Aesthetic modernism in the philosophy of Walter Benjamin

Although Walter Benjamin did not put forward a systematic philosophy, from his first text to his last text, we see that his writings have a fundamental problem. As a thinker of the modern age, Walter Benjamin tries to analyze the dynamics and transformations of the age in which he lives. His main problematic is progress, the development of technique and the transformation of experience. In this context, Benjamin's theory of aesthetics and art is to question the new functions and forms that art has acquired with the dissolution of tradition and to reveal the revolutionary potential of new cultural practices. Benjamin is of the opinion that the historical meaning of art has changed with the development of technique. One of these new forms is aesthetic modernism. Aesthetic modernism refers to the sum of the attitudes and cultural values of poets, writers and thinkers who emerged in the late capitalist period and were aware of the crisis of modernization and harshly criticized modernization. Aesthetic modernism turns towards primitivism instead of progress, irrationality instead of reason, dream instead of reality. Walter Benjamin's approach to aesthetic modernism is related to the essence of the aesthetics of the modern age. Benjamin tries to analyze the relationship between aesthetic modernism and technique and experience. Benjamin states that with the development of technique, the ritual-auratic structure of art was dissolved. The most important outcome of this dissolution in the artistic field is that there is a strong break from Aristotelian poetics. This dissolution also meant the dissolution of the untouchable, hierarchical, anti-democratic structure of the work of art. The wall between art and daily life remains. For Benjamin, the transformation of technique democratized artistic practice. In this context, he questions the possibilities of aesthetic modernism and revolutionary art. Thus, Benjamin reveals the progressive potential of aesthetic modernism. While doing this, he carried out his studies in a wide spectrum, from Spinoza to Leibniz, from the German Mourning Play to Romanticism, from Marx to Nietzsche, from literature to cinema, from Freud to Bergson. The texts he wrote influenced many thinkers and writers after him. He has taken his place as an original philosopher in a wide range of fields ranging from philosophy to cultural studies, from art to politics.