ABSTRACT
In an essay written in his early twenties, ‘The Lives of Students’, Benjamin discusses how most university ‘education’ simply prepares people for an unquestioning, fated life, rather than opening them up to real and challenging thought. The underlying point, however, is that Benjamin’s essay makes apparent the depth of contempt that he felt for instrumental reason and the devastating hold it had on modern life, even in institutions of supposed learning. Benjamin, for example, clings to the possibility that, despite the increasing success of the university ‘in ridiculing the few surviving visionaries as starry-eyed dreamers’, the dreamers will continue to strive for ‘that expansive friendship between creative minds, with its sense of infinity and concern for humanity as a whole’. Benjamin’s search for the cracks and discontinuities led him in a slightly different direction.
