Benjamin’s concern to reincorporate the perspective of art’s temporal transformation demands an analogous radicalization. The “genetic and concrete classification” (OGT, 24) that Benedetto Croce called history (in order to distinguish it from that generalizing thought that abstracts away from change and development) must now be reconciled with Benjamin’s theory of Ideas. For the messianic philosophy of history that grounds Benjamin’s work problematizes existing formulations of the concepts of history and historical origin. In line with his discussion of the Idea, the concept of historical origin should not be reduced to the causality and actuality of the empirically factual, nor should it be regarded as a purely logical and timeless essence. It is not merely, Benjamin argues, “the coming-to-be of what has originated ” and cannot be recognized in “the naked, manifest existence of the factual” (OGT, 24). For the ‘historical’ sequence that permits the Idea to be represented must include not only that of the actual phenomena of a given period, but also that of their subsequent development in the understanding of later epochs. An investigation of the essence of the German mourning-play, for example, cannot restrict itself to contemporaneous events and actual plays as if these were ‘facts’ settled and decided once and for all, but must also investigate the changing understanding of this historical epoch and the varying reception of these plays, including the prior conditions of its own self-understanding. But nor is it a “purely logical” category, as if the Idea were some essence detached from and unrelated to history, to be grasped through an abstraction from all these particular historical developments (OGT, 25). Origin [Ursprung] is therefore distinguished from a merely genetic coming-into-being [Enstehung] and evolutionary development of ‘pure history’, to include the essential inner history of the “life of the works and forms” (OGT, 24–6). The “science of the Origin” is a philosophical history, a history of the essential, whose contemplation enlists a dialectical perspective to grasp the form of the “original phenomenon”: as something subject to a process of becoming and disappearing, and therefore only partial and incomplete.  Benjamin once again resorts to an image: “The origin stands as eddy in the stream of becoming and vigorously draws the emerging material into its rhythm” (OGT, 24). Criticism attempts to virtually reassemble the fore- and after-history [Vor- und Nachgeschichte] of the phenomena into a historical constellation, in which the Idea is represented and the phenomena redeemed. This is its messianic function in relation to the historical Absolute. 