English to Russian Art/Literary Philosophy From a biographcal novel by an American writer

Benjamin began to lecture on Greek metaphysics, reading aloud from Plato (but translating from Jowett’s Victorian English into German by sight).

He was intrigued by Plato’s ‘invention’ of Socrates. ‘He is both real and unreal, both historical and ahistorical,’ Benjamin explained. He noted that any philosophical system began with an attitude, an approach, to history, and that Plato’s understanding of how one could grant eternal life to a figure such as Socrates was utterly ingenious. It was not a question of mere appropriation. ‘We’ve seen what happens when a writer overwhelms his subject, as with Max Brod and Kafka,’ he said. ‘Brod did not respect the aura of the individual genius; he did not proclaim Kafka’s separateness from himself, and so his biography of his friend is horribly flawed.’ He explained to them that the figure of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues was ‘made up’ in the sense that Plato had transposed the man he once knew into intellectual and moral situations he had never, in life, encountered. But Plato knew the spirit of Socrates so intimately he could give him a life ancillary to the one he ‘really’had. Plato could, in other words, be trusted with Socrates; the fiction was real.

Heymann Stein leapt to his feet when Benjamin drew the allusive quotation marks around the term really with fingers in the air. ‘Surely,’ Stein argued, ***‘one has a life. One does not “have” a life.’***

Benjamin said, ‘I am sorry, Herr Stein. I should have made myself clearer. It is our tendency as moderns to cast everything we say in ironic light. This is a mistake, of course.’ He began to pace, as if thinking intensely, trying to work out something fresh. ‘Language brings reality into being; it is, as it were, a bridge between what happens in the mind and what occurs in the world. Perhaps I will try to put this more boldly: Unless one frames reality in words, the reality does not exist. This theory of language plays havoc with conventional notions of time, and that is a problem; on the other hand, I do not believe in time. That is, I can’t believe in unimagined, linear time. To put something between brackets is to expose its linguistic element, its dependency on invented time, its mystery, its final unreality.’