From Loss of World to Recovered Pearls

Or how to recover history for use in a radically new era -- first citations

Over the next few posts, I want to think through our predicament and what might be done, especially with regard to the possibility of ancient wisdoms — historical, traditional, authoritative — being of any help.

Predicament?

Walter Benjamin, from Theses on the Philosophy of History (Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations)

Thesis IX

Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
icb kebrte gem zurück,
denn blieb ich aucb lebendige Zeit,
ich hätte wenig Glück.*

~ Gerhard Scholem, “Gruss vom Angelus”

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(*) My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920, Israel Museum

Answer?

Hannah Arendt, introduction to Illuminations, on Walter Benjamin

III. The Pearl Diver

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

~ THE TEMPEST, I, 2

Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of “peace of mind,” the mindless peace of complacency. “Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions” (Schriften I, 571).

Sources

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin, edited and introduction by Hannah Arendt.

Bargués, P., Chandler, D., Schindler, S. et al. Hope after ‘the end of the world’: rethinking critique in the Anthropocene. Contemp Polit Theory (2023). Open access.

De Valk, Eva. The Pearl Divers: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Krisis (2010). (PDF)

Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger.