Here they all are (from The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, ed. Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, tr. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, Chicago: U of Chicago Press--note, I still have to check the German for any more) , for anyone who is ever interested. It is striking how much they throw light on many of Benjamin's views, as well as how the views of Heidegger were perceived:
The first, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, November 11, 1916 (p. 82), after just completing "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," updating Scholem on his latest reading:
An essay (originally held as a lecture when he received the venia legendi in Freiburg) on "Das Problem der historichen Zeit" has appeared in the last or next to last issue of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, and documents precisely how this subject should not be treated. An awful piece of work, which you might, however, want to glance at, if only to confirm my suspicion, i.e. that not only what the author says about historical time (and which I am able to judge) is nonsense, but that his statements on mechanical time are, as I suspect, also askew.
In another letter to Scholem, December 1, 1920 (p. 168), referring to Heidegger's habilitation dissertation, "The Doctrine of Categories and Meaning in Duns Sotus," (1915) a topic Benjamin himself was (prior to finding Heidegger's text) thinking of writing about:
I have read Heidegger's book on Duns Scotus. It is incredible that anyone could qualify for a university position on the basis of such a study. Its execution requires nothing more than great diligence and a command of scholastic Latin, and, in spite of all of its philosophical packaging, it is basically only a piece of good translating work. The author's contemptible groveling at Rickert's and Husserl's feet does not make reading it more pleasant. The book does not deal with Duns Scotus's linguistic philosophy in philosophical terms, and thus what it leaves undone is no small task.
In another letter to Scholem, January 1921 (p. 172), despairing the progress of his work on language and meaning alluded to above:
...I essentially must patiently lie in wait for my new project. To be sure, I have firmed up certain basic ideas, but since every one of them must be explored in depth, it is impossible for me to have any kind of overview at the beginning. Furthermore, the research I have done to date has caused me to proceed with caution and to question whether it is correct tofollow scholastic analogies as a guide, or if it would not perhaps be better to take a detour, since Heidegger's work presents, albeit in a completely unilluminated way, the elements of scholastic thought that are most important for my problem, and the genuine problem can somehow be intimated in connection with this. Thus it may be better first to have a look at some linguistic philosophers.
Nine years later, in yet another letter to Scholem, January 20, 1930 (p. 359-60), reflecting on his goal over the past two years "that I be considered the foremost critic of German literature," and on possible changes to the Arcades Project ("the theatre of all my conflicts and all my ideas"):
I intend to pursue the project on a different level than I had previously planned. Up till now, I have been held back, on the one hand, by the problem of documentation and, on the other hand, by that of metaphysics. I now see that I will at least need to study some aspects of Hegel and some parts of Marx's Capital to get anywhere and to provide a solid scaffolding for my work. It now seems a certainty that, for this book as well as for the Trauerspiel book, an introduction that discusses epistemology is necessary--especially for this book, a discussion of the theory of historical knowledge. This is where I will find Heidegger, and I expect sparks will fly from the shock of the confrontation between our two very different ways of looking at history.
Here is the most striking reference--one can hardly believe it. Back in Berlin (from Paris) later that year, on April 25, 1930 (p. 365), at the inception of his wonderful and extremely productive friendship with Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin writes to Scholem summarizing his recent work:
My most recent short piece bears the title of "From the Brecht Commentary" and I hope it will appear in the Frankfurter Zeitung. It is the first product of my recent very interesting association with Brecht. I will send it to you as soon as it has appeared. We were planning to annhiliate Heidegger here in the summer in the context of a very close-knit critical circle of readers led by Brecht and me. Unfortunately, however, Brecht is not at all well. He will be leaving very soon and I will not do it on my own.
A letter from March 7, 1931 (p. 371-2) to the publisher of Neue Schweizer Rundschauu, Max Rychner, after receiving Rychner's article on Bernard von Bretano's essay "Kapitalismus und schöne Literatur." Benjamin is articulating his standpoint with respect to dialectical materialism to Rychner, who refers to Benjamin in his essay as just another Communist-sympathizing Marxist dogmatically employing the materialist view:
...The strongest imaginable propoganda for a materialist approach came to me, not in the form of Communist brochures, but in the form of "representative" works that emanated from the bourgeois side over the last twenty years in my field of expertise, literary history and criticism... Marxist ways of thinking, with which I became acquainted only much later, were unnecessary for me to demarcate myself early and clearly from the horrid wasteland of this official and unofficial enterprise... Cur hic?--Not because I would be an adherent of the materialist "worldview;" instead, because I am trying to lead my thinking to those subjects into which truth appears to have been most densely packed at this time. Today those subjects are neither the "eternal ideas" nor "timeless values." At one point in your article you very kindly refer to my Keller essay in a way that does me honor. But you will no doubt agree with me in this essay too it was precisely my concern to legitimize an understanding of Keller on the basis of understanding the true condition of our contemporary existence. It may be a truly unmaterialistic formulation to say that there is an index for the condition of historical greatness, on the basis of which every genuine perception of historical greatness becomes historicist--not psychological--self-perception on the part of the individual who perceives. But this is an experience that links me more to the clumsy and caddish analyses of a Franz Mehring than to the most profound paraphrases of the realm of ideas emanating today from Heidegger's school. [The implication is that Heidegger is a theorizer of "eternal ideas." Benjamin concludes by asking Rychner] ...to see in me not a representative of dialectial materialism as dogma, but a scholar to whom the stance of the materialist seems scientifically and humanely more productive in everything that moves us than does that of the idealist.
About seven years later, on July 20, 1938 (p. 571-2), Benjamin writes to Gretel Adorno from Skovsbostrand in Denmark (traveling with Brecht) about the intellectual atmosphere there and in the world more generally:
Here I get to see writing that hews to the [Communist] party line a bit more than what I see in Paris. For example, I recently came upon an issue of Internationale Literatur in which I figure as a follower of Heidegger on the basis of a section of my essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities. This publication is wretched. I think you will have a chance to hear what Bloch makes of it. As for Brecht, he is trying his best to make sense of what is behind Russian cultural politics by speculating on what the politics of nationality in Russia requires. But this obviously does not prevent him from recognizing that the theoretical line being taken [a line close to party lines, that incidentally would render Benjamin a follower of Heidegger] is catastrophic for everything we have championed for twenty years.
Of course, there could be more references, so actually I wouldn't take this as exhaustive (references, of course, proceed by other means than by dropping names). But at least these "by-name" references are all here.
4 comments:
Thank you, this was exactly what I needed.
Thank you, Mike. I was stumbling around simply trying to uncover even some bibliographic information pertaining to Benjamin's view of Heidegger and I happened upon your blog. Thank you for compiling this information, it is and will be most helpful to me. And, as a side note, I look forward to exploring your blog more thoroughly. Thanks again.
This is an incredibly belated comment, I know, but thanks for this.
I've just begun to dip my toes into Heidegger and was struck by what I saw as similarities between his philosophy of history and Benjamin's. I found this blog post in researching connections between the two thinkers - I wasn't expecting this level of hostility on Benjamin's part! Perhaps it's a case of their similarities only further highlighting their differences in Benjamin's mind. (Or perhaps my initial sense of kinship is entirely mistaken)
Do you have any recommendations for comparisons between Benjamin's and Heidegger's historical thought?
It's a bit difficult to find comparisons between the two that are just, because there's been such an effort on the part of French and American theorists to bring the two into conversation that in a way the differences and real points of contact get overlooked. At least from what I've seen. I'd look at German studies of Benjamin, probably, to find something useful, regarding the one view of history and the other. I can recommend Eduardo Cadava's Words of Light, which has *the* best reading of aura, and its historical import, which might bring it into contact with Heidegger for you better. And maybe Benjamin's -abilities by Samuel Weber, might address it, though I haven't made it through the thing yet. I think also, probably, though you've probably read all these already, Adorno's letter to Benjamin about the latter's stuff on Paris, and why it is unsatisfactory to him (Adorno), is helpful, knowing where Adorno is coming from, and also Adorno's more sustained and fundamentally sane critiques of Heidegger, in his book on Negative Dialectic and elsewhere. You can triangulate them, in other words, through Adorno, I think.
But as regards the two directly, it's not too surprising that he's hostile, given that he might have talked to Adorno about the latter, and given the general hostility of any left-intellectual of a socialist stamp to anyone anywhere near fascism, though if you look, I think the sense of revolution and violence in both might be similar (though Benjamin understands it better). I think the two are very different, really, but maybe you can convince me otherwise. The major similarity I think has to be a very negative view of history as one of fragmentation and falling away from some sort of possible harmony. But for Benjamin, if I remember right, this falling away is brought about by humans and technological progress, while for Heidegger, it's brought about through the way humans are responsive to and transformative of something in their nature, roughly speaking.
In both cases, there is some understanding that history is the unfolding of some semi-higher power. Or rather, some underground power--since both in a way are trying to get out of the Hegelian sort of way of dealing with stuff. In both cases, there's little respect for the individual, for the empirical, as an actor in history, to put it bluntly. Big mysterious things are at work, and the burden of each philosophy is to demystify this big thing as much as possible. Maybe the best place where they are similar is in their accounts of what it is like to think: in Heidegger, you throw yourself out against the past, and retrieve it and yourself--in Benjamin, you burst an image of the past apart. These are both really active ways of conceptualizing what it means to think, the way the individual participates in thinking.
Maybe another way to say this is that both are anti-Hegelian, in that they don't think thinking is somehow becoming immanent to a sort of world-historical principle or logic. But Heidegger comes closest to the latter, talking about the destining of world-historical being (read his later stuff "On Time and Being," say, the stuff on "enowning," to make this comparison more directly), though he at the same time claims to be sloughing off the dialectic in doing so. This is rather unconvincing--in a way Heidegger never overcomes Hegel, who in many ways was a better Aristotelian than Heidegger was (Heidegger just didn't give a damn about thinking through logic, and called this progress). Benjamin in a way actually engages with the dialectic, and becomes more respectable in my eyes for doing it. Yet Heidegger was to become in the end more influential until recently, of course--I don't know what that means, but you can in a way again triangulate the people to see more directly how they compare.
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