Images of history : Kant, Benjamin, freedom, and the human subject

257 Pages·2016·1.689 MB·English

by  Eldridge, Richard

IMAGES OF HISTORY

IMAGES OF HISTORY
Kant, Benjamin, Freedom, and the Human Subject
Richard Eldridge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eldridge, Richard Thomas, 1953- author.
Title: Images of history : Kant, Benjamin, freedom, and the human subject /
Richard Eldridge.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Oxford University Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049046 | ISBN 9780190605322 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190605339 (ebook (updf)) | ISBN 9780190619855 (ebook (epub)) |
ISBN 9780190605346 (online content)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical anthropology. | History–Philosophy. | Kant,
Immanuel, 1724-1804. | Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940.
Classification: LCC BD450 .E3935 2016 | DDC 128.092/2–dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049046
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To my teachers, and in memory of Ted Cohen
Austin, in a seminar discussion at Harvard in 1955, once com-
pared the role of intending with the role of headlights (on a min-
er’s helmet? on an automobile?) … An implication he may have
had in mind is that driving somewhere (getting something done
intentionally) does not on the whole happen by hanging a pair of
headlights from your shoulders, sitting in an armchair, picking up
an unattached steering wheel, and imagining a destination… .
Much else has to be in place— further mechanisms and systems
(transmission, fuel, electrical), roads, the industries that produce
and are produced by each, and so on––in order for headlights and
a steering wheel to do their work, even to be what they are. Even
if some theorists speak as though intention were everything there
is to meaning, is that a sensible reason for opposite theorists to
assert that intention is nothing, counts for nothing in meaning? Is
W. C. Fields our only alternative to Humpty Dumpty?
—S tanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary
CONTENTS
Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
1. Introduction: Historical Understanding
and Human Action  1
2. Kant’s Conjecturalism  44
3. Cultivating the Ethical Commonwealth:
Kant’s Religion and Reason in History  75
4. Benjamin’s Modernism  102
5. Modernist- Materialist Criticism and Human
Possibility: Benjamin’s One-W ay Street
and Traces of Free Life  150
6. Self-U nity and History  179
Notes  193
Bibliography  221
Index  233
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PREFACE
Like many philosophy books, this is a book about how to think about
ourselves and our commitments— how to get a grip on ourselves—
in a new way, both in engagement with current circumstances of life
and with some critical distance on them. At this level of generality
and ambition, philosophers often seem compelled to begin again if
their work is to count for anything at all in a distinctively philosoph-
ical way, so that they are driven to reinvent or rediscover methods
for articulating what has gone essentially wrong, both in philoso-
phy and in life, and for how it might be addressed. As Nietzsche put
it in one memorable passage in which he undertook to re- found the
subject and to separate himself from other philosophers,
You ask me what are all the idiosyncrasies of the philoso-
phers? . . . For one thing, their lack of historical sense, their
hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They
think they are doing a thing an honour when they dehistori-
cize it, sub specie aeterni— when they make a mummy of it.
All that philosophers have been handling for thousands of
years is conceptual mummies; nothing real has ever left their
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