The theory of Ideas presented in the Prologue is truncated and difficult to understand outside the context of Benjamin’s earlier works, and the philosophical tradition that it engages with is further obscured in the first English translation. However, the critical aspects of Benjamin’s investigation advocate—against aesthetic versions of positivist empiricism—a metaphysical realism, and, against certain versions of philosophical idealism, a non-singular essentialism. That is, he does not restrict the possibility of metaphysical reality only to actual empirical particulars and he advocates the multiplicity and not singularity of the essence (understood, in Goethean terms, as a harmony and not a unity of truth). In doing so, he must address that  ‘theological’ paradox, mentioned in the discussion of symbol and allegory, of how the transcendental/supersensuous appears immanently within the material/sensuous. Benjamin is clear that the relation between Ideas and phenomenon is neither one of Aristotelian ‘containment’ nor one of Kantian lawfulness or hypothesis. Ideas are not given to some intellectual intuition, but they are capable of being sensuously represented. Such a sensuous representation of the truth remains the task of philosophy.