▶︎ 0:00 Today's lecture will be mostly devoted to Benjamin's essay Fate and Character. But I will begin with a quick summing up of some of the main points of the last two lectures and lead to that very interesting and deep essay. So we started with laying out Benjamin's vision of language, primarily by way of reading his interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis as some kind of theory of language.
▶︎ 0:37 And we saw that in the medium of human language, it is possible to, as it were, give expression or fulfill or actualize the expressive character of nature. So that is the task of man to continue, we said, creation by the word or fulfill this expressive potential of nature. We also discussed what the form of the fall would be in that reading of Genesis. That is, in what way we speak of man abandoning this task of expressing nature.
▶︎ 1:26 And the fall was also conceived linguistically in the first place. That is, as a turn from naming, which is the highest form of being in language and significance, to judgment. We will see today, I think, in a clearer way how this abandoning of the task of man really creates some space of a cursed form of human life. Some kind of original guilt, as it were, that will express itself in various ways in human life.
▶︎ 2:11 But we didn't develop that in the context of the essay yet. We took a turn to discussing the way in which the work of art, the work of literature is for Benjamin within, let's say, this fallen condition of language, a locus in which it is possible to recognize something of this higher nature or that nature, inheres in the work of art, and it can be expressed and realized in and through it.
▶︎ 2:53 Not necessarily as we saw in the original, in the work as it is formed and comes to the world, through the activity of the genius, but rather we spoke of the role of critical practices or even translation as realizing that higher meaning that inheres in a work of art. So it's as though the secondary work, not the original, the secondary work of the critic and the translator is conceived by Benjamin as what we should indeed focus on in thinking about how to recognize and realize that higher life in the work of art. Raise language, as it were, to a higher level.
▶︎ 3:52 Now, if I try to recall my introduction, really the starting point of those lectures, of course our aim in the series of lectures is not to remain with the considerations of language or literary works or things like that, but actually to lead towards an understanding of the Arcades Project as a philosophical project. And there Benjamin is obviously not concerned with the critique of a literary work, but rather a critical presentation of a space of life, of historical life. To use an expression he likes, he speaks there of reading the real. That is, not reading a literary work, but actually taking the space of life and reading it critically.
▶︎ 4:50 So can we turn to human life, individual, collective, and recognize in it those struggles that were formulated initially through this vision of the relation of man to nature, to created nature, in language? Is it possible to recognize in the space of life the form of suffering that is formulated through Benjamin's diagnosis of the fall of man? That is, as it were, see how it pertains really to life as we know it. And can we think of the critical task of fulfilling meaning or giving expression to nature, again, not in relation to the literary work, but rather as a form of redeeming the human creature in its day-to-day existence?
▶︎ 5:52 I'm going to put it slightly differently, but it's really the same point. If earlier what concerned us was to conceive of the relation of man to nature in his language, now we can ask ourselves what it is to think of the problem of the fall and of redemption, as it were, in terms of the belonging of man to nature. That is, we all know we are natural beings. Man is placed in nature not only through his task of expressing nature, but also in some sense as belonging to this hierarchy of orders of natural beings.
▶︎ 6:41 And Benjamin uses a somewhat peculiar expression. He speaks of nature in the human to express this belonging of human beings to nature. Nature in the human rather than human nature, which would be the more obvious expression because as we saw earlier, the analysis of the place of man in nature results in the claim that man has no essence or nature in the same way as other beings have an essence or nature. Man is given a task. But he nevertheless belongs to nature and therefore the problems of expression and as well as the abandoning of that task bear directly on his form of life, on his belonging to nature, on what we think of as the struggles of natural life in the human space of existence.
▶︎ 7:56 So what would it be to think of this problem of fulfillment of meaning or fall from that task in the space of human life? And I say, not only fulfillment, but also unfulfillment because much of what Benjamin discusses is first of all the forms of unfulfilled life, how human beings fail to realize, as it were, their life in meaning. Well, natural species, at least insofar as we think of them biologically, are such that the unfulfilled is an exception. So usually natural beings, animals grow and become an exemplar of their species.
▶︎ 8:54 But when we think of human life for Benjamin, I would say unfulfillment is something like the norm or, as it were, the initial condition from which we have to start thinking about the struggles of human life. And the essay Fate and Character precisely provides us with this initial elaboration, this natural dimension within human existence and the struggles as well as forms of release from that suffering that is unique to us humans.
▶︎ 9:35 Now, take the title Fate and Character. In it, we have, on the one hand, what I would call the characterization of the guilt of life as such, which will be manifest as fate, as well as something which we'd call the innocence of life, which Benjamin is going to explicate through the notion of character. So on the one hand, natural guilt, on the other, natural innocence.
▶︎ 10:11 Of course, we'll have to distinguish natural guilt and natural innocence from various notions of being guilty because of action you did, because breaking the law, all those things which we associate with the social idea of being guilty. Here we're talking about original sin in some sense, so some very fundamental sense of guilt and innocence.
▶︎ 10:41 And Benjamin also identifies two forms of art that for him take up precisely those two poles of guilt and innocence. The one is tragedy, which deals with fate and a certain kind of guilt, that, as we also said, I think, in one of the last lecture, a guilt that precedes something like the offense. And the other would be comedy, which for Benjamin is the genre, the form of art that expresses or make manifest in the best way natural innocence. We'll think of some examples maybe later.
▶︎ 11:35 Now this already makes clear that the first task for Benjamin in this essay would be to bring apart the spheres of fate and character, that is natural guilt and natural innocence. Take them apart because often we tend to connect them, to link them together. Or at least that's what Benjamin claims regarding the modern conception of the relation of fate and character. So let's start by laying out this modern conception which he's going to criticize.
▶︎ 12:15 The modern view of the relation of those two concepts, fate and character, can be characterized as follows. If we have knowledge of the character of the person on the one hand, and knowledge of all the external situations that this person will find themself in, then it will be possible to predict how they will act, react, and so on in every such situation. Thus, in that kind of very broad sense, we could predict their fate. So character on this view would be a psychological category identified with some stable complex of beliefs, desires, and so on. And the world that faces the person would be considered in terms of facts, events, causality, and so on as determined completely.
▶︎ 13:31 Now, when there are various occurrences that impinge on this person in the line of life, they would react in recognizably typical ways according to their characters, according to this complex of motives, desires, fears, whatever. And fate would then be this line of life that is a result of the meeting of the inner and outer, understood causally, deterministically, and so on. Of course, part of our worldview would be that you can maybe have a complete analysis of the psychology of a person, call it the inner, but it would be, of course, hopeless to gather knowledge of all possible events that would impinge on that person in the path of life. And therefore, it would be logically possible to predict a person's fate if you only knew what he would encounter. But in fact, it's not something possible. It's not a real possibility.
▶︎ 15:06 Now, when Benjamin wants to challenge this notion of character, the first thing he needs to do is shift from the language of causality and determination to the language he prefers, as we saw, which is the language of meaning or significance. The authentic concepts of fate and characters are to be understood through the sphere of meaning and actually to be distinguished thereby from one another, rather than linked as in the modern conception. So the first thing would be to say character is not a psychological category. Psychology is always a complex of motivations, desire, and so on. Character, Benjamin would say, is inherently one, and we have to think of it as prior, logically prior to the multiplicity of desires and psychological features of a person. It is, as it were, the ground underlying all the manifold manifestations or expressions that character would have in the life of a person.
▶︎ 16:37 For sure, we don't have access to our character. Our character is not something we can reveal through introspection that would make it, again, a psychological category. Rather, we want to say, if at all our character is revealed in time, so to speak, a posteriori, rather through how we start finding, let's say, a pattern, some coherence in all the multiplicity of things we do. We reflect, as it were, on whatever happens to us, whatever we desire, whatever we encounter and react to, and start seeing that all these manifestations can be grounded in one unity, which is now slowly revealed as our unchanging character.
▶︎ 17:39 I think there are moments in life that you feel like, gosh, it's not anything new what I'm doing now. It's just myself all over again. I know that something like that has been me forever in different variations. And it is this sense of character as some kind of primal ground of all those manifestations through life which Benjamin aims at when he wants to develop this notion.
▶︎ 18:13 We have discussions of character in that way in philosophy, in various places. Kant has the notion of an intelligible character, which is a notion he uses in the context of morality, but it also has this kind of simplicity, rigor, stability, and so on. Schopenhauer speaks of character a bit in that way, in order to attack various views of free choice, as it were, as what guides human action. Human life is the expression of that will, that ground which we now call character. And Benjamin goes with this way of understanding the standpoint through which we recognize character.
▶︎ 19:12 Of course, as we say, character can manifest itself in different ways, in different circumstances. But we can also say that it can manifest itself with different intensity in life. So all of us, in a way, have their character, but there are people that you can see the character, so to speak, on their sleeves. It's constantly manifest. They're just almost not an individual, a complex individual. They're a type. Whatever circumstance, you feel like they will have a way of behaving that turns this circumstance as to an occasion for expressing their very typical character.
▶︎ 20:17 So that in some sense, and we'll return to it when we discuss character towards the end of the lecture, for those people, the distinction between inner and outer is blurred. It's as though they are in a world that fits their character because they react always in such a way that expresses their character to whatever circumstance they find themselves in. We will see that this indifference, I would call it, of inner and outer, which we start recognizing with this initial discussion of character, will also be something we find in the other pole, that is the manifestation of fate, for instance, in tragedy.
▶︎ 21:22 Let's now shift from this initial discussion of character to the other notion that's extremely important in this essay, namely that of fate. Fate is often used to refer to the suffering of a person which, in a sense, is not meted by human hand, but as it were, through the agency of the world itself. Job would be one example we might think of. But we feel like we need to find a meaning to this suffering that the world brings on us, and therefore we say, "Well, it's a kind of punishment." Fate is associated with a punishment, but of course, it's not the kind of punishment you get when you break human law.
▶︎ 22:28 Therefore, the feeling is, well, it has to do with the wrongdoing directed at God or at the gods. It's a punishment for a guilt of a completely different kind, not a guilt that has to do with our existence among other human beings, but as it were, with what is above. And that would make it a category of religion, let's say.
▶︎ 23:02 Now, Benjamin, I think, wants to challenge that understanding of fate as well. And he has different ways of bringing out why that cannot be right. He says, for instance, that if we have a coherent notion of the guilt of a person for offending God or something higher, through their action, then we also need to have a notion of innocence that corresponds to it, that belongs to the same space. But he says there's no such thing as having innocence as one's fate. Fate is always guilt. There's no reward of fate.
▶︎ 23:57 We speak of fortune, and it's an interesting distinction, fate and fortune. And we'll see that character of comedy is how to think correctly of the fortunate, the world of the fortunate. But fate knows only guilt. There's no good fate, and as Benjamin remarks, what is as maybe the fundamental distinction between the human life and the life of the gods, let's say, the Olympian gods, their blissfulness, is that in some way they're not subjected to fate. There is a notion in Greek mythology of Moira, which even the gods are subjected to. But at least in the sense in which we want to speak of fate, gods are one with themselves. They're not subject to fate. They're almost comic characters in that sense.
▶︎ 25:00 Benjamin speaks of the guilt of life, fate as related to the guilt of life, as something that is more fundamental than the kind of guilt that is associated with this or that act in life. It's, as we said, natural guilt. In some sense, we could say fate is the character of finite human life, and it is a background of this mere life which one's action can make visible, precipitate, but it is basically a form of unrealized existence or being in the world.
▶︎ 26:02 So fate would not be attributed to someone, to an individual, but it's a mode of being in the world. It's a mode of being which can be a mode of being of an individual, but also for Benjamin of a collective. It's some form of, as we said before, characteristic of unrealized life.
▶︎ 26:32 Now, we do speak of fateful moments. The sense that something happened and determined my fate. If only that didn't happen, everything would be fine. And Benjamin says that those fateful moments exist only in bad novels. We don't want to say fate has to do with a chance event, an encounter, and so on.
▶︎ 27:09 Fate is the condition which is precipitated by those encounters. It's not as though if I only did not do this, my life would be different. When you live in an environment with this characteristic of fate, there will be no lack of occasions to precipitate the suffering. Think for a moment of
▶︎ 27:45 Unhappy relationships. People would tend to say, "You did this. That's why I react in this way." And the other person said, "No, you did this, and that's why I hate you now," and so on and so forth. And it seems like the problem is not this or that, it's the whole way of living that relationship, and the this and that are just occasions for everything to come to the surface. It's something like that should be our conception of the space of guilt and fate. You are in it and small things can just provoke fate and bring it to the surface and create those catastrophes in human life.
▶︎ 28:46 Benjamin's essay also identifies a form of art, namely tragedy, as one of the most powerful expressions of what it means to exist in a field of fate, and how the sacrifice of the tragic hero or heroine allows one to, or allows them to raise their head above this cursed space of fate. Let us try to understand that and along the way, address this presupposition we have, namely that fate is something like determinism in human existence. You sort of have a fate, then it works inexorably and you end up at a certain place, usually with a catastrophe. But somehow we tend to think that means determinism in human life.
▶︎ 29:55 Now, with Benjamin, I want to say fate is the character of unrealized life, of mere life, that's another famous expression of him, as a state which lacks precisely expression, determination, and so on. It's an ambiguous mode of existence in the world. Almost the opposite of determinism that's precise and so on. I maybe give again the example of the unhappy couple. Let me try to describe it in the following way. They live a contradiction. Their common existence includes, as it were, contradictory demands on each other or on their life together.
▶︎ 31:08 And yet one can live a contradiction without it becoming manifest and visible. Whenever a problem occurs on one side, you say, "Well, that's local," and you avoid it, and you're led to the other side of the contradiction after many days, and then suddenly a problem occurs there, and you say, "No, no, that's, let's not face it and avoid it," and continue in some kind of eternal return, let's call it, of this unrealized, ambiguous, form of existence, existence in a contradiction without realizing it. This is, as it were, a form of what Benjamin means as existing in a field of fate, in ambiguous, unrealized life.
▶︎ 32:09 Now, what's central to the tragic hero or the tragic heroine is precisely that they make visible, they make manifest that contradiction which other people can suffer from without realizing it. So it's as though they live in a society, in a form of life which has contradictory demands on them. But they're not avoiding those demands. They're rather bringing them together, as it were, gathering those two sides of ambiguous existence in their own person, of course, through tremendous suffering, and thereby make ambiguity, as Benjamin puts it, into paradox, visible paradox. Not that they have a solution for that, but they show, let's say, others that this existence is cursed. You just go around in circle. You don't solve anything. You just live those contradiction and bring upon yourself the suffering over and over again.
▶︎ 33:37 Antigone would be the best example of a tragedy, which is described indeed as a conflict between two laws, the law of the state and the law or the laws of the gods. And this is obvious there is some kind of conflict, some kind of contradiction there. But I think the point should be that Antigone has the strength to go all the way, to show, as it were, to bring to a clash those opposites which might be there all the time in various forms.
▶︎ 34:20 There's this occasion in which there's the need to bury her brother according to divine law, and there is the prohibition by Creon, not to bury the enemy. And so this occasion might be something that you say, "Well, let's avoid it." That's probably Ismene, Antigone's sister's way of being. But Antigone has the force, the strength to bring this contradiction to a head, to make it completely visible and to bring catastrophic consequences upon herself. But thereby showing something about the space of life, about this condition of fate, and in a sense, arresting it, arresting that ambiguity, and calling for a higher form of existence in which that paradox does not rule anymore.
▶︎ 35:39 There's something to say about the different forms in which this kind of logic of tragedy, this move from ambiguity to catastrophic determinness, is connected with a heroic stance, with the stance of the tragic hero or heroine. We could speak of Oedipus in those terms. But I think, at this point, what might be best is to move from tragedy to comedy, from the space of fate to that of character.
▶︎ 36:23 Maybe before that, let me add one more thing about this notion of fate, and this is the relation between fate and the law. That is the law of the state. If fate is understood as a certain space of life, existence in which ambiguity rules, as we said, then we might think that the law introduces determinacy into life. You do that, you get punished in that way. Everything becomes clear. There's no more sense of a space in which there are occasions for fate to gather itself on your person.
▶︎ 37:21 So in a way, we might think there is an opposition between this condition which precipitates tragedy and this modern space of life in which everything is clear, in which you have laws, in which we have determinate boundaries, and you know what will happen when you cross them. But Benjamin says, no, actually, there is a way in which law can be an instrument of fate. That is, it would be a way to perpetuate this form of unrealized life.
▶︎ 38:13 This kind of relation between fate, or what Benjamin also calls the mythical, and law, this kind of strange alliance between fate and the law is one of the main issues in a very famous essay of Benjamin entitled Critique of Violence, which has been subjected to many interpretations and controversies, and in which appears a term that is also central to fate and character, namely the notion of bare or mere life. So what we're saying basically is that mere life is unrealized life. It is life that has the characteristics of existing in the world in a space where fate rules or where the mythical rules. Law is not the opposite of this mythical space of fate. It can actually sustain the presence of fate and the suffering it brings in our life.
▶︎ 39:41 And it will be part of Benjamin's aim to show us that modern life, let's say in the Arcades Project, is a space in which fate rules. It's modern existence, it's various ways in which we think of human beings in city, in the crowd, with those dreams of bourgeois existence. But part of the point of Benjamin's discussion of fate is indeed to show that this is not something we should recognize only in the tragedy of Sophocles and Aeschylus and so on, but also in the space of modern life.
▶︎ 40:42 Let's speak a little bit about character or what we called natural innocence as opposed to fate, which is the space of natural guilt. For Benjamin, character is a spiritual unity of life. It is a form of expressing natural spiritual innocence. It is not just as fate is, it is not a moral notion, innocence, or concept of innocence before the law and so on. It's really natural innocence, which we want to express through this non-moral aspect of character.
▶︎ 41:43 And Benjamin shows we find those characters mainly in comedies. They're often scoundrels, misanthropes, misers, if we think here of the characters of Moliere's comedies. And what characterizes them primarily is the absence of psychological complication. They are simple because they embody a very determinate and clear trait of character.
▶︎ 42:29 We think of ourselves often as having this space in which we reflect, we think about how to lead our life. We have all those conflicts in our lives, which form part of how we decide and choose and so on, various motivations. This is all the inner space of a normal person, the struggles to live happily and in the right way. And in some sense, Benjamin says, when you think of character and when you think of comic characters, there's no such space. That's precisely the strength of character. They're completely unified, completely simple.
▶︎ 43:32 They are, as I put it before, types. There's something about the embodiment of a type which of course seem to go against various notions we have of authenticity, of seeing our way of thinking of a mature life as complex and so on. But what Benjamin wants to show with this notion of natural innocence is that there's something like a release from fate, from complexity, from self entanglement in this simple form of existence, which is the existence of a person of character.
▶︎ 44:25 So a character is a type, we want to say. There's some kind of anonymity to character. Anonymity insofar as we don't think here of a singular individual, of a special individual, of someone who lives his own life. We think of the miser, the misanthrope, Chaplin, to take an example that Benjamin liked a lot and wrote about. This is not a complex or psychologically complex human being. There's some simplicity there. There's some naiveté. There's what we might call the figure of a fool even.
▶︎ 45:25 But through that simple existence, certain freedom from fate opens up, from the entanglements and ambiguities of fate. And in a way, Benjamin wants to say we might be tempted to think of a person of a determinate character as being locked up in something like a narrow and determinate way of reacting to things in life. You always think like a miser. Whatever occasion, you're going to approach it through that trait of character that is yours. And in that sense, we might think, well, this is not release. This is not freedom. This is, on the contrary, some way of thinking of determination.
▶︎ 46:31 But for Benjamin, this rigor and this determination, what he calls the affinity of character to logic, this apparent lack of freedom is actually the highest form of release. Release from what is the most problematic mode of being, the guilt of fate, the existence in a space that is ambiguous. Character is unambiguous. You always get, as it were, the expression of the character, whatever circumstance. And therefore, there's an immense freedom in simplification, as though the most problematic aspect of our being unfree is the fact that we're completely entangled in ourselves. And that's precisely what cannot be happening to the simpleton, to the character that has this very simple way of existence.
▶︎ 47:55 We talked about the way in which character problematizes the distinction between inner and outer. And I think that becomes clearer now. It's as though no character is turned to the outside, first of all, because you don't think of the inner space, the psychology, the inner struggle, the reflection. There's just this way of being in the world.
▶︎ 48:29 Benjamin describes it as radiant in a way. And it feels like when you have a person of very strong character, something about his environment comes with them. It's as though they have a space that their character lights up, a certain color that they give to all their interactions, a way in which the person of character has a world tailored to their measures. Not necessarily a happy world. They can fail constantly.
▶︎ 49:12 That's one way in which Benjamin characterizes Chaplin's character. Constantly fails, but constantly jumps on his feet and continues. And somehow all the interactions are Chaplin's world. Whatever, whoever he meets, whoever he interacts with, that interaction receives the color of this very strong and simple way of being.