Fulfilled Time. Benjamin’s Reception of Hermann Cohen’s Idea of Messianism

It seems possible to perceive a continuity between the concept of the ideal in the Ethics and in the Religion of Reason of Hermann Cohen. In the same way, there is a possible, although partial, proximity of the ethical and messianic temporality that characterizes these concepts to Benjamin’s Jetztzeit. In Benjamin the ethical and “historical task” pertaining to the conscious subject and collective agent—the generations, the oppressed masses, in the Theses—is founded on a conception of time that is not empty and mechanical, but that is full, intensive, and redemptive. This latter is the time of the Bible and prophecy, where historical contingency and the eternity of the idea coincide and mirror one another, as in the idea of happiness and downfall [Untergang] referred to in Benjamin’s “Theological-Political Fragment” (SW4, 306–7/ GSII: 1, 203–4). The infinity of the “new” cognitive, ethical, and political task is intensive and comes to fruition in “actuality,” in which the concept of historical consciousness redeems the past and provides instruction for praxis. This owes a great deal—even granted Benjamin’s inversion of Cohen’s idea of ethics bound to the future in the actuality of remembrance and the political interruption of the course of history—to Cohen’s Judaic-messianic conception of ethics and his concept of temporality and eternity, his concepts of sanctity, humanity, justice, and peace bound to history, and to his ethical anti-ontologism and anti-eschatologism. Benjamin reads Cohen’s Messianism as an ethical ideal in history, which even if seen as an unreachable goal in an unreachable future, fulfills every “now” with the presence of its totality. In Cohen, past and present fall into the future—in his logic with the method of anticipation, in his ethics with the concept of eternity: “Cohen contrasts, as more originary, the ‘per-spective’ of anticipation with the extrinsic retrospectiveness of the ordinary conception of time as a given succession. The correlation of future and past within which theological determination of ‘plurality’ [Mehrheit] finds its originary formulation, replaces the ‘correlation of past and present’” (Fiorato 2005: 148). In Benjamin, the fulfillment is given in the relation between past and present, in the historical monad. The concept of history is a construction where the messianic idea, the perfect world, is present in every “now of knowability” in which the monadological “dialectical image” presents itself as the actualization of moments of an unredeemed past that is redeemed in knowledge and afterward in political action.