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Since the start of the so-called psychedelic renaissance some 25 years ago, writers have tackled the subject from the vantages of science, politics, mental health, productivity, creativity, spirituality, how-to, and even cooking. With his new book On Drugs, Justin Smith-Ruiu explores these powerful drugs through a philosophical lens, analyzing their effects and implications via thinkers spanning Foucault to Freud, Spinoza to Sartre, and scores of others who over the past 2,000 years have sought to explain the mysteries of the human experience.
While authors have applied philosophy to psychedelics before, they have typically done so through the framework of mental health or otherwise medicinal frameworks, while Smith-Ruiu is more interested in treating psychedelics as philosophical objects worthy of examination in and of themselves. At the same time, he follows the drugs down the rabbit hole, sizing up what psychedelics taught him on a personal level, and delving into questions surrounding the scientific prohibition of auto-experimentation, whether the hallucinations conjured by psychedelics are real or imagined, and what they have to teach us about the nature of reality.
A professor of history and science, Smith-Ruiu has previously applied philosophical analysis to some of the most pressing issues of our day. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, he explored how the internet arose from some of our deepest philosophical yearnings. In Irrationality, he asserted that human irritation is fundamental to the human experience rather than a contextual social aberration. And in Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference, he argued that our contemporary conceptions of race are not innate but rather emerged from the modern scientific efforts to classify and systematize. (He also happens to have an asteroid named after him—it doesn’t get much “higher” than that.)
His latest book On Drugs may have been written sober, but it staggers between memoir, history, and philosophical analysis in a way befitting its psychedelic subject matter. For the following interview, Smith-Ruiu spoke with Nautilus about modern science’s resistance to self-experimentation, whether philosophy can be practiced while intoxicated, and how these strange substances upend our understanding of the world.
Over the centuries, psychedelics have faced various attempts at prohibition and repression. What are your thoughts on this antagonism?
Throughout the book, you’ll notice that there is no activism in there at all. In fact, I say explicitly that I myself take no position whatsoever on legalization. The truth is, I’m kind of up in the air. I can see the potential downsides of overuse. I think we’re seeing some of the potential downsides already in places where cannabis has been legalized. On the other hand, I have a basically libertarian view about issues like this, and I think overall repression does not work. It’s ineffective, and it just ruins people’s lives by transforming them into criminals on top of whatever damage might come as a result of drug use.
People like Freud and William James used cocaine and nitrous oxide, and wrote about it.
And we certainly know people who have argued pretty effectively that if you’re just looking at actual harm, psychedelic drugs are among the least harmful substances one can put in one’s body. They’re certainly a lot less harmful than many legal substances, including alcohol and tobacco. But because I’m not an activist—because I’m a scholar and a historian, I like to think about things from a zoomed-out, long-day, impartial perspective. So I’m inclined to adopt a point of view inspired by mid-20th-century structuralism, along the lines of people like Claude Lévi-Strauss, and to propose that perhaps any given human society just needs a certain number of prohibited substances and a certain number of licensed substances. And I do not think we will ever arrive at a point where all and only the “right” substances are legal, and all and only the “right” substances are illegal. I think it will always be in flux.
One of the key questions your book explores is whether philosophy can or should be pursued while intoxicated. Why has there been something of a prohibition against this practice?
I personally do not think philosophy should be pursued while intoxicated. I mean, if you’re philosophically inclined in your temperament, you might not be able to prevent yourself from, let’s say, informally philosophizing while you’re drunk—and certainly I don’t want to prohibit that. But I think if you’re going to be giving a talk or writing a book, it’s almost certainly preferable to do that with nothing more than a bit of caffeine in you.
That said, there’s another question regarding philosophy, which is: Are the experiences you have outside the mode of lecturing or writing—what is disclosed to you under conditions of altered perception—relevant to what you might want to say in your capacity as a philosopher when you are sober? And there I just have to say yes, of course. If there are conditions under which your perception of reality is radically different—whether that’s because you’ve taken acid, or because you’ve submerged yourself in a pitch-black cave for 72 hours as ancient Greeks used to do, or whether you’ve twirled around intensely as whirling dervishes do—and it alters your consciousness, of course it’s relevant to any exhaustive philosophical inquiry about the relationship between mind and world, or between the way we apprehend the world and the way the world is.
Why is it prohibited? I think it’s primarily in the modern period, that is, the 17th century, that philosophy begins to place a particular premium on sobriety. Sobriety as a value, as part of a package of features of the ideal philosophizing mind, alongside, importantly, wakefulness. Much of modern philosophy—as we see most clearly in Descartes—is all about proving we are not asleep, and proving that hallucinations are not part of reality. You know: the reed that looks crooked when it’s sticking out of water but is in fact straight, and so on.
And so there emerges a conception of philosophy as a project of correcting for error, and error is understood as any representation of the world that occurs under non-default conditions. And the default condition of the human being from the 17th century on is the wakeful, sober human being. And I think it’s pretty easy to understand why we value sobriety in that connection. But I think the wakefulness question is probably even more interesting. We know there are societies that take dreams as revelatory or as instructive, as forces that can regulate the conduct of human life and give answers. That’s one way to organize your life as an individual and within society. There are complex historical reasons why that vanished in the modern West, but I do indeed think it’s time to investigate what might have been lost in taking that particular, very contingent historical pathway.
Similarly, you explore the prohibition in the scientific community against experimenting on oneself. Why does this negative view toward auto-experimentation exist?
This is not so much a question about norms and values in the history of philosophy as it is about norms and values in the history of science. As I argue in the book—largely following Mike Jay and his very wonderful book Psychonauts—at the end of the 19th century, people like Freud and William James used cocaine and nitrous oxide, and wrote about it. And in writing about it they were in effect just following the model of, say, Benjamin Franklin when he sees a lightning storm and goes out to fly a kite to shock himself in order to learn more about electricity. That’s auto-experimentation, too. And up until the beginning of the 20th century, it was a totally legitimate element of strategy for scientific inquiry to take yourself as your guinea pig.
By sometime in the first half of the 20th century, what we find is that while there still are drug diaries—Walter Benjamin, for example, or Jean-Paul Sartre writing about his experience on mescaline, which was not good, and then famously Michel Foucault in the 1970s on acid in Death Valley—but in these cases it’s largely literary and imaginative exploration rather than something the inquirer himself conceptualizes as a contribution to the advancement of science.
The “normal” representation of reality is largely socially constructed.
So what changes? Well, obviously, in part it has to do with the fact that the scientific method tells us that a self-reporting of an experience under the influence of mescaline, for example, is not really good science, because in any case it’s only one person and that’s not a sufficiently large sample, to say the least. But beyond that, there’s also the fact that over the course of much of the 20th century, we have the hegemony of behaviorism, which tries to get rid of inner qualitative experience altogether, particularly in research in psychology but also radiating into other disciplines.
From there, over much of the 20th century, the attitude is, it doesn’t matter what it feels like to the subject under the influence of the drugs, it only matters how it changes the motion of their bodies, which we can observe from a third-person point of view. And obviously that’s inadequate. Obviously there is a phenomenology of the drug experience that is worth analyzing, and that is relevant to our total picture of what these substances are, and also what the workings of the mind are.
Another question you explore is whether psychedelics are a purely hallucinatory experience, or if “they reveal something to us about the way things are that we ordinarily cannot perceive.” You ultimately conclude the latter. Why?
Do I say that they reveal something to us about the way things are that we ordinarily cannot perceive? I don’t take the approach of someone like Terence McKenna or the excessively enthusiastic psychedelic-guru types. I don’t want to say that when, to use McKenna’s terminology, you’ve consumed DMT and little green elves appear to you, that this is evidence for the existence of little green elves.
I take something more like an anthropological approach, and I really wish more philosophers would learn how to do that—learn how to adopt the perspective of an anthropologist. If you are, say, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and you go and spend time among the Azande in Sudan, and they tell you that certain people among them have in their torso somewhere a witchcraft organ, and that they’ve seen the witchcraft organ on rare occasions when the body is cut open or something like that—this is a real example, I’m not making it up—is there such a thing as a witchcraft organ? No. But is it a meaningful part of inquiry, if your subject matter is representations of social reality, to take seriously the idea that some people have a witchcraft organ in them? Yes, it absolutely is legitimate.
For me, in particular, what psychedelics have made me more sensitive to is this: the “normal” representation of reality—and I’m willing to come out and say it—is largely socially constructed. We take seriously all sorts of entities like private property and money and best friend and Casual Friday—the list is long. When we take these as real, this is just one world-carving. And it’s no more justified than the world-carving that tells you that rocks are married to the earth.
And what you find under the influence of psychedelics is that the world-carving you generally take for granted is just totally made up. And you see the world, or you can see the world, in a way that, in my experience, has been, “Wow. How could I ever have thought that our ordinary default world-carving is correct?”
So it’s not that I get a different world-carving. It’s not that I say, “Oh, actually, there are little green elves,” or “Oh, actually, the cosmos is a giant serpent.” But it puts one in a frame of mind where such claims no longer seem any more absurd or ill-founded than claims like “This or that work of contemporary art is worth $10 million,” or whatever.
Read more: “The Psychedelic Scientist”
You note throughout the book that many aspects of the psychedelic experience “are just too far beyond language” to describe. Why do you think it is so ineffable?
Well, I suppose here we’re confronted with the kind of rigid law of the history of Western philosophy. In order to count as philosophy, something has to be expressible in propositional form. And if it’s not expressible in propositional form, the usual line in our tradition over the millennia has been, well, then that’s just not part of what we do. And this is expressed in various ways. Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” is perhaps the pithiest way to express it, but it’s pretty close to being an iron law of Western philosophy.
Once you bump up against that limit, you cross over into a different kind of practice. And Aristotle goes right up to the limit at one point in the Metaphysics when he tries to imagine what the thinking of the Unmoved Mover—the divine first cause of the world—is. And he says that, unlike with us, the Unmoved Mover’s thinking is a thinking of thinking. What would thinking of thinking be like? We don’t know. So there’s no reason to dwell on it. And it’s fascinating to see him go right up to that limit and then be like, if I go on here, if I add another sentence, I’m going to lapse into a different kind of inquiry than the one I’ve been trying to remain faithful to.
Plotinus, of course, is an exception—and Porphyry tells us he had four ecstatic experiences of communion with the One—of which nothing predicative can be said. It both is and is not, it’s beyond being and non-being, and so on.
So the sober attitude—Aristotle’s, Wittgenstein’s, many others’—is, look, if you can’t render it into propositional form, then be quiet. Or in other words, the joking definition of a mystic is someone who has experienced something ineffable and won’t shut up about it.
And yet, we know that in poetry, for example, we allow metaphor, imagistic language, attempts to gesture at the ineffable. But traditionally the litmus test for what counts as philosophy has been drawn at that boundary.
You write, “Psychedelic drugs, we might sum up, operate in part by confounding or reversing our ordinary expectations that the external world is more real than the internal one.” Can you elaborate on this?
For 400 or 500 years in the Western world, we have converged on a commitment to the default view that the ultimate elements of reality are particles. You build up the world out of atoms, and then those are built up out of other particles. You build the world out of bosons and leptons and quarks. And of course things get messy over the course of the 20th century, because the little elements we’re supposed to build the world out of turn out to look a lot less like pebbles and a lot more like something that straddles the boundary between being particle-like and being something altogether different. But nonetheless, our folk representation remains pellet-like.
It doesn’t have to be that way. And indeed 20th-century physics gave us compelling reasons to think it’s not that way, even if we cling to it because the alternatives feel unacceptable. We know from history that alternatives have been maintained quite successfully. One lovely example: the Pythagorean tradition from ancient Greece through the Italian Renaissance, according to which the fundamental structure of reality is not pellet-like but music-like. What is most real—what is ultimately irreducible—is something like musical harmony. Another example: classical India. Many people represented the ultimate nature of reality as consisting of lexical units, words, speech. And the fundamental science of reality on this view was something like linguistics.
Now, what the psychedelic experience can show is that these alternative starting points are actually quite compelling. And these are starting points in which what is “external” is not the basic layer. Words and music are experienced internally, as something that happens in us.
And, as I say at some length in the book, religious faith and romantic love are examples of stances toward reality where you might know the physical composition of an object—the crucifix is made of wood, the locket is made of silver—and yet you know with inward certainty that what the crucifix or locket is cannot be reduced to that composition.
Under psychedelics, those principles of inner experience become magnified. You can come to appreciate the suggestion that reality itself may be composed of such inner experience, and that it was only a contingent historical fact that we bet the farm on physics. And who knows—that gamble might be coming to an end. For all I know, psychedelics might actually help facilitate the transition to whatever comes next. 
Lead image: 24K-Production / Shutterstock
