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"Friedlander, Eli"
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Walter Benjamin : a philosophical portrait
Walter Benjamin is often viewed as a cultural critic who produced a vast array of brilliant and idiosyncratic pieces of writing with little more to unify them than the feeling that they all bear the stamp of his \"unclassifiable\" genius. Eli Friedlander argues that Walter Benjamin's corpus of writings must be recognized as a unique configuration of philosophy with an overarching coherence and a deep-seated commitment to engage the philosophical tradition.
Friedlander finds in Benjamin's early works initial formulations of the different dimensions of his philosophical thinking. He leads through them to Benjamin's views on the dialectical image, the nature of language, the relation of beauty and truth, embodiment, dream and historical awakening, myth and history, as well as the afterlife and realization of meaning. Those notions are articulated both in themselves and in relation to central figures of the philosophical tradition. They are further viewed as leading to and coming together in The Arcades Project. Friedlander takes that incomplete work to be the central theater where these earlier philosophical preoccupations were to be played out. Benjamin envisaged in it the possibility of the highest order of thought taking the form of writing whose contents are the concrete time-bound particularities of human experience. Addressing the question of the possibility of such a presentation of philosophical truth provides the guiding thread for constellating the disparate moments of Benjamin's writings.
eBook
Missing a Step Up the Ladder
In this paper I want to argue that a unified set of concerns constituting a new dimension—a realignment of our sense of language, self, and world—emerges in the progress of the Tractatus as we turn to inquire into the inner connection between language and such notions as world, limits, life, and ipseity. The most elusive step in that progress, and the one most necessary to recognize as part of the argument of the Tractatus, is the transition from an understanding of language in terms of logic, sense, and meaning to a perspective in which language becomes the primary locus of significance or meaningfulness (that is, meaning that has value or importance). It is also the pivot from the logical to the ethical concerns of the book. An ethics that appeals to the notion of meaningfulness is elaborated in terms of the dimension of existence, namely in terms of the very possibility of agreement of disagreement with what has ultimate reality.
Journal Article
Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin is often viewed as a cultural critic who produced a vast array of brilliant, idiosyncratic pieces of writing with little more to unify them than the feeling that they all bear the stamp of his “unclassifiable\" genius. Eli Friedlander finds an overarching coherence and a deep-seated commitment to engage the philosophical tradition.
eBook
Meaning Schematics in Cavell's Kantian Reading of Wittgenstein
A distinctive feature of Cavell’s reading of the Philosophical Investigations is the extent to which he takes Wittgenstein’s account of language to constitute a translation of the Kantian project of laying out the conditions of possibility of experience, “so that it speaks not alone of deducing twelve categories of the understanding but of deriving – say schematizing – every word in which we speak together “( Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome , p. 39). The specific inflection of the kinship between Kant and Wittgenstein established by Cavell’s reference to the doctrine of the schematism will be followed in my paper, taking it as a schema for bringing together moments of his reading of the Philosophical Investigation . Certain characteristic features associated by Kant with the schematism of concepts will be translated in my paper into moments that Cavell identifies in Wittgenstein’s investigation of the grammar of language. In particular, I take it that Cavell provides the terms in which to conceive of the central function of the imagination in the investigation of criteria as well as of the proper understanding of the dimension of life internal to our use of concepts. Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein further brings out the temporality internal to an investigation of language whose three moments I distinguish as “projection”, “presentation” and “return”.
Journal Article
On Vanishing and Fulfillment
In various places in Benjamin’s writing the divine is identified in the total passing away and disappearance of the phenomenal. Probably the most famous case for such annihilative characterization of the divine occurs in the essay “Critique of Violence.” Yet, the account of divine violence in that essay, with its intimation of active destruction, tempts one to construe the moment of disappearance in terms of catastrophic effects wrought by God on the physical world, on the model of a force that makes visible changes in reality. This problematic figuration of the catastrophic in Benjamin’s vision of history might hide a
Book Chapter
MYTH
“In this work,” writes Benjamin, “I mean to wrest from primal history [Urgeschichte] a portion of the nineteenth century” (A,393). Combating the resurgence of myth is an explicit task of the writing of history: “To cultivate fields where, until now, only madness has reigned. Forge ahead with the whetted axe of reason, looking neither right nor left so as not to succumb to the horror that beckons from deep in the primeval forest. Every ground must at some point have been made arable by reason, must have been cleared of the undergrowth of delusion and myth. This is to
Book Chapter