Painting: Snow Scene in the Black Forest, 19th century, Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Trautschold (1815–1877) / Victoria & Albert Museum / London, UK / Bridgeman Images
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012875
Conceived 1916
Written 1925
Then, as now, dedicated to my wife
Contents
List of Abbreviations ix
Translator’s Introduction xi
I Epistemo-Critical Foreword 1
[1] Concept of the tractatus—[2] Knowledge and truth—[3] Philosophical beauty—[4] Division and dispersion in the concept—[5] Idea as configuration—[6] The word as idea—[7] Idea not classificatory—
[8] Burdach’s nominalism—[9] Verism, syncretism, induction—[10] The genres of art in Croce—[11] Origin—[12] Monadology—[13] Neglect and misinterpretation of Baroque tragedy—[14] “Appreciation”—[15] Baroque and Expressionism—[16] Pro domo
II Trauerspiel and Tragedy
40
[17] Baroque theory of trauerspiel—[18] Influence of Aristotle insignificant— [19] History as content of the trauerspiel—[20] Theory of sovereignty—
[24] Tyrant as martyr, martyr as tyrant—[25] Underestimation of the martyr drama—[26] Christian chronicle and trauerspiel—[27] Immanence of Baroque drama—[28] Play and reflection—[29] Sovereign as creature—
[30] Honor—[31] Annihilation of historical ethos—[32] Setting—[33] The courtier as saint and intriguer—[34] Didactic intention of the trauerspiel
[35] Volkelt’s Aesthetic of the Tragic—[36] Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy—[37] Theory of tragedy in German Idealism—[38] Tragedy and legend—[39]
Kingship and tragedy—[40] “Tragedy” old and new—[41] Tragic death as framework—[42] Dialogue: tragic, juridical, and Platonic—[43] Mourning and tragedy—[44] Sturm und Drang, Classicism—[45] Haupt- und Staatsaktion, puppet play—[46] Intriguer as comic character—[47] Concept of fate in the drama of fate—[48] Natural and tragic guilt—[49] The prop—[50] The witching hour and the spirit world
[51] Doctrine of justification, apatheia, melancholy—[52] Dejection of the prince—[53] Melancholy of the body and of the soul—[54] Theory of Saturn—[55] Emblems: dog, globe, stone—[56] Acedia and inconstancy—
[57] Hamlet
III Allegory and Trauerspiel
[58] Symbol and allegory in Classicism—[59] Symbol and allegory in Romanticism—[60] Origin of modern allegory—[61] Examples and illustrations—[62] Antinomies of allegoresis—[63] The ruin—
[66] The allegorical character—[67] The allegorical interlude—[68] Titles and maxims—[69] Metaphorics—[70] Elements of the Baroque theory of language—[71] The alexandrine—[72] Dismemberment of language—
[73] The opera—[74] Ritter on script
[75] The corpse as emblem—[76] Bodies of the gods in Christianity—
[77] Mourning in the origin of allegory—[78] The terrors and promises of Satan—[79] Limit of profundity—[80] “Ponderación Misteriosa”
165
Appendix A: “Trauerspiel and Tragedy” (1916) 261
Appendix B: “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy” (1916)
List of Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used for works by Walter Benjamin:
C The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)
EW Early Writings 1910–1917, trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)
GB Gesammelte Briefe, 6 vols., ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995–2000)
GS Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., suppl., ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppenhäuser, et al. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989)
OGT The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977)
SW Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003)
Translator’s Introduction
howard eiland
Writing to his close friend Gershom Scholem on completing the draft of Origin of the German Trauerspiel, on February 19, 1925, Benjamin refers— a little complacently—to the “unmitigated chutzpah” of the text’s methodological foreword, which he describes as a contribution to the philosophy of language done up as theory of ideas. He was particularly proud of “the philological part of the work,” involving the citation of recondite seventeenth- century literary, theological, iconographic, and lexicographic sources, as well as the provision of a “powerfully planned” bibliography and, to head the symmetrically constructed main textual divisions, seven epigraphs taken from “the most incredible old Baroque works of popular vintage.” But he confesses to Scholem that in the course of its two-year planning and composition, during which he carefully tracked the tradition of commentary on the German Baroque from classicism and Romanticism to the present day, he has “lost every yardstick for measuring the work.” And he wonders, as he prepares the text for submission to the University of Frankfurt as the habilitation thesis required of all those seeking to lecture as a professor in a German university, whether any contemporary reader will be able to participate fully in these esoteric and forgotten issues (diesen abseitigen und sehr verschollnen Dingen).
His subject matter was the comparatively little-read histrionic genre of the Baroque trauerspiel or mourning play, particularly that of the Second Silesian School in the later seventeenth century. The consideration and revaluation of these often bloody and bombastic history plays pivot on an analysis of the trauerspiel’s characteristic dramatic form and, through this analysis of “the life of works and forms,” on a new appropriation of Baroque allegory and emblematics. This entails, further, a reinterpretation of the concept of Baroque as a category of the early modern having an intimate anticipatory relation to certain contemporary developments of the critic’s own day, specifically the Expressionist movement. Such a retrieval of the Baroque as style and epoch was an undertaking Benjamin shared with other researchers in his day, especially in arthistorical and literary-critical fields, where his notion of image writing had some precedent. With the help of “some six hundred quotations,” he shows himself to be conversant with this secondary liter ature and prepared to move beyond it in a new spirit of research.1
His primary concern in the study, he tells Scholem, is to recover the idea of allegory—an ambition that goes back at least to the year 1916, when he composed two short essays on the German trauerspiel as a quasi-musical hybrid form, characterized by the endlessly resonating “word in transformation,” in contrast to the irrevocably closed form of classical tragedy, grounded as it is in the “eternal immobility of the spoken word” (see the appendices to this volume). This early fascination with the expressive form of Baroque drama, this sense of its still-open future, developed concurrently with his close study and translation of the Parisian po et of melancholy, Baudelaire (for whom every thing becomes allegory, as we read in “The Swan”), and with his ongoing dialogue with Scholem on the
1. See Jane O. Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
themes of language and lamentation in the Hebrew Bible. It was thus not just the redemption of allegory that he was envisioning but also, in the face of a certain aesthetic nominalism, the redemption of literary genre.
As it turned out, his apprehensions concerning readers of his text were well founded. The submission of the thesis (including “only the second, tamer half” of the foreword, that is, beginning with section 13) soon ran aground on the author’s allegedly “incomprehensible manner of expression,” as the initial report to the humanities faculty at Frankfurt put it, and Benjamin was advised in July to withdraw his application for habilitation in order to avoid a formal rejection. The failure of his academic aspirations, however half-hearted these may have been—the letter of February 19 to Scholem already expresses his “dread” of “lectures, students, etc.”— precipitated Benjamin’s turn to the career of freelance writer and journalist, which he pursued with a passion over the next fifteen years, first with considerable success in Weimar Germany and, after 1933, in Paris and other ports of call in his increasingly desperate European exile.2 That summer of 1925, in fact, he had already made
2. This is not to minimize the humiliation and outrage (his word is Schmach [GB 3:90]) that Benjamin felt as a result of the de facto rejection. He took revenge on the academy by writing the mordant “Preface to the Trauerspiel Book,” which he enclosed in a letter of May 29, 1926, to Scholem: “I would like to tell the story of Sleeping Beauty a second time. / She sleeps in her hedge of thorns. And then, after a certain number of years, she wakes. / But not at the kiss of a fortunate prince. / The cook woke her up when he gave the scullery boy a box on the ear that, resounding from the pent-up force of so many years, echoed through the palace. / A lovely child sleeps behind the thorny hedge of the following pages. / May no fortune’s prince in the shining armor of scholarship come near. In the kiss of betrothal she will bite. / The author has therefore had to reserve to himself the role of master cook in order to awaken her. And already long overdue is the box on the ear that would resound through the halls of academe. / For there will awaken also this poor truth, which has pricked itself on an old-fashioned spindle as, in forbidden fashion, it thought to weave for itself, in the little back room, a professorial robe” (GB 3:164).
contact with a group of writers associated with a new literary journal, Die literarische Welt, which would publish some of his most impor tant literary criticism; he had also made inquiries into the emerging radio industry, in which he would work on a regular basis beginning four years later; and he was engaged to translate Proust into German with a fellow writer and flâneur, Franz Hessel. Moreover, he had begun mixing with Marxist circles since meeting the Latvian actress and director Asja Lacis the previous summer on Capri, where he wrote much of the trauerspiel book. Together with the more overtly experimental One-Way Street, on which he had been working since 1923, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels would appear from Rowohlt Verlag (publisher of Die literarische Welt) in January 1928, and would have an immediate impact on literary circles in Germany and France. Although its reception among scholars working on the Baroque has always been, as Uwe Steiner has observed, rather tepid, it can be regarded today not only as a fundamental source for the study of early modernism but also as an exemplary work of high-modern prose, comparable in its bold expression and fruitful, if extreme, difficulty to contemporaneous production by Joyce, Schoenberg, or Picasso.
In the “Epistemo-Cr itical Foreword” to the trauerspiel book, which at the outset raises the question of the mode of presentation appropriate to philosophy, Benjamin distinguishes his own critical methodology from “the seamless deductive connectivity of science” and from what he calls Systemlogik. Systematic closure, he maintains, has nothing to do with truth, which should be understood not as an unveiling that destroys the mystery but as revelation that does it justice. Truth is distinguished from positive knowledge; we can close upon and possess pieces of knowledge, but truth is not a matter of intention or possession. With an implicit glance at the Greek etymology, he defines his method as one of indirection, detour, the roundabout way, even wile and ruse: “Methode ist Umweg.” And, because his subject necessitates a theologically informed per-
spective, he adduces a scholastic-theological term to characterize the project as a whole: “Presentation as indirection—this, then, is the methodological character of the tractatus.” In opposition to established conventions of linear argumentation, Benjamin posits an “intermittent rhythm” for philosophy: thinking’s presentation of itself is continually taking a breath, so to speak, and starting anew with the problematic. This principle of consistent intermittence is reflected in the often jarring aphoristic style of Benjamin’s sentences, which can be seen as a counterpart to the montage construction of One-Way Street and subsequent texts. The punctuated, constellatory way of proceeding that is the method of this tractate, and which reflects the discontinuous or monadological structure of the world of ideas, is likened, in the extraordinary first section of the foreword, to the assemblage of a medieval mosaic from brilliant individual bits. (To Scholem, Benjamin describes his method of stitching together the sometimes long quotations in the trauerspiel book as “the craziest mosaic technique,” and to his “patron,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal, he claims that the academic format was merely an occasion for putting into practice his citational strategies.) Only the most profound and exact immersion in the micrological detail of the retrieved material, Benjamin insists, enables the transformation of historical “material content” into philosophical “truth content” that makes the tractate something more than antiquarian, and gives to the critical enterprise its gravity and relevance.
It was thus in quest of the “golden fleece of Baroque allegoresis,” as he puts the matter to Scholem, that Benjamin launched his philosophical literary history, fueled by the assumption that structure and detail in literature are always historically laden. The simplistic classicist understanding of allegory as merely illustrative of predetermined concepts is something Benjamin is at pains to keep distinct from the authentic notion, whose consciously belated genesis is as closely tied to the fascination of humanist scholars with Egyptian
hieroglyphics as it is to the venerable biblical conception of “the book of life.” The latter formula indicates the centrality of time, of temporal process, in the functioning of allegory, as contrasted to the instantaneity of the symbol. And it points to the “Christian origin of the allegorical vision” in its Baroque acceptation. This is nothing doctrinaire. In the “abyss of allegory,” the dissociative, dismembering tendency of allegorical perception inevitably spawns a teeming metaphoric that militates against any rigid application of dogma, such as one finds in a work like Pilgrim’s Progress. “The modern allegory arising in the sixteenth century”—and in Germany this took place in a predominantly Lutheran context—is distinguished from the Christian-didactic medieval allegory by its outer and inner “brokenness,” its preoccupation with incessant decline and what Benjamin calls “eternal transience,” which is the way “these generations” experienced history. Despite its roots in medieval morality plays and mystery plays, and in the general atmosphere of memento mori, the allegorical world of the German trauerspiel is a fundamentally historical world—bleak, disenchanted, empty of access to the transcendentals of the mystery plays. Indeed, Benjamin observes, history—the sense of historical crisis—has entered into the very setting of these plays, permeating the scenic image and the emblematic props, as it does the action and expressive gestures of the characters; temporal process is inscribed and anatomized in spatial imagery (see section 32). The Dingwelt, the world of fleeting material things or fragments of things, is here a “natural decor” of ruins and runes, through which the gloomy royal personages of the trauerspiel move as though under a fatal spell, themselves thinglike in their rhetorically orchestrated, almost choreographic exchanges. And yet this proto-Expressionist “decadent” world of equivocation and mutability, presented in the guise of the royal court with its shifting intrigues, is everywhere haunted by the ineradicable memory of the ancient gods, transformed as the pantheon is by Christian demonology.
If modern allegory, in Benjamin’s understanding, bespeaks an ongoing collision between the guilty Christian physis and a purer pagan natura, if it is inescapably conditioned on the nearness of the gods, however disguised and distorted they may be in the grimacing-mocking masks of Satan and his infernal cohorts, then these tensions are perhaps most fully legible in the phenomena of melancholy, that temperament and pathological “humor” constituted under the sign of Saturn, god of the nether world. As we read in the final, climactic sections of “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” the first main part of Benjamin’s study, the “new interpretation of the earth” that is presupposed in the various trauerspiels entails a demythologizing reconception of the ancient agricultural divinity and his Tartarus nature. Uprooted from the pagan cosmos and hence already decentered, the saturnine disposition occasions vertiginous melancholic immersion in the fallen—which is to say, transitory—being of things. The “mortifying” gaze of the melancholic causes the life to flow out of its objects; the hollowed-out things become allegories, ciphers, hieroglyphs, each dependent on all the others, each singularly opening onto the abyss of meanings. The wisdom of melancholy is attuned to the depths (der Tiefe hörig). Yet, as Benjamin is careful to point out in presenting the phenomenology of this complex affect, the brooding figure of melancholy is winged in Dürer’s famous engraving. There is a dialectical structure to the Saturn idea: Saturn is the “demon of antitheses.” For the seed god brings about new growth as much as a falling to earth, expansion and dispersion as much as gathering and consolidation. Within the mourning play— and mourning itself, it is suggested, has a comic inner side—this antithetical nature informs the dialectic of the “Baroque apotheosis,” comprising in the end a highly paradoxical redemption in downfall.
“The allegorist awakens in God’s world.” So Benjamin concludes, aphoristically, toward the end of the second main part of his treatise, in the course of expounding the “theology of evil” said
to be at issue in the Baroque trauerspiel and in the Lutheran Baroque generally. Allegorical vision accordingly originates in knowledge of evil: “Knowledge, not action, is the form of existence most characteristic of evil.” Of course, in the biblical tradition that is operative here, knowledge is the beginning of sorrow; apprehension of allegorical significance depends on the gaze of the knowing subject, that is, of the melancholic, the one who can mourn. Mourning is the mother of allegories, as it is their inexhaustible content. Benjamin lays great emphasis on the subjectivity of the melancholy gaze, and refers to the origin of allegorical perception in the knowledge of good and evil—that is, in the knowledge of evil—as the “triumph of subjectivity and the inception of an arbitrary rule over things.” No doubt the idea of arbitrary rule, Willkürherrschaft über Dinge, as a function of “absolutely subjective profundity,” invites misunderstanding. Unlike other kinds of knowledge, which involve some sort of possession, knowledge of evil has no object, Benjamin argues. He quotes (without quotation marks) his own unpublished essay from 1916, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in one of its most striking assertions: “For good and evil, being unnameable as they are nameless, stand outside the language of names [in which objects have their articulation].” Evil and the knowledge of evil are allegories: evil signifies something other (allos) than what it is— signifies, Benjamin writes, the nonbeing of what it itself embodies. Allegory simultaneously fulfills and revokes the nothingness in which it realizes itself. In the allegory of evil is revealed a real unreal: “the real, effective reflection of empty subjectivity in the good.” This is pointedly distinguished from Socratic optimism, the reduction of evil to ignorance.
Through the “empty abyss of evil,” as we read in the culminating section of the trauerspiel book, subjectivity grasps its own creaturely reality and sees it as the mere reflection of itself in God. The creature is the distorting mirror of its creator. In the final analysis, sub-
jectivity as such, fallen and abyssal, signifies an incalculable economy of the whole: “the avowed subjectivity comes to triumph over every deceptive objectivity of law,” and at the same time it “assimilates itself, as . . . hell, to divine omnipotence.” Subjectivity as entry. The argument from linguistics is impor tant here. For what is signified in “the depths of the subjective” is its groundless ground in language; the subject is predicated on the word. This is “the theological essence of the subjective”—its origin and natural history in the Sprachgeist, the mysteriously evolving spirit and physiognomy of language. Allegoresis— the dynamic “schema” of which is transformation—turns things into writing, image writing, at once dissolving the things as autonomous external objects and saving them in concentrated form as a complex of infinitely interpretable, fateful emblems. “Above all, in this exchange, contrast rules”: the “technique of metaphors and apotheoses” produces “those numberless effects in which, visually or only verbally, the throne room is transformed into a dungeon, the pleasure chamber into a tomb, the royal crown into a garland of bloody cypresses.” Without being in any way abolished as a metaphysical and historical category, transience itself is redeemed, in these plays, as the profane “allegory of resurrection.” The trauerspiel book thus ends with the resounding enigma of a dialectical reversal out of evil, a sudden revolution and turnabout (Umschwung), as deduced from the princi ples of Baroque allegory—that “golden fleece.” It is worth recalling, in this connection, that the golden-winged ram whose fleece occasions the quest of the Argonauts is associated, through the figure of Phryxus, with an escape from death.
The historical plays of the Second Silesian School in the period after the bloody Thirty Years’ War—which for many had an immediate resonance in the period after World War I—are fraught with a sense of unrelenting radical evil. Variously set in the courts of seventeenthcentury England, medieval Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, or
ancient Rome, they are filled with scenes of political and erotic plotting—seduction and betrayal, murder and revenge, torture and martyrdom. Issues of sovereignty are generally uppermost, the struggle for power often involving a female protagonist. The authors of these extravagant plays—Andreas Gryphius, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, and Johann Christian Hallmann being the most notable—were erudite men under the patronage of powerful cour t officials. The works themselves, as performed by adolescent schoolboy actors from Protestant academies, were at once cannily theatrical and the product of a learned school culture (Schuldrama); intricately wrought on a rhetorical level, such as only the educated could appreciate, they were nonetheless staged with elaborate spectacle calculated to appeal to a wider audience. (Benjamin depicts them as a precursor of the musical opera that emerged at the end of the seventeenth century.) Elevating the didacticism of the medieval passion play to a new level of moralizing bombast, they preach a vision of history as itself a trauerspiel: “Baroque drama knows historical activity not other wise than as the base machination of schemers” (section 31). Corresponding to the allegorization of history is a certain abstract and even spectral quality in the rendering of character. Ghostly apparitions are a regular feature.
It is remarkable that, participating in his own way in the German appropriation of Shakespeare that goes back to Herder and the Sturm und Drang, Benjamin adduces Hamlet as a consummate trauerspiel. His claim, more precisely, is that the theory of the trauerspiel furnishes prolegomena to the study of Shakespearean “tragedy,” and of Hamlet in par ticular. (Benjamin had been concerned with the play since his early student days, although, as he admits to Hofmannsthal, he was not really at home in Shakespeare, whom he read in translation.) These prolegomena, in the form of summary interpretations, may be glimpsed at various p oints throughout his study, and most extensively, with regard to Hamlet, in sections 50 (“The witching hour and the spirit world”), 57
(“Hamlet”), and 78 (“The terrors and promises of Satan”). By virtue of a more or less perfect balance between the allegorical and the elemental, says Benjamin, Shakespeare succeeded where the German drama did not in giving a human form to melancholy.3 Moreover, the melancholy Dane, for whom to remember is already to mourn, is the only figure from the plays of mourning in whom saturnine acedia or world-weariness, consequent in part upon the antinomian attitude of Protestantism toward everyday life (section 51), achieves a genuine apotheosis in self-consciousness. By contrast, the German trauerspiel remained “astonishingly obscure to itself.” Hamlet’s melancholy, emerging from the depths of the creaturely realm, is winged:
His life, as the exemplary object of his mourning, points, before its extinction, to the Christian providence in whose bosom his mournful images turn into blessed existence [ seliges Dasein]. Only in a life of this princely sort is melancholy, on being confronted with itself, redeemed. The rest is silence.
(Section 57)
Shakespeare alone was capable, Benjamin contends, of striking “Christian sparks” from the rigidity of the learned, “unchristian and pseudo-antique” Baroque figure of melancholy. With its brooding subterranean luminosity, differentiated from all lumen naturale, melancholic immersion “comes to Christianity” (and therefore to hell and its demons) in the Prince. For Benjamin this means that Hamlet’s death—despite the ostensibly classical framework of sacrifice—is not essentially tragic. The “mystery of his person,” in the
3. In section 78, Benjamin compares Shakespeare to his distinguished Spanish contemporary Calderón de la Barca: in the former, “the elemental” has primacy, in the latter “the allegorical.” In section 46, he maintains that Calderón and Shakespeare created more impor tant trauerspiels than the German writers of the seventeenth century.
si mul ta neously mea sured and venturesome, mournful and playful passage through its “stations,” is said to correspond to the “mystery of his fate,” the elusive recurring object of his contemplation. The haunted son and distracted Wittenbergian philosopher, torn between the claims of past and future, is “spectator by grace of God.” With this attestation of a profane apotheosis and redemption of melancholy, a precipitous grace at work in the world of sullied flesh—of intrigue, succession, and revenge— Benjamin caps his argument for a fundamental distinction between the mythically oriented ancient tragedy and the historically oriented Baroque trauerspiel. At the same time, citing the work of the Warburg school in par ticular, he calls attention to the deep contamination of Christian intentions with pagan residua in the culture of the Lutheran Reformation and its afterlives. The question of a possible proximity of the “Christian” to the “tragic” within this aesthetic of excess and extremity is not explicitly raised.
The translator wishes to acknowledge his debt to the first English translation of Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, produced by the scholar of German liter ature, John Osborne of the University of Sussex, in 1977. Osborne’s translation has served for many years as a highly readable rendition of Benjamin’s semi-hermetic text. The present translation attempts to approximate the original German diction and syntax more closely than does Osborne’s version, without sacrificing idiomaticity. Benjamin’s sentence structure in this book is not infrequently strange and even tortured, suggestive now and then of a parody of more conventional academic German. At the same time there is a distinctly baroque quality to the prose, in keeping with its subject, as though it were spun on the oldfashioned spindle Benjamin mentions in his privately circulated “Preface to the Trauerspiel Book,” quoted above. His formulations can be as seemingly impenetrable as the hedge of thorns sur-
rounding Sleeping Beauty. But I have generally avoided breaking the longer sentences up into shorter ones, as daunting as this can be for readers, in the interests of reproducing the rhythm and rigor of Benjamin’s thought process. Particularly difficult constructions are glossed in notes to the text.
Origin of the German Trauerspiel
I Epistemo-Critical Foreword
Since no whole can be brought together in either knowledge or reflection, seeing that the former lacks internality and the latter externality, we must necessarily think of science as art if we are to expect from it any sort of wholeness. And it is not in the general, in the boundless, that we should look for this, but, just as art is always wholly present in each individual artwork, so should science always be wholly manifest in each par ticular matter treated.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Materials to History of the Theory of Colors1
[1] It is peculiar to philosophical writing to be confronted anew at every turn with the question of presentation.2 To be sure, in its closed and finished form, philosophical writing will constitute doctrine, but it is not within the power of mere thought to confer on it such closure.3 Philosophical doctrine rests on historical codification. It is therefore not simply to be conjured up more geometrico. If mathematics demonstrates clearly that the complete
1. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke. Jubiläums-Ausgabe, vol. 40 (Stuttgart, Berlin [1907 ff.]): Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, 2:140–141. [“Knowledge” here translates Wissen. See SW 1:279 for an earlier citation of this passage from Goethe.—Trans.]
2. “Presentation” translates Darstellung, which also means “representation.” In the epigraph from Goethe, art is said to present itself (sich darstellen) wholly in each artwork.—Trans.
3. “Doctrine” translates Lehre, which can also mean “teachings” (usually a body of religious teachings, such as the Talmud) or “theory.” See Benjamin’s letter of September 6, 1917, to Gershom Scholem (C, 94).—Trans.
elimination of the problem of presentation—as claimed for every didactics rigorously attuned to its subject—is the mark of genuine knowledge, what presents itself no less conclusively is the mathematician’s renunciation of the realm of truth intended by languages. That which is method in philosophical projects is not just absorbed in their didactic implementation. And this means quite simply that an esoteric dimension inheres in them, a dimension they are incapable of shedding, forbidden to disown—and which, were they ever to boast of it, would condemn them. It is this alternative presented to philosophical form by the concepts of doctrine and of the esoteric essay that the nineteenth- ce ntury concept of system ignores. Insofar as the concept of system determines philosophy, the latter is in danger of contenting itself with a syncretism that seeks to capture the truth in a spider’s web stretched between bodies of knowledge, as though truth came flying in from outside. But this studiously acquired universalism comes nowhere near to attaining the didactic authority of doctrine. If philosophy is to preserve the law of its form not as a mediating guide to knowledge but as presentation of truth, then it is necessary to emphasize the practice of this form—not, however, its anticipation within the system. In all epochs in which the uncircumscribable essentiality of the true has come into view, this practice has imposed itself in the form of a propaedeutic that can be designated by the scholastic term “tractatus,” for this term contains a reference, however latent, to those objects of theology without which truth cannot be thought. In their tone, certainly, tractates may be doctrinal; in their inmost disposition they are denied the conclusiveness of instruction that could maintain itself, like doctrine, on its own authority. And no less surely must they do without the coercive means of the mathematical proof. In their canonical form, the authoritative citation will enter as the sole constituent of an intention almost more educative than didactic. Presentation is the crux of their method. Method is indirection. Presentation as indirection, as the roundabout way—this, then, is the methodological character of the tractatus.
Renunciation of the unbroken course of intention is its immediately distinguishing feature. In its persevering, thinking constantly begins anew; with its sense of the circumstantial, it goes back to the thing itself. This continual breathing in and out is the form of existence most proper to contemplation. For inasmuch as the latter pursues various levels of meaning in observing one and the same object, it receives the impetus of its constantly renewed beginning as well as the justification of its intermittent rhythm. Just as the majesty of mosaics remains intact when they are disassembled into capricious bits, so philosophical observation fears no dissipation of momentum. Both come together out of the singular and disparate; nothing could attest more powerfully to the impact of what is transcendental—be it a saint’s image or the truth. The value of thought-fragments is all the more decisive the less they are immediately capable of measuring themselves by an underlying conception, and the brilliance of the presentation depends on this value to the same extent that the brilliance of the mosaic depends on the quality of the poured glass.4 The relation of the micrological work process to the global dimension of the work, to its plastic and intellectual entirety, makes it clear that truth content can be grasped only through the most exacting immersion in the details of a material content.5 Mosaic and tractatus both achieve their highest development in the West during the Middle Ages; what makes them comparable is that they are so deeply related.
[2] The difficulty inherent in such presentation only proves that it is an original prose form. Whereas a speaker makes use of voice and facial expressions to underscore individual sentences— even where they cannot stand on their own—and fuses them
4. Glasfluss: lead glass colored with metallic oxides. It has been used since antiquity to imitate precious stones.—Trans.
5. Concerning truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt) and material content (Sachgehalt), see the opening of Benjamin’s essay of 1921–1922, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (SW 1:297–299).—Trans.
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Release date: December 30, 2023 [eBook #72548]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1915
Credits: deaurider, Harry Lamé and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALLIGATOR AND ITS ALLIES ***
Please see the Transcriber’s Notes at the end of this text.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.
Copyright, 1907, by Doubleday, Page & Company
ALLIGATOR MISSISSIPPIENSIS. (After Ditmars.)
(Reproduced by Permission of Doubleday, Page & Company.)
The Alligator and Its Allies
By Albert M. Reese, Ph.D. Professor of Zoölogy
in West Virginia University
Author of “An Introduction to Vertebrate Embryology”
With62Figuresand28Plates
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
C
OPYRIGHT, 1915
BY ALBERT M. REESE
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
PREFACE
The purpose of this volume is to bring together, in convenient form for the use of students of zoölogy, some of the more important details of the biology, anatomy, and development of the Crocodilia. For obvious reasons the American Alligator is the species chiefly used.
In the first chapter the discussion of the alligator is largely the result of the personal observations of the author; the facts in regard to the less familiar forms are taken from Ditmars and others. The description of the skeleton, with the exception of short quotations from Reynolds, is the author’s.
The chapter on the muscular system is a translation from Bronn’s Thierreich, and the author has not verified the descriptions of that writer.
The description of the nervous system is partly the author’s and partly taken from Bronn and others.
The chapters on the digestive, urogenital, respiratory, and vascular systems are practically all from descriptions by the author.
The chapter on “The Development of the Alligator” is a reprint, with slight alterations, of the paper of that title published for the author by the Smithsonian Institution.
The bibliography, while not complete, will be found to contain most of the important works dealing with this group of reptiles.
The author is grateful to Mr. Raymond L. Ditmars and to his publishers, Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Co., and Messrs. Sturgis & Walton, for the use of a number of plates; to the Macmillan Company and to the United States Bureau of Fish and Fisheries for the same privilege; to the National Museum for photographs of the skull of the gavial; and to the Smithsonian Institution for the use of the plates from researches published by them and included herein.
Proper acknowledgment is made, under each borrowed figure, to the author from whom it is taken.
