On On Drugs (III)

Don't Descartes my heart

Dear Justin

Here are some mediations on your Psychedelic Meditations in Chapter 3 of On Drugs.¹

Mind the Mind

You start the chapter with René Descartes’ meditation on how his mind perceives a piece of wax as a distinct object even after the heat of a fire has left the wax changed beyond recognition. Descartes’ reflections on his mind’s perception of the wax is reflected back as a reflection on the mind doing the perceiving and reflecting: "do I not know myself, both with greater truth and certitude, and also much more distinctly and clearly?" Ah, the famous cogito, ergo sum!

But that’s old hat. You suggest a little thought experiment: “What if, rather than melting the wax, our rationalist philosopher had instead, as we colloquially say, set about melting his mind?” You speculate how he might have meditated on his perceptions on drugs of the piece of wax, of people passing in the street below and of himself:

I perceived the wax imperfectly and confusedly before, while now I perceive it extremely vividly, and somehow as if I and it were the same thing. […]

I should forthwith be disposed to conclude that the wax is known by enhanced sight, and only partially by the intuition of the unenhanced mind alone, as is likewise shown in the analogous instance of human beings passing in the street below, as observed from the window. In this case I do not fail to say that I see their singular souls themselves, their infinite luminous depths, just as I say that I see the true wax […]

For if I judge that the wax has such an unfathomably radiant and beautiful nature, simply because I am apprehending it as such, does it not follow for that same reason that I also have an unfathomably radiant and beautiful nature?

You speculate that the effects of LSD could have made him “particularly sensitive to the reality of other minds” and could have led him to rethink his famous scepticism about the existence of anything apart from his own thinking self:

Indeed, so far is he from doubting the real existence of other minds encountered in external reality that he is now prone to discerning other minds everywhere, even in the piece of wax itself. Some of these minds, he may grant, are being generated from within him, rather than being encountered from without. But again, just as with the enhanced properties of the wax as he is now perceiving it, so too with the other minds he encounters: the fact that they are what we would ordinarily call hallucinations does not seem to him, under these circumstances, to constitute a reason for supposing they are unreal.

We certainly could imagine the rationalist Descartes dropping a tab of acid, seeing minds everywhere, readjusting his philosophy to be closer to animism and learning to love himself in the process.² But if we find ourselves, like the tripping Descartes, “giving in to the power of the imagination rather than resisting it” we could also imagine him dropping a tab of acid, believing himself to be a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, feeling a strong compulsion to go to the Ganges and waking up the next day regretting his purchase of a non-refundable ticket to Pondicherry.

If the argument is that rationalist philosophers in the style of Descartes can benefit from opening their minds a little, this is a sensible if hardly novel suggestion. Back in the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal, a critic of Descartes’ obsession with reason, wrote in his Pensées:³

C’est le cœur qui sent Dieu et non la raison. Voilà ce que c’est que la foi. Dieu sensible au cœur, non à la raison.

Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point : on le sait en mille choses.

Je dis que le cœur aime

• être universel naturellement et

• soi‑même naturellement

selon qu’il s’y adonne, et il se durcit contre l’un ou l’autre à son choix. Vous avez rejeté l’un et conservé l’autre. Est-ce par raison que vous vous aimez ?

My translation:

It’s the heart that senses God and not reason. That’s what faith is. The heart is sensitive to God, reason is not. The heart has its reasons which reason doesn’t know: we know this applies to a thousand things.

I say that the heart loves

• the universal being naturally and

• itself naturally

according to how it gives itself over or hardens against the one or the other. You have rejected the one and kept the other. Is it because of reason that you love yourself?

Which dead white French guy should we believe: Descartes (left) or Pascal (right)?

Even without sharing Pascal’s faith, anyone who has been in love can identify with the famous line The heart has its reasons which reason doesn’t know. Although, I do want to quibble with Pascal’s list of things that the heart loves naturally. Why would there be a need for an elaborate journey of self-discovery if the heart naturally loves itself?⁴ And since we have such a limited capacity to even conceptualise the universe, let alone the universal being, can our hearts really be said to love this being naturally? (What is the “heart” anyway? Is it possible to make a consistent distinction between mind and heart, intellect and imagination, spirit and soul?)

If we’re talking about what we love naturally, surely we need to consider the natural empathy that most non-philosophers exhibit towards (certain kinds of) people and (certain kinds of) animals. Descartes notoriously denied that other animals think and feel, considering their cries to be analogous to the squeaking of a wheel. But not everybody in the seventeenth century was so blind to the world around them. In God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor and the Search for Meaning (2021), Meghan O’Gieblyn writes

Descartes, the genius of modern philosophy, concluded that animals were machines. But it was his niece Catherine who once wrote to a friend about a black-headed warbler that managed to find its way back to her window year after year, a skill that clearly demonstrated intelligence: “With all due respect to my uncle, she has judgment.”

Written before the launch of ChatGPT and other large language models, God, Human, Animal, Machine explores how developments in artificial intelligence are leading us to reconsider what it really means to be human, which may have more to do with the emotions that we share with dumb animals than with the reasoning (and hallucinatory) ability that we share with smart machines. Alasdair McIntyre, who is having his post-humus moment, had a good eye for a title: After Virtue, Dependant Rational Animals… I have not read the latter but I would like to point out the obvious pleonasm in “Dependant … Animals” (let’s bracket for the moment the question of how rational humans really are compared to other animals). Every animal depends on its parents — even the most deadbeat dads of the human and animal worlds — to bring it into existence. No animal wills itself into being. This is the most basic existential position that we share with all life on this planet: at some point, each of us started developing into a particular form of life and at some point each of us will stop developing, i.e. die. As mammals, we depend on our mothers to gestate our developing bodies and to feed us from her own body before we can be weened. We depend on those around us to show us who we are.

While writing this post, my mom told me that they had to put down their dog Enya, who was 12 years old. She loved scratchies.

As a child, I felt a strong affinity towards other animals, which faded into the background in adolescence, when I was preoccupied with thoughts of sex and God and politics. Psychedelics put me back in touch with the deep conviction I share with William Blake that “everything that lives is holy”.

But this effect does not appear to be universal. Some people seem to come away from their psychedelic experiences more convinced than ever that humans are not really animals, that even though we share an evolutionary history of billions of years with our animal kin, our ability to use our reason or our imagination makes us free to transcend our animal selves. The meaning of psychedelic experiences, like the meaning of all our experiences, seems to lie in the (third) eye of the beholder. Whatever else they may be good for, I am sceptical that these drugs will do much to solve some of the intractable disagreements within philosophy.

Anthropologically unusual ideas

Later in the chapter, you write that “in the early modern period philosophy finally won its protracted war with the other cultural practices that make some claim to truth”. I think this gives “philosophy” too much credit and also assigns it too much blame. In my version of the story, it is the printing press and the resulting loss of the Catholic Church’s monopoly on truth that led to the flourishing of alternative ways of truthseeking such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. Apart from mathematics, these all relied on paying careful attention to the outside world, rather than armchair philosophising, with our without the aid of lysergic acid.

You observe, rather ruefully, that “we ourselves are the ones who came up with the anthropologically unusual idea that dreaming is an epistemically disadvantaged state to be in.” Apart from the ability to synthesise LSD, you don’t seem to think much of the achievements of modern Western civilisation compared to cultures who prefer to dream rather than do, an attitude I normally associate with Integralists and 1619ers. Personally, there are a number of “anthropologically unusual ideas” that I would like to hang onto, including:

• the germ theory of disease

• electricity

• rights for women, queers and animals

• freedom of religion, speech and association

An anthropologically unusual idea. Francisco Goya (1799)

Visions, dreams and miracles

You also write that “from the seventeenth century onward, there has been a social expectation that public figures at least proceed as if they are motivated by shareable reasons and arguments, not by visions and dreams”. I find this to be a rather odd juxtaposition, since our purportedly reason-based culture has not prevented the spread of super-shareable ethnonationalist visions and religious fundamentalist dreams.

We haven’t lost our ability to dream, but we seem to be losing the willingness to try to reconcile our dreams, i.e. to dream together. To take the country of my birth as an example: the idea of South Africa as “the rainbow nation” has always been a bit of a pipe dream, but holding onto this pipe dream remains preferable to nursing feelings of suspicion and resentment. The Afrikaans writer Abraham H. De Vries wrote about how Alan Paton, the author of Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) and Ah But Your Land is Beautiful (1981), could not foresee the events of 1994 (my translation):

Alan had a deep mistrust in the psychological ability of whites, especially Afrikaners, to change; he would not have believed this year.

I have to give it to him; a miracle is not something that one expects.

Or knows how to sustain.

What is the difference between a miracle and a mass illusion? A little faith.

Coming to our senses (or more literally: Turning into a tale)

Philosophy! What is it good for?

The practice of philosophy has long risked degrading into a cult of Reason. Murdoch named Kant of all people Lucifer: “The argument for looking outward at Christ and not inward at Reason is that self is such a dazzling object that if one looks there one might see nothing else.”⁵ But we can avoid making an idol out of Reason without abandoning it altogether.

I often think about Mary Midgley’s 1992 paper Philosophical Plumbing, in which she draws a surprising comparison between the two professions. Both play a fundamental though often unacknowledged role in civilised life, but we tend to notice defects in our plumbing much more readily than we do defects in our philosophy:

When the concepts we are living by function badly, they do not usually drip audibly through the ceiling or swamp the kitchen floor. They just quietly distort and obstruct our thinking.

Judging by the state of public discourse on just about every topic, I think it is fair to say that many of our basic concepts are in an alarming state of disrepair. But instead of trying to repair these concepts, we just keep inventing new ones. Think of the millions of words spilt on whether or not the atrocities committed by the Israeli state in Gaza meets an unworkable definition that was invented by a refugee lawyer in 1944 and enshrined in the toothless concept of “international law”. These semantic debates have done little but make it even less likely that Israelis and Palestinians will commit to a process of truth and reconciliation.⁶

Midgley goes on to say that a good philosopher needs to be both poet and lawyer:

Shelley was indeed right to say that poets are among the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. They can show us the new vision. But to work the new ideas out fully is still a different kind of work. Whoever does it, it is always philosophical business. […]

a good deal of poetic philosophising has been imported lately from Europe and from the East, from the social sciences, from evangelists, from literary criticism and from science fiction, as well as from past philosophers. But of course, this poetry comes without the disciplined, detailed thinking that ought to go with it.

A poet is free to say, as John Pistelli once did, that a woman is an imponderable. But if one wants to pass legislation granting certain entitlements to women qua women, then one is obliged to define such a term in a manner that is generally accepted. One would hope that philosophers, considering evidence about human nature from history and science, could help formulate principles to help us decide when to tackle a particular issue in a lawyerly manner and when to take a more pluralistic approach to the different poetic interpretations that different people may hold. Unfortunately, to the extent that academic philosophy has contributed to the discourse, it has only further muddied the waters, with Judith Butler’s writing on gender being the prime example. Of course, Martha Nussbaum took down Butler’s obfuscatory style back in 1999 in an article perceptively titled: The Professor of Parody: The hip defeatism of Judith Butler, but the culture seems to have little interest in Martha Nussbaum, apart from a few days after that gossipy Rachel Aviv profile. Defeatism is more hip than ever.

Less of a philosophical plumber than a philosophical arsonist.

The problem lies not so much with individual philosophers, who like yourself and Martha Nussbaum, continue to do good work. The problem is that the culture at large is actively hostile towards actual philosophy.⁷ And I fear that the ability of psychedelic drugs to convince individuals that they have direct, unmediated access to the truth can contribute to this attitude of defeatism regarding the very possibility of public philosophy.

My argument thus far

Psychedelic experiences are weird and interesting, although not uncommon. The personal significance attached to such experiences can be said to challenge some of the basic tenets of analytical philosophy, but these same tenets have long been challenged on other grounds. Psychedelic experiences can indeed, as you point out, reveal to us how our everyday sober consciousness is distorted in all kinds of ways by personal associations and social fictions. But we must also be careful that such experiences do not distort our thinking in other, perhaps equally subtle, ways.

Psychedelic experiences can be seen as one of many possible poetic sources of inspiration for the philosopher. A theory shouldn’t be dismissed simply because it came to the philosopher in a drug-induced vision. But since the effect of drugs on the mind seem to depend not only on the drugs but also on the mind, the philosopher still has to rely on logic (or, failing that, rhetoric) to persuade those unwilling to rely on the authority of the philosopher’s subjective experience. There are good reasons why scientific and philosophical disciplines discount subjective experience in their quest for truth. Such attempts at greater objectivity, while never perfect, have led to discoveries granting mankind real power over the material world. We shouldn’t be blind to the downsides of this Faustian bargain, but we should also be careful to not throw out the baby with the materialist bath water.

Next time: The myths we trip by

Initially, I did not pay much attention to Chapter 1 of On Drugs entitled What it’s like, mainly because I already know what it’s like. But your rather nonchalant references to a philosopher melting his mind for the sake of philosophy has made me reflect on the various metaphors used to describe psychedelic experiences and what these myths and metaphors suggest about the potential and limits of these experiences.

Sincerely,

Mary Jane Eyre

1. Letters I and II.

2. Forgive me, but the part where Descartes discovers his own “unfathomably radiant and beautiful nature” reminded of the following passage that is often attributed to Nelson Mandela, but is in fact from Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles" (1992):

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Sheila Heiti’s Harper’s article about the origins of A Course in Miracles (1976) made me wonder to what extent I had also been practicing a form of psychedelic-assisted auto-hypnosis.

3. The French text is from this delightful webpage which makes me nostalgic for the old Internet.

4. Many spiritual-but-not-religious traditions get around this apparent paradox by suggesting that modern society and personal traumas have put obstacles in the way of our natural self-love and that our spiritual journey is really a process of letting go of that which no longer serves us. This attitude is perhaps best expressed in a poem attributed to Rumi:

Your task is not to seek for love,

but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself

that you have built against it.

5. From “The Idea of Perfection”

6. I’ve written before about how many of those who look to the anti-Apartheid struggle as inspiration for their pro-Palestinian activism refuse to acknowledge that what eventually led to a peaceful resolution is years of dialogue between people with skin in the game, rather than moral grandstanding by outsiders.

7. Alan Watts had the decency to call himself a philosophical entertainer.