Thought
Walter Benjamin corresponded much with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer, even from their New York City residence. The competing influences — Brecht’s Marxism, Adorno’s critical theory, Gerschom Scholem’s Jewish mysticism — were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover, the critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin’s writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplar synthesis is On the Concept of History (Theses on the Philosophy of History).
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Famous quotes containing the word thought:
“I know that each stage is not going to last forever. I used to think that when he was little. Whenever he was in a bad stage I thought that he was going to be like that for the rest of his life and that I’d better do something to shape him up. When he was in a good state, I thought he was going to be a perfect child and I would never have to worry; he was always going to stay that way.”
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Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
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“And oh, I knew, I knew,
And said out loud, I couldn’t bide the smother
And heat so close in; but the thought of all
The woods and town on fire by me, and all
The town turned out to fight for me that held me.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)