Customer Reviews

On Hashish

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Benjamin aptly describes the bipolar nature of his own intoxicated illumination when he writes that, in "the imagination put in thrall to thinking during hashish intoxication," there are two "different sorts of powers: a genius of melancholy gravity, another of Ariel-like spirituality." Here, first, is an illustration of Benjamin's genius for melancholic heaviness: "In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glaces of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness -- a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm..." Here, next, an example of his more uplifting, "Ariel-like spirituality": "Versailles, for one who has taken hashish, is not too large, nor eternity too long. Against the background of these immense dimensions of inner experience, of absolute duration and immeasurable space, a wonderful, beatific humor dwells all the more fondly on the contingencies of the world of space and time." In the end, sadly, the darkness seems to have won out over the light in Bejamin's own life, but one wonders whether that fate would have been averted had he not lived through such dark days? Still, Benjamin believed in the revolutionary potential of the experiences he describes in this book to lighten the times, and he came to advocate a "profane illumination" that would be capable of recapturing the transformative insights hashish (and also opium and mescaline) afforded without continually requiring the drugs themselves. Such ideas seem to me to be well worth pondering.

This is wonderful, nostalgia-inducing, provocative collection of Benjamin's waking dreams and wandering reflections.

I was looking forward to some profound insights from a hashish using philosopher. Frankly, I've heard better from a stoned college student. I found nothing of substance in this book. Perhaps some will find it enough that a recognized major modern philosopher regarded hashish as worthy of study and contemplation but I don't.

I bought this book because it came as a bit of a shock to me that the uptight highbrow metaphysician, Walter Benjamin, had experimented with hashish. I knew, as one does, about his suicide by taking a morphine tablet. But I imagined that this was a one time thing, done as a way of escaping Nazi arrest.

Well, what do we get when a rather tedious, uptight German metaphysician smokes some pot? An uptight, convoluted, ponderous description of it. German philosophers tend to write this way you know, as any reader who has had to plough through Kant and Hegel is well aware.

In today's era, when every other suburban housewife smokes a joint from time to time, all these "insights" cited by the editorials seem more than absurd. They rise to the level of high camp. All this convoluted, philosophical introspection to describe the increase in appetite-You know, getting the "munchies"-almost made me titter aloud, as Benjamin does when he ingests the drug, and acts as if this is some profound revelation about the absurdity of existence. I'm sure we all remember those dorm room giggles.

Yes, one can argue that this is a jaded age and that our familiarity with all these effects does not vitiate a profound philosopher's insights. I wouldn't want to argue it though.
This age is not any more jaded than the one in which Benjamin took his life rather than be captured by the mass murderers unleashed throughout Europe at the time. And his insights are not profound. They're typical of German metaphysical twaddle, and, as such, excruciatingly tedious and boring.

Maybe there is somebody out there who would appreciate this book, some pale admirer of the German metaphysicians who is still rereading Hegel to unlock his insights. They don't exist - that goes for Benjamin as well as Hegel.