In September 1940, while fleeing from the Gestapo, Walter
Benjamin ended his life with an overdose of morphine. In preceding years,
Benjamin had used morphine, mescaline and, mostly, hashish in curious attempts
to explore the workings of the human mind. From letters we know Benjamin
ultimately planned to publish "a truly exceptional book about hashish"
(145). The project, however, was never finished. Only two brief texts Benjamin
did complete, the articles "Hashish in Marseilles" and "Myslovice
— Braunschweig — Marseilles". Apart from these, what we know about his
drug experiments is based upon a number of entries in Benjamin’s notebooks,
some passages from personal letters, and, most importantly, protocols of his
drug sessions. Now, Howard Eiland has published a handy English edition that
brings these different texts together. On Hashish is thus not, as the
title might suggest, a book about cannabis. It is hence of less interest to the
hemp aficionado than to the student of Benjamin’s intellectual world.

A knowledgeable introduction by Marcus Boon familiarizes
the reader with the socio-intellectual context. Terse annotations illuminate
the historical backdrop. The clear thematic focus and the compactness of this
edition make it a helpful utensil for the student of Benjamin’s philosophy.
Regrettably, the translation renders the German expression most central to
Benjamin’s phenomeno­logical studies, Rausch, either as "trance"
(which invokes unsuitable conno­tations of mild passivity) or, much worse, as "intoxication"
(which goes diametrically against the meaning Benjamin had in mind). Eiland
admits that "neither [is] an entirely satisfactory translation" (p.
XII), yet he does not come up with a better solution (the simplest being to
leave the term untranslated). The matter does demand attention to the
linguistic detail because of Benjamin’s foremost interests. He did not care
much about the objective and material aspects of drugs (i.e. physiological and
toxicological properties) but focused entirely on their subjective and
cognitional effects. It was the experiences of, and the lessons from,
drug-induced ecstasies, raptures, and highs — all of which would have been
better translations for Rausch than "intoxication" — that
mattered to him.

In a time when the consumption of
drugs other than alcohol and nicotine was a novum in the Western world,
Benjamin saw himself as an explorer, out to investigate unknown lands of the
mind. It is this aspect of his studies that demarcate him as a serious
truth-seeker from fellow travelers on the drug train. His experiments were not
the idle games of a bohemian intellectual in pursuit of exciting entertainment.
Nor was he craving artistic inspiration. Benjamin pursued an experience that
was meant to have philosophical relevance.

His main hypothesis was that
important experiences, essential to the conditio humana, had been lost
when society transitioned into the individualistic era. Giving up cultural
formations that created and fostered communal consciousness, people had become
out of touch with certain aspects of themselves (in the main: empathy for
others and a fellow-feeling towards the environment). To recapture these
aspects, one must sidestep one’s individualistic blindfolds, Benjamin held.
Ultimately, a new philosophy was needed; its inception, however, could
perchance be helped along by consciously sought-out esthetic experiences.

For Benjamin, surrealistic art and
drug-induced highs come in, therefore, not as assault on the faculty of reason,
but as means to forms of rationality other than the prevalent, technocratic
one. In a letter to his philosopher-friend Max Horkheimer, he claimed, "critical
theory cannot fail to recognize how deeply certain powers of Rausch are
bound to reason and to its struggle for liberation." (145) Just as Herbert
Marcuse some thirty years later, Benjamin connected the drug-induced experience
to insights into the nature of the universe that could advance the project of
human freedom.

How so? Rausch opens up —
as do certain art forms and some religious experiences — new vistas.
Truths concealed behind the veil of our conventional perceptions and buried
beneath the foundations of the ordinary come to the fore. For instance, hashish
helps to unfamiliarize oneself with accustomed perspectives. Benjamin felt it
lets us break away from the narrow confines of our individuation, making us
realize an essential sameness in being. This goes along with a benign feeling
for others and towards nature, ushering in the idea of an all-encompassing
sympathy.

Recalling the "ancients’
intercourse with the cosmos" in various communal forms of "ecstatic
trance" (129), Benjamin declares: "It is the dangerous error of
modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to
consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights."
(129f.) Humankind must find a more harmonious relationship with its natural
environment, not apart and aside from ordinary reality, but by integrating such
experiences into everyday modes of societal living. What we need is a wholesale
cosmopolitical transformation of our lifeworld that supersedes the
boundaries of sexual, racial and national differences: "Men as a species
completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is
just beginning its development." (130)

Out of an interest in the
reconciliation of nature and freedom, Benjamin was particularly in favor of the
mediation of the senses (as doorways to the realm of nature) and the mind (as
gatekeeper to the realm of freedom). This mediation, he thought, was
foreshadowed in a duplex way: in the drug-induced visualization of thought
(when thinking assumes sense quality by being heard, seen, or felt), and, vice
versa, in the intellectualization of sense data (e.g., by the uninhibited flow
of allegorical imagery before the eye).

Benjamin perceived this chemically
aided synthesis of the mind and the senses to be liberating as it suggested to
him the possibility of a future reign of reason that would operate no longer by
repressing our sensual instincts and desires. The integration of our
sensitivity and sensuality into the intellectual realm and the spiritualization
of our physical strivings, anticipated in the drug experience, were hence "truly
political in the end" (145). Individual liberation would lead to new forms
of societal freedom. Under the influence of it, Benjamin went thus so far as to
postulate: "The advantages of universal ha[shish] consumption ought to be
weighed impartially." (70) Likewise he once pondered a "valid
legitimation" (81) for the use of opium because it helps us penetrate the ‘matrix’
before our eyes: Benjamin named it "the world net" (95) and noted, "the
whole universe is caught in it", blinding us from the "peculiar
experience of identity" of all being (82).

Yet, with hindsight Benjamin was
given to more caution: "we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that
we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic […].
And the most passionate investigation of hashish Rausch will not teach
us half so much about thinking (…) as the profane illumination of thinking
will teach us about hashish intoxication." (133f.) One has to agree. In a
world where nearly every college student has had experience with cannabis etc.,
and very few are philosophizing like Benjamin, there is little hope that dope
alone will change things for the better.

Apart from reflections driven by
Benjamin’s philosophical interests, the book contains a plethora of hilarious
verbalizations of Benjamin’s aphoristic humor, accentuated by the influence of
weed, such as "If Freud were to do a psychoanalysis of creation, the
fjords would come off badly." (71) Naturally, the reader also finds a
great many observations on the heightened auditory and visual sensitivity
induced by cannabis. The merits of the latter lie with, and are limited to, the
poetic evidence of an experience that once was, but no longer is, the
prerogative of an exclusive few. Those passages, although comprising more than
half the text, seem, therefore, quite immaterial compared to the scattered
philosophical gems in the text, as, for example, the following passage that
concludes his (published) essay "Hashish in Marseille":

"I would like to believe that
hashish persuades Nature to permit us — for less egoistic purposes — that
squandering of our own existence that we know in love. For, if, when we love,
our existence runs through Nature’s fingers like golden coins that she cannot
hold and lets fall so that they can thus purchase new birth, she now throws us,
without hoping or expecting anything, in ample handfuls toward existence."
(126)

© 2006 Claus Dierksmeier

Claus Dierksmeier is Professor of
Philosophy at Stonehill College in Easton (Boston), MA. His specialty is the
philosophy of freedom in the 18^th – 21^st century and its
legal, economic and religious ramifications. (He adds “I am very grateful to my assistant, Emily Chambers, for smoothing out my
Teutonic English.”)

Categories: Philosophical