REASON, AGENCY, AND HISTORY: REMARKS ON KANT AND BENJAMIN

This essay begins by determining the nature of Richard Eldridge's project. Referring mainly to writings by Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin, I view his attempt as considering what it involves to be an agent in a historical setting. According to Eldridge, the correct answer will have to involve the right combination of Kant's emphasis on rational self-determination and Benjamin's account of spontaneous (yet nonrational) self-transformation. In response to this answer, I suggest that Benjamin's view may not easily lend itself to being made compatible with Kantian thinking. In particular, Benjamin's effort to think experience in terms that do not make any reference to rational self-determination must be viewed as deeply foreign to Kant's project. I also argue that Kant's third Critique, in particular its conception of reflective judgment, could have provided Eldridge with a view of agency and experience that does not deviate substantially from Kant's project elsewhere. At the end of the essay, I argue that the duality we find in Eldridge's exposition should be viewed as not only related to individuals but to society in general. An attempt to resolve it must involve reflection on how historically constituted social forms create such stark oppositions between reason and its other.