Peter Fenves (Evanston)

On a Second Program from the Coming Philosophy: Benjamin, Truth, and Epistemic Diversity

The starting point for this presentation lies in Benjamin’s attempt to write a habilitation-thesis on the theme of “language and logic.”  The original framework for the pursuit of this theme collapsed when Benjamin re-read Heidegger’s habilitation-thesis. Starting anew, Benjamin conceives a new framework that revolves around a formal distinction between knowing (Wissen) and cognition (Erkenntnis): whereas the latter, associated with logic, is subject to critique, the former, correspondingly associated with language, is to be prompted in the diversity of its equally valid kinds.  The language-and-logic theme thus develops into a philosophical program that, in contrast to the earlier “Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie,” is principally concerned with a certain concept of truth.  Prompted by the prospect of habilitating in Heidelberg, Benjamin’s second attempt to elaborate this theme culminates in the claim that there must be a “pure type”—the term derives from Max Weber—of what he calls “theoretical knowing.”  Prompted, in turn, by Max Scheler’s Cologne-based program for an anti-positivist sociology of knowledge, Benjamin specifies the core “kinds of knowing” and adds a hybrid kind, which represents a transformation of “theoretical knowing”— and with it, the very idea of philosophy.  The presentation concludes with a description of why and how the second program for the coming philosophy goes underground, so much so that at the end of the habilitation-thesis Benjamin eventually writes, a kind of knowing that proudly denies its kind-wise diversity (“bloßes Wissen”) forms the infrastructure of hell.

Peter Fenves is the author of several books, including The Messianic Reduction, and co-editor of two Benjamin translations, Toward the Critique of Violence and On Goethe.