“History without literature and philosophy is chronicle; literature without history and philosophy is amusement; philosophy without history and literature is empty” (190). It is through a consideration of the imbrication of history, literature, and philosophy that Richard Eldridge situates his discussion of the possibility of freedom afforded the human subject in relation to both modern social institutions, as well as the idealized institutions conceivable in the Kantian imaginary. More precisely, Eldridge’s text responds to the question “[h]ow are we [to] … best develop and pursue historically a moral image of the world?” (43). The two-sided nature of Eldridge’s question as both development and pursuit accounts for his turning to two philosophers that Eldridge himself admits are strikingly different: Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin.
Beginning with Kant, on whom he has written and published extensively, Eldridge broaches the question of the development of a moral image by asking what the role of ideals are in the conceiving of history (2). The answer that Eldridge develops is based in part on the distinction that Robert B. Louden makes between Kant’s ‘pure’ and ‘impure ethics’ (79). This distinction foregrounds that ideals, in the form of the Kantian a priori, only tell half of the story and that a pure rational ethics is incomplete. Indeed, for Kant, impure ethics complement and actualize pure ethics in concrete social institutions, such as the “visible church” of religion in the example Eldridge provides (92). In providing an account of Kantian impure ethics, Eldridge’s reading of Kant goes far beyond the three critiques and into Kant’s anthropological texts, writings on religion, and of course his views on history, which, as Eldridge explains, is for Kant “a process of conflict-ridden but continuing transition … according to the claims of universal reason” (94).
Kant’s progressive, and decidedly positive, view of history is in stark contrast to Benjamin’s in whom Eldridge locates the answer as to the pursuit of a moral image of the world. In other words, for Eldridge, where Kant develops an ideal towards which we must strive, it is in Benjamin that the means of pursuing this ideal can be found. More specifically, “[r]ather than being the product of reasonable, instrumental calculation,” such as the Kantian pure ethics, for Benjamin, a meaningful relationship to history “can only be acquired through the cultivation of Anschaulichkeit” (104). Anschualichkeit is a concept that Eldridge reads Benjamin as borrowing from Friedrich Hölderlin, and is “a critical intuitive discernment of a possibility of action that is disclosed in an encounter with a material cultural object within the frame of social-historical life” which is to say that Anshualichkeit takes place in empirical material experience rather than as a product of abstract reasoning (104). Hölderlin is one of three German thinkers that Eldridge interprets as having specifically influenced Benjamin, the others being Kant and Johann Goethe. Eldridge goes on to credit Kant with providing Benjamin with the concept of critique, and Goethe with the notion of a daemonic nature respectively. Importantly, the Benjaminian Anschualichkeit, as intuitive attentiveness, can be produced by literature, which “is not only a beginning, middle and (tragic) end … but also the effort at attention on the part of a reflective subject, the author (as a model for the reader’s attentions) likewise caught amid the strife of life” (130). Eldridge develops this notion of literary attention in his reading of Benjamin’s One-Way Street wherein he identifies “an essential continuity … between the work of the poet composing experiences … and the work of the critic-philosopher composing experiences of literary works, historical events, or material cultural artifacts in order to bring an orienting Lehre [teaching] into partial articulation” (141). The continuity Eldridge perceives between the poet-writer and critic-philosopher establishes a relation that is imperfect by virtue of only being able to reach partial articulation, and is meant as a contrast to the relation that Kant conceives of as existing between pure and impure ethics in his philosophical system.
Eldridge’s book, which is composed of an introduction, two chapters on Kant and Benjamin respectively, and a conclusion, offers as a final argument a comparison of the relation between the development and pursuit of a moral image and the relation a subject has towards the language that s/he speaks. Quoting Stanley Cavell, Eldridge writes, “[t]o learn language is to enter into a norm-governed, self-sustaining, evolving, somewhat socially distributed, and nowhere absolutely fixed practice of responsiveness and responsibility” (187). In regarding language learning as a balancing act between norm-governance and constant evolution, Eldridge draws it in parallel to an image of history that takes the best from Kant’s idealism and Benjamin’s materialism.
The strength of Eldridge’s book lies in his ability to synthesize two drastically different bodies of work into a mostly coherent whole. Several times Eldridge is careful to point out moments where Kant’s and Benjamin’s schools of thought are incompatible, but this manifests itself most clearly in the conclusion wherein Eldridge introduces both Cavell and Sigmund Freud to interpret the balance of idealism and materialism he has drawn from his reading of Kant and Benjamin. That Eldridge’s argument takes this turn is not damaging, but the lack of an explicit dialogue between Kant and Benjamin in the conclusion is noticeable. Having said this, Eldridge’s individual treatment of Kant and Benjamin is excellent. In particular, Eldridge provides a strong account of the relation between Benjamin’s early theologically inflected work and his later materialist thinking, a feature of his work that is commonly under- or even unanalyzed in critical commentaries. Those interested in understanding the larger implications of Kant’s critical project outside of the individual subject, or in a more philosophical, rather than literary, interpretation of Benjamin will find Eldridge’s book highly useful, clearly written, and persuasively argued.
