No, it’s not all good. Good
is born of evil; there are some goods that cannot be had except in the presence
of evil: courage, patience, and sacrifice on behalf of another. But that does
not make evil good.
Henry Ford observed, “History is bunk.” No, Mr. Ford, it’s worse than bunk. It is an
ever-growing heap of wreckage piled up by an implacable wind, as the philosopher
Walter Benjamin imagined. Benjamin begins by quoting a poem by Gershom Scholem
in which a painting by Paul Klee, Angelus
Novus, is the focus:
My wing is poised to beat,
gladly would I turn back;
were I to stay for endless days,
hapless I would remain.
-- Gershom Scholem, “Greetings from Angelus" [my translation,
indebted to that of Richard Sieburth]
Benjamin comments:
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he
is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the
angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain
of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls
it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and
make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from
Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel
can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to
which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress.
(Thesis IX in
“On the Philosophy of History.” I reproduce the translation
of Lloyd Spencer (which depends on earlier translations, like that of Harry
Zohn, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938-1940
(Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 2003), 392-93). For Walter Benjamin’s 1940
work, "On the Concept of History," see idem, Gesammelte Schriften
I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974) 691-704. Scholem's poem on the Klee painting was
written for Benjamin's twenty-ninth birthday -- July 15, 1921. Sieburth's
translation is found in Gershom Scholem, The Fullness of Time: Poems
(Jerusalem: Ibis, 2003.))
The New Testament analogue to Benjamin's
philosophy of history is found in Paul: “[H]owever much sin abounded, grace
abounded even more” (Romans 5:20).
People keep taunting me with this phrase but it seems uncouth to shout in their faces. Thanks for tying this to Klee. Wow. I'm sure Calvin and Hobbes could put this in perspective.
Angelus Novus has been loaned to the Zentrum from Israel until October. Catch it if you can.
Posted by: David Ker | July 30, 2008 at 06:19 PM