Abstract
Bakhtin and Benjamin are ambivalent towards habit and cognate phenomena such as ritual, tradition and so forth, and their adequacy to the task of preserving the integrity of experience. In the nineteenth century, the influential figure of Hegel, however, had been positive about the benefit (indeed the indispensability) of such customary cultural and social forms for the free development of the individual’s subjectivity. In the second part of Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1822), Hegel launches a sustained attack on Kant’s resolution of the problem of what Hegel terms ‘abstract freedom’. Like Kant, Hegel argues that abstract freedom (the unconstrained freedom to do what we want) is illusory, since in acting according to our individual desires we are in thrall to those desires. Similarly, Hegel also argues that freedom is to be achieved in the acting out of our duty: ‘I should do my duty for its own sake, and it is in the true sense my own objectivity that I bring to fulfilment in doing so. In doing my duty, I am with myself [bei mir selbst] and free.’1 Against Kant, however, Hegel argues that the fulfilment of one’s duty towards an abstractly conceived categorical imperative is not sufficient for the realization of the individual’s freedom. Rather, Hegel contends, such a conception of freedom in duty towards an abstract rational imperative pits reason against desire and hence denies human beings the happiness produced by the satisfaction of their natural desires.
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Notes
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge, 1991, p. 161.
‘Gemeinschaft [community] should be understood as a living organism, Gesellschaft [society] as a mechanical aggregate and artefact.’ Friedrich Tönnies, Community and Association, trans. Charles P. Loomis, London, 1955, p. 39.
See, for example, Max Weber, ‘Science as Vocation’ (1917), in ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, London, 1991, pp. 129–56.
Smith argues for the substantial influence of Simmel on Benjamin in Gary Smith, ‘Thinking through Benjamin: An Introductory Essay’, in Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, London, 1983, pp. vii–xlii (xxxii).
Susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, London, Cambridge MA, 1989, pp. 71–72.
Tihanov and Brandist are foremost amongst these critics. See Tihanov, Master and Slave, and Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle. See also Greg Nielsen, ‘Looking Back on the Subject: Mead and Bakhtin on Reflexivity and the Political’, in Brandist and Tihanov (eds), Materializing Bakhtin, London, 2000, pp. 142–63 (161–62). Bonetskaia also treats the connection between Simmel and Bakhtin. Natal’ia Bonetskaia, ‘Bakhtin’s Aesthetics as a Logic of Form’, in David Shepherd (ed.), The Contexts of Bakhtin: Philosophy, Authorship, Aesthetics, Amsterdam, 1998, pp. 83–94. Vorokhov seems to have been one of the first to have treated the connection. P. N. Vorokhov, ‘M. M. Bakhtin i G. Zimmel’, in N. I. Voronina et al. (eds), M. M. Bakhtin i gumanitarnoe myshlenie na poroge XXI veka, 2 vols, Précis from the Third Saransk International Bakhtin Readings, 1995, referred to in Emerson, The First Hundred Years, p. 213.
See Michael F. Bernard-Donals, Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism, Cambridge, 1994, especially pp. 18–46. Clark and Holquist’s substantial biographical study, Bakhtin, pays attention to neo-Kantianism, especially pp. 57–61, but does not mention Simmel or Lebensphilosophie. In a similar vein, Roberts speaks of ‘Bakhtin’s early “neo-Kantian” period’.
Matthew Roberts, ‘Poetics Hermeneutics Dialogics: Bakhtin and Paul de Man’, in Morson and Emerson (eds), Rethinking Bakhtin, Evanston IL, 1989, pp. 115–34 (118).
None the less, as Léger points out, Simmel sees the tragedy of culture as a result not merely of modernity but also as an epistemological constant as a result of the transformation – exacerbated by the conditions of modernity, nevertheless — that life undergoes when it creates a cultural value. See François Léger, La Pensée de Georg Simmel, Paris, 1989, p. 326. This process, however, is an eternal phenomenon. Simmel’s ahistoricism here is the target of Adorno’s criticism.
Georg Simmel, ‘Die Gross-Städte und das Geistesleben’, in Das Individuum und die Freiheit, ed. Michael Landmann and Margarete Susman, Frankfurt/Main, 1993, pp. 192–204 (202).
See also Georg Simmel, ‘Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur’, in Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909–1918, Gesamtausgabe Vol. 12, ed. Otthein Rammstedt, Frankfurt/Main, 2001, pp. 194–223.
Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, Cambridge, 2002, p. 161. Here, we may also consider the figure of Nietzsche. In his authoritative study, Schacht argues that Nietzsche is perhaps best understood as one of the inaugurators of Lebensphilosophie. Richard Schacht, Nietzsche, London, 1983, p. 531. Nietzsche’s image of the world as a state of flux in which tendencies to coagulation contend with the dynamism of the will-to-power stands in close proximity to the themes of this chapter. Amongst the many of Nietzsche’s ideas that would also be relevant to this chapter are his criticism of mechanism and causalism and his treatment of Kant in The Will to Power (notes from the 1880s, published posthumously), and the distinction between Apollonian art of image and form and Dionysian art of direct experience and intoxication in The Birth of Tragedy (1872).
See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York, 1968,
and Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Michael Tanner, trans. Shaun Whiteside, London, 1993.
‘Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances (perceptions) in a consciousness, in so far as this connection is necessary.’ Furthermore, necessity is a concept that pertains only to a priori knowledge. Immanuel Kant, ‘Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics’ (1783), in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics with Selections from the Critique of Pure Understanding, ed. and trans. Gary Hatfield, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 3–137 (58).
Any tendencies in Kant to abstraction do not occlude the importance of empirical perception. As Köhnke notes: ‘Kant indicates again and again that every act of the subject in the process of cognition can only be effectual through an actual application to real or in the event thinkable experience.’ Klaus Christian Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism, Cambridge, 1991, p. 181.
The basic dualism from which the opposition of Erlebnis and Erfahrung proceeds is Kant’s distinction between concepts and sensible representations or intuitions. See J. Michael Young, ‘Functions of Thought and the Synthesis of Intuitions’, in Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 101–22.
For details of Hegel’s rejection of Kantian dualism, see Paul Guyer, ‘Absolute Idealism and the Rejection of Kantian Dualism’, in Karl Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 37–56. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1794), with its doctrine of the absolute ego which includes, through reflection, both self and not-self, is an equally important moment in the rejection of the Kantian bifurcation of experience that is influential for the early Benjamin.
See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs, Cambridge, 1982.
Rousseau’s influence was also important. Rousseau had argued that the transition from the happy state of nature to a state of inequality and servitude is made possible only by the development of calculation and abstraction, particularly through the invention of language. A theory of experience constructed on the basis of Rousseau’s thinking here bears strong similarities to the position of Lebensphilosophie. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’ (1754), in The Social Contract and Discourses, ed. P. D. Jimack, trans. G. D. H. Cole, London: Everyman, 1993, pp. 31–126 (63–70). Rousseau’s revolutionary investigation of his own inner experience in the Confessions had a profound influence on Dilthey.
Wilhelm Dilthey, Poetry and Experience: Selected Works (1906), Vol. 5, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodl, Princeton NJ, 1996.
See Edmund Husserl, ‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man’ (1935), in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer, New York, 1965, pp. 149–92. Husserl’s objections to Kant are similar to those raised by Bakhtin that I discuss below. ‘According to Kant, transcendental subjectivity is a transpersonal abstractly deduced principle of justification, whereas for Husserl it is a concrete and finite subject.’
Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, Stanford CA, 2003, p. 108.
Martin Jay, ‘Experience without a Subject: Walter Benjamin and the Novel’, in Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead, The Actuality of Walter Benjamin, London, 1998, pp. 194–211 (195).
Henri Bergson, ‘Introduction à la métaphysique’, in La Pensée et le mouvant (1907), Paris, 1999, pp. 177–227 (211).
Filippo Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, Edinburgh, 1998, pp. 249–53 (251).
On the connection between Bergson, Italian Futurism and war, see Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-garde, Princeton NJ, 1993, pp. 157–66. A similar connection between Bergson and war can be seen in Vorticism.
See Natan Zach, ‘Imagism and Vorticism’, in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, Harmondsworth, 1991, pp. 228–42.
Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, Berlin, 1926, p. 41.
Bakhtin is close here to the thought of Aristotle and his understanding of man as the zoon politikon whose essence is to be found in activity and participation in a plural, public sphere. Furthermore, Bakhtin’s thought would bear comparison with Hannah Arendt who draws substantially on Aristotle. Many of her key themes – her preference for activity over contemplation, for becoming over being, her emphasis on participation in the public sphere and on the nexus between freedom and speech – resonate with Bakhtin’s ideas. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, London, 1998. Attention to Arendt might usefully supplement Hirschkop’s analysis of Bakhtin as a thinker of the public sphere in Hirschkop, Bakhtin.
Here Hirschkop’s comments on the similar lack of clarity over the status of the notion of dialogue are relevant: ‘[Dialogism] is both the natural state of being of language as such and a valorized category of certain discourses. It has a role in the theoretical critique of Saussurean linguistics and in the evaluative literary history Bakhtin narrates. When these two senses of the term are conflated, the specific form dialogism takes in the novel is assumed to be the manifestation of the true essence of language, an essence somehow repressed in the monological. In fact it is the status of monologism which is most problematic: if dialogism is the nature of all language, then what gives rise to monologism? For monologism is not merely an illusion or an error, it is a form of discourse with real, if mystifying, effects, which must be accounted for in a theory of language. It is this reality, or effectivity, of an illusionary or mystifying language which is evaded when the monological is treated as a theoretical error.’ Hirschkop, ‘A Response to the Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin’, p. 75. Hirschkop develops this and related ideas in order to highlight the political dimension of Bakhtin’s thought as one of the central themes of his later monograph. See Hirschkop, Bakhtin, for example, pp. 55–57. Hirschkop’s ‘Is Dialogism for Real?’ also explores the double nature of dialogue as description and political imperative. Ken Hirschkop, ‘Is Dialogism for Real?’, in Shepherd (ed.), The Contexts of Bakhtin, Amsterdam, 1998, pp. 183–95.
Simmel’s philosophy of money shares substantial ground both with Marx’s theory of alienation and with Lukács’s theory of reification. For a detailed analysis of this, see Gianfranco Poggi, Money and the Modern Mind: Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, Berkeley CA, 1993.
Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, ed. David Frisby and Klaus Christian Köhnke Frankfurt/Main, 1989, pp. 594–95.
See Spengler’s comments on the writing of his book and its connection with the war in Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 2 vols, Munich, 1923, Vol. 1, pp. 62–67. On the reception of Spengler in Germany, Hawthorn comments: ‘[German] wartime propaganda had portrayed the battle as an heroic struggle between culture and civilization, between the high ideals of Germany and the crass materialism of England. The defeat appeared to mean that culture and with it the whole humanist Weltanschauung had apparently gone down [...] to civilization. The despair which this induced accounted immediately after 1918 for the extraordinary popularity of Spengler’s The Decline of the West in which the distinction between culture and civilization was most dramatically drawn and in which the transition from the one to the other, from the summer to the autumn of Faustian culture, was projected in a way that even now one has to admit, for all its faults, is remarkably plausible.’
Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory, Cambridge, 1976, pp. 178–79.
Spengler’s ideas on the cyclical nature of history contain strong echoes of the thought of Vico and Herder. See Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Princeton, 2000.
This is one of the points where Bakhtin parts company with the existentialist ethics with which – in, for example, his emphasis on authentic being — he may seem to share common ground. Coates notes, for example, that ‘Bakhtin’s description of the pretender bears a striking resemblance to Sartre’s person living in bad faith.’ Coates, ‘Bakhtin and Kagan’, p. 23. Sartre, however, conceives of love (on the analogy of sexual love) as the desire to possess, hence he conceives of love as an oscillation between love and hatred, of the desire to be possessed and to possess. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, New York, 1954, pp. 339–430. For a discussion of this and, in particular, the lack of a Sartrean conception of shame in Bakhtin, as well as an assessment of hierarchy in ‘Author and Hero’, see Ann Jefferson, ‘Bodymatters: Self and Other in Bakhtin, Sartre and Barthes’, in Hirschkop and Shepherd (eds), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, pp. 152–57. The ultimate point of conflict between Bakhtin and Sartre must be, however, as Clark and Holquist point out, Sartre’s maxim that ‘hell is other people’. Clark and Holquist, Bakhtin, p. 94.
The link that Hobbes makes between authorship and authority, in Chapter XVI, ‘Of Persons, Authors and Things Personated’, finds a resonance in Bakhtin’s thinking on the same themes in ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 111–15. One might also argue for the importance of Hobbes’s philosophy of language to Bakhtin and, perhaps, Voloshinov. Using arguments that bear comparison with Voloshinov’s distinction between theme and meaning (a distinction that I discuss in the next chapter), Hobbes argues that meaning is not a fixed property of words but rather that speakers’ evaluative judgements, based on their desire for power and their own gain, are the basis of signification. See Hobbes, Chapter IV, ‘Of Speech’, Leviathan, pp. 24–31.
Such is Hobbes’s ‘naturall condition of mankind’ in which we find ‘three principall causes of quarell. First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory’; these result in life being characterized by ‘continuall fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XIII, pp. 88–89. Like Bakhtin, Hobbes makes his argument entirely on an ahistorical analysis of experience. Like Bakhtin, however, one can easily contextualize Hobbes’s thought in terms of contemporary concerns — in Hobbes’s case the crisis of authority in the English Civil War period — rather than Bakhtin’s Russian civil war. See Johann P. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Contexts, London, 1992.
For a discussion of the relationship between Hobbes’s theology and what Overhoff terms his materialism, examining the antagonism between materialist philosophy and traditional Christian eschatology, see Jürgen Overhoff, ‘The Theology of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51, 2000, 3, pp. 527–55.
See, for example, Beatrice Hansen, ‘Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work’, in Ferris (ed.), Companion to Benjamin, pp. 54–72 (70–71); Thomas Weber, ‘Erfahrung’, in Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (eds), Benjamins Begriffe, Frankfurt/Main, 2000, pp. 230–59; taking one example: in his generally perspicacious study, McCole devotes seven pages to the question of ‘just what is actually responsible for the mutual exclusivity of Erlebnis and Erfahrung’, without exploring the intellectual-historical context of the ‘tragedy of culture’ which would provide much in the way of an answer. McCole, Benjamin, pp. 272–79.
Jay, ‘Experience without a Subject’, p. 195. Plate is another critic who, apparently independently of Jay, recognizes this aspect of Benjamin’s thought and its debt to the confrontation of Kantianism and Lebensphilosophie: ‘Benjamin was not content with either [Erfahrung or Erlebnis] – the former being too rationalistic and pragmatically impossible to render in a modern age of shock, the latter being too immediate and individualistic – and so instead he sets up a dialectic between the two varieties of experience, attempting to overcome the subject-object distinction.’ S. Brent Plate, Walter Benjamin, Religion and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion through the Arts, London, 2005, p. 4.
See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Genealogy of Morals’, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, 1992, 451–599, especially pp. 475–80. This is the passage that discusses the infamous blonde Bestie. One can discern in Benjamin’s text not only the influence of Nietzsche but also perhaps of Decadence. The opposition of the destructive and rejuvenating Barbarian and enervated and sterile civilization is a standard topos of Decadence from Verlaine’s ‘La Langueur’ (1883) onwards.
The passage to which Benjamin refers here is the opening lines of the conclusion to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788): ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ The passage continues with a striking description of the way in which the synthetic activity of practical reason conjoins the universal and the particular; on the one hand, in practical reason our sense experience and animal being are validated in universal terms; and on the other, the realm of the universal receives the weight of actual experience. My orientation towards the laws of nature ‘begins from the place I occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems’. My orientation towards universal moral laws ‘exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary connection’. Kant, thus, establishes a harmonious and dynamic relationship of communication between the realm of universal laws of nature, the realm of universal laws of morality and the individual cognizing consciousness that inhabits a sensual world. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Moral Writings (1788), trans. Lewis White Beck, Chicago IL, 1948, p. 351.
Gasché, however, makes a case for the presence of Kantian motifs in the ‘The Work of Art’, commenting: ‘Benjamin’s borrowings from Kant [in the ‘The Work of Art’] do not exclude his rejection of major aspects of Kant’s doctrine. [...] The contention that Benjamin objected to the unifying gesture of transcendental deduction, to what he called Kant’s despotism, in other words, to his transcendentalism, is highly suggestive of what sort of Kant — a ant folded back into the empirical, a criticist economy without transcendentalism — is operative in Benjamin’s work.’ Rodolph Gasché, ‘Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction”’, in Andrew Benjamin and Osborne (eds), Benjamin’s Philosophy, London, 1994, pp. 183–204 (201–02).
Hermann Cohen, the leading Marburg neo-Kantian, whose Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1918) was a source for both Bakhtin and Benjamin, only underlined the Kantian mathematical bias. In Jennings’s words: ‘Cohen attempted to confirm the continuing validity of Kant’s description of the structure of the understanding. For Cohen, however, modern philosophy could “delineate in a positive manner the horizons of knowledge” only by severely restricting “the concept of the possibility of experience,” for example, by limiting the data of experience to a model of the world based solely on verifiable mathematical and scientific evidence.’ Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism, Ithaca NY, 1987, p. 84. For Cohen’s influence on the early Bakhtin, see Nikolai Nikolaev, ‘The Nevel School of Philosophy (Bakhtin, Kagan and Pumpianskii) between 1918 and 1925: Materials from Pumpianskii’s Archives’, in Shepherd (ed.), The Contexts of Bakhtin, pp. 29–41. Brandist also deals frequently with Bakhtin’s debt to Cohen in Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle.
Wolin reads ‘On the Programme of the Coming Philosophy’ as a proto-Surrealist text that points to Benjamin’s later work, and there is no doubt that this passage can be read as an example of that tendency. It shows Benjamin’s continuing preoccupation with phenomena which cannot be subsumed to a Western rationalist viewpoint. See Richard Wolin, ‘Benjamin, Adorno and Surrealism’, in Tim Huhn and Lambert Zuider-vaart (eds), The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, London, 1999, pp. 93–122. Nevertheless, Benjamin is not proposing irra-tionalism; his concern is that philosophy’s understanding of the rational must expand to take into account what is normally dismissed as irrational.
Rochlitz sums up the debate over the ethical dimension of Benjamin’s thought asfollows: ‘In Benjamin’s work, the contemporary debate onethics is confronted with a mode of thought situated to one side of what seems to have become its immutable framework, the opposition between Kantians and Aristotelians or Hegelians. Here again, Benjamin occupies a peculiar place: he is claimed both by thinkers who, like Ricoeur, lean toward a neo-Aristotelian philosophy and an anchoring of ethics in narration, and by those who, like Habermas, defend a procedural ethics of narration. How are such contradictory claims possible? We find very little moral theory in Benjamin; thus the two sides can draw support only from his intuitions and implicit presuppositions.’ Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, trans. Jane Marie Todd, London, New York: Guildford, 1996, p. 253.
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© 2007 Tim Beasley-Murray
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Beasley-Murray, T. (2007). Experience. In: Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230589605_3
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