What was so tremendously original about their collective responses was that the answers lay not in political activism or in a revolutionary labor movement, but in such abstruse phenomena as avant-garde art, psychoanalysis, dialectical philosophy, and a messianic religious faith. The room is the site of an extended conversation. There is a primary conversation where a group of very old men present the questions and set the tone of the discussions. Everyone in the room is in some manner reacting to the old men s ideas. The truly profound, innovative, or outlandish assert their own observations, and attempt to enter into dialogue with the old men.
People come in and out of the room.
Some gather around their favorite speaker, and some are drawn to particular groups because of shared interest in a particular subject. The room is the whole of Western philosophy. The old men are classical philosophers such as Socrates and Plato. The profound, innovative and outlandish, are the more modern thinkers such as Hegel and Marx . Finally, the members of the Frankfurt school fit the category of those gathered round their favorite speaker.