Cutting a one-way street through the space of time: the exigence and image of Lucretius in Walter Benjamin's philosophy

Contrary to Jacob Taubes and Giorgio Agamben’s ‘messianic hypothesis’ that would attribute to Benjamin’s
posthumous theses “On the Concept of History” the spectral presence of Pauline theology, this thesis aims to
demonstrate that the implicit reference therein is rather to the atheology of Lucretius’s De rerum natura.
Starting from philological grounds within the Theses, we show that Benjamin’s conscious connection of his
concept of the image as it relates to perception and historical time to the Epicurean tradition is signalled in
published works going back to his 1918 dissertation on German Romanticism. This fact allows us to formulate
a counter- hypothesis: Benjamin’s philosophical trajectory was decisively altered by his encounter with a figure
who has been ignored by scholars, namely his thesis advisor, Richard Herbertz at the University of Bern.
Notably, this Swiss professor, who Benjamin was prevented from habilitating under only by financial
difficulties, developed and taught a singular post-Kantian neo-Epicurean “critical realism” as a war-machine
against the neo-Scholasticism of Heinrich Rickert and Edmund Husserl. Tracing this connection in its historical
and philosophical significance, we argue that the Bern period and not Capri is best understood as the fault line
between the ambiguously religious absolute of Benjamin’s early thought and the resolutely profane character of
his mature philosophy. On this basis, we show that Benjamin and Martin Heidegger’s respective habilitation
projects were self-consciously and opposed partisan expressions of the two parties to the now forgotten civil war
within 20th-century German philosophy prior to the National Socialist regime: on the one hand, the rising
tradition of Wilhelm Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie with its “psychology without a soul” represented by Herbertz
and Karl Bühler against, on the other, an alliance between the Neo-Kantian and Phenomenological schools that
was forged against this essential and institutional enemy. We evaluate our hypothesis by its capacity to crack
open the enigmatic structure of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel—a structure that was to remain opaque to the post
phenomenological sensibilities of Theodor Adorno. It is this work, we argue, that represents Benjamin’s only
complete presentation of the philosophical problem that, slowly formulated over the course of his time in Bern,
he would pursue until the end: constructing a directed arrow or “One-Way Street” of history that supervenes
upon but can at no cost be identified with the unrepeatable spatial dynamics and “flitting” images of natural
historical transience—the endless cycles of Cronus’s reaping and sowing. It is this problem to which Benjamin’s
ownmost concept of moral-historical indebtedness or Schuld answers. Indeed, we conclude, Benjamin’s anti
Nietzschean neo-Epicurean philosophy was motivated neither by any melancholic longing for the transcendent
redemption-cum-absolution of matter’s essential insignificance nor by any merely aesthetic justification thereof,
but rather by a joyous affirmation of the immanent meaning of the cosmos and a courageous indifference
towards death in the face of those things worth doing.

Epicurus only looked at the value of one’s state, he knew nothing of the inner value of the person… The other (intellectual) world [mundus intelligibus] is the one where happiness coincides exactly with morality: Heaven and Hell, of which the one aims at the greatest happiness, the other at misery. The other world is a necessary moral ideal. — Immanuel Kant

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