin was describing. Nothing in the past was safe from him. Hill went rummaging around in the history of early modern England and found hints of a potential Marxist paradise that somehow failed to be realized, though we find echoes of it in the diggers, the ranters, the levelers, the true-levelers and the Muggletonians. Hill was fanning the spark of hope in the past, as Benjamin put it.
Picking up where I left off with Thesis VII, further along Benjamin wrote:
“With whom does historicism actually sympathize? The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors. Hence, empathizing with the victor invariably benefits the current rulers. The historical materialist knows what this means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which current rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.”
Unlike duped historians, who are effectively paid shills for the powers that be, according to Benjamin the historical materialist sees history for what it is and knows what it means, and what it means is that to the victors go the spoils, and the victors write the history that justifies the distribution of the spoils. Or, rather, they get their paid shills to write these histories. Benjamin continues:
“According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried in the procession. They are called ‘cultural treasures,’ and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For in every case these treasures have a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great geniuses who created them, but also to the anonymous toil of others who lived in the same period. There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one hand to another.”
Cultural treasures, as Benjamin here calls the surviving artifacts of our history, are symbols of past oppression, and as such they are not to be admired, but rather to be despised for that they symbolize, or at best viewed with cautious detachment. That is why we see activists defacing paintings in museums and monuments like Stonehenge. That’s why you throw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which is apparently a document of barbarism, notwithstanding that it was painted by a destitute loner, who, like Benjamin, eventually shot himself. And that’s why you spray paint Stonehenge, which is not a marvelously surviving monument built by early Celtic peoples, but rather a lineage which we cannot contemplate without horror. Benjamin ends Thesis VII with a particularly pregnant imperative:
“The historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from this process of transmission as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.”
Here we find Benjamin at his most visionary. Since Benjamin’s time historians have done nothing more than brush history against the grain, which becomes a kind of petty game in which you try to undermine the great achievements of the past, all of course, to demonstrate what a wonderful person you are for recognizing that history is to be hated and condemned, rather than valued as the story of how we become what we are. If you understand that those who want to brush history against the grain are interested in history only in order to condemn it, then you will immediately understand why Benjamin attacked Ranke’s historicism. Benjamin doesn’t name Ranke, but Thesis VI begins:
“Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was’.”
This is Benjamin explicitly renouncing Ranke’s dictum, repeated by many historians since, that the business of the historian was to depict the past as it actually happened. Ranke’s dictum was a response to the moralizing history that had been common, in which history was understood as a vehicle for moral lessons that that past can teach the present. Ranke rejected this moral vision of history, and sought the exposition of an age on its own terms, and true to its own ideals. Benjamin, in turn, rejected Ranke. Benjamin didn’t want history to be an account of the past, but a judgment upon the past, and especially a condemnation of the past.
We can understand Benjamin’s idea of history in terms of Nietzsche’s trichotomy of the kinds of history. For Nietzsche, there was monumental history, antiquarian history, and critical history. Monumental history seeks to make of the past a monument. Monumental history exists for us to draw strength from the past as an example, and even as an exemplar; accordingly, history consists of the great deeds of great men who can inspire us to our own great deeds, that we may in turn become great men. Antiquarian history glories in the past for its own sake, almost as a form of compensation for the perceived inadequacies of the present. The antiquarian historian loves the past, reverences the past, and loses himself in the past, and of Nietzsche’s three kinds of history, the antiquarian historian most closely approximates the attitude of historicism. Of critical history Nietzsche says,
“Man must have the strength to break up the past; and apply it too, in order to live. He must bring the past to the bar of judgment, interrogate it remorselessly, and finally condemn It. Every past is worth condemning: this is the rule in mortal affairs, which always contain a large measure of human power and human weakness. It is not justice that sits in judgment here; nor mercy that proclaims the verdict; but only life, the dim, driving force that insatiably desires — itself. Its sentence is always unmerciful, always unjust, as it never flows from a pure fountain of knowledge: though it would generally turn out the same, if Justice herself delivered it. ‘For everything that is born is worthy of being destroyed: better were it then that nothing should be born.’ It requires great strength to be able to live and forget how far life and injustice are one. Luther himself once said that the world only arose by an oversight of God; if he had ever dreamed of heavy ordnance, he would never have created it. The same life that needs forgetfulness, needs sometimes its destruction; for should the injustice of some- thing ever become obvious — a monopoly, a caste, a dynasty for example — the thing deserves to fall. Its past is critically examined, the knife put to its roots, and all the ‘pieties’ are grimly trodden under foot.”
Benjamin’s idea of history is a critical history in Nietzsche’s sense, but Benjamin’s criterion for judging the past is Marxism, not life, as in Nietzsche. While Benjamin isn’t always a consistent Marxist insofar as that might be following Marx in both the letter and the spirit, Benjamin was perhaps more a Marxist than Marx himself in his radicalism. Throughout the theses there is, as in Marx’s critique of the Gotha Program, which Benjamin mentions several times, an impatience with all who are insufficiently radical. Social democrats, again, as with Marx, are especially despised, since they lure the workers into thinking that the social order can be changed through gradual reform.
Like leftists today, Benjamin denounces everything he disagrees with as fascism. For Benjamin, historicism is a thinly concealed form of fascism. Historicism, as he sees it, serves the interests of bourgeois society as its ideological superstructure. In Thesis XI we find both of these now-familiar moves, i.e., of condemning those who are insufficiently radical and finding fascism under every rock:
“This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor scarcely considers the question of how its products could ever benefit the workers when they are beyond the means of those workers. It recognizes only the progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features that later emerge in fascism.”
But in this passage we can also see the gap that opens up between Marx and Benjamin. Marx was a great techno-optimist, and saw history as a story of inevitable progress that ultimately converges on the communist commonwealth. Benjamin didn’t follow Marx in his techno-optimism, and here again Benjamin reveals himself as a visionary, because it is the apocalyptic vision of techno-dystopia that has dominated our culture since Benjamin’s time, and not Marx’s optimistic vision of technology. In the four volume edition of Benjamin’s papers in English translation, volume 4 includes “On the Concept of History” as well as fragments from the composition that Benjamin had taken out of his final draft. Many of these edited out fragments are as interesting as what Benjamin left in the final draft, and there is one in particular that we should notice:
“Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train — namely, the human race — to activate the emergency brake.”
For an orthodox Marxist, what Benjamin is saying here is something out of opposite world. Revolutions for Marx were necessary for the progress of history, but Benjamin didn’t believe in progress. Benjamin sees revolutions as a way to bring an end to the terrible process that history has become, a rebellion by the workers against a system that is out of control. Since the capitalists are benefitting from the runaway train of history, the workers have to activate the emergency brake through a revolution. But it’s not enough for Benjamin to pull the brake and bring history to a halt. It is necessary to destroy what came before. In another fragment he wrote:
“A conception of history that has liberated itself from the schema of progression within an empty and homogeneous time would finally unleash the destructive energies of historical materialism which have been held back for so long.”
The reference in this quote to “empty and homogeneous time” is another important theme for Benjamin’s conception of history. Benjamin contrasts empty and homogenous time to a discontinuous conception of time and history that we could think of as revolutionary time. One of the concepts that Benjamin uses for the exposition of his conception of history is “Jetztzeit.” It is difficult to find a good exposition of what Benjamin meant by “Jetztzeit,” and English translators have rendered it in different ways, some using “now-time” others employing “here-and-now” or “time of the now” or “presentness.” In my episode on Ernst Bloch I mentioned that Bloch and Benjamin knew each other, and they were in and out of contact over about twenty years. Bloch wrote a reminiscence of Benjamin in which he gave a pretty good exposition of the term:
“‘Now-Time’ (Jetztzeit), a concept Benjamin liked to use in a completely new way, was a concept that Schopenhauer — to say nothing of Karl Kraus — had mocked savagely from a purely linguistic perspective because of its ugliness. Benjamin never denied its ugliness, but found even here something unusual: Now-Time signifies a time when what is long past suddenly becomes a Now. Not, however, as a Romantic reprise: the polis, say, in the French Revolution, was a Now. What is long past touches itself in an odd, enveloping, circular motion, in which even the narrow and indifferent Now of 1925 or 1932 suddenly acquired correspondences or concordances that no longer remained in history. In short: the continuum was exploded, so that the suddenly raw citation rises before our eyes.”
In Thesis XIV Benjamin writes of Jetztzeit, here translated as “now-time”:
“History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he blasted out of the continuum of history.”
And in Thesis XVIII A Benjamin writes:
“Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus among various moments in history. But no state of affairs having causal significance is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. The historian who proceeds from this consideration ceases to tell the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. He grasps the constellation into which his own era has entered, along with a very specific earlier one. Thus, he establishes a conception of the present as now-time shot through with splinters of messianic time.”
In my episode on Ernst Bloch I quoted Block as saying, “Messianism is the red secret of every revolutionary.” But Benjamin made no secret of his messianism, stating it openly, though this openness may have been due to Bloch’s influence. David Kaufmann in his 1993 paper “Thanks for the Memory: Bloch, Benjamin, and the Philosophy of History” called Ernst Bloch “…the drill sergeant of the visionary…” and the visionary Bloch drilled was Walter Benjamin.
