Gottfried Benn
*
ARTISTS AND OLD AGE
Last winter in Berlin I went to a lecture at the Kant–
Gesellschaft given by a Kant scholar on Kant's posthumous work.
This work, the
Opus posthumum,
the original of which was lost in
Northern Germany during the last war, exists in the form of tran–
scripts which, with notes and commentary, were made available to
the limited public of the philosophically interested about twenty
years ago; it is apparent that Kant never got to the point of working
it over and finishing it completely. The
Opus posthumum
was writ–
ten during the years 1797-1803; Kant's great earlier works had been
published some twenty years before that time.
It
has now become
evident that some of his fundamental theses look very different in
the light of the later work, which contains passages in contradiction
to the
Critique of Pure Reason,
and the lecturer raised the question
which propositions were to be considered v,alid, the earlier or the
posthumous ones; for the two were scarcely reconcilable. The lecturer
did not attempt to settle the question, but suggested that some of the
earlier theses were cancelled out by some of the later. Behind this
question of the comparative validity of Kant's earlier or later work,
there looms up the problem of early and late works in general, the
problem of the continuity of the creatively productive personality,
of the transformations it undergoes and the breaks that occur. The
particular case is that of a philosopher, but the problem is one that
occurs in the case of artists too.
• Gottfried Benn, born in 1886, is one of the major poets of modern Germany.
He occupies a position as an innovator and experimentalist in German literature
comparable to that of Eliot and Pound in English. His verse, unfortunately, pre–
sents such great difficulties of translation that it is virtually unknown outside
German-speaking countries.
