Artistic Will In The Period Of Decadence

Benjamin was a German Jewish thinker in early20th century. His thoughts reflected the crisis of that dark age. People often confuse about his conflicting standpoint and his multiple professions. While Benjamin considered himself as a literary critic, who discovers the truth through the literature works. So this paper will investigate Benjamin’s thoughts by exploring his critics. We could see that Benjamin’s major concern is how human being is and what they should do during the secular modern time without God.In modern society, tradition collapsed, with which the significance lost. The totality ruined, and the world presented in the form of allegory instead of symbol. The assured truth disappeared, meanwhile mythic deceived people. People lost memories of the past, the understanding of their own existence, and the perception of the reality. It was this ignorance that encouraged the mythic power, and made themselves under the mythic control, hard to be rescued.In this case, Benjamin proposed to re-recognize the past, people’s own self, and the truth. He wanted to resist the mythic power and the trick totality, and insisted to search truth form fragments. This is his epistemology, his profane illumination, and his redemption. For Benjamin, although the divine had hidden, and the ideals can’t be grasped, we still could research the phenomena. If we do so, truth might emerge itself. In this sense, Benjamin’s research was the preparation for the truth and redemption, in which Benjamin still had the faith. However since the divine truth had disappeared, and Messiah was also out of sight, this faith was after all a hope in despair. So Benjamin actually meant that we must confront the ruins without God, think and search strenuously in the hopeless hope. This is the will in the period of so-called decadence, and the heroism in this secular world. Among those ambiguous appearances of Benjamin, this paper deems him a modernist. On the one hand, he admitted bravely the absence of God and the status of ruin in the modern time, without escaping to a false totality; on the other hand, his insistence on the pursuit of truth distinguished him from the nihilism, keeping a belief for transcendent. This attitude still has significance for us today.