Walter Benjamin e a categoria de experiência (Erfahrung)

Abstract

This study deals with the category of Experience (Erfahrung) in the writings of Walter Benjamin. To this end, it initially investigates the context lived by the author in the modern period with its technological and scientific changes and the influences that he received from the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, aspects that decisively will mark his own understanding about that category. Secondly, it searches out to highlight the understanding of Benjamin on the subject and the constellation of elements that are related to it, among which we can point the question of time, narrative, tradition, memory and thresholds situations. Still showing the impoverishment of the very notion of Experience against the advent of modernity and the impacts of World War I, as well as its consequent reduction of the scope of experiment occurred in that period. Also adding to this, an instrumental conception of language and philosophy which is now used only as a guide to scientific knowledge. Such point also involves a criticism of the theory of knowledge of Immanuel Kant and the interpretations of it carried out by the school of Marburg. That’s the reason why it discusses, finally, the urgent need to recognize the poverty of Experiences in which we live and the requirement to recover the Experience to its fullest to the speech, especially the philosophical, in order to resume the expressive character of philosophy itself, once consigned to oblivion, as well as its ability to think in temporality.