Horizons of memory: childhood memoriesas an experience of figurative comprehension of timein the philosophy of Walter Benjamin

Abstract

The article outlines Walter Benjamin’s philosophical theory of time, which formed the ba­sis of his conception of history. It is a famous alternative to a number of existing models. Benjamin’s approach to understanding time is characterized by a unique methodology. It is based on artistic images and not on abstract categories and linear patterns of a philosophi­cal and historical discourse. On the one hand, such images allow Benjamin to capture the characteristic properties of a concrete time, which are often difficult for historical sci­ence to grasp, and on the other hand, they make a strong impression on the reader because they require an emotional involvement in the text. The book “Berlin childhood around 1900”, often attributed to the genre of a poetic prose, is a visual representation of Ben­jamin’s philosophical ideas. The fragmentary style of narration and its metaphorical nature are intended to demonstrate a different way of experiencing the present moment – when the signs of the future clearly appear in the fragments of the past. The fusion of all three temporal modes in an instant he calls “Jetztzeit” (just now), which is difficult to articulate in the language of rational metaphysics, is embodied in the allegories of “Berlin child­hood”. Selected fragments of this work are analyzed in the present paper. They capture each of the three time dimensions in the current “now” mode: the fragment “The otter” symbolizes the past, “Loggias” symbolizes the future and “The sock” symbolizes the present. Childhood memories, which do not usually appear in philosophical reflec­tions, serve as a source of the birth of images: on the one hand, they supply sensual mate­rial from personal experience, on the other hand, they suggest a synthesizing principle, be­cause a child is more sensitive to the unity of fiction and reality. Benjamin’s “memorial letter”, seen from this angle, turns out to be a strategy to think poetically about the world, time, and history.