This book is a trip. Among other things, it copiously details all the drugs that the US-born professor of history and philosophy of\u00a0science at the Universit\u00e9 Paris Cit\u00e9 has ingested. They include psilocybin, LSD, cannabis; quetiapine and Xanax\u00a0(for anxiety); venlafaxine, Prozac, Lexapro and tricyclics (antidepressants); caffeine (\u201cI have drunk coffee every single day without fail since September 13, 1990\u201d); and, at\u00a0least for him, the always disappointing alcohol.<\/p>\n
The really trippy thing, though, is\u00a0not so much Justin Smith-Ruiu\u2019s descriptions of his drug experiences, but the fact that they\u2019re written by a\u00a0tough-minded analytic philosopher, one as\u00a0familiar with AJ Ayer\u2019s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge as Aldous Huxley\u2019s mescaline-inspired The Doors of Perception. Moreover, they\u2019re presented with the aim of melting the minds of his philosophical peers and the rest of us by suggesting that psychedelics dissolve our selves\u00a0and make us part of cosmic consciousness, thereby rendering us free in the way the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza defined it\u00a0(paraphrased by Smith-Ruiu as \u201can agreeable acquiescence in the way one\u2019s own body is moving in the necessary order of things\u201d).<\/p>\n
The melting metaphor is apt, since the primal scene of early modern western philosophy came when the 17th-century French thinker Ren\u00e9 Descartes melted a piece of wax. The\u00a0lump may change its form, smell, length, breadth, and yet, Descartes supposed, we still claim to know that it is the same piece of wax. The knower\u00a0can be wrong about all their perceptions involving this wax but not, Descartes argued, that they are thinking: this is the basis of his famous \u201cI think therefore I am\u201d \u2013 by\u00a0means of which the French thinker\u00a0made us the rational, science\u2011venerating beings we have\u00a0been ever since.<\/p>\n
Smith-Ruiu, discombobulatingly, flips the script on the Cartesian thought experiment: what if, instead\u00a0of melting the wax, Descartes had \u201cmelted his mind\u201d with acid, or one of those hallucinogens starting to\u00a0arrive in Europe across the Atlantic along with potatoes and tobacco, such\u00a0as peyote or ayahuasca? What\u00a0if\u00a0he had not foregrounded rationality and instead extolled the imaginative powers that, Smith-Ruiu\u00a0suggests, are\u00a0unleashed by psychedelics? The\u00a0west might have ended up seeing\u00a0the world completely differently, and human beings as \u201cinfinite reservoirs of\u00a0light and wisdom\u201d.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s more in Smith-Ruiu\u2019s psychedelic experience, one might say, than is dreamt of in strait-laced colleagues\u2019 philosophies. His thinking seems kin to such voguish, mind-blowing movements as Markus Gabriel\u2019s new realism, and Timothy Morton\u2019s implosive holism and object-oriented philosophy. Immanuel Kant claimed the transcendent was by definition behind an impenetrable veil, inferable perhaps but never knowable. We could never, in this world, see God. For Smith-Ruiu, psychedelics might help lift that veil. For that thought alone I\u2019m amazed \u2013 and cheered \u2013 that he got tenure.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s worth mentioning at this point that this is not one of those gonzo books typed while the author is out of their gourd. Smith-Ruiu is no Hunter S Thompson. It is called On Drugs<\/a> but it was not written on drugs (apart, presumably, from some of the prescription meds he details above and the odd espresso hit). \u201cI am as I write, sober, lucid, and entirely focused on the task at hand.\u201d<\/p>\n The book ends with a remarkable plot twist (philosophical spoiler alert!).\u00a0In 2023, Smith-Ruiu attended Catholic mass for the first time in 40\u00a0years at the church next door to his Paris apartment. His claim here is that\u00a0the psychedelic experience is analogous to\u00a0that of ritual worship: ordinary time\u00a0is interpreted as a\u00a0distortion, and during mass one might perceive, as he did on mushrooms, something like eternity. Another parallel is that one submits one\u2019s will in church as on a psychedelic trip. He writes: \u201cPsychedelics, like religion, like poetry are among other things an abandonment of the will to go it alone.\u201d Smith-Ruiu is\u00a0self-aware enough to note how absurd this sounds: that psychedelics have become his gateway drug to the\u00a0Catholic church.<\/p>\n And you don\u2019t even need to take magic mushrooms from some geezer in a Dutch head shop (as Smith-Ruiu did) to melt your mind. He cites the opening of Proust\u2019s novel \u00c0 la Recherche du Temps Perdu, when little Marcel dreamily imagines that he has become some of the things he\u00a0has been reading about before nodding off \u2013 a church, a quartet, the\u00a0rivalry between Fran\u00e7ois I and Charles V \u2013 as an example of everyday\u00a0psychedelia.<\/p>\n That isn\u2019t the only non-pharmaceutical way to expand your consciousness \u2013 you could try reading this extraordinary book, whose riches I can only hint at in this review.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality by Justin Smith-Ruiu is published by Norton (\u00a322).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This book is a trip. Among other things, it copiously details all the drugs that the US-born professor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32955,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[288,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-32954","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}