HOWARD H.

HILLMAN (1929-1999)
The strange case of

As is the case with music and the arts, for every famous foresighted thinker, whose
thoughts define the outline of the future, there are a host of attendant philosophers who, while
virtually unknown, make the major thinker possible. Such is the case of Howard H. Hillman,
whose works were purposefully kept (by himself) from the market mechanisms and survive
only in tattered copies of the Soviet academic “samizdat” of the mid-1980s. How a bunch of
then-young Soviet (two Russians, one Latvian, one Jewish) philosophy post-grads got hold of
the Hillman texts is to remain a mystery, all the more so that the leader of this group, called
“the Salmin bunch”, Alexey Salmin himself, recently passed away before reaching 55. The
Hillman legacy survives patchily, primarily through (increasingly occasional) citations in
Central / East European political-philosophical literature.
Apparently Howard H. Hillman was born at the height of the Depression, in 1929, to a
Tennessee factory worker family. Aged 17, Howard volunteered for the Army to escape the
drudgery of working-class life. He served in Korea and Vietnam, where he became intensely
interested in Buddhism, spending much of nhis tours of duty visiting temples and talking to
priests. In 1968 he returned to the USA, with the manuscript of his first book ready, and
settled in “Flower Power” California.
The book, “Shapes of Things”, published by Hillman and some friends as a semi-
underground title, started circulating around 1969-70. It was a forerunner of later attempts to
fuse Buddhism and “Western philosophy”, while trying to base the fusion firmly on the terrain
of rational, Western-style thought. “Blind Faith”, the follow-on volume, came out around
1974 and provides a dissection of theological thought very similar to the dissection of
philosophy, provided around the same time by Pirsig in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance”.
“Power”, a political treatise in the Locke tradition, but specifically aimed against the
helplessness of theories coming out of France (eg. Foucault’s ideology of the all-
pervasiveness of, and inescapeability from, power) surfaced in the late 1970s. This turned out
to be the most translated (into Soviet samizdat) Hillman work. The reason was his argument,
clearly heard in totalitarian societies, that there are in fact a number of ways that “a dignified
individual” can escape from the spider’s web of power. Also attractive was his argument
relating to the centrality of “marginal” individuals. Unlike Marcuse, Hillman argued that such
individuals were not only a force for destructive change, but also – a force for later re-
construction. If a “marginal”, argued Hillman, manages to move along the margins of
neighbouring worlds, he becomes more central (and can have a greater impact) to the overall
picture than the individuals central to those worlds, which are mere sections of the general
picture.
During the 1980s and early 1990s Hillman retired to a cabin on the slopes of Portland
(Oregon), part-time teaching (English literature) and a full-time preoccupation with
reconstructing vintage motorcycles and selling them to various biker communities. He
resurfaced briefly in New Age circles in the mid-1990s, but was more or less hounded out
because of his last book, “21st century Schizoid Man” (presumably a conscious lift of the King
Crimson song). In the book Hillman argued that, rather than bringing in the harmony of “the
Age of Acquarius”, the coming century would bring in a sharp relapse of societies into
fundamentalist collective identities, as (for various reasons, mostly to do with the fear of
freedom) people would run for the shelter of collective religion. In the post-9/11 world, this
analysis survives better than its contemporary thesis (Huntington) of the “clash of
civilizations”.
 In the late 1980s I had the honour of being included into the perpiphery the Moscow-
based “Salmin bunch” and of being thus exposed to the Hillman manuscripts circulating
around progressive academic circles. The impact of those, as well as of the discussions within
the Salmin bunch literally saved my soul – i.e. led me to conclude that: a/ it was possible to
not compromise totally with totalitarian regimes, because avenues of dignity were available;
and b/ that these regimes were more or less guaranteed to fizzle out, as long as enough people
decided to take up the avenues leading to the preservation of dignity and, therefore – the
possibility (indeed, probability if not inescapability) of freedom.

Evgenii Dainov
Professor, Political Science and Philosophy
Sofia
Bulgaria