The Tension Between Reflecting & Poetry

Benjamin is a great literary critic in 20th century. At the early stage he tried hard to reestablish the authority of criticism in the era when systematic philosophy and critical theory were aot paid much attention to any more. His tactics was to establish his own theory of criticism and then acquire a better understanding of society and history by criticizing literature, and thereby succeed in spanning from literary criticism to culture criticism. Influenced by Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Hberson, his philosophical theory was expected to develop into a new empirical philosophy, which had got rid of the disadvantages of rationalism and nonrationalism. His criticism theory was affected by the romantic critics such as F Schlege, Holderlin, Goethe etc. From the aspect of modernism, he tried hard to make use of the method and thoughts of Mars Weber, Simmel and Marx to inspect the origin of modernism and the changes of modern aesthetic experience. However, his frustrated lifetime and the historical situation engendered him to prefer a theological benevolence. Consequently, he hoped to get out of the river of historical time, which was in predicament. In his later works, he put forward some terms like das gedichtete, aura, irony, fable, which not only embodied his theory of criticism, but also revealed his particular critical style. As both a critic and philosopher, Benjamin's critical works dealt with a wide range of culture by means of interpreting literary works. He strove to unearth the philosophical, aesthetic and theological connotations from literary works, which reflected a romantic philosopher's sober and reflecting critical principles and his purpose of constructing aesthetic philosophy itself. However, meanwhile he did not pay enough attention to the artistic appeal.Benjamin's theory of criticism involved linguistics, translation,history, politics and theology. By interpreting The Bible he put forward a new theological linguistic theory, of which he made use to inspect thewhole history of human's ideology. His linguistic theory can be used to explain wide, comprehensible cultural phenomena. However, his ideal imagination of prehistoric pure language led him astray in the understanding of the significance of human's language. In addition his theory of historical instantaneous benevolence showed deep color of theology and aesthetics. In the investigation of cultural history he created an organic view on cultural history, which avoided the drawbacks of study history problems in isolation. From the viewpoint of aesthetic modernity, he, from the considerations of his own experience, went deep into the changes of modern people's aesthetic experience and subsequently refined a new feeling pattern, which could be seen in the disappearance of the artistic aura, the declining of stories and modern lyrics. He converted the perceptual descriptions of these changes of aesthetic experience into a social theoretical...