Benjamin credited Romanticism with revealing nature’s dark, frightening side that rationality cannot overcome.

Evidence

For Benjamin, by contrast, what he had written in his essay of 1912, A Dialogue on Contemporary Religiosity', remained decisive: it is to Romanticism that we owe the powerful insight into the dark side of naturalness: it is not basically good, it is strange, horrible, frightening, dreadfulmean … What Romanticism discovered was the appreciation of everything frightening, inconceivable and low which is woven into our lives.’ Although he was more sceptical than Adorno with regard to the power of consciousness and its progress, Benjamin was at the same time more cautious in his assessment of myth and its ability to be overcome by rationality. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 894

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment on the myth-reason entanglement, and to the broader Frankfurt School ambivalence about Enlightenment.