Walter Benjamin’s views art as a linguistic phenomenon that reveals the unity between subject and object. According to Benjamin, it is in art that the distinction between Nature and Freedom is denied and overcome.
Kantians and positivists (if one can really make a distinction between the two) typically understand the datum as something independent, as an element completely alien to the subject. The datum is absolute in itself.
Any worldview, any interpretation of the world, is necessarily a consequence of the apprehension of these data. Concrete material becomes concrete thought in a unidirectional movement; the subject is limited to playing the role of a very powerful structuring and information processing machine.
Experience is the only link that unites these two irreconcilable elements – object and subject – but it remains incapable of resolving the conflict between the two. Experience is the definitive disruption between the conceived and the concept. It marks victory over a philosophy of resonance, a Spinozian philosophy, where the organic unity between object and subject is concrete, not abstract.
Moreover, the necessarily external relation exposed by Kantians and positivists is the counterpart of a process of interiorisation. Thus, the object is external to the subject not because it is independent of the subject, but because it is ontologically independent: it exists prior to being apprehended by the subject. Therefore, the laws of both subject and object are independent and prior to their mutual relation.
Such an understanding of the world is metaphysical, idealistic; de facto, it rejects any material basis for knowledge of the world while denying its possible transformation. That is why the Kantian subject is nothing other than a transcendental subject in the full sense of the word (although any reader of Kant will immediately bellow: “There is no full sense of ‘transcendental’ in Kant!”)
Walter Benjamin discovers in the Kantian cognising subject a contradictory figure. Indeed, it was difficult not to discover it when Kant had been criticised for more than a century!
Benjamin acknowledges the merit of Kant’s transcendental contribution, i.e., Kant’s account of the subject as a necessary and conditioning element of experience. For Benjamin, however, this is an incomplete, static conception. Benjamin blames Kant for still reproducing an empiricist conception of experience, i.e., a conception of the datum as an absolute in and of itself. (This idea of the unattainable thing-in-itself is generally alien to Benjamin – although he sometimes falls into its clutches – and will be the object of criticism along other philosophical lines.)
Turning away from Kant, Benjamin proposes to recover the Spinozian inheritance. It is experience understood as a linguistic[1] phenomenon that allows us to see experience in its liveliness and mobility, in its fullness. We could safely say that Benjamin’s thought was based on a sort of symphonic dance between natura naturans (the active power of Nature) and natura naturata (the world of natural things), sometimes guided by the figure of the messiah.
Thus, Benjamin came to the conclusion that it was necessary to eliminate, to overcome, the distinction so strongly emphasised by previous philosophies between Nature and Freedom, or, what he saw as the same thing, between causal mechanism and moral will. This distinction means that it is impossible to embrace Freedom within the realm of Nature. Nature becomes a realm of oppression, contrary to that romantic perception of the locus amoenus. On the other hand, Freedom becomes a state (or an attribute) that exists in spite of –and not because of– Nature.
Benjamin disagrees with this view that makes the relationship between Nature and Freedom analogous to that between object and subject. Indeed, the subject appears in itself as free or oriented to freedom, requiring liberation from its natural aspect, liberation from the object. Benjamin proposes to arrive at a unification between Nature and Freedom, between causality and morality, that would allow him to comprehend natural freedom and free nature, the nature of Freedom and the freedom of Nature.
It is at this point that we begin to discover the deep roots of the messiah in Benjamin’s philosophy. Although in his early works on art the messiah did not make an appearance, there the eruption of morality as an act of freedom that interrupts the mechanical course of nature is a germ of the historical role of the messiah. Benjamin focused on the moment-now, the absolute, metaphysical atomisation of time. In the philosophy of the young Benjamin, this absolutisation appears first and foremost to be linked not to time itself, but to things themselves, to their natural form. The final condition or the highest metaphysical state – similar to the Hegelian Absolute – is not the end of history, but an immanent state of perfection capable of showing itself at any moment.
A moment of liberation is thus produced in art. At times this moment of liberation seems to be, for Benjamin, a condition of liberation. In art the linguistic relationship between subject and object is fully discovered; it is in art that Nature and Freedom form one and the same being. At its best, art is the path that leads to that metaphysical idea of perfection, to that absolute. Art has a propensity to destroy external structures, extracting true internal content.
Each work of art contains its own criteria, its own ways of transforming the world, which depend on the work itself; it becomes a subjective formation independent of the author. An artwork obtains its critical capacity at the moment it is composed. This capacity does not follow from the life or personality of its creator, but from the resemblance the artwork bears to life itself. An artwork materializes the dialectical unity between the expressible (as mimetic capacity) and the inexpressible. Only in this way can a work of art become a discursive expression.
We see, then, how in the early Benjamin some of the ideas that would later be key to his concept of history begin to appear, such as discursivity, the actualisation of being, and the syntactic unity between object and subject (or between Nature and Freedom).
[1] When I speak of this relation as a linguistic one, I mean that the connection established between the subject and object resembles the one usually established between these terms within the realm of language, of grammar if you will. That is, a relations that is essentially external but finds unity in its synthesis as discourse. In discourse, this relation unfolds and is loaded with content. The linguistic relation of the subject and object is dead until it is set in motion, until it becomes discursive. It is then that the object is discovered in all its expressions as forms of the subject (as its predicate, as its attribute, as its circumstance, etc.); the subject sheds the indeterminacy of the pronoun to become through the object, while the object only succeeds in overcoming the dispersion of its original form (as attribute, predicate, circumstantial complement, etc.) when that amorphous chaos is for the subject. However, I feel it necessary to comment that this does not mean that this is the way I defend that the subject-object relationship should be understood, but rather that this is how I believe Walter Benjamin understood it.
