ABSTRACT
The first chapter lays out the questions from Benjamin’s early, meta-philosophical texts that will shape his subsequent work, particularly examining the ‘Program for the Coming Philosophy.’ This program places the concept of experience at the center of Benjamin’s project, and argues for the need for a fundamental shift in how we understand experience, not merely as a means to gain knowledge but as a problem in its own right. In accordance with this shift, Benjamin develops six fundamental demands for further philosophical reflection: to search for a definition of experience that renders it intrinsically valuable; to differentiate various forms of experience; to conceive of the metaphysical structure of experience as a sphere of neutrality between subject and object; a reformulation of the notion of freedom in line with the new notion of experience; the formulation of a new relation between truth and error; to understand experience as a matter of the relation between knowledge and language. With each of these points, Benjamin departs from a certain issue in Kantian philosophy, but arrives at a new understanding of how to think of the concepts in question. Additionally, I use each point to hint at ways in which the later Benjamin would incorporate the given demand into his thinking. In closing, I argue that Benjamin’s ‘Program’ has to be interpreted in light of his later comments on it as leaving room for open-ended inquiry and even contradictory solutions, so as to avoid the pitfall that he calls ‘the illusion of false productivity’ in philosophy.
