Understanding Walter Benjamin

The work of Walter Benjamin has now begun to play a major role in many investigations into the nature of modernity. It is understood, to take just a few examples, as offering resources for understanding how technology affects the status of the work of art, for rethinking the very nature of historical time, for opening up new possibilities of reading literary texts, and for re-defining how the relationships between culture and politics are to be understood. Benjamin’s work remains, though, in many ways a mystery. This is not least because many of its contexts are still too rarely explored in sufficient depth. The importance for the understanding of his work of Benjamin’s Ph.D. dissertation on the German Romantics, ¹ for example, still tends to be underestimated. ² Given that, as I hope to have established, Romantic philosophy is still significant for the contemporary philosophical scene, a reassessment of Benjamin which gives initial priority to his work on the Romantics seems overdue. The fact that the focus of Benjamin’s work, from the beginning to the desperately bitter end, ³ can be characterised in terms of the relationships between language, art and truth will allow us to suggest how some of his work poses questions that are of interest to contemporary philosophy, both analytical and hermeneutic (see also Bowie 1995a).