Benjamin initially sought to develop these ideas in the context of Kant’s philosophy of history, believing it was in this context that the problems of the Kantian system could be fully exposed and challenged (C, 98). A very early article, ‘The Life of Students’ (‘Das Leben der Studenten’, 1915), is useful for suggesting how these problems manifest themselves within the philosophy of history. It rejects a “a view of history that puts its faith in the infinite extent of time and thus concerns itself only with the speed, or lack of it, with which people and epochs advance along the path of progress” and contrasts this with a perspective “in which history appears to be concentrated on a single focal point, like those that had traditionally been found in the utopian images of the philosophers” (SW 1, 37).  The latter, ‘messianic’ view of history has a distinct intention and methodology: it aims to grasp how elements of what Benjamin calls “the ultimate condition” and “highest metaphysical state” of history—which we might call the historical Absolute—appear not as the telos or end of history, but as an immanent state of perfection which has the potential to manifest itself in any particular moment (SW 1, 37). He claims that the necessary recognition of such metaphysical condition requires an act of criticism [Kritik] (SW 1, 38). Benjamin had initially proposed Kant’s philosophy of history as the topic of his doctoral dissertation, and while he felt it necessary to change this to the Early German Romantics’ philosophy of art, crucial features of the proposed project survive in the final work. Astute readers, he says, may still discern in it an “insight into the relationship of a truth to history” (C, 135–6). Specifically, the concept of art criticism operating in Romantic aesthetics rests upon epistemological presuppositions that reveal the ‘messianic’ essence of Romanticism (SW 1, 116–7; n.3, 185). The messianic conjunction between the highest metaphysical state of history and the ephemerality of each particular moment is here seen as theoretically determining the Romantic relationship between the artistic Absolute—or what Benjamin defines as the Idea of art—and each particular artwork.