Episode 41 - Intoxication

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Pena-Guzman,

Ellie: 0:08

and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

Ellie: 0:29

David, today we're talking about the very juicy topic of drugs.

David: 0:35

And alcohol. And, uh, you know, in thinking about this episode, one of the things that I realized is how difficult I find it to talk about drugs with my students in the classroom, as a faculty member, right? Like what position should I occupy in relation to drugs?

Ellie: 0:52

This is one of those topics that it's hard to know, whether to share anecdotes or not. I have to just put my cards on the table, I'm kind of square, so I won't be like hiding a bunch of super juicy anecdotes about psychedelics.

David: 1:04

Okay. But you're going to be hiding some then.

Ellie: 1:08

No, no, I don't know if I'll be hiding any. I'm just If, there are ones that I'm hiding, they're not, they're just not juicy.

David: 1:13

Okay. Fair enough. I think if they're not juicy, then I encourage you to conceal them. Only juicy revelations.

Ellie: 1:21

Yeah, this is going nowhere fast. So let's get it somewhere fast because our listeners are coming to this episode with high expectations, I would imagine. Um, I want to start with a anecdote about a professor does speak openly about his experiences with drugs. That is the psychology professor at Harvard University, casual, Carl L. Hart. And Carl L. Hart is a neuroscientist has written a book called Drug Use for Grownups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. And in this book, Carl Hart talks about the fact that he does, recreationally, a number of drugs that we would consider to be pretty scary drugs.

David: 2:01

Yes.

Ellie: 2:02

And an essential part of his view is that the distinction between so-called hard drugs and soft drugs is politically motivated rather than neuroscientifically sound. He started his research on the negative effects of drug addiction. He came to conclude that a lot of these effects are really overhyped. Addiction is an issue for some people, but it's an addiction for far fewer people than we think when it comes to drug and alcohol use. He says that 70 of users of any drug will not become addicted to it, and emphasizes the racialized and politicized elements of the drug war, right. Or even the fears around opium that came about, you know, in the early 20th century, fears around marijuana.

David: 2:46

Well, and okay. I had read about this professor, but I didn't know he was a neuroscientist. I, in my head, develop this image of him, honestly, as an English professor, like poet, which maybe says something about my own prejudices and biases, not just about drugs, but also about disciplinary specializations, you know, the square scientists versus cool people over in the English department.

Ellie: 3:12

There are so many scientists nowadays who are really leading the charge of exploring drug use, especially psychedelics, for actually treating a lot of mental health crises rather than causing them. And, you know, to throw in another element here, there was a recent cover of Newsweek magazine that says "a new treatment for depression." And the picture on the cover is of magic mushrooms. It says psylocibin, AKA magic mushrooms, could be the biggest advance since Prozac for treating depression.

David: 3:42

Yeah, I know there has been this massive wave of research, and what I never really considered is that the scientists who are writing about psychedelics as an object of study are also doing them on their own as ways of exploring, you know, the deepest recesses of the mind or what have you. But I think it's important to know that in this particular case, Carl Hart is very open about using not psychedelics or weed, but heroin in particular, which just such a charged drug socially around which there is a lot of shame and a lot of judgment, really, from others because it is seen as one of the most addictive, right? And it is in connection to this that he says, no, you can be a recreational user without becoming an addict.

Ellie: 4:36

Yeah. And he tells the New York Times that the predominant effects he's discovered produced by the drugs discussed in his book are positive. And it didn't actually matter whether the drug in question was cannabis, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, or psilocybin. That's a quote from him. Um, and he says that some of the positive effects include greater empathy, altruism, and sense of purpose. And those affects all sound great, right? Greater empathy, altruism, gratitude, and sense of purpose. I'll be honest, I'm not looking to try heroin anytime soon, probably ever, however, I think at least, you know, the, the current wave of psychedelic research, in particular, show that there's kind of a sea change at work right now in our culture in terms of how we perceive drugs and what the future of them in society might be.

David: 5:25

Yeah. But I feel the need to point out that even if scientists have only recently come to talk about and discuss and experiment on the positive sides of drugs and alcohol, let's just group those two together, philosophers had had things to say about drug use and alcohol consumption for a long time. So maybe this new interest is simply the reawakening of a philosophical discussion now being had in scientific terms. Today, we are talking about intoxication.

Ellie: 6:07

How has getting high been central to mystical experiences and even philosophical theories, especially in ancient Greece?

David: 6:13

What is it like to be under the influence of drugs and alcohol?

Ellie: 6:17

And why has intoxication been vilified?

David: 6:26

Well, Ellie, I think we should clarify for our listeners, first and foremost, that this is not an episode about addiction. It is an episode about intoxication and it's important to differentiate between the two precisely for the reasons that Carl Hart stipulates: that one can engage in practices that bring about the experience of intoxication without necessarily becoming an addict. And also there are forms of addiction, you know, like I don't know my addiction to shopping or my addiction to any other of the great pleasures that life has to offer without that addiction entailing intoxication. And so for us today, what really matters is the history and the experience and the philosophy intoxication.

Ellie: 7:13

Yeah, totally. And I'll just say there too, I have not read Carl Hart's book about this. In fact, interviews that I've heard him give have like some libertarian undertones that make me think we would fundamentally disagree about certain things, but, you know, for the purposes of, I think, getting into the contents of this episode and thinking about ways that experiences of intoxication may provide keys to understanding certain aspects of life that, you know, maybe go against the grain, I think it's helpful think about that, to sort of open our minds to the possibility. That's kind of where I am with some of this, especially when it comes to those so-called quote hard drugs that I was strongly taught to like avoid at all costs. Let's move back from the contemporary moment, way back to ancient Greece.

David: 7:59

Because the ancient Greeks were no strangers to intoxication. And one of the things that most of my students notice right away when I teach ancient sources is the prevalence of drinking in many of these settings. For example, Plato's symposium, which is basically a feast in which people are getting drunk, and it's a central theme of the dialogue. And one of the reasons that drinking figures so prominently in ancient texts is not just because it reflected a social reality that drink was around, and it was a way of interacting with others, also because it was a central ethical concern for the ancient Greeks. So if you look at ethical treatises from the Classical age, the main preoccupations they had from a moral standpoint was one's relationships to what they called the pleasures, the aphrodisia, and that included drink, food, and sex. And so the question of one's relationship to these objects was according to some historians, central preoccupation of Greek morality. In other words, you knew what your character was depending on whether you actually had mastery over your relationship to the aphrodisia.

Ellie: 9:14

Yeah. I mean, I probably wouldn't go so far as to say it was the central preoccupation Greek ethics. Yeah that's an overstatement, but I do what you're pointing out David is the fact that Greek ethics, especially with Plato and Aristotle, are fundamentallyoncerned about the priority that the search for bodily pleasure might take over the more theoretical pursuits of the mind. And so ancient Greek philosophers do think, in at least these cases, we'll leave the Epicureans because they're are different story here, that the mind should really be able to control the desires of the body. And those desires of the body would include the desire for drink and sex. At the same time, one of the really fascinating things here that according to some, the very Greek idea of the distinction between the mind and the body, and the idea that the mind has access to these superior realms that tell us the truth of the way the universe really is, might actually have come from hallucinogenic vision. There's been an increasing resurgence of what is known as the Ergot hypothesis, which was first formulated in 1978. And this Ergot hypothesis suggests that many of the ancient Greek philosophers underwent a series of secret rituals at the small village of Eleusis that may have involved psychedelics, that is ergot-spiked wine. Ergot is a fungus that grows on barley.

David: 10:44

Yeah. So the Eleusinian mysteries are one of those historical phenomena that get referenced a lot in philosophical writing about ancient philosophy, but only recently have we began to understand exactly what they entailed and what role drugs may have played in that. Essentially every year in September, Greeks would gather in the city of Eleusis, which is just west of Athens, for a very big festival, which was meant to celebrate the harvest season. And during them, and there were these initiation rituals, where people would get together in this semi secret setting and they would consume, well, semi secret insofar as there were other people in there, right.

Ellie: 11:28

Yes,

David: 11:28

Initiates-

Ellie: 11:29

If you weren't one of the initiates, on pain of death, you could not talk about anything that happened there. So it's like hardcore secret in that sense.

David: 11:36

Well, yes. And Aeschylus, the Greek tragedian, was actually prosecuted for revealing some truths about the mysteries. Um, during these rituals, people would consume a drink called kykeon, which was a combination of red wine with grated cheese, which would cause it to ferment with time and also this mushroom, which is called ergot, name the Ergot hypothesis of ancient Greek philosophy, which is that all these Greek people were just high on ergot, which is a hallucinogenic. And, you know, the, the number of people who participated in these Eleusinian mysteries are super recognizable. We're talking about people like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Cicero. So it included Greek and later Roman figures because the festival continued, um, you know.

Ellie: 12:34

Once the Christians took over and like made everything boring.

David: 12:37

Yeah. They're like all this being high? No, thank you. Only abstinence for us and drinking the blood of Christ.

Ellie: 12:45

Although recently, actually, some guy has written a book suggesting that the blood of Christ might have also had ergot in it or some hallucinogenic substance. It's called The Immortality Key. Somebody was recommending to me at a pretty sure they heard about it on like Joe Rogan's podcast.

David: 13:01

And this speaks to a deeper tension in Christianity between this rejection of intoxication versus the fact that most models of sainthood and transcendence and touching of the divine described by the people who have them as experiences of a kind of intoxication.

Ellie: 13:20

Yeah, and certainly, I mean, there was a lot of debate around the Eleusinian mystery rights, precisely with respect to this, David, you know, were people actually doing psychedelics or were they just having profound mystical experiences? The one thing that is totally clear is were having profound, mystical experiences. Many people who partook in the Eleusinian mystery rights said that it was meaningful the most experience of their entire lives, it completely changed their worldview. And one of the really cool things about it too, is that in addition to all of the famous philosophers that you mentioned, David, who took part in these mystery rights, it was open to most Athenians. It was open to people of all classes, it was open to women. But it was open to enslaved people as well.

David: 14:04

Yeah. I like the idea of drugs as the great equalizer of Greek life and also as the source of most of the philosophical theories that love to read about as professional philosophers, you know, Plato's theory of the immortality of the soul, ergot; Aristotle's moral theory, ergot.

Ellie: 14:26

Maybe let's tell our listeners a little bit about why the Eleusinian mystery rights might have led to an interest in things like death and immortality, long story short. And I'm getting a lot of this from the book, The Road to Eleusis, which is a 1978 book that was co-authored by a classicist Carl AP Ruck, Albert Hofmann, who was the inventor of LSD, Swiss chemist, and R. Gordon Wasson, who was like a mycophile, somebody who's like obsessed with mushrooms and he and his wife, Valentina Pavlovna, were really invested in talking about the beauty of mushrooms in the seventies. So anyway, in this book, the classicist Carl AP Ruck describes how every September, thousands of Athenians go on this sacred road, crossing the narrow bridge from Athens to Eleusis, and ended up having this big party and this big raucous party outdoors. And then they enter the temple, the high temple of Eleusis, where the hierophant, who is the sacred priest, prepares the kykeon, the potion that you're talking about, David, and-

David: 15:34

Red wine with the grated cheese, everybody.

Ellie: 15:38

I'll, I'll be honest. I did not see grated cheese mentioned, so I don't know if there's like, contention around the the recipe. In any case, there is at least a good reason to believe, although we don't have this confirmed, that the wine had ergot in it.

David: 15:55

Yes.

Ellie: 15:55

And once the people had taken the kykeon, they described things that we would usually associate with psychedelic intake, such as trembling in the limbs, fear, vertigo, nausea, a cold sweat, and then this would be followed by a vision, a site, an aura of brilliant light, as Ruck says, that suddenly flickered through the darkened chamber. And one of the things that's really interesting here is that people described a sort of synesthesia or running together of the senses of hearing and vision in particular, well as just this profound, overwhelming sense of oneness with the universe. So I just want to quote the ancient author Aristides here,

David: 16:36

Yeah.

Ellie: 16:36

who says Eleusis is a shrine common to the whole earth. All the divine things that exist among men, it is both the most awesome and the most luminous, which sounds so fancy, but according to The Eleusis is a description of a psychedelic drug trip. David, what do you think about this and how do you think it might have led to an interest in death, awareness of death, and mortality of the soul?

David: 16:58

Well, I think when we think about the experience of being high in this case, on psychedelics, one of the most common themes is that feeling of oneness with the universe or a blurring of the line between body and nature, self and other, that happens at the level of the senses, right? It's definitely not an intellectual experience per se, it is a sensory experience where you literally feel your way through the world in a new way.

Ellie: 17:26

Um.

David: 17:27

Experience the ego, arguably, as separate from the body. If that's an experience that you have and you have ritualistically, and that is shrouded in the aura of the Eleusinian mysteries, right? This secret that you're suddenly being initiated into, it becomes possible to codify it as a philosophical theory, right? In terms of asking the question, what must be the case such that this experience that I had is real and possible and something like the immortality of the soul could be the answer to that.

Ellie: 18:04

In the Michael Pollan book, How to Change Your Mind, he describes the way that one thing that people who've had experiences with psychedelics report is an abatement of their fear of dying. They feel less afraid of dying after they've had this. And he talks specifically about one study that was done among patients undergoing cancer treatment, where they report actually psychedelics as being a kind of death rehearsal process. They feel like in letting go of their ego in their body, they have a sense of what it might be like to die. And that actually brings comfort. It brings comfort that there's something on the other side of death. That the death of the body does not correspond to one's permanent death. One of the authors of The Road to Eleusis, this guy Wasson, goes so far as to say that Plato got the idea of the forms, which are these essentially immaterial, indestructible, and intangible concepts or ideas that exist in minds of, you know, individuals, but also sort of collectively in the universe, just in a space that's outside of space and time, precisely from the Eleusinian mystery rights here. And the reason that he says this is because the psychedelic experiences permit you to see more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, this is me quoting Wasson here, beyond the horizon of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, to enter other planes of existence. Even as the Indians say, to know God. There's this profound affecting of the person on both an emotional and a rational level, this feeling of union with others, ecstasy, right? You feel ecstasy when you undergo these experiences, you feel like you're outside of yourself, that being outside of yourself gives you more objective you even in, in his view, right? So it's not like psychedelics are just like this misleading experience of the world. They're actually really profoundly linked to a more objective perception of reality.

David: 20:07

Yeah, from now on graduate students need to just write their metaphysics dissertations under the influence for them to have objective.

Ellie: 20:18

um um Thank God I don't have any graduate students.

David: 20:22

I know goes back to the point about the difficulty about talking about this as professors. Even if I do worry about the potential reductionism of accounts of philosophical systems based purely on the psychedelic experiences of the people who wrote them, think that we should be open to the fact that experience of the philosopher, in this case with the Eleusinian mysteries, would have an impact on their philosophical commitments. And I think this is we see in our day and age when people use psychedelics and come out on the other side, maybe not with a metaphysical treatise per se, but definitely with a different appreciation of the place of humans and the human intellect in the grander scheme of things, right. Almost an ontological or metaphysical worldview,

Ellie: 21:11

Yeah. There's been a lot of attention drawn recently to statistics that show that among people who take psylocibin, especially in cases where the sat in the setting are really determined to help enable a mystical experience. These experiences are reported as being among the top five most meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of people's lives.

David: 21:34

You know, in the spirit of breaking through the taboo of professors talking about drugs, I'll share the fact that I have done shrooms and I would list my experience as, especially my first one, as one of my top five moments of confronting myself and seeing myself in a way that shocked me. uh

Ellie: 21:58

Okay. So you went there.

David: 21:59

I was on the road to eleusis.

Ellie: 22:02

Is this where the ideas for your new book, which has a prettypsychedelic cover, are coming from? About animal consciousness?

David: 22:10

Yeah. It's about dreamworld. So maybe there is here a causal narrative to be told, but the first time I had a mushrooms, I had a really, really bad trip. Just the darkest side of me that I did not know existed, came forward. The experience of doing shrooms, I think, tapped into an aspect of my subconscious that I really did not know was there. And for about five to seven days afterwards, I could think about nothing but what my experience of shrooms had taught me about myself. And, and by this, I mean, just like seven days of obsessing about how to interpret the experience that I just had, followed by weeks and months of still processing it.

Ellie: 22:56

Well, so when you say you had a bad trip, David, does that mean that you had a bad trip because you were faced with aspects of yourself that were hard to experience, but that were ultimately meaningful to know about? Or do you mean like, no, it was a net bad.

David: 23:08

Uh.

Ellie: 23:09

I hadn't done it.

David: 23:10

No, I'm when people talk about a good trip versus a bad trip, what they mean is the valence of the experiences triggered by the drug. So do you have feelings of euphoria and happiness and oneness with the universe? That's a good trip, versus a bad trip is one in which you feel isolated, you feel aggressive, you feel potentially abandoned the world. And so it's in those bad trips that you tap into that darker side of, let's just call it into dark side of metaphysics.

Ellie: 23:41

Yeah. Cause I mean, one thing that comes to mind here is that, you know, when ancient Greeks were doing these Eleusinian mystery rights, they weren't seeking,

David: 23:47

Yeah.

Ellie: 23:48

vibes only, of they were seeking a profound meaning.

David: 23:52

No, and I think this is an important point to underline that drug use, for me, it's, it's really more of a test, um, that you endure more so than a fun thing that you do, in the hopes of maybe learning something. And even if it's not pedagogical, because you come out knowing more, at least you come out on the other end having experienced more. And so I think that happens independently of whether your experience is valence positively or negatively. As in my case,

Ellie: 24:26

yeah. And I, I think too, part of what people focus on in the dangers of psychedelics always about the dangers of the substances themselves, but the dangers of the wrong set and setting. So set and setting or something that Michael Pollan talks about in his book but also comes-

David: 24:38

Yes.

Ellie: 24:38

up in a lot of earlier work on psychedelics where you really need to have the right set and setting, which usually means a guide. It doesn't need to be an ancient Greek Hierophant, singing in your ear and the kykeon for you.

David: 24:51

Uh-

Ellie: 24:51

Didn't really have the social support that you needed in order to integrate that experience after the fact, were sort of ruminating on it on your own. You maybe didn't have the right setting in the moment. It's not the worst thing in the world, you survive, but hey, it

David: 25:03

Yeah.

Ellie: 25:04

Had you had the right social support.

David: 25:05

Maybe. Would it- would it have been more positive? Yes. Would it have been better? I don't know because I really cherish this experience in retrospect. When we think about the use of psychedelics in other time periods or in other cultures, their use has historically taken place in a ritualistic context. There is usually something like a guide or a spiritual leader or healer that walks the participant through the experience itself. So you're not alone and you don't have to make sense of it in a vacuum, which maybe is what went wrong with my own, uh, trip, uh, several years ago, my first one. And when it comes to the recent resurgence of interest in psychedelics in Western science, it's important to note that initially, that interest took the form of thinking of psychedelics essentially as new drugs, drugs that you administer for things like depression or other conditions. And the consensus used to be that you simply administer the drugs and then they work their magic. People, as a result of taking them will come to develop a different relationship to the world, right? It will cure their depression or whatever struggle they are dealing with, reducing psychedelics to just another pill. And recently, one of my students, shout out to Justin Walker wrote a really paper about what is now known as PAP, which stands for psychedelically assisted psychotherapy. The core insight of practitioners of PAP is that psychedelics can indeed bring about a radical reorientation of the self and help with mental health crises or other problems, but only if you recreate, in a clinical setting, that context, which as we pointed out, it's important for people to essentially have a good trip. And that includes having a psychotherapy sessions leading up to the moment of usage, during the moment of usage, and after, so that the experience of being on psychedelics has to be book-ended by these modern forms of ritual in which the scientist or the doctor or the psychotherapist essentially plays the function that in other contexts is played by a guru or a healer or a spiritual leader.

Ellie: 27:52

Hierophant.

David: 27:52

Yeah. The, the modern day Hierophant. And that's right. And the point about PAP is that it brings that ritual into the modern clinical setting, because it's very difficult to separate what's causing the, the healing process, whether it's just the psychedelic experience the context that frames its meaning.

Ellie: 28:15

Well, yeah, because when we take a broader sort of psychosocial approach to human biochemistry, we see that, you know, it's never going to be-

David: 28:23

Um.,

Ellie: 28:24

an, a substance on its own is what creates a given experience or determines give an experience, but that a substance and ingesting a substance is in relation to a variety of lot of other factors. I think it's interesting to think about this in relation to the rise in interest among Americans, especially people in LA of ayahuasca ceremonies, I know a lot of people who are super into ayahuasca and this is a traditionally South American hallucinogenic tea that has been used by indigenous peoples for religious and medicinal purposes. And ingestion of ayahuasca traditionally has to do with, you know, a whole sort of series of rights known as the ayahuasca ceremony. The ayahuasca ceremony helps with the development of spiritual awareness and a sort of sense of personal meaning and knowledge. So it can really provide a profound way in to understanding your reality. But I think a couple of things here, so one is the fact that there's a lip service that's paid at least like in my circles in LA, I don't know, do you, or people that you know, into ayahuasca too, David, or is this just me?

David: 29:26

Well, and so San Francisco has a long history of like hippie culture, radicals, anarchists, and a lot of drug use. so, yes, I know people who have done and some who continue ayahuasca as well as a few other substances.

Ellie: 29:40

Yeah. And, and I think that there's at least among the people that I know a lip service that's paid to the traditional and ritualistic components of that, and a desire not to sort of just appropriate the substance ayahuasca for one's own purposes, at the same time, you know, even like, let's say, let's say like the ayahuasca whites, ayahuasca whites who go down from, you know, LA-

David: 30:04

Uh

Ellie: 30:05

to these ayahuasca ceremonies, when, you know, they want to experience the traditional ayahuasca ceremonies are for one often getting duped by like fake shamans.

David: 30:17

Hmm.

Ellie: 30:17

don't actually know what they're doing, but are able to make a ton of money.

David: 30:21

Like instagram, like influencer shamans.

Ellie: 30:24

God. Yeah, just like slap on a white robe and, grow a beard and you're good good to go.

David: 30:30

Wear a lot of jewelry.

Ellie: 30:31

Yeah. And you've got people from my neighborhood, Silver Lake forking over thousands of dollars to you at any point. But, but I also think, you know, if you've got like a real shaman, there's this desire to do ayahuasca for self-discovery and self-development, and that idea of the focus on the self is a little bit different or a little bit different.

David: 30:51

Significantly different. Opposite. It's like, it's not-

Ellie: 30:55

The traditional ways.

David: 30:56

It's about ego solidity.

Ellie: 30:59

Yeah. Or it's, or it's about ego death in order to find yourself.

David: 31:02

Yeah.

Ellie: 31:02

of like weird paradoxical thing. The anthropologist Evgenia Fotiou wrote an article in 2016 about the erasure of indigenous shamanism, where they argued that ayahuasca in the psychoactive states that it induces are actually held up among indigenous groups to illuminate true reality and regular life is actually considered an illusion. So the ayahuasca ceremony reveals this objective truth, the way things are, Plato's forms, if will perhaps. A lot of Americans go down to central and south America for ceremony in order to like have a trippy cool experience, right? So they think about that as like the dream world of imagination and the real world is still what science tells them is the truth, whereas it was actually inverted for indigenous groups.

David: 31:52

Yeah. And I mean, I see this, let's call it the white ayahuasca crowd, you know, like, do you know-

Ellie: 31:59

That's my term here.

David: 32:01

Whites, you know where they gather yes? Burning man. Like the burning man crowd is a group of, by now, it didn't necessarily use to be this a long time ago, but by now it's very wealthy white techies who go into the desert to experience with drugs as a way of learning to think outside the box so that then they can come back into their high powered jobs the bay area, in Silicon Valley, disrupt the market, you know, with their radical new ideas that they had while were on-

Ellie: 32:32

Microdosing the whole time too. So it's like they had this radical giant experience of psychedelics, but then they have their like mini experiences every day.

David: 32:39

Yeah. And it seems that for them, the kind of social context that frames the experience of psychedelics leads to what I might call like a capitalist hallucination, or a capitalist experience of transcendence, as opposed to the kinds of experience of transcendence that you find in other settings where there's a different framing for it.

Ellie: 33:03

Well, and I want to maybe share a little bit about what that different framing might look like. I will also say I have wonderful friends who go to burning man, and so no, no like judgment of people-

David: 33:14

I should, you know, like speaking about burning, I'll burn myself because I've been to burning man. So yeah, I, and, and it definitely is very much a Disney- fied form of tripping, uh, very purified control Western.

Ellie: 33:30

Yeah. But in thinking about what, what are sort of like purified and less controlled experience might be, I want to go back to Wasson, the mycophile, who is one of the coauthors of The Road to Eleusis about his description of his mushroom trip with the Mazatec tribe of the Mexican highlands. When Wasson took this trip and I believe it was actually the first mushroom trip that the Mazatec tribe members had permitted a foreigner to take, describes the following. So I'm just going to go ahead and read Wasson here: what you were seeing and what you were hearing appear as one, the music assumes harmonious shapes, giving visual form to its harmonies and what you were seeing takes on the modalities of music, the music of the spheres. So there, we see a description of synesthesia, which is something you and I have done an episode on, David, this kind of mixing of the senses.

He goes on to say the following: 34:24

all your senses are similarly affected cigarette with which you occasionally break the tension of the night's smells as no cigarette before had ever smelled. Glass of simple water is infinitely better than champagne. Elsewhere, I once wrote that the bemushroomed person, amazing phrase, is poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen. In truth, he is the five senses disembodied of them, keyed to the height of sensitivity and awareness. All of them blending into one another most strangely, the person utterly passive becomes a pure receptor, infinitely delicate, of sensations.

David: 35:09

So I might have some questions about what seems to me like a hyper romanticized, description of the experience of tripping in this particular case.

Ellie: 35:22

white?

David: 35:22

Kinda am, uh, yeah. So I do worry a little bit about that, but we see here at least two strands, right? That are common in a lot of phenomenological first-person reports of psychedelic use. The first one is just that blending, that cocktail, of the senses that gives rise to synesthetic experiences. And the second one is that ego death, which here he's talking about in terms of becoming an all seeing eye that sees others, but it's not seen by them in turn. So a kind of separation of the mind from the body, which for him is an utter passivity right. You just become this kind of screen through which the world is constantly passing, without necessarily having control over the world. And I think that sense of passivity is common.

Ellie: 36:14

But I also think if we're really taking a lot of the reports seriously about psychedelic ego death and this idea that the boundaries between inside and outside dissolve when you're experiencing this, then we might actually say that the passive active distinction itself is falling away altogether, right.

David: The new Nietzsche: 36:31

beyond good and evil, beyond passivity and activity.

Ellie: 36:35

Which-

David: 36:35

no.

Ellie: 36:35

is something that a lot of philosophers have tried to get at how do we get beyond the passivity activity binary.

David: 36:41

Yeah

Ellie: 36:41

Who took all kinds of other drugs.

David: 36:43

Um.

Ellie: 36:44

Some psychedelics,

David: 36:45

Um.

Ellie: 36:46

Maybe took like Mescalin anyway.

David: 36:47

And I wish have emphasized that aspect of ego death, because my worry about a lot of narratives that overemphasize the positive oneness with the universe is that they cover over fundamentally negative aspects of all tripping, even if you're not having negative trip per se. And I take it, because often people feel need to describe their trip as an ego building exercise that at the end, paid off in ways that are legible to other people, right? If you go and tell your friends, I did a trip and it left me feeling broken and ashamed, that's a harder sell than saying I left hearing the music of the spheres.

Ellie: 37:31

I don't know. I, it's not like your friends who are reporting their psychedelic experiences are trying to like convince you to do for some like weird reasons.

David: 37:39

Sell it to themselves.

Ellie: 37:41

You to come to America, you know, to do ayahuasca is going to be a different story, but I'd be sort of inclined to take Wasson that his word here, like why not? And I do think one of the things that comes out for me that's pretty interesting in this description is the idea that the glass of water tastes better than like the finest champagne, this intensity of the-

David: 38:00

Yeah.

Ellie: 38:01

that the trip can enable. That actually brings to mind for me some meditative experiences that I've had, you know, which haven't involved substances, but have involved prolonged periods of seated meditation, when you can experience even the most subtle of sensations as really overwhelming. Some great spiritual leaders have said, you don't have to do actual drugs. You can just like meditate or pray and get the same effect, right?

David: 38:24

No. And I think the intensity is a, is a really good point. And one that I think a lot of forms of intoxication might have in common. Uh, not all, because some deadened the senses, definitely with psychedelics. Um, my experience has been that you experience the most subtle gust of wind as an activation of all your touch receptors all over body. You experience most basic patch of grass that's just so filled with color and life and vibrancy.

Ellie: 38:57

Yes.

David: 38:58

The observer.

Ellie: 38:59

when I will say in my one extremely mild dabbling into this kind of experience for me, sour- I was, I was fascinated by the look, the feel, and the taste of sour belt candy. But you know, we we've been focusing almost exclusively here on psychedelics, interestingly, after having started talking about alcohol. And the reason for this is that there's good reason to believe that the ancient Greeks, when they talk about were often talking about wine that was spiked with psychedelics. But you know, maybe we can think about this a little bit in relation to being drunk too. Like, what does-

David: 39:34

Yeah.

Ellie: 39:34

To be drunk in terms of your senses? What comes to mind for me here is like the experience of driving in a cab in New York City, going home after a long and wonderful night and just unrolling the window and feeling the breeze and listening to music and being like alive.

David: 39:53

Uh, for me, the experience of being drunk brings a feeling of letting go of things that hold me back. So I become a very confident drunk, and also a very giggly drunk. So it's just this sense of that inner voice that typically checks my actions makes me question my behavior gets quieter and quieter. I mean, my ego

Ellie: 40:17

Hmm.-

David: 40:18

and it's voice dying with it.

Ellie: 40:21

Gets a little smaller.

David: 40:23

Yes, it's like, hmm, I need a little bit more silence. Give me another shot. Um, but you're right. That when we think especially about ancient Greek philosophy, it's not just the psychedelics, it's also the drinking. And there is a historian Marty Roth who wrote a book called Drunk

the Night Before: 40:41

An Anatomy of Intoxication, in which he makes the argument that the origin of Western philosophy lies in intoxication. And he writes ergot hypothesis, but he also just writes about wine and drinking and he says, it's in those moments of intoxication, of drunken stupor, that sometimes philosophers stumbled upon their truth, right? The truth that then would become the basis of their philosophy. And we still have this of drunkenness with truth nowadays, right? Think about In Vino Veritas or, uh, the, the idiom that only children and drunks tell the truth. and there is a drunk drunken truth in that.

Ellie: 41:28

I think here, it might depend on degree, right? Like if a little tipsy, maybe I'll be a, you know, a more sparkling version of myself. But if I'm like actually drunk, like it's not a good scene. I remember one time in college, I was like, I wrote this poem that I thought was so brilliant about how I felt like I was like on a surfboard, there was something on a sandbox. I'll leave it at that. And I read it the next morning I was like, this is the worst thing I've ever read. And if my college freshmen self was saying, this is the worst thing I've ever read then yeah and it was like, literally the worst thing you've read because like I also wrote a of other horrible things sober when I was a freshman college.

David: 42:05

Well, and I like that you pointed out that you've wrote a poem, because there is this theory about the origins of philosophie being intoxication, connection to wine, connection to ergot. But the French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy wrote a book called Intoxication in which he makes precisely the opposite claim where he says, you know, some people might say that intoxication gives birth to philosophy, that it is the beginning of philosophizing, because when you're drunk and tipsy, you start playing with ideas that you typically don't, right. Everybody has philosopher inside that comes out at the bar. But in reality, there is a point at which intoxication also becomes the end philosophy. Real intoxication doesn't bring out the philosopher in us, it brings out the poet. And there is a stronger historical association between the drunken poet, rather than the drunken philosopher. If anything, still requires some element of sobriety.

Ellie: 43:07

Yeah.

David: 43:08

Poetry doesn't.

Ellie: 43:10

It brought out my inner poet. It's just that the inner poet is a bad poet.

David: 43:14

Which is the truth about you. That you're just a bad poet. Uh.

Ellie: 43:20

But you know, a couple of other philosophy podcasts have references to alcohol in their titles, which doesn't seem random.

David: 43:27

You're right.

Ellie: 43:28

So we have, for instance, David, the podcast that you and I first listened,

David: 43:32

Okay.

Ellie: 43:33

that led us to decide to do a podcast together a few years ago, it called Drinking with Socrates. And it has since transformed, a new podcast from the host Gwendolyn Dolske, a friend of mine. Who's- Yeah. And now her podcast is Good is in the Details, which we've been featured on.

David: 43:50

Um

Ellie: 43:50

but drinking with Socrates is-

David: 43:51

yes

Ellie: 43:52

name, And then there's Hotel Bar Sessions, which is a, another philosophy podcast run by some friends of ours.

David: 43:59

Um, when you and I were thinking, about starting a podcast, the way in which we talked about what we wanted this podcast to be was something that recreated the experience we had in graduate school of just chatting with friends about philosophical ideas, and most of that didn't happen in the classroom. It-

Ellie: 44:21

Yeah.

David: 44:21

in social settings, in people's basements.

Ellie: 44:23

Parties.

David: 44:24

At parties.

Ellie: 44:25

With PBR and two buck

David: 44:28

and ergot. Like

Ellie: 44:30

Oh, I wish we had ergot, that would've made it more fun. It was cheapest beer.

David: 44:35

We had to settle for the red wine meets bad cheese combo.

Ellie: 44:41

Totally. Also, oh my God. I, I it's just occurring to me. There's even a third philosophy podcast, Two Philosophers Drink and Beer and Discuss Film, yet-

David: 44:48

Yeah.

Ellie: 44:49

That is a alcohol related.

David: 44:51

Yeah. And so it seems as if alcohol loosens the mind, but at some point loosens it so much that, Nancy says, the philosophical dies into the or transforms into the poetic.

Ellie: 45:09

Well, and this link between poetry and drunkenness is kind of in contrast to one of the arguments against drunkenness that I really enjoy, which is the section of Emmanuel Kant's book, The Metaphysics of Morals entitled "On Stupefying Oneself by Use of Food or Drink." And he writes that the problem with being drunk is that it reduces us to being mere animals. We violate our duties to ourselves by putting ourselves in the state of drunkenness. He says, the first of these debasements below even the nature of an animal. So, so we, we-

David: 45:44

A plant.

Ellie: 45:45

Yeah, we like reduce ourselves to the level of a mere animal, but then we even go below that through, as he says, fermented drinks.

David: 45:51

Oh Oh, my God.

Ellie: 45:52

Um, and

David: 45:55

Fermented.

Ellie: 45:57

And also potentially from other narcotics, such as quote opium and other vegetable products, end quote. He says that these drinks are seductive because under their influence, we dream for a while and we become happy and free care. This is just an illusion-

David: 46:13

Yes.

Ellie: 46:13

of carefree happiness, right? Afterwards, what follows is like a bad hangover and just the desire to go back to it. So, so Kant actually worried about addiction, which as we've said is not really in the scope of our episode today. He really thinks the problem is not that we become poets, but that we become worse than animals, lower than animals.

David: 46:31

We become the mushrooms. Enjoying Overthink? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 47:01

So David, you and I have been talking about the fun and games related to intoxication, but there are reasons even aside from the whole big question of addiction, which we've decided to dodge, that intoxication has been vilified. So let's go through some of these reasons. Why have people in American society been so worried about intoxication?

David: 47:23

Yeah, and well, it seems to me like one reason is our Christianity and the fact that we see substance use outside of the rituals that the church itself condones as a vice, a sin, something that leads to not just sinful behavior directly, but also things like laziness, right? Think about the image of the drunk, who turns away-

Ellie: 47:47

Yeah.

David: 47:47

Jesus Christ.

Ellie: 47:49

Well, totally. And I think, you know, that is a combination, that image of the lazy drunk, is a combination of Christian resistance to drunkenness and also capitalist resistance to drunkenness. And those two really come together in the Protestant work ethic around which American society is fundamentally structured. And, you know, historically speaking too, there there's this big movement in the 1800s called the temperance movement that started to sweep the nation, with the religious revivalism movement in the 1820s and thirties. And a lot of different American states actually had temperance laws throughout the 19th century. So these weren't necessarily prohibition laws, but they had to do, right, with moderation at the very least. And I, I love this idea that, um, you know, temperance reformers would often blame demon rum corrupting American culture. So there's just like demon rum that's making everybody like, uh, worse than animal type of person.

David: 48:45

There is a racism to that one just because rum is, you know, like a Caribbean drink.

Ellie: 48:50

So I'm not sure about that. There's definitely racism related to the vilification of marijuana and opium-

David: 48:56

Course. Yeah

Ellie: 48:57

century. So, so part of the reason that opium became illegal was because white women of a certain class, like bougie white ladies that we had got the ayahuasca whites, we got the opium, started frequenting opium dens run by Chinese Americans in the early 20th century. People got worried that the women would-

David: 49:15

That their chastity.

Ellie: 49:18

Yeah. That they would, you know, like be given over to licentiousness in these spaces. And I think the question of gender here is actually pretty important when we think too about the fact that the temperance movement that I mentioned was historically led by women. And in fact prohibition was spearheaded by women. And sometimes for really valid reasons. Abuse and domestic violence become much more likely when people are under the influence of alcohol and drugs.

David: 49:48

When men are, and that very-

Ellie: 49:50

Perpetrators, most of-

David: 49:52

Yeah,

Ellie: 49:53

whom were men here, if I'm gendering it already.

David: 49:54

yeah. And I mean, that, that continues today. When you think about that, well-known statistic that on super bowl, Sunday, cases of domestic abuse skyrocket, it's directly associated with the rise of this male culture of heavy drinking.

Ellie: 50:11

Oh my God.

David: 50:12

-reasons for women to not want to deal with the pretty harsh consequences of being around men who are drunks.

Ellie: 50:20

Definitely. And I think too a desire to protect women, which in some cases might be related to like weird iterations of Christian purity culture. But in other cases, as you mentioned, David, is like super legit. There's this desire too in a lot of temperance rhetoric to protect children and youths. So think about even in our lifetime, DARE, the-

David: 50:40

Hm.

Ellie: 50:41

People coming into my elementary school and high school and be like, never try a single drug ever.

David: 50:46

Um, but you know, when thinking about the vilification of drugs, you do have this history of the war on drugs. You had this deeper history of the temperance movement, but a more philosophical point that I think needs to be brought in here. And this is a point that is made by Maggie Nelson in her book On Freedom. She argues that part of the reason why we live in a culture that is anti drugs by and large, is because drugs, especially those that run the risk of bringing about addiction, point to a paradoxical expression of freedom because the drug user is somebody who is an autonomously choosing something that seems to ultimately undermine their autonomy. And as a society, we just can't quite reconcile this desire for a kind of freedom that can manifest itself in a form of subjection. And she makes a similar claim, for example, about sexual freedom in connection to practices like BDSM, where she says the reason that a lot of people are critical of BDSM practices, even without knowing anything about them, is because they can't reconcile in their head how somebody could want to be dominated. And she says it is in the nature of freedom to be complicated, such that we sometimes desire submission. Sometimes we desire the absence of choice, and freely choosing to potentially be unfree.

Ellie: 52:19

Putting ourselves in that position, like, let's think about drinking. If I say I want to get drunk tonight, then once I'm in that drunken state, I am then making further choices for myself I might not have initially wanted. So like, if I'm already drunk, I'm like, oh, now I'm going to keep drinking. And if I get even more drunk after that, then I regret it the next morning, cause I'm like, oh, self a, the sober self chose self B, which is the drunk self, but self B chose self C, which is a really drunk self, self A didn't want self C, right. And so-

David: 52:54

Didn't she.

Ellie: 52:56

No, no. Like really didn't, right. She was like, I wanted to get drunk, but not wasted. And so, you know, this also raises questions about again, set and setting, right? Because like, whether people are in safe settings is huge here. But even if we're just bracketing those really important questions thinking about autonomy, yeah, I mean, I mean, I do understand that that claim that in choosing or autonomously choosing to waive our own autonomy, putting ourselves in a position where we're going to then be making choices for ourselves that are being made from an arguably like non autonomous state, but that have affects for autonomous selves.

David: 53:35

And Maggie's point is actually slightly different, which is that maybe your self A chooses your self B and maybe your self B does choose self C, and I think this corresponds with my own experience of drinking, it is not the case that I choose to have the first drink and then the second drink. And then suddenly I can't help myself. And I must have the third and the fifth. It is a very gradual transition at which at, various points, you decide to continue the experiment, right? You decide to go a little further, and it is true that eventually you get to a point in which choice is no longer really on the table, but it's been taken off the table by a series of choices that you made.

Ellie: 54:20

Yeah. But that doesn't mean that self A chose self C. You, you said self A chooses self B, self B chooses self C, but you didn't say self A chooses self C. That's kind of what I'm getting at. And I'll give you an example here. I have a couple of friends who are sober. They don't drink alcohol because they're worried if they drink alcohol, it will lead to them doing cocaine. And so they're like alcohol was actually not a problem for me. Cocaine is a problem for me, my self that comes out when I drink alcohol is a self that will do cocaine. And so I just don't do alcohol.

David: 54:50

Yeah, but I think that's an abdication of one's freedom and I think the real problem is that once people begin drinking, they still have the choice not to do cocaine, but having a drink sort of as the authorization because people say, oh, well, I have no choice because I drank. And so it's all or nothing logic.

Ellie: 55:15

It's not that it's like, oh, if I drink, then I'm like licensed to do whatever. It's like, no, no matter how hard I try, like once I start drinking, I'm just going to inevitably find myself having done cocaine. And so like, there's actually trying an attempt to retain freedom by not drinking to begin with.

David: 55:31

And fair.

Ellie: 55:32

-abdicate their freedom once they're drunk-

David: 55:35

That's fair.

Ellie: 55:35

by doing cocaine.

David: 55:36

What I really like about Nelson's writing on this is that she buckles down and she says, even in the cases of the most extreme addiction, we might need to find the freedom that is expressed even in the figure of the junkie. And that's something that's very difficult to do socially, because we want to believe that the junkie, the abject drug user is so devoid of freedom that they couldn't have possibly chosen this. And that's the really kind of like kick in the gut for me about her argument that makes me think a lot about the relationship between freedom and submission in relation to things like sex or, in this case, and alcohol.

Ellie: 56:14

Well and I think a word that hasn't come up yet, but I think is central to this discussion the ancient Greek word pharmakon, which is something that the philosopher Jacques Derrida draws attention to in an essay aptly entitled "Plato's Pharmacy." Um, this, essay is predominantly about writing, not about drugs, but I think what we've been talking about in terms of intoxication really resonates here. In ancient Greek, the pharmakon has a duality. It is both a remedy a poison. And Derrida says that about the pharmakon isn't actually that it has a dual essence of being poison and cure, rather than it has no essence at all, by virtue of being both poison and cure or presenting itself as a poison, but possibly turning out to be a cure, as in the case, perhaps, of the psychedelic research that we've been discussing, something that seems really scary, could be a cure for depression. But it also can present itself as a cure and turn out to be a poison in the case, for instance of drunkenness, where you're, you know, having a good time and then suddenly finding yourself wasted and horribly hung over the next morning. And that that duality is mercurial enough that it really puts pressure on the distinction between inside and outside, good and bad, even life and death.

David: 57:31

Well, and the duality that is intrinsic to the pharmakon on a Derridean reading, here we can think about it in terms of the fact that intoxication, for instance, is both the beginning and the end of philosophy. The moment in which you begin philosophizing, but also the moment in which philosophy becomes something else like poetry. Um, it is also the duality of the trip as both a highly egoistic experience in which you confront yourself and also ego death. So the holding of the two extremes in the same experience, I think, is one way of thinking about the Derridean pharmakon.

Ellie: 58:08

And one thing I really want to find out, although I'm not confident I ever will is whether the ayahuasca trip does show you the world as it really is, or whether it's beautiful, mystical illusion.

David: 58:21

Just don't become an ayahuasca white, Ellie.

David: 58:30

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay.

Ellie: 58:38

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice.

David: 58:44

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank our production assistants, Sam Hernandez and Anna Solomon.

Ellie: 58:53

Thanks to our audio editor, Karen Fabec, Samuel PK Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

And to our listeners: 58:59

thanks so much for overthinking with us!