Wesley Phillips (Independent): ‘On the Concept of Counter-Tradition’

This research is motivated by what I take to constitute the antinomy of contemporary radical thought: panlogicism and exceptionism. Each conceives of the philosophical possibility for social change in a divergent way to the other. The former, Hegelian-Marxist position, has the disadvantage of presenting a progressive view of history from the standpoint of its incomplete or even catastrophic standpoint. It has the advantage of grounding social change within human, self-conscious activity. Conversely, much post-war French and Italian radical thought articulates the possibility of change through a concept of extra-historical event (as versus intra-historical mediation). Philosophies of the event identify the problem of panlogicism, but at a price: exceptionism threatens to exceed the critical standpoint of historical experience, requiring a dogmatic intervention at odds with the critical humanist project. It lapses into the position of its opposite, panlogicism.
 
Walter Benjamin’s messianism constitutes a philosophy of the exception. Yet his distinctive historical materialism makes him uniquely placed for an understanding of the antinomy. I seek to draw out his affinities to the ‘programme’ of German Idealism, Hegel included. Specifically, a reconstructed debate rather than antinomy between Hegel and the middle Schelling (historically, the parting of ways between not just friends, but panlogicism and exceptionism), forms a part of the ‘philosophical foundations’ of Marxism (Gillian Rose). Schelling’s ‘system of freedom’ can be brought to bear upon Hegel’s ‘speculative science’, in light of both the collaborative ‘System Programme’ fragment and several of Benjamin’s texts. Hypothetically, the system of freedom would correspond to a logic of the exception.
 
One of my philological justifications for connecting Schelling to Benjamin comes from Franz Joseph Molitor, a student of Schelling’s. Bram Mertens has recently claimed that Molitor’s The Philosophy of History, or, On Tradition had a profound influence upon Benjamin, by way of the concepts of tradition and Lehre. The spatial-simultaneous understanding of tradition, which continues into the Arcades Project, opposes the linear-progressive understanding of history, as represented by historicism and, allegedly, Hegelianism.
 
The concept of tradition oscillates between catastrophe and redemption. Capitalism is a ‘cynical’ tradition of its own, based upon exchange-based forms of repetition. But it is the shared, mythic structure of the opposed temporalities that opens up the possibility of a ‘countering [Umkehr]’, from ‘Zeitalter’ to ‘Weltalter’, and from tradition to counter-tradition. I connect this to Schelling’s understanding of myth as future intimation, in his own Weltalter. Such countering has as much to do with mediation as with exception, since the countering is already underway.