The Evaporation of the Aura and The Meaninglessness of Life

In his paper "Über Einige Motive Bei Baudelaire" or "On Some Motifs of Baudelaire" Walter Benjamin points out a particular phenomenon spreading in our modern world, namely the "withdrawal of the aura", Benjamin’s observation affirms the perspective of the poet Charles Baudelaire that photography dispels the magic outline, or aura, surrounding the things we use everyday The problem is that a camera captures a person’s image without returning any ‘glance’, but implied in every glance is the anticipation of the glance being returned. When this expectation is fully satisfied, we experience the aura of something. In Benjamin’s opinion the aura experience is based on transferring a commonly experienced reaction from human relationships to the relationship between inanimate nature and mankind. "To feel the aura of something" means to give it the power of returning our glances. If our modern world often seems to be meaningless, perhaps this is a consequence of the fact that the objects that surround us have lost their aura, and have no more power to ‘return a glance’. Objects are reduced to mere functional apparatuses which are seen to be useful only if they satisfy our material needs. It has been suggested that a form of psychological animism could be adopted in which we might treat objects in a different way, taking special care of them almost as if they were alive.

​Excerpt Taken From 
"Beyond Synchronicity: The Worldview of 
Carl Gustav Jung and Wolfgang Pauli"
Credited to:
Marialuisa Donati, Milan