Drugs are given a bad name, really with out drugs we couldn’t think at all. I mean the chemicals that change the way we think. If modern neuroscience is to be believed all thought is interaction of different drugs. For the philosopher thoughts are like drugs. As the druggie may seek out Pot to escape the troubles of the day, the philosopher may seek out Watts; as the druggie seeks out cocaine, the philosopher may seek out Nietzsche; as the druggie may use LSD the philosopher uses Heidegger or Deleuze.
The question “what are you thinking?” is asked as if it could always be answered quickly, but some thoughts take hours of effort and conditioning to be thought, or maybe even months or decades. Philosophers tend to seek out these rare and hard to attain thoughts, and for the same reason that the druggie seeks out his chemical of choice, to change the way their mind works, often to self medicate.
Some druggies become addicted to one particular drug that the try to stay under the influence of. Philosophers can be the same way, often the most religious or dogmatic philosophies come from this addiction. The most stingy man will share with you a smoke if he is a smoker, something about addiction is contagious, it tries to spread itself to others. And philosophic addictions are the same way, some religions go door to door pushing their fix of choice.
Other druggies have a very different kind of addiction, on to exploration, those that don’t prefer one drug over all other, but will try anything thrice, just to see where it can take them. And this addiction can be just as pushy. There are philosophers like this, trying to push the limits of though, to see what they can think. Personally I have more sympathy for this addiction, the high of thinking something truly out there is most wonderful.
Thoughts and drugs both have different affects on different users, and both have short term and long term effects. The effects I am referring to is the way that they change the experience of though, the way things are. Some thoughts (drugs) have a vivid and quick effect that leave little long term effect beyond a possible memory of doutable accuracy. Other thoughts (drugs) forever change the way thought works. The history of philosophy is rich with a pharmacopia of thought drugs to get high or alter the mind forever.
Of course we only notice drugs when they change, for example the normal neuro transmitters in your brain are not of much notice, until they are suplimented with some DMT, or LSD. Thoughts are the same way thinking as you normally do never feels like much of a drug until you are exposed to something novel. This is a focus for philosophers, and thinkers in general, to learn and teach and discover new thoughts, hopefully ones that are wild trips that change the meaning of everything. Some thoughts become so common that we desensitize to them as a trip and they become the norm. Generally such thoughts are a cultural addiction, just as some peoples regularly use certain chemicals, all peoples have certain thoughts that are needed to make them a particular people.
Modern science has created drugs that put us close the the point of being able to sculpt new types of consciousness, and this has scared many people, that we will enter a brave new world situation. But this has been the norm for thousands of years in the realm of human thought, with new thoughts being discovered and spread through cultures often destructively to the thoughts that came before. We keep creating new kinds of human, those toxic to their predecessors are most likely to succeed.
We rarely think of thoughts as being drugs, because in everyday life most thoughts seem so common that the idea of a truly foreign though doesn’t come up. That there are thoughts which are not easy to access beyond the scope of our education system is often ignored. And that certain thoughts could take years of effort to attain is often ignored out of arrogance. And how powerful of a change these thoughts can have is not often appreciated. A work of a great thinker can change the way the world seems just as much as a large dose of a hallucinogen. A great poet can be more calming then any opiate.
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I think one of the ways to describe my particular understanding is "pan-psychotropicism" or "pan-hallucinogenism." I mean this is an etymological sense, that matter is a turning of the psyche--a warp of psyche back on itself, with psyche understood as feeling or desire, and the warp as feeling's encounter with itself; the touching touch. Or, that matter is a wandering of the mind; a pathway of feeling, as in a dream.
ReplyDeleteThis is only really controversial in the back-ground of the so-called "mind-body" distinction. When faced with the undeniable fact that drugs, once introduced into the brain, affect feeling or sense, we can either deny the reality of feeling and sense and keep our conception of matter as inert and dead. This means, essentially, all is dead if not even man is alive; life becomes something about death. Or we can posit some impossible connection (a pituitary gland) between mind and body, and treat the drug experience as a degradation of some ideal functioning; this places life and feeling impossibly in another world, accessible only through the unthinkable and impossible connection. It, too, is a death.
Or we can take it as proof that mind and matter are coextensive, and that our specific configuration of feeling is coeval with our specific configuration of matter; but that neither reality is primary, or possible without its other side as matter/feeling. Movement/feeling. Life and death as the two drafts, as Rilke puts it. This is the insight of the various shamanisms, in Australia, in the Americas, and in Russia. All of these witnessed an apocalypse, destruction and utter despair, and saw their methods forgotten. But, also, whose reintroduction into the burgeoning global religion is, as it were, part of God's plan, and part of the continuing revelation of history.
The introduction of this insight had scholarly antecedents (c.f. Eliade's writings, which coming out a Christian dream-time, and also his explorations of shamanism) but it ultimately came to enter our consciousness through drug experiments that re-connected the detached, scholarly accounts to a common experience with the shamans. The beats and the hippies, but not just these. These experiments proved dangerous; they were self-destructive and resulted in "..a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified, sewn-up bodies." There were none of the controls and safeguards of a shaman,or the accumulated lore, to guide them. Not only that, but the inner constitution of such moderns systematically misinterpreted what was seen in the mold of subjective experience, or set itself up as a resistance that had to be broken down traumatically.
It also may be accurate to say, as some types have, that LSD for instance was and remains a government plot (i.e. it was created by the CIA, and served to transform potential revolutionaries into self-absorbed voyeurs of experience.) Certainly drugs helped prevent an American version of "May of 68'." And then there was the millionaire Beetles, who came over here in suits and ties only a few years before, who said "You tell me it's the institution, Well, you know, You'd better free your mind instead." But an event that is immediately counter-revolutionary may result in a multiplication of revolutionary permutations of desire, which spiral out of control and are released from being pent up in fantasies, into actual life and the realm of production. This occurs upon reaching some critical mass by being multiplied, or erupting by a certain destabilizing chain of events (the internet, perhaps,combined with our dual catastrophes of peak oil and global warming.)
At any rate, psychedelics themselves have already entered the public consciousness in just the manner you described: symbols on a page or images on a screen. And I ask: which is more mind blowing? Taking acid, or growing up watching movies, hearing music, and reading books created by people who took acid? The description of the psychedelic, in think, is now both separate, and infinitely more important, than the actual experience. Psychedelics as a force in literature, film, and sound, short-circuiting the mass Freudianism of industrial advertisement.
ReplyDeleteYet, does the drug experience still stand as the root of this complex of destabilizing sensation? I don't think so, if only because it is a phenomenon without roots at all, but exists whole and in itself. The psychedelic description was the catalyst for a population that was already subjectivized and self-absorbed; and it happened in their terms, at first only deepening isolation. But what was since released, and what has now connected to a wider network, is perhaps coming to entirely different terms. The drug experience may, however, continue as one of the quadrants of such a galaxy, just as with shamanism.
I agree, too, that the impulse of drug use and philosophy is in common: the impulse of escape. I became a philosopher because there was nothing else I could have done, and I would have died otherwise (truly.) Action in the world proved impossible. But there is another impulse; maybe for drugs, but certainly to thought. The living thought. The thought that does not escape, but maneuvers into revolutionary ways of living. The thought that builds. This is our ethical imperative. We cannot be thinkers that hide away, but we must be thinkers who build.