In the 1920s, Germany was a mess of extremes: full of burgeoning artistic creativity, but equally embroiled in political turmoil and societal upheaval. The philosopher Walter Benjamin was himself at this time conducting his own series of smaller, rather more personal upheavals. These were not declarations of change or public manifestos. These were more clandestine, if no less significant, upheavals.
“Fed on the damp boredom of postwar Europe and the last trickle of French decadence”, in opium dens and private rooms from Berlin to Paris, enterprising individuals sought to expand their minds through black-market, chemical means. Hashish, opium, even subcutaneous injections of pure mescaline. But Benjamin did not dive into this world for the sheer hedonistic indulgence of it all, though I’m sure there was a certain dark allure to the proceedings. His drug use was intentional, methodical, observed, and above all, recorded. Each altered state he encountered was another opportunity to study himself as an avatar of humanity, interrogating the structures of memory and perception, even the foundations of meaning itself.
During his first hashish experiment in December 1927, Benjamin poetically described the immediate head-change: “Your thinking follows the same paths as usual, but they seem strewn with roses.” This romantic notion would darken somewhat as his experimentation continued, and in the following years, up to 1934, Benjamin used various substances as a method to achieve what he famously declared a ”profane illumination”, a kind of materialist epiphany inaccessible to contemplative thinking. This flash of insight, grounded in hard, sensory reality rather than any kind of mystical transcendence, was a phenomenon he laid out in his 1929 essay Surrealism: the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.
With his friends, the medical doctors Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel, acting as co-observers, he documented his sessions in a series of highly detailed protocols. The vast majority of these remained unpublished long after his death but are now available in On Hashish, a posthumous collation of the protocols. On Hashish is a strange text that teeters between rigorous scientific inquiry, journal, and exploration of complex metaphysics. So, it was ambitious in its scope to say the least.
Inspired by the prominent poet Charles Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels (Artificial Paradises), a book in which he himself describes the experience of consuming hashish, and coming to a somewhat disheartening conclusion: “What hashish gives with one hand it takes away with the other: that is to say, it gives the power of imagination and takes away the ability to profit by it.”
Benjamin, unimpressed with the work, hoped to write a more definitive book on hashish that would succeed where Baudelaire failed. He sought something far more rigorous and scientific, applying the ideas of phenomenology (the study of subjective experience), to truly investigate the structure of consciousness, and therefore how it can be moulded and changed. Benjamin was sadly never able to fully complete his work. The relentless political upheaval in Germany, culminating in the rise of Nazism, saw him exiled from the country, and in 1940, on the Spanish border, fleeing from persecution, Benjamin tragically took his own life.
What remains of the work, however, is a testament to his attention to detail and dedication to the subject. On Hashish is a remarkable archive of hyper-detailed reflections on the effects of hashish, opium, and mescaline, and the insights they can provide us on human consciousness. The work is dense, far from a traditional scientific text, somewhat a reflection of the consumption in and of itself, a blend of critical prose and strangely surreal metaphor. It is one of the earliest serious explorations of altered states carried out by a prominent European intellectual. Scholars like Sebastian Marincolo have argued that Benjamin’s protocols represent “one of the most nuanced cognitive phenomenologies of cannabis ever produced” and are crucial to understanding Benjamin’s evolving theories on aesthetics, particularly the concepts of “aura” and the “optical unconscious”.
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