References
- Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings vol. 1: 1913–1926, tr. Rodney Livingston and others, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press at Harvard University Press 1996, p.56. Hereafter SW1.
- Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, tr. John Osborne, London: Verso 1998, p. 27. Hereafter OGT.
- Rosenzweig, an academic Hegel scholar in the 1910s, ‘returns’ to Judaism after the Christian religious conversions of his friends and relatives such as Rudolph Ehrenberg and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy around 1913.
- Part Four (‘Concerning Service and Counterfeit Service…’) and in a section entitled ‘Concerning the Guiding Thread of Conscience in Matters of Faith’ in Kant, Immanuel, Religion and Rational Theology, tr. & ed. Allen W Wood and George di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996.
- “The distinguishing mark of the true church is its universality; and the sign of this, in turn, is the church's necessity and its determinability in only one possible way” (ibid, p.146)—historical faith based on revelation and experience “has only particular validity” and therefore carries a “consciousness of contingency”: “but only the pure faith of religion, based entirely on reason, can be recognised as necessary and hence as the one which exclusively marks out the true church” (ibid, p.146). Faith in religious service alone is ‘slavish’, whereas in contrast moral faith must be free, a ‘saving faith’ which has two conditions “for its hope of blessedness”: “the lawful undoing (before a judge) of action done” (“reparation for guilt, redemption, reconciliation with God”) ibid, p.142. “What it can and should bring about, namely, the conversion to a new life conformable to its duty”, “faith in the ability to become itself pleasing to God in a future good conduct of life”, “The two conditions add up to one faith; they belong together necessarily” (ibid, p.147): “The necessity of a connection cannot be seen, however, unless we assume that one faith can be derived from the other, i.e., that according to the law of morally efficient causes either the faith in absolution from the debt resting upon us will elicit a good life conduct, or the true and active disposition of a good life conduct—one to be pursued at all times—will elicit faith in that absolution” (ibid, p.147). Hence an antinomy arises “the resolution of which—or, if this is not possible, at least its settlement—can alone determine whether a historical (ecclesiastical) faith must always supervene as an essential portion of saving faith over and above the pure religious one, or whether, as mere vehicle, historical faith will finally pass over, in however distant a future, into pure religious faith” (ibid, p.147).
- Kant also discusses the problem of futurity as Jewish Messianism in a long footnote (ibid, p.163)—here it is the reliance on the written word which prevents the dispersed Jews from ‘assimilating’ into the people of the lands in which they find themselves. Messianic kingdom (here defined as a divine kingdom secured by covenant) splits into those relying on the old or the new covenant—the Jew and the Christian. The Christian's new covenant is precisely what allows them to assimilate into the Roman Empire and the “whole civilised world at the time” (ibid, p.163) but also means that “the Jews could always rediscover their ancient documents among the Christians (who had issued from them) if in their wanderings, where the skill to read them and hence the desire to posses them may have repeatedly died out, they just retained memory of having at one time possessed them” (ibid, p.163).
- The discussion of Abraham in “The Conflict of the Faculties” in 1798 can be read therefore as a return to this specific problem, even though the work as a whole is an actual return to the question of censorship in relation to the philosopher's freedom to discuss theological matters at all.
- This essay has not been translated into English, but for a discussion of its argument, see Yaffe, Martin D. “An Unsung Appreciation of the Musical-Erotic in Mozart's Don Giovanni: Hermann Cohen's Nod Toward Kierkegaard's Either/Or“ in Robert L. Perkins (ed.) International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or part 1, Georgia: Mercer 1995.
- For example, Jewish faith as established was “only a collection of merely statutory laws supporting a political state; for whatever moral additions were appended to it, either originally or only late, do not in any way belong to Judaism as such. Strictly speaking Judaism is not a religion at all but simply the union of a number of individuals who, since they belonged to a particular stock, established themselves into a community under purely political laws, hence not into a church; Judaism was rather meant to be a purely secular state, so that, were it to be dismembered through adverse accidents, it would still be left with the political faith (which pertains to it by essence) that this state would be restored to it (with the advent of the Messiah)” (Kant, op cit, p.154). Here Kant becomes most emphatic—Judaism is a ‘premature’ state—‘revolutionary’, ‘mechanical’ and ‘dangerous’ (ibid, p.156) and untimely in the sense that it is outliving the Christ figure which “makes a servile faith inherently null” (ibid, p.156).
- In the chapter called “The Day of Atonement”, Cohen will discuss this antinomic form as the central point of monotheism and its ‘concept of the human individual’ thus: “All the dialogues that Abraham, as well as Moses, has with God are concerned with the problem of the forgiveness of sin, and in every case it is solved clearly, though without a suspension of ‘justice’…. The antinomy between justice and mercy proves, to be sure, continuously vacillating, yet the point of gravity remains firmly in the forgiveness of sin. And it is Ezekiel's merit to make this point of gravity a central point of monotheism. It becomes sufficiently clear how only the concept of the human individual could make this attribute of God into the central attribute” (Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, tr. Simon Kaplan, New York: Frederick Ungar 1972, p. 209).
- For Cohen, the essential problem in Religion of Reason is reconciling the essential particularity of the Jewish people with the necessary ethical universalism of a religion of reason: “The Deutro-Isiah again shows the double face of the antinomy between the people and messianic mankind, which passes through the whole of Jewish history. This antinomy is the point of gravity [Schwerpunkt] of the development [Entwicklung] of Jewish history; every form of inner inhibition comes from it, but also sets into continuous motion all development. For the furtherance of monotheism has stamped upon us an historical singularity” (ibid, p.254). The problem for Cohen then is describing the movement of this ‘historical singularity’ without recourse to what he sees as the ‘identity form’ of dialectical method.
- Rosenzweig's letter of November 1916 in Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (ed.) Judaism Despite Christianity: The Letters on Christianity and Judaism between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, Alabama: University of Alabama Press 1969, p.134. Compare this with Kierkegaard: “The authentic tragic hero sacrifices himself and everything that is his for the universal; his act and every emotion in him belong to the universal; he is open, and in this disclosure he is the beloved son of ethics. This does not fit Abraham; he does nothing for the universal and is hidden’, Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1983, p.13.
- We can see by the opening sentences of the Star of Redemption that it is Kierkegaard too who exemplifies this new form of philosophizing. Newness and the orienting ‘event’ of death combine here with a reference to Kierkegaard's book which cannot be accidental: “Without ceasing, the womb of the indefatigable earth gives birth to what is new, each bound to die, each awaiting the day of its journey into darkness with fear and trembling” (Rosenzweig, op cit, p.3).
- Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, tr. and ed. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan, Indianapolis: Hackett 2000, p.53/54.
- See Kierkegaard, op cit, p. 133. Kierkegaard explicitly deals with the question of disorientation on p.107.
- Rosenzweig, op cit, p.54. Written in 1822, Grabbe's play was not performed until 1907, when it was taken up by the German expressionist movement. It tells the story of Satan's appearance in contemporary Germany and his encounters with Rattengift (a poet), a schoolteacher, his fiancé Liddy, a Baron and his daughter. Much of the humour is derived from the characters’ failure to recognise Satan despite his creaturely form, and the continuous jokes made at the expense of contemporary literati. The play culminates in high farce as the Devil escapes from the cage in which he has been lured and chases several cast members into the audience. Grabbe ends the play by having himself step on stage in an attempt to restore order, and as the schoolmaster ignores him, Liddy shouts “schoolmaster, schoolmaster, how bitter you are towards the man who wrote you!” (Christian Dietrich Grabbe, “Jest, Satire, Irony and Deeper Understanding”, tr. Maurice Edwards, in Eric Bentley (ed.) From the Modern Repertoire Series Two, Indiana: Indiana University Press 1952, p.42). Grabbe's lack of success with either this play or his other ambitiously conceived dramas (Herzog Theodor von Gothland (1822) Don Juan und Faust (1829)), plus his low reputation as an alcoholic, ensured that all his plays went unperformed until the late 19th Century, when he was rediscovered as part of the tradition of Büchner, von Kleist, Tieck, Hebbel and the Sturm und Drang. Alfred Jarry translated an abridged version of the Jest, Satire…as Les Silènes [The Sileni] (1900) before Hans Johst used Grabbe's life-story as the basis for his 1917 expressionist drama Der Einsame. It was this latter pathos-filled portrayal of the struggling artist that prompted Brecht to write Baal as an antidote in 1918. In 1939, the historical ‘rescue’ of Grabbe is established by Benjamin's “What is Epic Theatre?”, which places Brecht and Grabbe alongside Gryphius, Calderón, Lenz, Strindberg, Goethe's Faust II and Plato's Phaedo (Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings vol.4: 1938–1940, tr. Edmund Jephcott and others, ed. Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2003, p. 304; from now on SW4).
- Rosenzweig, op cit, p. 54.
- Rosenstock-Huessy (ed.), op cit, p. 119.
- Even more explicitly in Rosenzweig the three books of Star of Redemption are set up as three ‘acts’ of a drama, in which the first introduces the ‘elements’ (God, Man and World, at first defined only via negative method); the second puts them into fluid, narrative, interrelation; and the third book paves the way for the timely exit from the book itself into the ‘no-longer-book’ of the responsive, dialogical form of revelation itself. Rosenzweig's dramatic models may not be quite as diverse as Benjamin's, but are nonetheless telling: Goethe's Faust (Rosenzweig equates Faust with Hegel here and elsewhere—the two books and the man share almost exactly the same lifespan), Hamlet, Aeschylus and Grabbe.
- After completing the Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig turned to two important translation projects—the Bible translations in collaboration with Martin Buber and the work on the medieval Jewish poet Jehuda Halevi. The actual act of translation is not the only distinctly Benjaminian aspect to this project. For Rosenzweig, Jehuda Halevi's poems and hymns awaken “the old lament of longing” (Rosenzweig, in Barbara Ellen Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi: Translating, Translations and Translators, frd. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press 1995, p.283), where the “fixedness of the boundaries produces all by itself a very baroque Baroque and a very classicised Classical” (ibid, p.244). Jehuda Halevi is in this sense something like the anachronistic Trauerspiel of Jewish narrative. For the poems—like the dramas of Trauerspiel—are not simply non-philosophical, historical curiosities to be ‘redeemed’ by modern theological practice. Rather they act as an Urtext of new thinking itself.
- Hence Benjamin in 1913, making an apparently superficial distinction between Kant and Kierkegaard: “Whenever a few pages of Kant [Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals] tired me out, I fled to Kierkegaard! You know that he demands heroism of us on the grounds of Christian ethics (or Jewish ethics if you will) as mercilessly as Nietzsche does on other grounds, and that he engages in psychological analyses that are as devastating as Nietzsche's. Either/Or is the ultimatum: aestheticism or morality? In short this book confronted me with question after question that I had always divined but never articulated to myself, and excited (even) me more than any other book’ (Benjamin letter to Carla Selig of April 1913, in Benjamin, Walter, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, ed. and annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, tr. Manfred R. Jacobson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994, letter 11). By July 1913, in a letter to Herbert Belmore, he will write about the “difficult and dialectical” aspects of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety and more precisely the question of form: “I believe that such a high degree of artistry in presentation and overall vision is not as evident as a by-product in many other books as it is in Kierkegaard. In his life, he probably forcibly subdues the melancholy cynic in himself” (ibid, Letter 22).
- SW1, p.60. Does Benjamin here deliberately confuse Polonius as counsellor, with Hamlet the prince, and his murderer? The pompous ‘o'er officer’ (Hamlet act 5 scene 1) like the first of two skulls which Hamlet addresses in act 5?
- See Benjamin, Correspondence, letter 136.
- See Benjamin, Walter Selected Writings vol. 2: 1927–1934, tr. Rodney Livingston and others, ed. Michael Jennings, Cambridge Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press at Harvard University Press 1999 (hereafter SW2), p. 503.