A Personalist Philosophy of History by Gilbert Bennett;

Author:Gilbert, Bennett;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2018-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

He aims through the essay toward explain an advance in human understanding that is both an “illumination,” i.e., a spiritual awareness, and “profane,” i.e., material and bodily. When he asks us, so memorably and eloquently, “to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution,” he means to configure the bodily and the spiritual together in the vision of revolution against the crushing atrocity of history (in which traditional historiography uses homogeneous time to render insuperable) as the real messianic event, achievable because it is believable.54 He is against ontological materialism (“metaphysical realism”), and he is against its ontological opposite – “histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious” – though one might see him in these particular words leaving more room for mysticism than he leaves for materialism.55 The “residue” or discharge from materialism renders the “anthropology,” that is, the philosophy of humankind, when humanity is taken as a whole. Doing that requires overcoming the interval of time, because they produce divisions among humans that both call out and can be negated by revolution. His interest in the flourishing of humankind leads him to issues of time and history.

We advance to profane illumination neither by empirical science nor by obscurantism. The means of awareness he proposes is, again, a mix, or an agony, of physical and spiritual cognition: a “dialectic optic,” which reappears in his work a decade later – just twice – as the “dialectical image.”56 Benjamin indirectly sketches this idea through Proust, characterizing both the narrator Marcel and the person Proust as curious servant, as flattering poet, as detective, as collector, as an aged but rejuvenated child, as a sage we might liken to Merlin or to Gandalf, as the sleeper whose dreams show his truth, as a seer at the edge of death, as one in whom

the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly, indefinitely and weightily, in the same way as the weight of his net tells a fisherman about his catch…. And his sentences are the entire muscular activity of the intelligible body; they contain the whole enormous effort to raise this catch.57

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