ll the Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy

1. It has to be shown that the "contradictions" by means of which the individual disciplines seek to discredit philosophy are w be found just as much in the individual disciplines themselves. At every point in them, moreover. Furrhermore, they do nor contradict rhe concept of truth, because there is no truth about an object. Truth is only in it. And the truth in an object may become manifest, depend ing on the r:ime and the context, in fundamentally different forms that only appear to contradict each other­namely, with regard to a point of view about it, not however with regard to a poinr of view in ir.

2. Our gaze must strike the object in such a way that it awakens some· thing within ir that springs up to meet the intention. Whereas the reporter who adopts the stance of the banal philosopher and specialized scicnrist indulges himself in lengthy descriptions of the object at which his gaze is directed, the intensive observer finds that somethjng leaps out at him from the object, enters into him, takes possession of him, and something differ· em-namely, the non intentional truth-speaks from out of the phi losopher.

3. This language of the intentionless truth (that is to say, of the object itself) possesses authority. This authority of the mode of speaking is the yardstick of objecrivit)' [Sachlichkeit]. It, nor the empirical object, in which the intentionless truth subsists and against which it cannor measure itself, since it cannot discover the object outside itself. On the contrary, this authority stands in opposition to the conventional concept of objectivity because irs va lidity, rhat of the non intentional rnnh, is historical-that is to say, anything bur timeless; it is bound to a particular historical base and changes with history. "Timelessness" must therefore be unmasked as an

Individual Discipl ines and Philosophy 405

exponent of the bourgeois concept o f truth. The authority we have de­scribed, then, conrains within it a precise concept of t ime, since it comes and goes depending on the temporal constella tion. Bur it does nor come into being merely because an opinion is gradually declared to be "correct" and so becomes correct. On the contrary, it leaps into existence as the result of an immersion of the object in itself provoked by the external gaze.

4. This authority proves its worth by testing itself aga inst forms o f expression, even nonobjective ones, as befits the legitimacy of every author­ity. So much so, that the decisive factor at the moment becomes that meticu lousness [Akribie] which is the least objective tool of a broadly conceived philosophical methodology and a lso the guarantor of a sovereign mastery of all rhe methods for creating an authority that would eliminate this same meticulousness. This is how it should be understood in my work on the Baroque. Insofar as truth is intention less, it seizes the whole inductive appararus, which has now become external, and thrusts it back inco the work. There, secure in the heart of the matter, it manipulates it- playfully, at will-in the interest of authority.

5. The objectivity of science, therefore, is of exactly the same type as the a lleged objectivity of criticism.

Fragment written in 1923; unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime. Translated by Rodney Livingstone.