Yes — I absolutely agree. Walter Benjamin’s work, when read closely, is a profound and idiosyncratic project of what we might call an “aesthetics of existence.” Not in the sense of a decorative or surface aesthetic, but in a much deeper sense: how one lives, perceives, resists, remembers, and redeems the fragments of life in an age of catastrophe.
Let me unpack this proposition with you from several angles — philosophical, literary, political, and metaphysical.
1.
Aesthetics as Redemption of the Everyday
Benjamin’s writing constantly returns to the marginal, the minor, the overlooked: arcades, toys, ruins, mechanical clocks, postcards, children’s books.
These are not nostalgic details. They are, for him, aesthetic sites of existence, where the suppressed history of the everyday might be recovered and redeemed:
“To live is to leave traces.”
— One-Way Street
Yet modern life erases traces, so Benjamin turns to the flâneur, the collector, the storyteller — those who live aesthetically, attentively, amidst destruction and distraction.
2.
Aesthetics as Resistance to Myth and Progress
In his famous Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin gives us the Angel of History, looking backward at the wreckage of time.
This is not just historiography. It’s a stance of existence — to live not in the false myth of progress, but in fidelity to the dead, the silenced, the crushed:
“There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.”
— Thesis II
To remember in this Benjaminian way is an aesthetic-political act. It is to refuse to let suffering be aestheticized into triumph, and instead to hold open the wound of history.
3.
Aesthetics as Mode of Attention
Benjamin had a mystical side — drawn to Jewish messianism, Kabbalah, and the idea of messianic time.
This emerges in his attitude toward perception: he wants to awaken attention — not the distracted reception of mass media, but a kind of spiritual readiness, a “now-time” (Jetztzeit):
“To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.”
— The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
This reversibility of gaze — this attuned attention — is an ethical-aesthetic mode of being.
4.
The Life of the Fragments
Benjamin never wrote a “system.” His work consists of fragments, constellations, and montages.
He lived in exile, in precarity, always crossing borders — both literal and conceptual. His method mirrored this: a kind of constellational thinking.
“Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.”
— Origin of the German Trauerspiel
This constellation-form is itself an aesthetic of existence — refusing linearity, refusing closure, gathering ruins and glimpses.
5.
Aesthetic Mourning and the Ethics of Seeing
Benjamin’s attention to the fragile — to children, to toys, to memory traces — is not sentimentality. It is a kind of aesthetic mourning.
He sees that aesthetic experience is the last refuge of human dignity under conditions of mechanization, commodification, and fascism.
To live aesthetically, then, is not to live beautifully, but to live responsively to the wreckage — to refuse to look away.
In Your Terms, My Friend:
Benjamin’s project could be said to resonate with:
- Your psychology of the self as a star map of scattered fragments.
- Your ethics of not walking away from the moment of encounter.
- Your sense that aesthetic sensibility is born from trauma and loss.
Benjamin teaches us that to live with and through the ruins is not defeat — it is a redemptive stance.
He died on the run, carrying a suitcase of papers he didn’t want to fall into fascist hands.
And yet, in those fragments, he left us an ethico-aesthetic map for existence in a broken world.
Would you like me to write an essay titled
《瓦爾特‧班雅明：作為一種生存美學的哲學家》
or
“Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Existence in an Age of Ruins”?
