Theses on the Philosophy of History

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Theses on the Philosophy in History (also On the Concept of History, from German: Über den Begriff der Geschichte) is an essay written in early 1940 by German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin.

Composed of twenty numbered paragraphs, Benjamin wrote the brief essay shortly before attempting to escape from Vichy France, where French collaborationist government officials were handing over Jewish refugees like Benjamin to the Nazi Gestapo. Theses is the last major work Benjamin completed before fleeing to Spain where he committed suicide in September 1940.

Benjamin mailed a copy of the essay to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who passed it on to Theodor Adorno. The essay was first published in a mimeographed booklet entitled Walter Benjamin zum Gedächtnis (In memory of Walter Benjamin). In 1947, a French translation by Pierre Missac appeared in the journal, Les Temps Modernes. An English translation by Harry Zohn is included in the collection of essays by Benjamin, Illuminations, edited by Arendt (1968).^[1]

Benjamin's colleague Gershom Scholem^[2], who is quoted in Theses, suggested that the cryptic essay's seemingly definitive rejection of Marxist historical materialism in favor of a return to the theology and metaphysics of Benjamin's earlier writings came after Benjamin recovered from the deep shock he felt following the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact when the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union and Fascist, anti-Semitic Germany, previously bitter rivals, announced a non-aggression pact.

Summary

In the essay, Benjamin presents a critique of historicism and historical materialism, both pillars of Marxist philosophy. According to Benjamin, "Historicism depicts the 'eternal' picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone" (Thesis XVI). Benjamin argues against the idea of an "eternal picture" of history and prefers the idea of history as a self-standing experience. Thus, Benjamin states “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.' It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger" (Thesis VI).

One key to Benjamin’s critique of historicism is his rejection of the past as a continuum of progress. This is most apparent in thesis XI. His alternate vision of the past and “progress” is best represented by thesis IX, which employs Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920) as a symbol of his admixture of historical materialism and messianic time.

Argumentation

To make his argument, Benjamin relies both on scientific and poetic discourse.

In Thesis I, Benjamin uses The Turk, a famous chess-playing device of the 18th Century, as an analogy for historical materialism. Presented as an automaton that could defeat skilled chess players, The Turk actually concealed a human who controlled the machine. He wrote:

One can envision a corresponding object to [The Turk] in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.

In Thesis XVIII, he highlights a scientific perspective of time only to follow it up with some provocative metaphors:

In relation to the history of organic life on Earth,' notes a recent biologist, 'the miserable fifty millenia of homo sapiens represents something like the last two seconds of a twenty-four hour day. The entire history of civilized humanity would, on this scale, take up only one fifth of the last second of the last hour.' The here-and-now, which as the model of messianic time summarizes the entire history of humanity into a monstrous abbreviation, coincides to a hair with the figure, which the history of humanity makes in the universe.

It is suggested by some scholars^[who?] that perhaps this blending of scientific perspectives and poetic language gives Benjamin's ideas immediacy.

Links

• Read Theses on History here
• See Klee's Angelus Novus here

References

Suggestions for Further Reading