▶︎ 0:01 To start with this path of development towards the arcades, I take an early and important essay, quite difficult essay, called "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man." It was written in 1916, sent in a letter to Benjamin's close friend at the time, Gershom Scholem, and published only posthumously. And I want to set up this essay as broadly, say as metaphysically, as fundamentally as possible. It deals with three domains of metaphysics. I would say the question of the world, of man, and of God. More broad than that you cannot have.
▶︎ 1:03 In traditional philosophy, you have cosmology, the world, nature, psychology, man, the soul, and so on, theology, that is God. Those are also, of course, the three ideas of reason which Kant says tempts metaphysics over and over again to go beyond the boundary of what's knowable. They are a temptation for reason in Kant. And I think we should read this essay as really bringing together those three dimensions, of world or nature, man, and God, and show how they converge in language. So the essay deals with language as the medium through which we understand the convergence of world, man, and God.
▶︎ 2:14 But of course, if we go with the title, we have to distinguish language as such from the language of man. Language as such, I would say, is present, albeit in different ways in each of those terms, that is in God, in nature, and in man. It is the creative word of God, that is language as it is creating nature. It would be the expressive character of nature, that is when nature is created, it has in itself this expressive potential, and it is the expression of nature to which man attends in his own language, that is in the language of man.
▶︎ 3:18 This initial formulation is far from clear, and we need to explicate it as Benjamin does in the essay. And I will do that by following his reading of the first chapters of Genesis, creation of the world, creation of man, and the story of the fall. That's, I think, the easiest way to get into the essay. Of course, there are ways, I think, to forego those theological biblical crutches and give a strictly philosophical, metaphysical articulation of his vision of language. But in order to get us quickly into the main matters, let me go with the biblical interpretation.
▶︎ 4:17 Let's start with God. What's this standpoint of the divine? Benjamin notes that in the biblical story of creation, we have a threefold rhythm that characterizes, of course, the creation by the word. God said, and there was. God saw that it was good. God named.
▶︎ 4:48 Let's take an example from the very beginning. God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. Each of these moments, as well as the unity of the three moments, bring out what I would call the radical otherness of the standpoint of the divine. Each of them problematizes a fundamental duality that belongs to a finite cognition, the finite intellect.
▶︎ 5:32 So God said, and it was, of course, shows that the distinction for us between thinking something and bringing it to existence doesn't hold for God. For finite beings, thinking gives only possibilities, and existence must be, or the actuality of what exists does not follow from the mere thought of it. Similarly, when we look at God saw that it was good, problematize the distinction we tend to make between cognition and will, or maybe between seeing and goodness, between what pertains to our knowledge of the world and what pertains to the will or what we ought to do, that is, to the good.
▶︎ 6:27 And lastly, God named, points to a form of knowledge that is intuitive, that is key to the singular and the immediate, whereas our cognition is discursive or assumes the mediation of concepts to determine whatever objects we want to know. In terms of, let's say, the German idealist philosophical tradition, we could say that what Benjamin presents us here is with some version of the idea or the speculative standpoint of an intuitive intellect.
▶︎ 7:15 Now, the second moment in the story of creation is the creation of man. And what Benjamin stresses is that as opposed to the creation of the world, by the divine word, man is created from earth and the divine breath. So if the divine word, as it creates nature, determines the essence of natural beings, it follows that man has no natural pre-given unity of essence. It is as though when creation is from the word, essence is posited and subordinated to the word.
▶︎ 8:07 When it is mediated by matter, strangely enough, it does not mean that man is lower than the rest of creation, but rather it releases man from this immediacy, this force of the divine creative word. It releases man for a higher task. And I quote from the essay, "Man who was not created from the word is now endowed with the gift of language, and he's elevated above nature." So language is, as it were, set free in man. One could say man is given the task of fulfilling creation, of, as it were, naming creation in his own language. It is in that sense that man could be said to partake in creation or, as Benjamin puts it, communicate himself to God.
▶︎ 9:16 So we have to think of this higher destiny, this task of man. First of all, insofar as we think of the language of man as a medium in which that task can be fulfilled, there must be something in the language of man, something in that medium of finite knowledge, which would be an analog of the moment of the threefold act of creation. So there would be with Benjamin certain interpretation of what it is for man to be created in the image of God, and that must introduce an analog of the three moments we characterized regarding divine creation into human language.
▶︎ 10:14 Of course, human language does not bring things to existence by the mere word, but it has this capacity to actualize nature. It's as though nature is not fully real without man, without this capacity that man has in his own language to actualize it. So there would be a higher state of nature that is revealed only in and through man's language.
▶︎ 10:54 As in the threefold act of creation, we also have to find an analog of this moment in which knowledge and value come together for God. God saw that it was good. Of course, find it in the finite language of man, and I would refer to this identity of knowledge and value in man's language as being in significance. But this term significance is something I would distinguish from mere meaning, from neutral meaning.
▶︎ 11:37 It suggests that language can be for man meaningful or involving. That is, be some kind of identity of what can be cognized and what has value in itself, what is meaningful. This possibility will become, I think, much clearer when we think of how Benjamin describes the fall of man, that is the way in which language appears for man after the fall.
▶︎ 12:20 Now, before we get there, let me just touch upon the third aspect of human language, which is analogous with our description of the divine word. We saw that for God, the word is an act of naming. And similarly, Benjamin would say, "In language, naming is the highest form of being in language for man." In terms of the biblical text, of course, it is the way Adam's first task is to name the animals. And I would take here naming the animals as somehow expressing this general task of naming nature.
▶︎ 13:13 And we must therefore find in man's language something like the knowledge of the singular, which corresponds to the act of naming. That knowledge of essence is not general, is not universal in a sense in which it is determined by laws and concept and so on. There must be a sense in which it is singular, concrete, and immediate. There is an intuitive dimension, as it were, to human knowledge that is open through his being in language.
▶︎ 13:56 We have various models in the history of philosophy for such an intuitive or non-discursive cognition. One example would be Spinoza's knowledge of the third kind. Another one, maybe a bit closer to Benjamin, would be Goethe's understanding of intuitive knowledge of what he calls ur-phenomenal nature or primal nature. Another example would be Schopenhauer's cognition of ideas, and so on. But I think we'll have to develop what it is for a finite being to have that option of knowledge of nature, of singular intuitive knowledge of nature in and through language.
▶︎ 14:50 And as I said, that is contrasted with knowledge of good and evil after the fall. So let's deal a bit with the fall as Benjamin understands it. Benjamin seeks to interpret not only creation, as I said, but also the fall in terms of his vision of language. And if naming would be the highest form of the cognition of nature, what is contrasted to it is judgment.
▶︎ 15:28 There is a mediateness, there is an abstraction that is associated with judgment, which contrast with the concreteness and singularity of naming. We name a being or an essence or a person, but judgment is of facts, of state of affairs. We judge that such and such is the case, that the table is round, that the sky is blue. We judge that such and such is the case by subsuming an object under a concept, in the simplest case. The concept would determine, as it were, the general perspective under which something is seen. So we judge a table according to, let's say, its shape. Could equally judge it under the concept of its color, its size, its weight, what it's made of, and so on.
▶︎ 16:35 The concept we use to judge the object, of course, expresses our interest in the object. And I say that in order to stress that in judgment, we shift to, as it were, what we want of the object, or what interests us in the object, or what we choose to see the object as. That leads to a certain impoverishment, of course, of the fullness of the thing judged. And it also problematizes the idea that the task of man is that of expressing nature. That is, it is an idea of capturing nature with our concept rather than being attuned with the expression of nature and actualizing it in man's language.
▶︎ 17:35 So you start to see that this contrast between naming and judgment is actually what serves Benjamin to describe how man can be seen to abandon the task of naming, or the fall in language would be this abandoning of the task of naming in order to shift to the perspective of judgment.
▶︎ 18:04 Now, another thing to say about judgment, and I work my way slowly to the tree of knowledge, is that judgment is bipolar. When we judge something, we ask ourself whether it is the case or it is not the case. Concept for us opened the space of the possible. And of course, there's a distinction between the possible and what is the case. In judging, we ask if this is true or this is false. We always have those two options. And that bipolarity, I think, is at the core of Benjamin's understanding of the problem of judgment.
▶︎ 18:58 We know the four results according to the biblical text from Adam and Eve eating the fruits of the tree of knowledge. So knowledge is knowledge of good and evil. It introduces value, good and evil as two opposed contents. It substitutes this duality for what we called earlier the goodness that comes with naming as such. For the original position of man in language, goodness was actualizing the language of nature in his own language. And so we shift from this goodness of significance to the duality of good and evil. We recede, as it were, from that space in which language and value come together, what I called earlier the space of the significant.
▶︎ 20:18 For Benjamin, then good and evil are not contentful categories. When you think at the most fundamental level about content, about the unity of content and value, you think about the possibility of language to actualize nature. But when you start conceiving of value in terms of the dichotomy of good and evil, in terms of a choice to make between good and evil possibilities, there's a sense in which one abandons already this idea of the goodness of the significant. So that's why Benjamin would say good and evil cannot be named. There's no concreteness corresponding to them.
▶︎ 21:09 And I quote again, the knowledge to which the snake seduces, the knowledge of good and evil, is nameless. It is empty in the deepest sense. And this very knowledge is itself the only evil known to the paradisiacal state. So what is he saying here? To talk in terms of those two categories of good and evil, to take them as substantive categories, would introduce emptiness into language. In other words, the threat that Benjamin associates with this perspective is not the danger of speaking falsely or misjudging, but rather of falling into nonsense.
▶︎ 22:02 In that sense, I would say there's something very similar between Benjamin's diagnosis and a certain theme in the thought of Wittgenstein at the same time. Benjamin refers to Kierkegaard and his notion of prattle or empty talk. I quote from the essay, the knowledge of things resides in the name, whereas that of good and evil is, in the profound sense in which Kierkegaard uses the term, empty talk, and knows only a purification and elevation to which the man engaging in empty talk, the sinner, was therefore subjected: judgment.
▶︎ 22:45 Note here the duality of the use of judgment. We saw judgment would be the act of judging that this and this is the case or is not the case. But here, Benjamin uses judgment in a different sense. To be judged here is to be sentenced, to be found guilty. So the one who approaches, as it were, good and evil or value from the standpoint of judgment is judged, is guilty from the start. Not because that person did something evil, but because of the way they approach the problem of value.
▶︎ 23:34 The turn to judgment in terms of this bipolarity of good and evil is itself the fall. Whatever we may gain in terms of conceptual propositional knowledge about good and evil, laws that distinguish good from evil and so on, would be correlative with losing that dimension of significance. So think of it this way. The tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden is something like an emblem of the fall. Why? Maybe I'll go to the board and show that.
▶︎ 24:22 The Hebrew word for tree is written like this. Etz. Now, look at those two letters. Each of them branches. One branch, another branch. The problem is emblematized in the structure of branching. Whenever you conceive of good and evil as two branches, as opposites, as something that results from turning to judgment, then you already have a problem.
▶︎ 25:05 Benjamin speaks of the tree of knowledge as passing judgment over the one who comes to question, to learn about good and evil, to ask for knowledge of the law. It's a bit like Kafka's parable about the gate of the law. The one who comes to ask about the law, coming to it that is from outside, will become ipso facto guilty, will be punished by, in the case of the parable, lingering at the precincts of the law unable to enter.
▶︎ 25:44 Benjamin calls it slightly differently. He says this is the mythical origin of law. And if you think of it, we'll talk a lot about Benjamin and myth and fate and so on, but one thing you can say about this space of the mythical, as it were, in tragedy and so on, is that you're guilty before you commit the offense. This is the structure of myth and fate. And similarly, when you come to value through this questioning, through this opposition, through this attempt to know the difference between good and evil, you're guilty. You're sentenced before doing anything. The problem, to put it figuratively, is not the apple, it's the branches. That was what they didn't get.
▶︎ 26:50 Let's move from the interpretation of Genesis to some general issues that come out of this account of language in Benjamin. I want to start with the way he thinks of nature as a hierarchy. We find in philosophies of nature from Aristotle to Schelling, an account of the orders of nature. Sometimes it's referred to as the scala naturae. In medieval philosophy, call it the great chain of being. But the general idea is that there is a hierarchical order of nature.
▶︎ 27:46 Sometimes we think of it as the hierarchy of genera and species. But in Benjamin's picture, because of this idea of the creative or formative force, we have a different picture. And of course, since he speaks of this expressive potential that is in nature, this expressive understanding of the essences of nature, then his idea of something like the distinction and the movement from one order to the other is formulated in terms of translation. Translation appears first in Benjamin as a concept of ontology. In the essay on language, it characterizes the transition between a lower and a higher order of nature.
▶︎ 28:50 Of course, I begin to speak of translation because we're going to make our way to a discussion of Benjamin's famous essay, The Task of the Translator, in the second lecture. But I think it's very important to see that this essay relies on the view of language that he sets up in On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. So it's a concept of translation that is highly philosophical rather than merely literary, let's say. We think of orders of nature. We can call it also something like an intensive hierarchy of nature.
▶︎ 29:33 And the idea is that each lower order would be taken up into a higher order, as it were, by being translated into it. So if we say there is a language of matter, there is this expressive potential in matter, it would be taken up into, let's say, the language of the chemical or the language of the biological. The lower order would be translated and bound into the logic of the higher language. It would not be free to express itself, as it were, according to its own language, but only given this limitation that the higher language provides. It's almost as though the lower orders submit to the force of the higher ones.
▶︎ 30:42 Another way to put it is that phenomena of a higher order would refract out of their own language, the language of lower orders. So I think of it not going from down to higher, but rather how from the standpoint of the higher, the lower appear or are refracted.
▶︎ 31:12 I say that because I think this can be explicated in terms of something that Benjamin had in mind writing those essays, and that's Goethe's method of investigation of nature. I mentioned Goethe in the context of the idea of intuitive knowledge. But maybe Goethe's most famous scientific achievement is his theory of color. And in that theory, just to put it very, very broadly, you have colors that belong to different domains. You have physiological colors, you have physical colors, and you have chemical colors.
▶︎ 32:06 The physiological colors would be colors that relate to the organ, to the eye, that, let's say, you see when you press the eye, that have to do with something like the organic. Physical colors are colors that are created by refraction in transparent or turbid media, refraction of light, like in a prism. And chemical colors are colors produced from interactions in matter such as oxidation, get this red or green color.
▶︎ 32:50 Why do I go into that? Well, think of it this way. You have the space of color, certain language of color, and it refracts in itself the organic, the physical, that is refraction of light, and the chemical. So you get an idea in which the various orders of nature are taken up and, as if it were, translated into the language of color. When you think of the different ways in which color manifests itself, you understand this expression of the fundamental orders of nature in the language of color.
▶︎ 33:42 What's the highest language? Well, of course, given the scheme we described, the highest language is the language of man. So we could say the language of man gathers in itself all that hierarchy. It refracts itself in the language of man. So in that language, it would be possible to actualize and reveal in full the creative force or the dimension of language as such that manifests itself in nature.
▶︎ 34:24 Let me read from the end of the essay on language, the way Benjamin describes this actualization of the creative force, and note how he uses the notion of translation there. "The language of a being is the medium in which its spiritual essence communicates itself. The uninterrupted flow of this communication runs through the whole of nature, from the lowest form of existence to man, and from man to God. The language of nature is comparable to a secret password that each sentry passes to the next in his own language. But the content of the password is the sentry's language itself. All higher language is translation of the lower, until, in ultimate clarity, the word of God, which is the unity of this movement of language, unfolds."
▶︎ 35:29 Let's keep in mind this figure of an intensive flow that runs through the orders of language and up to, gathers in the language of man. We say man has the task to give expression to nature in his own language. The point is, in his own language. That is, let's not think of it as though man looks outside at nature, listens to the bees, hear the waves, and so on, and tries to express what's going on there. No, keep in mind this idea of translation.
▶︎ 36:21 In a sense, all of nature, all of this hierarchy is refracted in man's language. All he has to do is to attend to the ways in which these languages of nature appear in and through his own language. It's as though, in order to express nature, man needs to attend to his own linguistic practices or to his own linguistic form of life, to think how nature is refracted in that form of life with language.
▶︎ 37:12 We're not talking about paying attention to how people speak about nature. We're not concerned here with contents that are communicated in language, with what we say, but there's a way in which Benjamin says something shows itself in language. Again, this quasi-Wittgensteinian distinction between saying and what shows itself. In order to attend to the expression of nature, man must turn to what shows itself in his own language. A certain form of maybe linguistic idealism here. And Benjamin has a couple of essays where he thinks about the relation of his ideas of language to Kant. In order to develop this point, we would have to go into those essays, but I leave it aside here.
▶︎ 38:26 Now, assuming that we turn to human practices with language, the question is whether there is a certain domain which is particularly suited to reveal this higher nature that is harbored in our form of life. For Benjamin, this would be art. The work of art is a place in which this dimension can be opened up. More specifically, of course, given his writings, the literary work is a locus of concentration of this expression of nature in human work with language or in a meaningful linguistic environment.
▶︎ 39:27 Let's think about some very general motivations. Why would the work of art be such a place for Benjamin? And one thing we could say is that, think back at this idea of the unity of knowledge and value, in divine language, in naming, which is the task of man, what we called the significant. I think a work of art, if you consider it, is something like a paradigm of what we find to be significant. With a work of art, we don't make a distinction between what is perceived, let's say, in a painting, a neutral description of composition, colors, and so on, and the value of it.
▶︎ 40:29 The sense is that you perceive value, you see it as significant. It involves you. The sense of what is there is at the same time the sense that it is good, that it is valuable, that it is something which draws you, gives you pleasure, involves you, call it however you want. But the point is that if we want to recover something of this idea of a unity of knowledge and value, the work of art might be a place to consider it.
▶︎ 41:13 Think also of, I'll use a bit of Kant here, but I think it can be helpful. Think of the concept of originality in a work of art. I go to Kant's formulation of originality in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. We could say that Kant conceives of a work of art as a paradox. Why a paradox? Well, on the one hand, it is a product. It is man-made. And the very concept of a product presupposes a rule of producing it, a rule of production.
▶︎ 41:59 But of course, at the same time, we want to say that the work of art is original. That is, there's no pre-given rule that explains how you come to produce it. So how do we solve this tension, this paradox? Well, Kant says the work of art is the product of genius. And genius is, well, we say it's a natural talent. But what does that mean? It means that in genius, nature gives the rule to art. It's as though nature expresses itself in and through the work of genius.
▶︎ 42:47 Or we could say the work of art as a product of genius harbors something like a higher nature in itself. And that nature has yet to be actualized. And here we move maybe from Kant to Benjamin, or maybe we could stay for a moment with Kant. Because if you think of it, this brief discussion of genius, of the way nature inheres in art, implies that there is a dimension in the work of art which is yet to be made explicit. That is there, as it were, implicitly when the work is born, when the genius produces it. But the genius doesn't quite know the rule of nature which inheres in his work. How is it revealed? Well, through what we call practices of criticism.
▶︎ 44:02 It's as though judgment, now in the sense of the criticism of the work of art, makes explicit, actualizes this potential of meaning, this nature that inheres in the work. Of course, it doesn't produce judgments in the way in which we formulated the problematic aspect of judgment. Kant has a word, a term for the way aesthetic judgment is to be understood. He says it's reflective judgment.
▶︎ 44:45 Reflective judgment is not judgment that determines the work from outside, as it were, through a given concept. You don't turn to works of art with a theory, given concept, and identify if that falls under your understanding of what that kind of work is. No, you are involved in the singular work, and the work is always singular. And out of this involvement opens the space of meaning.
▶︎ 45:24 So judgment reverses its direction. It's not determining. It's not problematic in the sense in which Benjamin understood it. It rather continues and actualizes the expression of the work. It makes it completely explicit. It fulfills that nature that's inherent in the work of art.
▶︎ 45:53 I described it roughly according to the way Kant thinks of aesthetic judgment. Benjamin doesn't write about Kant, but he does write about reflection in the context of what comes immediately after Kant, German Romanticism. So his dissertation, The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, is basically laying out the implication of this understanding of reflection as a fulfillment and actualization of what inheres in the work. Particularly in the writings of Schlegel and Novalis.
▶︎ 46:40 But what's important here is that we have not only the product in which, as we saw through this idea of originality, we can say there's some dimension of nature that inheres in it, but also some kind of model of what it is to express that nature, to actualize it, to make it fully explicit. And that would be criticism.
▶︎ 47:13 Let me touch on one more moment in Benjamin's reading of the first chapters of Genesis. We can relate it to the curse on Eve after the fall. In the Bible it says, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, in sadness thou shalt bring forth children. And this theme of sadness is particularly important to Benjamin. And he, as it were, transposes it into our relation to nature.
▶︎ 48:02 So the fall would be the abandonment by man of this task of giving expression to nature, naming nature. And in abandoning that task, Benjamin says, nature is left to its muteness. And it acquires, as it were, a different face. Or our relation to nature now is imbued with a different mood, which Benjamin says is sadness.
▶︎ 48:44 Maybe we can explain it for a moment by way of a remark of Schopenhauer's that I quite like. It goes roughly like that. Schopenhauer asked, "Why are flowers so beautiful?" And the answer is, well, that's because they are mute, and they need to attract men to, as it were, speak for them. But it's a kind of figure for what we are talking about in relation to Benjamin's vision of language.
▶︎ 49:24 So man fulfills the expression of nature. There's this task of man to give expression in his language to nature. But then when man abandons that task, nature is left to its muteness, and the relation, the being in nature, as it were, acquires this face of sadness.
▶︎ 49:53 The concern with sadness is another nice theme to trace through Benjamin's writing. I'll just mention his Habilitationsschrift, that has the title The Origin of a German Trauerspiel, or Sadness Play, Mourning Play sometimes it's translated. We're not going to speak about this wonderful work, which includes, of course, the paradigmatic sad figure, the melancholy prince, Hamlet. But for Benjamin, I think this way of thinking of a fundamental attunement to the world, which is sadness, is something that derives in some sense from, again, this vision of language and the relation of man to nature in his language.
▶︎ 51:12 One of the interesting moments in Benjamin's Origin of German Trauerspiel, of the Baroque Trauerspiel, is a well-known analysis of Dürer's engraving, Melancholia I, which is at the center of Benjamin's reading of this affect, this mood of sadness, that pervades the world. And we are going to encounter this topic of sadness, this mood, in another context, namely, in the beginning of Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900. But that's only in a couple of lectures.