Walter Benjamin

"With Benjamin there was, I think, an inability to embrace the illusion of a future. Yet without an investment in what might be, one is doomed to dwell solely on what was, and, in the case of those in extremis, to see the hardships one is presently forced to endure as the only reality. I have always shared Adorno's and Horkheimer's view that Benjamin's social criticism was compromised by his religious idealism, and I have, in particular, never accepted the idea that the present is simply a site of eternal return for all that has gone before, and that the possibility of renewal lies in meditating on a dismembered past.10 In this view, entropy is inescapable (the debris piling up at our feet as the storm of progress hurls us away from paradise), and redemption dependent on the appearance of a savior. But perhaps it was Benjamin's unworldliness I found so unsettling—the accusation that the intellectual is by definition maladapted to real life, to practical tasks, to marriage, to human relationships, his head in the clouds, his life in an ivory tower, his ideas of no earthly use. Yet I shared the view of Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno that the thinker does not owe it to society to demonstrate how it might be changed for the better. Although Marx had taken exception to the notion that the task of the philosopher was simply to understand the world, not change it, I had a deep aversion to prescriptions and exhortations as to how one should lead one's life, and was drawn to Anna Akhmatova's desire to describe, before all else, and to "stand as witness to the common lot.""