Walter Benjamin on the Allegorist and the Collector
The Secular and The Religious are Not Opposites
“In every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector.”
- Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project
“In every secularist hides a religious believer, and in every religious believer a secularist.”
- Zohar Atkins, Arcades Project
Walter Benjamin has a penchant for aphorisms that are at once insightful and opaque, shimmering in and out of focus.
Harry Frankfurt would call an aphorism which sounds good, but has no deeper meaning “bullsh*t.” But, where some would see Benjamin as a bullsh*tter, I take him to be an artist. One of Benjamin’s aims as an artist is to reveal the form of things. His aphorisms are gestures at the form of aphorism. The less their content makes sense, or refers to something precise, the more they can make us aware of their architectural structure. Like an abstract expressionist, Benjamin sometimes draws our attention to the material with which he works, language itself.
That said, Benjamin’s aphorism about the relationship between allegorist and collector isn’t just an empty gesture. It’s also an aphorism about the relationship between form and content.
Allegory is the act of interpretation, of making X mean Y. Collection is the act of composition without interpretation. A collector is concerned with the form, the allegorist with the meaning or content.
When Benjamin says that the allegorist hides in the collector, he’s saying that you can’t be interested in form without also having an implicit hope for meaning. A coin collector isn’t only interested in coins as an abstraction, but also in coins as representations of something else.
Meanwhile, allegorists or people who immediately jump to give their interpretations of things, skipping over the things themselves, are also motivated by form and not just content. There is an aesthetic appeal to allegory independent of the meaning one makes.
We could say that people who go around making meaning of their surrounding are also collectors—collectors of interpretation.
In claiming a relationship between allegorist and collector, Benjamin indicates how each can turn into the other. Sometimes, we are on the search for an interpretation and get side-tracked by the allure of the form itself. Trivia can be mesmerizing. Other times, what starts off as mere noticing of patterns, just futzing around with a bunch of stones or stamps all of a sudden bursts into an insight about the world. All of a sudden, the random assortment of stones is now a cipher for something else, something present, if invisible.
In different terms, the relationship between allegorist and collector is the relationship in phenomenology between Being and beings. The collector cares only about beings, but not the Being of beings. The allegorist looks through beings to their Being. In fact, Being is always the Being of beings, so both allegorist and collector err when they become one-sided.
Spirituality has a material substrate and the material world has a transcendent quality to it. The secular and the religious are not opposite, separate realms, but two modes of engaging the same reality.
To allegorize Benjamin, “in every secularist hides a religious believer, and in every religious believer a secularist.”
Heterodox Academy featured an edited version of my conversation with John Tomasi.
My conversation with novelist and theologian Tara Isabella Burton is out. We talk about new age religion, social media, pluralism, and much more!
ICYMI: I talk to Zachary Davis for Ministry of Ideas about the meaning of life.