m1,2

We're certainly not dealing in this passage with a straightforward belief in Fortuna, since we'll always remember how theology is a defining source of historical materialism. It's more like the dichotomy of leisure and business at the heart of language is determinative, to some degree, of the main thrust here of characterizing the contemplative life (which is the life of the flaneur). This life is seen as escaping not just the vita activa, but the "world at large." The citation from Schuhl (one of the last books Benjamin would read perhaps, in 1938) situates the conception of contemplation in the Middle Ages, which just as in m1,1 makes the idea and experience of idleness and leisure historically evolving forces, historically determined forces that even in their abstraction and subjectivity are linked at the root to ideas of the active, business, and the world of capital. And we can note as well the doubleness of Fortuna (the "conjunction" of its two identities, to use the word from the earlier passage), and how difficult it might be to distinguish them, to know whether one is enjoying leisure or embracing idleness, and hence to have an idea of whether one has escaped the wheel of fortune or is "under her power," doing her bidding. In fact, this passage calls into question the entire idea of the flaneur, the "man of contemplation," as of course a person of very great privilege, someone who has managed to evade any need for actual work to survive, and it's this person who accesses the true nature of the soul, yet only to be "immobile at the center" of the world at large, a pivot point around which that world turns, a person presumably experiencing the "dialectics at a standstill" the flaneur perceives and creates. I think part of Benjamin's point here is that the Middle Ages, with its feudal and hierarchical worldviews, would have had far less trouble with such an idea, that in fact contemplation operated this way, that it was possible to flee the world, and that privilege was, as with the Greeks, simply a matter of course, whereas what we as readers of the Arcades Project are perceiving is that in fact philosophy is at the heart of mechanism, its pivot point and final controller. At the same time, we too are on this continuum and subject to the evolution of these forces, the citation leading us to their consideration but also being part of mechanized book culture, part of a very determinate materiality, finally no more nor less than another passage in the arcade.