Philosophy at Its Origin: Walter Benjamin's Prologue to the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels

Already in one of his early lectures, “The Idea of Natural History,”¹ Adorno emphasized how radical the turn was that Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama had brought about in the philosophy of history. Presented to the Kantgesellschaft at Frankfurt in 1932, ² Adorno’s lecture polemicized against the conception of history dominant in contemporary philosophical schools, notably in phenomenology and Heidegger’s new ontology. Criticizing their inability to come to a dialectical conception of nature and history, Adorno set it as the lecture’s program to introduce what he called a fundamental “ontological transformation of the philosophy of history.” ³ The lecture first sketched the development from Max Scheler’s early phenomenology, which still remained grafted onto the Platonic dualism between a static realm of immutable Ideas and historical contingency, to the shift introduced by Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), whose concept of ‘historicity’ recognized the inextricable entwining of nature and history. But by turning historicity into an existential structure and by anchoring the new ontology in a hermeneutics of meaning (Sinn), Heidegger’s philosophy inadvertently remained hampered by the subjectivistic assumptions of transcendental philosophy. Instead, it was Benjamin’s study of the baroque Trauerspiel, which, in focusing on the decay and transience of natural history (Naturgeschichte), had initiated the turn to a fundamentally different, anti-idealistic form of history. By suggesting that history and nature were commensurable in the moment of transience that marked both, the Trauerspielbuch, Adorno contended, had annulled the idealistic antithesis between history and necessity, human freedom and nature. Welding together nature and history, ‘natural history’ obviated the traditional aporias between both, pointing instead to their originary dialectical interplay. Moreover, the Trauerspielbuch renounced the conception of a reality saturated with meaning, turning instead to a reified, alienated world and to the facies hippocratica of history, whose figure was allegory. Indeed, in Benjamin’s semiotics of allegory and in his practice of reading the ruins of history, Adorno recognized a revolutionary departure from the transcendental legacy that still implicitly informed Heidegger’s hermeneutics.

With this philosophical assessment of Benjamin’s Habilitationsschrift, Adorno was among the few who early on identified its radical implications. However, while Benjamin’s theory of allegory in its anti-systematic, anti-idealistic force has since found general acceptance and applications, the study’s epistemo-critical prologue (erkenntniskritische Vorrede) by contrast has often been regarded as hermetic or arcane. Meant as a decisive contribution to the methodological debates that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Benjamin’s introduction advanced a “Platonic theory of science,” ⁴ eine platonisch auf Darstellung der Wesenheiten gerichtete Wissenschaftstheorie (O 40; GS I.1., 221), which was to provide the foundation for philosophy, the philosophy of history and philosophical aesthetics. But when seen from a contemporary perspective, the prologue’s return to Plato’s doctrine of Ideas, which it called “philosophy at its origin”⁵ (O 30; GS I.1, 209), must seem not so much untimely as curiously out of time as the entry to a study that would come to be regarded as one of the cornerstones of modernity. Nor is it readily apparent how such a return to Platonism could be reconciled with a radically new philosophy of history—a point already made by an early critic who saw in what he considered to be Benjamin’s “Pseudoplatonism,” “the most dangerous malady that can befall anyone who deals with historical matters either ex professo or out of his own inclination.” ⁶

In light of these apparent contradictory moments, which seem to divide the prologue from the main study, the following analysis proposes to return to the prologue of the Trauerspielbuch in order more closely to examine the conception of history it offers. In particular, I will examine to what degree Benjamin intended to provide a fundamental critique of contemporary theories of history and their roots in subject philosophy by means of the introduction of two new historical categories, namely, those of the ‘origin’ and ‘natural history’ (natürliche Geschichte). ⁷ For although the prologue circles back to Plato, it cannot...