7 - Benjamin and the ambiguities of Romanticism

Summary

When the young Benjamin finally decides, in 1917, to jettison Kant for the Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis as the topic for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berne, the choice reflects no arbitrary shift of interest. Benjamin had already been struggling to rescue Kant's thought from what he perceived to be its fatal slide into scientific positivism in the hands of the neo-Kantians of his time. Whether it was the failure of this rescue or another reason (according to a letter from Benjamin to Scholem, it was the “very unpleasant” experience of finally getting around to reading the philosophy of history expressed in Kant's essays on “Ideas for a Universal History” and “Perpetual Peace”), this shift toward the Romantics marks a clear break with the dominant philosophic thought of his day. Moreover, since this was a movement away from the various ideologies of progress espoused both by the neo-Kantians (and also used by one of them, Hermann Cohen, to justify the German war effort) and by the German youth movement with which Benjamin had been involved during the years preceding 1917, the stakes are immediately high.

If Benjamin’s renunciation of Kant during the war years is linked, at least in his own mind, to the conformism he sees implicit in the latter’s portrayal of history as an endless inexorable progress toward a pre-established goal – the “infinite task” – it is also crucially informs his rehabilitation of the Romanticism that flourished at Jena under the influence of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel in the late 1780s and early 1790s.