Iaan Reynolds, “To Liberate the Future from Its Deformed Existence in the Womb of the Present”: Political Education in Kant and Benjamin
My paper will explore the possibility of a project of political education that maintains the enlightenment paradigm’s orientation toward the educative improvement of humanity (seen, for example, in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller), without inheriting the way this tradition frames education as a process of attaining mastery over nature. My model for this project is the thought of Walter Benjamin, who takes up and critically modifies the enlightenment problematic of education throughout his oeuvre. Benjamin’s theory of political education is valuable for us today, I will argue, owing to the way that it holds onto the image of a future humanity freed from the constraints of capitalist society, but uncouples this image from a narrative of progressive historical realization. As many of Benjamin’s works, especially early in his career, are appropriations and inversions of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, we will begin by examining the latter’s theory of education and historical progress. We can understand Kant’s view of humanity’s progressive realization as an educational process involving both the formation of individual humans and the making and remaking of social and political institutions. Humanity’s historical education for freedom depends on a conception of progressive realization in the species, a continual and public process of intergenerational transmission, and a grounding in the transcendental idea of freedom. Benjamin’s departure from Kant, as we will see in the second section, lies in his rejection of the idea of a teleological struggle towards ideals. More generally still, unlike Kant who sees human civilization as the antithesis of animality, Benjamin locates a positive conception of barbarism in capitalist institutions and forms of life. Benjamin’s theory of political education thus does not see in present conditions the necessary prerequisites for the realization of humanity, but the blocking of this realization; for this reason he outlines the need for the cultivation of secret knowledge, in a discontinuous tradition breaking from present educational methods, grounded in the precepts of historical materialism.