Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892 - September 24, 1940)
In May 2006, Harvard University Press published "On Hashish" by someone the New York Times calls, "the revered philosopher, essayist and critic Walter Benjamin." Benjamin experimented with hashish, opium and mescaline between 1927 and 1934, and "On Hashish" is a collection of his writing on the subject, including his drug-taking protocols and descriptions of their effects.
Benjamin's writings were "mosaics incorporating philosophy, literary criticm, Marxist analysis, and a syncretic theology" says the introduction to Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. He translated Marcel Proust and made a study of Baudelaire, publishing several essays on him, influencing his decision to experiment with drugs, which he did in a methodical manner under the supervision of two physician friends who had recruited him as a test subject.
After taking hashish on December 18, 1927, Benjamin wrote these notes (in translation): "Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety complex…All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura…. Feeling of little wings growing in one's smile… An outward projection of the inner feeling of ticklishness." He continued, "It is striking that the inhibiting factors which lie in superstition, etc. and which are not easy to designate, are freely expressed rather impulsively without strong resistance…One traverses the same paths of thought as before. Only they seem strewn with roses." He also wrote an account of an unsupervised intoxicated evening in Marseilles in 1928.
"He took these drugs, which he looked on as 'poison' [Baudelaire's term in his writings on hashish and opium], for the sake of the knowledge to be gained from their use," wrote Eiland Jennings. "He considered hashish intoxication itself a peculiarly intense form of study, at once dangerous and full of charm, a simultaneous expansion and concentration of the powers of perception." His 1929 essay "Surrealism" underscored "the propaedeutic function of intoxicants in achieving a 'profane illumination' of the revolutionary energies slumbering in the world of everyday things, and it invokes a dialectics of intosication." Elsewhere, Benjamin wrote, "The opium-smoker or hashish-eater experiences the power of the gaze to suck a hundred sites out of one place."
In Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Benjamin wrote, "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism."
Benjamin died in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis, either by suicide with cyanide or morphine or otherwise, as the film "Who Killed Walter Benjamin?" speculates.