Invited seminar for the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies Reading morning, 22nd November 2023 at the Institut für Jüdische Philosophie und Religion, Hamburg Universität, Hamburg, Germany.
Walter Benjamin, Theory of Experience
In the years between 1913-1916 Benjamin develops a first shape of his Theory of Experience, strictly related to both his Theory of Language (On the Language as Such and on the Language of Humans, 1916), his aesthetic studies (Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, 1915), and to his political activism.
In 1912 the philosopher enrolled at the Friburg University, in the Philology Department. Among others, he attended the courses of the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert. At the same time, he was an activist in the German Youth Movement, in the group led by Gustav Wyneken. The Youth Movement contained elements ranging from pacifism and idealism to nationalism and anti-semitic conservatorism. Wyneken’s group was a small progressist and idealist intellectual elite, devoted to the reform of academia and bourgeois culture. According to Scholem, Benjamin was one of the intellectual leaders of this group.
In the essay ironically called “Erfahrung”, Benjamin criticizes the bourgeois concept of experience as a repetition of the same which has lost the authentic connection to the Geist. To this he opposes an idea of authentic experience, typical of Youth. In 1914’s Metaphysics of Youth, the proper experience of youth is linked to the possibility of true communication and to the origin of language.
The Reading will be dedicated to explore the oppositions between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, the dialectic between possibility and impossibility of experience and communication, the sceptical elements of his theory and the relations to some concepts from Jewish Mysticism – particularly, from Kabbalah.
Texts
W. Benjamin, “Experience”, 1913
W. Benjamin, Metaphysics of Youth, 1914
Photographer: Julian Hochgesang (2021)
Caterina Diotto 