Esoteric context The problem of a tendency in democracies to self-annihilate their own
enfranchisement and constitutional principles of
legal equality by electing dictators in times of
anomie and cultural uncertainty looms in the background of Benjamin's considerations in the
Ursprung from before the major period of his intensive literature review of Baroque drama in 1923 until long after the book's tardy publication in 1928. Benjamin is ultimately agnostic on the question of democracy, displaying a mostly unstated and (one might almost say) a collegial or even ‘historically Jewish’ (according to the Nazi-jurist and legal theorist
Carl Schmitt, towards whom the book was directed as a counter-hex) Benjamin first addressed this issue in his
Critique of Violence, which examines—among other things—the paradox of living in Social Democracy where the constitution is suspended and martial law is declared so frequently that it constitutes an increasingly normative aspect of the functioning of the state. Carl Schmitt wrote his
Political Theology, in part, as a response to the provocation of this essay and the questions it raised. Schmitt is cited in the text of the
Ursprung, and producing an answer to his challenge seems to have preoccupied Benjamin in the construction of the major sections of the book. Benjamin sent the
Ursprung to Carl Schmitt as we know from his correspondence. Schmitt responded (insofar as he responded) to this second gauntlet thrown down by Benjamin several years later by legally formalizing the
Gleichschaltung, an institutional drive towards the Nazification of all German institutions and social forms (including family, church and schools in addition to every other institutional form like commerce etc.). Who won the argument is a question left open to readers of history, which is long (longer than the twelve years that the Third Reich lasted).
Post-metaphysical foreword As with the subtly
feinted diagonal to Nietzsche's
Birth of Tragedy in the title of the whole book (as above in the #Style & scope section), Benjamin's
Epistemo-Critical Prologue, likewise contains a lyrical or sonic reference to
Lenin's book on theoretical methodology under the heading
Materialism and Empirio-criticism.
Kracauer's summary of the Prologue Kracauer gives the most concise summary of the prologue, which appears in a book review of the
Ursprung shortly after it came out in print: The difference between traditional abstract thinking and Benjamin's manner of thinking is as follows: whereas the former drains the artifacts of their concrete plenitude, the latter burrows into the material thicket in order to unfold the dynamism at their core. [This method] accepts no generalities whatsoever, pursuing instead the unfolding manifestation of ideas in specific and really or presently perceived situations throughout history [where they ceaselessly evolve and never stabilize]. But since, for Benjamin, every idea is a
monad, the whole world seems to him to proffer itself in [the
holographic microcosm of] every presentation of such an idea. ‘The being that enters into it—the ideal with its previous and subsequent history—brings an abbreviated and darkened diagram of the rest of the
world of ideas riding upon the artifact and concealed in its own figure,’ as Benjamin explains. Benjamin was early on the train of cannabinoids, mescaline and more generally “winning youth to the revolution by chemical sacraments”
Epistemo-Critical Prologue vs Materialism and Empirio-criticism vs Being and Time Lenin's book on methodology,
Materialism and Empirio-criticism, recommends rationalist pragmatism, subordinate to Marxist revolutionary theory, in the reading of history and world events. Benjamin's
Epistemo-Critical Prologue moves in the opposite direction: contemplating the limitations of scientific representation, and its contingency in relation to metaphysically ethereal yet, nevertheless, determining forces. The terrain of awareness Benjamin tears open here anticipates
Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the
uncertainty principle and challenges proposed to our theory of knowledge presented in the
Theory of relativity. Benjamin's thoughts on these subjects anticipate
Werner Heisenberg and
Kurt Gödel. But he resorts to
Goethe rather than calculus. Benjamin's critique of the hard sciences is couched in the jargon of
aesthetics and
metaphysics. Rather than presenting itself as a mathematical or logical proof, it suggests itself here as a sensibility. Predating proofs by Heisenberg and Gödel, also predating the Theory of Relativity, it is no wonder that none of Benjamin's examiners knew what to make of this text. The main drive is that absolute statement is impossible in human language or any other system of human representation including the numerical. Thus by extrapolation, he suggests in the first few pages that
science is devoted to an impossible object or objective if it commits itself to the discovery of a
unified field theory of static principles, given that the wild transformation of words and ideas over time will ravage these notions as the years go by; furthermore, their eternal and temporally essential transformation in real time makes it impossible to establish such principles in the first place. From there the argument scales, iterates, qualifies and quickly recapitulates the development and relations of these dynamics throughout the history of western philosophy with particular emphasis on how they express themselves in the final, blood-drenched climax of the
Reformation, specially referred to as the
Baroque, for the next forty pages or so. In terms of its epistemological and metaphysical claim (and not the specific historical substance his method addresses itself to), Benjamin's prologue later finds provisionally inferred support in
Albert Einstein's introduction to
Bertrand Russell's book on
Theory of Knowledge which awkwardly and agreeably logs an objection to the main arguments of the book that this essay by Einstein introduces. It is very unlikely that Einstein read Benjamin in order to inform his judgment on this question. Russell is a
positivist. Benjamin and Einstein are not positivists, in terms of their
theory of knowledge. Benjamin occasionally toys with the term
nihilism, but this word has many connotations that do not apply to him especially in his own time. The introduction to the
Origins of German Tragedy—the "Epistemo-Critical Foreword"—is so difficult as a philosophical and theological exercise and, retrospectively, so substantively important in the discourse of metaphysics and
fundamental ontology in German and European thought (especially in the aftermath of
Friedrich Nietzsche) that in many respects the
Ursprung foreword dwarfs the main body of the book that follows it. The work attempts to constitute an alternative (or at least a skeptical refusal) to the embrace of the
will to power and a warning against this trend. Beginning with the first chapter of Benjamin's study of baroque drama, he presents the reader with many challenging mental exercises as the text proceeds but it has been noted that the book may likely be less read and understood than it otherwise might have been due to the fact that almost no one proceeding on the assumption that the book is a study of Baroque drama the way that authors like
Samuel Johnson or
Harold Bloom have written studies of
William Shakespeare ever makes it past the foreword. It is conjectured that the foreword to this book so disarmed and confused his committee at the academy that it disqualified the substance of the book from fair consideration. Except in Benjamin's case these arguments are advanced as a provisional preparatory note to a marginal study of
dramaturgy informing the memory of an extinct, archaic and little read genre of late-medieval,
post-apocalyptic plays. Putatively written to outline Benjamin's methodology for the study of Baroque tragedy, the foreword may be read as no less than a manifesto of a new mysticism of word and concept proposed in the void of religious feeling following upon the loss of the Bible's status as a transcendental authority in the late 19th century sometimes referred to as the
Death of God. This is a terminology that Benjamin and Scholem rigorously avoid. On the contrary, they see something resembling (for them in the early phase of their careers and in a transformed sense later on) the basic insight of monotheism, encrypted in Biblical myth or otherwise revealed in the script (where “the medium is the message” as
Marshall McLuhan later summarized Benjamin). It is not the
original insight of monotheism that they see in what militant German nihilists refer to as the Death of God. These people, Benjamin and Scholem, are not originalists or fundamentalists. Benjamin, in the
Unsprung chases after the revelation in
jetzeit or in the now-time, which is the only place where insights have ever happened—at the foot of Mount Sinai in what are now ancient centuries that remain to us only in their artifacts, or in the present of the 1920s while he is working on the
Ursprung or right now as we read it. What the mysticism outlined in the
Ursprung looks like in terms of its practice or application is never directly discussed, or systematically outlined. It is not even called a mysticism until much later. It is only suggested by the shape of the work and its method. Nevertheless, the grounding for its conception as an after-theology or post-theology is remarkably accomplished in the course of its presentation.
Exoteric content Instead of focusing on the more famous examples of baroque drama from around the world, such as
Pedro Calderón de la Barca and
William Shakespeare, Benjamin chose to write about the minor German dramatists of the 16th and 17th century:
Martin Opitz,
Andreas Gryphius, Johann Christian Hallmann,
Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, and August Adolf von Haugwitz. For him, these playwrights – who were seen as too crude, dogmatic, and violent by earlier critics to be considered true artists – best reflected the unique cultural and historical climate of their time. Benjamin singles out the theme of "sovereign violence" as the most important unifying feature of the German "trauerspiel" or "mourning play". In their obsessive focus on courtly intrigue and princely bloodlust, these playwrights break with the mythic tradition of classical
tragedy and create a new aesthetic based on the tense interplay between
Christian eschatology and human history. Foreshadowing his later interest in the concept of history, Benjamin concludes that, in these plays, history "loses the eschatological certainty of its redemptive conclusion, and becomes secularized into a mere natural setting for the profane struggle over political power." == Hermeneutic antidote to Nietzsche ==