The sun: Die sonne

This essay interrogates the structures of visuality in Walter Benjamin's "Fate and Character." Comparing Benjamin's thought to presentations of the sun in Plato, Plotinus, and Goethe, it shows how Benjamin is concerned less with the eternal and stable categories of the good and the beautiful than with the transient and unstable notions of history and freedom. Benjamin resolves these categories through two images of weather: one of fog as the medium of mythic guilt in tragedy; another of the sun, which illuminates the freedom of the character in comedy. These weather images relate to a taxonomy of forms of light that dictate the shape of Benjamin's essay, and in turn point to a contrast between messianism and utopia under notions of divine weather and divine weatherlessness.