Walter Benjamin Philosopher
- Gender: Male
- Citizenship: Germany
- Born: Jul 15, 1892
- Died: Sep 26, 1940
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German philosopher and cultural critic. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, historical materialism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism. He is associated with the Frankfurt School.
Among Benjamin's major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Baudelaire, and translation theory. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, who developed a theater notable for its Verfremdungseffekt. An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism. Influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen, Benjamin coined the term "auratic perception", denoting the aesthetic faculty by means of which civilization may recover an appreciation of myth.
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
death
Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
experience
The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
hope
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
beauty & happiness
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
knowledge
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
wisdom
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
art, truth & wisdom