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The Fate of Universal History: on the Task of Philosophy of History Between Kant and Benjamin

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The Fate of Universal History: on the Task of Philosophy of History Between Kant and Benjamin DePaul University Via Sapientiae College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences 3-2020 The fate of universal history: on the task of philosophy of history between Kant and Benjamin Daniel Pepe DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd Recommended Citation Pepe, Daniel, "The fate of universal history: on the task of philosophy of history between Kant and Benjamin" (2020). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 284. https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/284 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE FATE OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY: ON THE TASK OF PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY BETWEEN KANT AND BENJAMIN A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy October, 2019 By Daniel P. Pepe Department of Philosophy College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences DePaul University Chicago, Illinois TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication 3 INTRODUCTION: ON PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, MODERNITY, AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 5 I. History and the Antique Image of It 18 II. History and Eschatology 27 III. History and the Idea of It 36 Part I CHAPTER ONE: ON THE KANTIAN TASK OF A THEORY OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY 41 I. The Hope for a Universal History 46 II. Indexing Development in History 57 III. The Empirical Life of Antagonism 66 IV. Theory and the Big Idea 83 CHAPTER TWO: COHERENCE, COMPLETENESS, AND IRRATIONALITY IN KANT’S PLAN FOR A UNIVERSAL HISTORY 97 I. The Problem of Historical Schematism 101 II. After Coherence: Thinking the Remains in the Shine of the Idea 119 Intermezzo CHAPTER THREE: EARLY GERMAN ROMANTICISM AND THE LOOMING PROBLEM OF FRAGMENTATION 148 I. The Problem of Historical Time in Schiller’s Universal History 153 II. Between the Fragment and Fragmentation in F. Schlegel 162 Part II CHAPTER FOUR: FINDING PASSAGE: FROM THE GODFORSAKEN WORLD TO REDEMPTION IN LUKÁCS AND BENJAMIN 189 I. Lukács on the “Novel Form” of History 194 II. The Problem of Redemption in a Godforsaken, Historical World 218 CHAPTER FIVE: PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY FROM THE STANDPOINT OF REDEMPTION: ON WALTER BENJMAMIN’S THEORY OF THE IDEAS 241 I. Benjamin’s Constellations: A Theory of the Ideas 250 II. Universal History and Happiness in On the Concept of History 265 Works Cited 288 Pepe | 2 DEDICATION To so many wonderful teachers, who, together, opened up philosophy and the world to me; to Rick, for the complete gift of an apprenticeship in perpetuity; to the friends, who either from the beginning or somewhere along the way shared in that winding path from youthful curiosity to a life’s devotion; to my family, those very dear ones that remain and those unforgettable ones, who passed before the time of this project’s end; to Ashley, for giving more patience, love, and support than one person could reasonably ask from another; and, to my mother, who not only gave me this life, but reminds me to try to make it worth living, too—my gratitude overflows and I can only speak these words in return, thank you. Pepe | 3 HAMM: I love the old questions. (With fervour.) Ah the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them! – Samuel Beckett, Endgame Everything that happens may be meaningless, fragmentary, and sad, but it is always irradiated by hope or memory. And hope here is not an abstract artifact, isolated from life, spoilt and shopworn as the result of its defeat by life: it is a part of life; it tries to conquer life by embracing and adorning it, yet it is repulsed by life again and again. And memory transforms the continual struggle into a process which is full of mystery and interest and yet is tied with indestructible threads to the present, the unexplained instant. – György Lukács, Theory of the Novel Pepe | 4 INTRODUCTION ON PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, MODERNITY, AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY Postmodernism, like so much of the history of modernity, already appears obsolete, inasmuch as it, too, has been consigned to the heap of outmoded, past due, unrealized, or simply failed attempts either to transcend or walk away from the modernist horizons of theory and praxis.1 Nevertheless, even for its most ardent critics, postmodernism must be granted at least one unambiguous victory that still abides, that is, the thorough disenchantment of the seemingly ancient relic of modernist philosophy, namely, the theory of universal history. After the postmodern invective, universal history no longer names the philosophical account of the object, history, as the actually existing context in which we encounter and question of the meaning of the human being, but only as the speech act of a meta-discursive legitimation, that is, the grand narrative. If I am to contest this lasting victory of an otherwise largely outmoded philosophical program, it is from no disdain for the postmodernism that was. Rather, the motivation arises from a perceived danger in the one element of postmodernism that was all too easy to carry 1 This term “postmodernism,” of course, has its own brief history of contestations concerning both the extent of its philosophical import and its exact social and historical connotations. The postmodernism that I consider here, however, refers to the meaning of the concept that Jean-François Lyotard formulated in his 1979 text, The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard’s portrayal of postmodernism memorialized a defining indictment of modernism in the figure of the grand narrative. Yet, the postmodern condition also approaches a de-historicized condition in the extreme, since it flattens history as both the ontological question of the past itself and the epistemological questions of the apprehension or cognition thereof. In postmodernism, the past appears as the arbitrary content of a specifically linguistic register in the present, namely, in such modes as speech-act theory and narrativity. Following his account of modernism inside the postmodern context, Lyotard only negatively defines postmodernism under the moniker of an incredulity to meta-narratives (Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press, 1984 (xxiii-xxiv). Lyotard thus stakes the very meaning of postmodernism against the modernist penchant for philosophy of history, which he identifies as one such, if not the primary, discursive practice of the grand narrative’s legitimation. Pepe | 5 forward alongside modernity’s short returns. In other words, as postmodernism comes to prominence by signaling modernity’s inability to cash its own checks—modernity’s failure to realize a new time distinguished by the historically developed, universal flourishing of the human species—postmodernism also threatens to evacuate any aspirational element from the philosophical contemplation of history altogether. For the postmodern critic, modernity tout court fails as the promise of another time in history, that is, a time other than that of the present. In the face of that loss and the ensuing historical fragmentation of the present vis-à-vis its history, it would seem all too easy and even potentially dangerous to return to a forward looking modernism that has otherwise lost an account of its history as its own—a history of missed or covered-over hopes to which it has not yet answered. To return to modernity again, ‘post postmodernism’, as it were, demands the relocation of another historical time emerging in that of the present, since, without such an effort, the claim of modernity stands to become quite meaningless or, at least, no more meaningful than any other antagonistically wagered claim given in the present. In this way, the philosophical interpretation of the relationships tethering the present and its past—as this is the object of philosophy of history in general—can work to uncover an indexing of the aspirational meaning of modernity itself. If we are to return to philosophy of history as a definitively modernist philosophical task that unites theory and praxis in an account of history’s universality, that does not mean we must dig postmodernism a grave deeper than the one that the actual persistence of modernist historical tensions has already assigned it. Yet, such a return to the modernist philosophy of history cannot simply assume to shake off the wounds and the historically persisting violence that are inextricably woven into the concepts proper to universal history, such as appears all too clearly the case, for example, among the concepts of the human, culture, and civilization in relationship Pepe | 6 to the history of colonialism.2 In light of its own history, a return to philosophy of history requires a dedicated, theoretical inquiry into the actuality of the underlying problem to which universal history emerges as an answer, even if it is an ‘old one’. Such an exigency for interpretation stands far apart from sketching some renewed content to a not-yet, future prosperity, that is, some end of a history that is still to come. Instead, in the face of modernity’s damaged yet irrefutable persistence, interpretation must look to the distinctly historical claims that endure in the idea of universal history itself, so
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