Professor Justin Smith-Ruiu on how magic mushrooms gave him a deeper understanding of ideas he’d studied for decades
Justin Smith-Ruiu is professor of history and philosophy of science at Université Paris Cité. He is founder and president of the Hinternet Foundation, an educational nonprofit. We spoke to him about what he learned from writing his latest book, “On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality” (W. W. Norton).
Philosophers usually shy away from writing about psychedelics, arguing that they distance us from reality. But you’ve called this attitude “suspect”.
I would say that it is more than just suspect. It’s actually incoherent, because it’s by no means a settled issue for philosophers that the world that we apprehend in our sober conscious state is one that we can take for granted as the world itself. There’s the classic examples that analytic philosophers like to turn to – for example, the reed sticking out of water that looks crooked, but is in fact straight. But also more systematically. As David Hume pointed out, when you walk away from a table and keep looking at it, what you’re seeing gets smaller and smaller. Yet we have good reasons to believe that the table itself is not getting smaller … We’re not granted any kind of immediate, unproblematic access to the world as it is.
So therefore we should take account of different modes of perception?
It’s incoherent to think that one mode of apprehension – the lucid, sober, waking one – has some kind of privileged relationship to reality itself. So one might as well consider other modes of apprehension, not as themselves privileged. I’m not a Terrence McKenna type who would leap from the experience of encountering little green elves while under the influence of [the hallucinogenic] DMT to a theory about their existence. But as there is no privileged mode of access, one should take all modes of access into account.
Is that what you set out to do in On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy and the Nature of Reality?
The book weaves together memoir with cultural and intellectual history. I’m a philosopher, but also a specialist in the history of early modern science – and so I’m interested in the circulation of plants and pharmaceuticals, and I go in some detail into the way that early modern globalisation produced the category of what we call “drugs” today. And there’s also a certain amount of rigorous philosophical argumentation.
And you chose to start by describing your own trip, on truffles in the Netherlands.
The reason for the front-loading of the memoir is not just because I wanted to share my experience, but also there are deeper systematic aims. I very much want to challenge the idea that we should keep the self who is writing out of the exploration of a topic like this. I think one should philosophise with the whole person, so to speak.
Were there any particular inspirations?
I’m following the wonderful example of historian Mike Jay’s book Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. He looks primarily at two cases: [the pioneering 19th-century psychologist] William James’s use of nitrous oxide and Freud’s use of cocaine. As men of science, they wrote about their experiences, because that’s what people did circa 1890. They were not so different in that regard from, say, Benjamin Franklin seeing a lightning storm and going out and sending up a kite in order to shock himself and learn more about electricity.
That’s what science was until the 20th century. You used yourself as a test subject because that’s the most direct way to learn. That largely vanished in the first half of the 20th century.
You’re a scholar of Leibniz, who is a rationalist through and through. So I was interested to hear that you gained a new insight into his philosophy through psychedelic experience.
The result of my own experience, on psilocybin [the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms] in particular, was to appreciate profoundly, for the first time – after 25 years or so of being a Leibniz scholar – like “holy shit, he’s right”. It seemed to me absolutely true that the world is entirely constituted by minds, and that what we call the “material world” is a derivative or result of the activity of minds. It enabled me to take certain claims about the nature of reality seriously, that had previously been just off the table for me. Before that, I never considered these claims to be potentially true. I understood them simply as a scholar of Leibniz would.
There’s a lot of stigma around the use of psychedelics. Do you think that’s harmful?
Since I published the book, I’ve come into contact with [psychiatrist] David Nutt, who is the head of Drug Science UK, and they’re pushing for what they describe as sane and rational results-based policy changes to incorporate psychedelics into psychiatric treatment. I admire the work they’re doing. But I’m not an advocate [for greater legalisation] or an activist. I don’t know what the right policy decisions should be. I tend to take a more distanced, historical view. Human societies have to suppress a certain number of substances, and I understand the reasons behind the prohibition of psychedelics [in most countries]. They’re very, very powerful. They can knock us out of social reality in a way that is dangerous for the cohesion of society.
I myself feel rather detached from society, looking at it from outside. I’m happy with that, but it would probably be pretty difficult for society to function if everyone were like that. So am I saying that I’ve appointed myself to a specialised “priestly” class that gets to have this experience, but others don’t? I don’t want that either. It’s a complicated thing.
Maybe only people who are fully aware of the risks? Or in a therapeutic setting?
I’ve been critical of the deployment of therapeutic and well-being rhetoric to promote psychedelics. The way psychedelics have been used historically, going back to the Paleolithic period, is plainly in a ritual and ecstatic context, which involves an openness to radical transformation of the sort that we can’t control. But you might go into therapy with concrete goals in mind – like, I need to improve my relations with my family members, or learn to fit in better at the workplace. What we have here is a conflict between two notions – the therapeutic and the existential. I’m more interested in the latter.
More generally, you have variations over time between the prohibited and the tolerated, and also a kind of motion back and forth between the medical, the recreational and the ritual. For example, I’ve seen some recent studies on the utility of marijuana for medical purposes, suggesting that it’s not what they were claiming some years ago. Some call into question its efficacy for pain reduction, which was one of the main arguments in favour of legalisation. It seems pretty obvious that the case for medical marijuana was just a way to open the door to legalisation as a recreational drug.
What about the relationship between psychedelics and religious experience?
Psychedelics can offer something like an analogy of religious experience. If you believe in a transcendental religion – a religion that transcends the material world, such as Christianity – then there is a really hard question around whether what psychedelics deliver has anything in common with what you would describe as a “beatific vision”. Can they really launch you into the world beyond, or do they just give you a more intense experience of your embeddedness in nature? In animist societies, it makes very good sense that ayahuasca, for example, could be at the centre of a religious rite, whereas it’s harder to make that case for Christianity.
But there is a Brazilian syncretistic movement that appeared in the 1930s, incorporating significant elements of Catholicism, which also uses ayahuasca and which is legally recognised today in the United States. There is a legal loophole where you can use psychedelic drugs if it is integrated into an officially registered church. I just gave a talk at a psychedelic church in Oakland, California. They’re not Christian, they’ve kind of put it together from scratch. But they check the right boxes to count as a religion.
It seems the book has put you in touch with a wide assortment of people.
All sorts of new crowds, which is a lot of fun for me. I’m also really surprised at how many people have come to me to confess their own psychedelic experiences, many of them people I never would have guessed had done such a thing.
You mean, from the academic world?
Yes. People I thought were going to be judging me harshly came to me and said, “Hey, good job, that was a lot like my experience.” It’s been really eye-opening, and has certainly changed my reputation. I’m seen as more renegade, but I don’t have the sense that that’s for the worse. I’m still a serious person, but it’s made my career a lot more fun.
