Benjamin sought to broaden Kant’s concept of experience to include the religious.

Evidence

In Benjamin’s view, Kant had established a reduced concept of experience. What had to be done now was, using what was typical in Kant's style of thinking, to undertake the epistemological foundation of a higher concept of experience', one which would allow for the logical possibility not merely of mechanical experience but also of religious experience’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 344

What Benjamin, who had once praised the younger generation as sober and Romantic', had in mind was to combine the soberness of the Kant who did not exclude from philosophy its demand for depth, the Kant who had written Prolegomena to a Future Metaphysics, with a Romanticism which insisted on reconciling the conditional with the unconditional and which, for the sake of the highest things, was not prepared to rely on emotions alone. In Benjamin's view, Kant had established a reduced concept of experience. What had to be done now was, using what was typical in Kant’s style of thinking, to undertake the epistemological foundation of a higher concept of experience’, one which would `allow for the logical possibility not merely of mechanical experience but also of religious experience’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 344

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the Frankfurt School’s broader project of rescuing the irrational and occult as objects of philosophical attention, against positivist narrowing. — connects to: Benjamin demanded that philosophy accommodate even fortune-telling and the occult.; Benjamin built his method from dreaming and ecstasy to expand consciousness beyond academic limits — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 811; Benjamin grounded his method of perception in dreaming and ecstasy. (+1 more)
• QUESTION: How does this higher-concept-of-experience program relate to the later Adorno-Benjamin debates on experience in the 1930s?
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 344

Broader Connections

• Benjamin built his method from dreaming and ecstasy to expand consciousness beyond academic limits #expands (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 811
• Benjamin grounded his method of perception in dreaming and ecstasy. #expands (0.72)