While surely in keeping with his character, Benjamin's position was philosophically ambiguous. The irreversibility of time and the consequence of inexorable decay that determines One Way Street— indeed, the concept of the temporality of truth generally—would seem to be in conflict with the Trauerspiel study's metaphysical understanding of philosophy as the representation of eternal ideas, as if "constellations" of truth were impervious to precisely that tran- sitoriness which was supposed to be truth's most fundamental quality. Put another way: If the historical transiency of the physical world is its truth, how is meta-physical speculation about it possible? Benjamin's answer was at this time a visual image: "Methodo- logical relationship between the metaphysical investigation and the historical one: a stocking turned inside out."
4 comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7d13SgqUXg&NR=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smale%27s_paradox
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_w4HYXuo9M
While surely in keeping with his character, Benjamin's position
was philosophically ambiguous. The irreversibility of time and the
consequence of inexorable decay that determines One Way Street—
indeed, the concept of the temporality of truth generally—would
seem to be in conflict with the Trauerspiel study's metaphysical
understanding of philosophy as the representation of eternal ideas, as
if "constellations" of truth were impervious to precisely that tran-
sitoriness which was supposed to be truth's most fundamental
quality. Put another way: If the historical transiency of the physical
world is its truth, how is meta-physical speculation about it possible? Benjamin's answer was at this time a visual image: "Methodo-
logical relationship between the metaphysical investigation and the
historical one: a stocking turned inside out."
Susan Buck-Morss, The dialectics of Seeing,p.21
Post a Comment