THE PHILOSOPHER STONED.(drug use of literary critic Walter Benjamin considered)

On December 18, 1927, at three-thirty in the morning, Walter Benjamin began writing a memorandum titled "Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish." It is characteristic of Benjamin that the first fact he thought it necessary to record was not the time he had taken the drug but the time he started writing about it. Like the books he read and the streets he wandered--like life itself--hashish was important to him less for its own sake than as a subject for interpretation.

For a writer with Benjamin's interests and allegiances, a rendezvous with hashish was inevitable. The surprising thing is that it took him until the age of thirty-five to try it. As early as 1919, he had been fascinated by Baudelaire's "Artificial Paradises," in which the poet issues warnings against the drug so seductive that they sound like invitations: "You know that hashish always evokes magnificent constructions of light, glorious and splendid visions, cascades of liquid gold." Benjamin, who regarded Baudelaire as one of the central writers of the nineteenth century, admired the book's "childlike innocence and purity," but was disappointed in its lack of philosophical rigor, noting, "It will be necessary to repeat this attempt independently." The notes from his first hashish trance show him holding deliberately aloof from any kind of rapture. "The gates to a world of grotesquerie seem to be opening," he wrote. "Only, I don't wish to enter." According to Jean Selz, a friend with whom Benjamin smoked opium on several occasions, "Benjamin was a smoker who refused the initial blandishments of the smoke. He didn't want to yield to it too readily, for fear of weakening his powers of observation."

Over the next seven years, Benjamin participated in drug sessions as either subject or observer at least nine times, but his attitude toward drugs remained vigilantly experimental. He seldom took them when he was alone, and he never had his own supplier, relying on doctor friends to procure hashish, opium, and, on one occasion, mescaline. The sessions were recorded in "protocols," furnishing raw material for what Benjamin intended to be a major book on the philosophical and psychological implications of drug use. When, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, his best friend from the age of twenty-three, Benjamin, then forty, listed four unwritten books that he considered "large-scale defeats"--evidence of the "ruin or catastrophe" that his career had become--the last was a "truly exceptional book about hashish."

Nearly three-quarters of a century later, a book by Walter Benjamin called "On Hashish" has finally appeared in English, along with another long-gestated work, "Berlin Childhood Around 1900" (Harvard; $14.95 each). "On Hashish" is not, however, the "truly exceptional book" he had in mind; it's a miscellany, gathering the protocols of his drug experiments, two published accounts of his experiences, and a handful of references to drugs culled from his other works. It can only begin to suggest the true importance of drug experiences for the development of Benjamin's thought.

Yet for this very reason "On Hashish" stands in the same relation to a more conventional essay on drugs as Benjamin's literary essays do to conventional criticism. "You hardly feel that you have been reading criticism," Frank Kermode noted when "Illuminations," the first English-language selection of Benjamin's writings, appeared, in 1968. "It requires the kind of response we are accustomed to give to works of art." "Illuminations" revealed just a few peaks from the sunken continent of Benjamin's work, but these were enough to establish him as a central figure in the history of modernism. Benjamin approached every genre as a kind of laboratory for his lifelong investigations into language, philosophy, and art, and his ideas on these subjects are so original, and so radical in their implications, that they remain profoundly challenging today, more than sixty-five years after his death.

The period of Benjamin's adulthood and achievement was 1914 to 1940, the darkest in modern European history, and, if no one ever wrote criticism the way he did, it is because no other critic felt the dislocations of the time so severely. Benjamin was born in Berlin in 1892, into a prosperous Jewish family, and his expectations were formed in the halcyon period before 1914. In "A Berlin Chronicle," a series of newspaper articles that make up the nucleus of "Berlin Childhood Around 1900," he remembered the feeling of bourgeois security that suffused the very furniture in his family's apartment:

Here reigned a species of things that was, no matter how compliantly it bowed to the minor whims of fashion, in the main so wholly ...