Ted Winslow wrote: > Keynes's point was...
I understand what Keynes's point was and I don't disagree with it. As far as it went it was a critique -- whether deliberate or not -- of the Kantian view of historical progress as a regulative ideal. I agree with such a critique, probably more than Keynes would have intended and would extend the critique by adding a disclaimer against what is vulgarly known as the short-term -- a "now" that anxiously and impotently awaits the future. If I understand your remark, Ted, I think you misinterpret the tiger's leap into the open air of history. You seem to read the tiger's leap as ferocious and devouring. I think it means unexpected, powerful and precise. (or maybe I was thinking of the Spanish Inquisition.. "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition...");-) Obviously with a metaphor for the sublime it's futile to argue about who's right and which qualities are the ones the author intended to evoke. But the context of Benjamin's metaphor suggests to me a spiritual tiger's leap -- Egal Chowers referred to it as a poetic redemption of time -- rather than some furious destructive frenzy directed at existing arrangements. I object to your juxtaposition of the tiger's leap with those opposed to apocalyptic messianic visions as if the leap is such a vision. I don't know if that's what you actually meant but if it is I think you seriously underestimate Benjamin's philosophical subtlety. "Economic possibilities for our grandchildren" is the essay where Keynes talks about the desirabiity of a 4-hour day... in the future (the long-run when we're all dead?). But in a 1945 letter to T.S. Eliot and in a 1943 note on the long-term problem of unemployment, he talks about shorter working time as an immediate strategy. > Here he was, like Marx, overly optimistic. Or perhaps overly Kantian? Abstract of "The marriage of time and identity: Kant, Benjamin and the nation-state," by Egal Chowers, _Philosophy and Social Criticism_, 1999. "The paper explores the role played by concepts of temporality in shaping the selfs identity and its moral responsibility. This theme is examined in both Kant and Benjamin, two theorists who view the modern self as an essentially historical being. For Kant, teleological and uniform time shoulders the heightening of the selfs universal attributes and the constant expansion of a moral community. The desired end is the establishment of an integrated and homogeneous human space, a cosmopolitan stage wherein history is finally redeemed. This progressive notion of time is seen as dangerous by Benjamin, since it generates forgetfulness and inner impoverishment of the self. Instead, Benjamin advances a fragmented conception of time, one allowing conversation between distant moments and grounding identity in concrete images. While the poetic recovery of memory leads to the distinct and exclusive, Benjamin follows Kant in demanding universal moral responsibility of the self. However, Benjamins strategy, so to speak, is the integration of our temporal -- not spatial -- experience." The Sandwichman __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
