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Tallis in Wonderland

Pharmaco-Metaphysics?

Raymond Tallis argues against acidic assertions, and doubts DMT discoveries.

I ought to begin with a confession. I have had no first-hand – or first-head – experience of psychedelic drugs. Admittedly, I occasionally (actually, frequently) ‘do’ a bit of (actually, quite a lot of) my favourite white wine. Courtesy of Pinot Grigio, I am sometimes translated to a parallel universe in which my jokes are funny and the laughter they trigger is directed at the tale rather than the teller. But this is hardly comparable to the experiences of ‘psychonauts’ who take hallucinogenic drugs such as psilocybin in pursuit of revelations about the true nature of the world, of our place in it, and of our eventual destination.

In The Doors of Perception (1954), Aldous Huxley reported on his experiences with the psychedelic drug mescaline. They ranged from the enchantment of an unpeeled awareness of the beauty of flowers, to a sense of a Divine Presence. The title of the book echoed William Blake’s claim in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) that “If the doors of perception were cleansed, then everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”

The philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) was ahead of Huxley. His experiences with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) had an enduring influence on his thought and, in particular, on his attitude towards religion. Reflecting on his experiences, he felt that all religions “converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance.” James was haunted by the suspicion that his everyday awareness was flanked by utterly different modes of consciousness, and separated from them by ‘the flimsiest of screens’.

You might see where this is leading. If you’re serious about philosophy, and in particular, if you want to explore what Peter Strawson called ‘revisionary’ rather than a merely ‘descriptive’ metaphysics – that is, if you are hopeful of waking out of normal wakefulness – then brain-blitzing psychotropic drugs may seem to have more to offer than arguments and counterarguments barnacled with footnotes. A train of propositions leading up to a conclusion seems unlikely to deliver a vision of ‘real reality’. Accepting the outcome of a syllogism seems to fall far short of embracing, or being embraced by, a world-picture transformed by experience. As Søren Kierkegaard said, “to stand on one leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going on one’s knees and thanking him” (Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1841). In short, conventional philosophical discourse seems a relatively feeble method of transforming one’s world-picture compared with mind-altering drugs. So why, in my nearly sixty years of puzzling over philosophical problems, have I never seriously considered using psychedelic drugs to assist my inquiries?

It’s not a matter of moral disapproval. As already admitted, I ‘do’ quite a bit of Pinot Grigio – at least in part in pursuit of its effects on my mind. In general, I have a liberal attitude to drugs, so long as taking them does not interfere with delivering on your responsibilities, to yourself and to others. Indeed, I believe that in many cases, the criminalisation of drugs has caused more harm than the drugs themselves. At the very least, decriminalisation would enable quality control, reduce the risk of potentially fatal overdoses, and destroy the business model of the murderous gangs who get rich through drug trafficking. No, my resistance to drug-assisted philosophising is rooted in my doubts about how seriously we should take what one might learn, or seem to learn, during a trip.

One big reason for my scepticism is that the lessons of the trip seem to overlook how drug-induced experiences are made possible by the world of untransformed daily life. Except in the case of those whose life has become devoted to taking, experiencing, and recovering from trips, turning on and tuning in usually takes place by appointment. For example, Aldous Huxley’s mescaline adventures were carefully planned well in advance. The first one began on time at 11 a.m. 3rd May 1953, during which he was looked after by his wife Maria and the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond. In short, it was situated in the everyday world to which we all belong. Had it been a bad trip, he would have relied on being rescued by inhabitants of a realm to which he, too, belonged, when he was not caught up in his drug-induced solitude.

The contradictoriness of psychonauts who would have us believe that their drug of choice has enabled them to see what reality really is, and that it is entirely unlike what passes for reality in their daily life, is worth a bit more attention. The trip takes place in an unchanged reality. Moreover, the drug has been synthesised, tested, quality-controlled, packaged, and transported in that world, and the facts about its properties have been discovered and broadcast by individuals in the grip of everyday life. It is ordinary people usually in ordinary states of mind in the ordinary world who experiment with the psychedelics that target 5HT2A receptors.

As for the trip itself, we can imagine someone who, having taken a large dose of psilocybin, say, feels the bounds of his ego falling away as he dissolves into The One. Thus liberated, he trips over the cat, falls down the stairs, and breaks his leg. Suddenly he’s in desperate need of the hitherto normal everyday world surrounding him, populated by bounded egos whose uncleansed doors of perception enable them to exercise their defined roles and rush to his aid. This is a reminder that, even if nothing as dramatic as that happens, a chemical vacation in a ‘different reality’ is just that: a vacation. And, of course, the judgement as to whether the experiences were a revelation of truth or (just) hallucinations will be tested against a shared knowledge base outside of the event.

It does not seem justified, therefore, to blithely regard mind-altering drugs as opening metaphysical peepholes on to fundamental reality; as heuristic devices enabling us to discover the true nature of the world, ourselves, or our place in the world; or to dismiss the world of childcare and work, of appointments and duties, as an ‘illusion’.

Contemporary philosopher Thomas Metzinger sees psychotropic drugs as tools for furthering our understanding of brain mechanisms, and thus (so he believes) contributing to a neurobiologically-informed philosophy of mind. He also argues that personal familiarity with altered states “would thoroughly shatter [consciousness researchers’] folk-phenomenological intuitions and endow them with completely new theoretical intuitions” (quoted by Nicolas Langlitz in Common Knowledge, 2016, p.377). Metzinger, however, dismisses the more dramatic conclusions extracted from psychedelic experience as ‘epistemologically vacuous’ (Being No-One, 2003, p.249): chemically-induced hallucination is not proof-by-revelation of the illusory nature of everyday reality. After all, certain molecules alighting on receptor sites in one’s brain does not on the face of things seem like an appropriate axiomatic starting point for metaphysical inquiry; nor does the subsequent spread of ‘enhanced’ neural activity seem to have the authority of a sound argument leading to a robust conclusion; nor does it create space for the to-and-fro of Socratic dialogue.

Everyday Transcendent Metaphysics

So much for pharmaco-metaphysics. But what are we to make of radically revisionary metaphysical views arrived at by the well-worn path of argument illuminated by the guttering rush-light of sudden insights, side-lit by the views of other philosophers, and propelled by what Ludwig Wittgenstein characterised in Philosophical Investigations (1953) as the “assembling of reminders for a purpose”? Are these views not subject to the same challenges that seem to invalidate psychedelic metaphysics? Think for instance of those who, holding a seemingly solid copy of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), accept George Berkeley’s claim in it that entities exist only insofar as they perceive or are perceived. They nevertheless expect the book to still be there when they enter a room where it is stored. (Berkeley, who was a bishop, argues that that’s because God continually perceives physical objects). Or consider academics who, persuaded of Immanuel Kant’s view that ‘material objects’ located in space and time in the way we perceive them to be, are in fact constructs of the mind - then travel by train to give a lecture on this topic at an agreed place and time. Or yet others who (to take a well-worn example) deny the reality of time, but are still confident that they had their breakfast before their lunch. What is most striking is that those who have these views live with, cooperate with, share projects and ideas with, those who do not. (I have often thought about the children, partners, and colleagues of philosophers who earn their living questioning the reality of the external world.)

Readers may suspect that the existential sincerity – or insincerity – of radically revisionary philosophical views has been a preoccupation of mine. Indeed, it has surfaced from time to time in this column – as in ‘Zhuangzi and that Bloody Butterfly’ (Issue 76, 2009) and ‘Arguing with a Solipsist’ (Issue 141, 2020). If a philosophical argument could demonstrate an entirely different picture of the world, could you really inhabit that brave new world? More importantly could you co-habit in that transformed reality with those to whom you are closest – those you accept without question as central to your everyday life, and who return the compliment of taking you for granted? World pictures radically at odds with daily experience can be genuinely shared – and lived out – only when they have a collective origin rather than being arrived at in solitude, irrespective of whether the method of transport is a drug or logical argument. Indeed, collective affirmation gives religious metaphysical views – such as that everything is enclosed in the being of an omniscient, omnipotent God, an advantage over individually-derived revisionary metaphysics. Radically revisionary views, if they are to be embraced sincerely, have to be shared with others in something that goes deeper than a report from (someone else’s) experience or a philosophical text. If we are to believe them and live them out ourselves, we need a community.

And so, for the present, I will be faithful to Pinot Grigio. Admittedly, there may be timidity behind my rejection of psychonautical adventures – a fear of losing control over my mind for an indefinite period of helplessness; and the prospect, when I return, of sharing with puzzled, even amused, friends and family, the incomprehensible tidings that (for example) “I am one with ultimate reality.”

As for philosophising, I will stick to pen and keyboard, paper and screen, and, of course, conversation. My focus will be on describing what seems to be the case, in the widest sense – thereby undermining the insufficiently-grounded views of materialists, idealists, and others who seem fundamentally to misunderstand the nature of the (extraordinary) ordinary world in which we live. Thus do I endeavour to open a space for celebrating the many-layered sense, rejected by some psychonauts, of the Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays of everydayness – allowing myself to be intermittently italicised courtesy of a glass or two of P.G.

Raymond Tallis’s Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City is out now in conjunction with Philosophy Now.