What to do about the woo?

In a landmark paper from 2019, Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston lay out their theory for what happens to the human brain under the influence of psychedelics: their so-called REBUS (RElaxed Brain Under PsychedelicS) model (Carhart-Harris and Friston 2019). Towards the end of the paper, and after some heavy-duty neuroscience, the authors change tack to ask an unexpected question: ‘What to do about the “woo”?’ (335). For, if psychedelics have great therapeutic potential – momentarily loosening the brain to shake it free of depressive, obsessive and other related cognitive rigidities – they often occasion strange and, for the authors, unwelcome ideation. It’s all very well healing people, but not if it comes at the cost of their entertaining ‘bizarre beliefs or poorly understood platitudes’ (336). The authors suggest psychiatrists and researchers steer patients away from any lurid conclusions. ‘Combining psychedelic therapy with a secular wisdom teaching, such as can be found in nonreligious Buddhism for example … as well as depth psychology … [will help] … to ground psychedelic science and medicine, while inoculating against evangelism’ (336).

Here, almost unnoticed, hard science has slipped into making normative and somewhat defensive theological (‘atheism’) and metaphysical (‘physicalism’) statements. That defensiveness is perhaps understandable if we remember the long shadow cast by scandals of the 1960s, where, most famously, Timothy Leary metamorphosed from buttoned-down Harvard psychologist to rogue priest, shaking the establishment with his call to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’. Sobriety is now the order of the day and, to be taken seriously, one has to distance oneself from the excesses of the past. Nonetheless, an obvious answer to the question, ‘what to do about the woo?’, is to give it some more thought, for just as we might want to probe the more extravagant claims made by psychedelic enthusiasts, we might also want to probe the philosophical and implicit theological assumptions¹ that underpin the great explosion in scientific interest in psychedelics occurring on both sides of the Atlantic: the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’.

Whatever it is that psychedelics do, they indubitably do so through physical alterations to the brain’s chemistry: Carhart-Harris, Friston and their contemporaries remain on firm ground here. It’s just that those minute chemical tweaks cause disproportionate upheavals in cognition, perception, memory, affect and understanding – the whole trippy phantasmagoria, so familiar even to the uninitiated. Carhart-Harris and Friston may be keen to contain the surfeit of meaning that erupts in psychedelic phenomenology, but in doing so they might be accused of rather missing the point. Psychedelics remain interesting precisely because they open up a plethora of metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, psychological, sociological, anthropological, cultural, political, not to mention theological, questions. Perhaps this is why psychedelic experiences have always prompted Western intellectuals to speculate – think William James, Aldous Huxley, Henri Michaux, to name just three – but as psychedelics move from the margins to the mainstream, driven by this explosion of big science, these questions cannot simply be sidestepped or shut down. Carhart-Harris and Friston’s atheism and physicalism may or may not turn out to be well-founded, but we should be wary of hasty conclusions. In other words, there has never been a greater need for a critical, psychedelic humanities where such questions can be given the weighty consideration they deserve.

Happily, then, the publication of Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience could not be more timely. This broad collection of essays, from scholars operating in a variety of different fields, successfully brings psychedelics into the humanities and the ambit of philosophy, staking out what will become dedicated areas of discussion and research in the years to come. It is a significant, often brilliant, book that deserves credit for its rigour and reach and should be read widely by those at the forefront of psychedelic research.

The book is not arranged thematically but I would suggest two broad themes do emerge. The first and the largest considers how best to interpret psychedelic experiences (what, in other words, to do with the woo); the second contextualizes and problematizes the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’ and questions the axioms and assumptions upon which psychedelic research, and psychedelic assisted therapy, are based.

To begin with the first theme, Ole Martin Moen asks the obvious question: ‘Are Psychedelic Drugs Distorting?’ (chapter 10). If they are, that is if they warp reality to the extent that practitioners are left with the kinds of bizarre and erroneous beliefs about the world discussed above, then we ought genuinely to be concerned by their usage. By addressing various ways in which psychedelics alter minds, Moen concludes that there can indeed be alteration without distortion, and that there is no a priori reason to dismiss psychedelics as distorting agents. He leaves unanswered, however, the trickier question of how we might distinguish distorted from altered-yet-faithful perception, so perhaps it is too early to let psychedelics completely off the hook.

The speculative metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead has long been an appealing lens with which to interpret and make sense of psychedelic experiences.² His notion of prehension and his panpsychist philosophy of organism lend metaphysical justification to the porosity of the self, encountered during those nature–mystical type experiences often reported by psychedelic users, while his occasionalism (see Harman 2009) leaves the door open for the theologically inclined. Perhaps that is why Whitehead is the most cited philosopher here, though with four somewhat overlapping chapters devoted to his ideas there is inevitably some repetition: a little more editorial trimming might have benefitted the whole. For me the most illuminating of the four were Michael Halewood’s ‘Making Your Soul Visible’ (chapter 6) and Matthew Segall’s ‘Altered Consciousness after Descartes: Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism as Psychedelic Realism’ (chapter 12). The latter wittily casts Descartes’ dualism, and his visions of angels, as a ‘bad trip’ from which Whitehead offers much needed succour.

I have already mentioned Aldous Huxley, whose influence upon the subsequent unfolding of psychedelic culture cannot be underestimated, and after Whitehead he is the most cited writer here. His most significant essay here, The Doors of Perception (1954), is rightly regarded as a classic work of psychedelic literature, and yet it remains as open to interpretation as the famous mescaline trip it attempts to describe. Huxley may have encouraged countless others to follow in his footsteps, but by equating his experience to those of the mystics, in however a tentative way, he unleashed a religious backlash most notably from a Christian perspective by R. C. Zaehner, and a Zen Buddhist perspective by D. T. Suzuki. Such artificial paradises, these critics concluded, could never come close to the apotheoses of their respective traditions.

In ‘The Unconscious in Zen and Psychedelic Experience. A Response to D. T. Suzuki’s Zen Critique of Drug-Induced Satori’ (chapter 11), Steve Odin takes Suzuki to task for (perhaps wilfully) misreading Huxley’s text. In a forensic analysis he reveals that there was nothing hallucinatory (or in Moen’s words, distorting) about Huxley’s trip, as Suzuki claims; rather, Huxley was beguiled by the very is-ness of things, and in that his experiences are, for Odin, wholly compatible with the Zen notion of mushin, or ‘no-mind’. Odin concludes that Huxley may very well have reached, momentarily at least, the same satori as Suzuki, but by means other than meditation.

In ‘Mary on Acid: Experiences of Unity and the Epistemic Gap’ (chapter 9), Jussi Jylkkä also refers to Huxley and to Zen, arguing that the collapse of the subject–object distinction, which often accompanies high dose psychedelic experiences, is best understood by the Zen term ‘This’ (Jylkkä provides no Japanese original). ‘This’ is an ‘experience where one loses one’s self and is completely present without reflection’ (159). This collapse into unreflective, pure conscious awareness demonstrates for Jylkkä that Mary, in a variant of Frank Jackson’s famous thought experiment, could never know what it is to trip from scientific knowledge alone (such as that offered by Carhart-Harris and Friston). While this conclusion is hard to dispute, I did wonder whether Odin’s ‘is-ness’ and Jylkkä’s ‘this’ were, though both rooted in Zen, actually somewhat different, if not divergent, interpretations of Huxley’s mescaline trip. The former sounds more akin to what Zaehner termed a nature mystical type experience, the latter a monistic.

To complicate matters further, in chapter 4, ‘Power and the Sublime in Aldous Huxley’s Drug Aesthetics’, Rob Dickens reminds us that Huxley never actually claimed to have had any kind of mystical experience, merely something verging upon one (a point often missed by detractors and supporters alike). Dickens therefore offers a compelling third way to read Huxley, one rooted in Huxley’s wider oeuvre, namely ‘the sublime’. Though he traces the concept back further, Dickens draws most extensively upon Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful ([1757/1759] 2015), in which the sublime differs from the merely beautiful by virtue of being occasioned by modifications of power, and by eliciting not only awe but terror. Presumably Huxley knew the essay, for he described his experiences thusly. In a famous poetic sparring match with his friend Humphry Osmond, in which both attempted to find a better name for what were then called hallucinogens or psychotomimetics, Huxley wrote, ‘To make this trivial world sublime/ Take half a gramme of phanerothyme’ (Osmond’s more euphonious ‘psychedelic’ prevailed: ‘To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic’) (61). Dickens takes Huxley at his word, and in doing so adroitly moves the debate away from what could easily become a stale theological quarrel.

The ideas of analytical psychologist Carl Gustav Jung have long been used by those seeking a rational justification for exceptional experience. It is therefore surprising to learn from Johanna Hilla Sopanen (chapter 14) that Timothy Leary rejected Jung’s thought because Jung was psychedelically inexperienced. Sopanen makes the case that Leary was too hasty. Jung, as we now know with the publication of The Red Book (Jung 2012), entered a protracted period of mental distress following his split from his mentor Freud, one that was characterized by an overwhelming torrent of visions and non-ordinary experiences and from which many of his notions were ultimately born. Though occasioned by distress rather than chemistry, Jung’s cartography of the psyche, says Sopanen, has much to offer us in terms of interpreting psychedelic experience, even if Jung thought drugs too dangerous a method of opening the unconscious. Here I found myself wanting a little more critical engagement because Jung’s ideas have come under sustained philosophical questioning and so may not offer the unshakeable foundation that Sopanen seems to suppose. One obvious question is whether Jung’s visionary experiences were indeed equivalent to those occasioned by psychedelics beyond any superficial resemblance, though it is hard to see how this might be conclusively answered.

Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy has proved of great utility in environmental philosophy, especially in Deep Ecology, but I am unaware of any application to the psychedelic field until now. In chapter 13, ‘The White Sun of Substance: Spinozism and the Psychedelic Amor Dei Intellectualis’, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes applies a perplexing aspect of Spinoza’s metaphysics – his amor dei intellectualis or intellectual love of God – to one of the more perplexing psychedelic experiences, that occasioned by 5-MeO-DMT. In characteristic lucid style, Sjöstedt-Hughes leads the reader through the steps of Spinoza’s metaphysics to conclude that the 5-MeO-DMT experience – one of contentless profundity, and consequently very difficult to express – may be exactly what Spinoza meant by amor dei intellectualis. Most intriguingly, Sjöstedt-Hughes suggests that the amor dei intellectualis lies at one end of a spectrum, of which the nature–mystical type encounters so crucial to Deep Ecological ethics lies at the other, expanding Spinozism to account for a much broader variety of non-ordinary experiences.

One of the most original contributions comes from Taline Artinian in chapter 1, ‘Transpersonal Gratitude and Psychedelically Altered States of Consciousness’. Artinian draws upon the philosophy of gratitude to distinguish a particular dyadic form she calls transpersonal gratitude, one in which gratitude is expressed for a gratuitous benefit (as opposed to triadic gratitude, where there is a giver–gift–beneficiary). Artinian considers the similarities between transpersonal gratitude and certain psychedelic experiences, finding resonances in terms of a weakened hold of the ego and a subsequent difficulty in communicating what happened (ineffability). In doing so she offers a potentially fruitful avenue for reading psychedelic experience as anything but woo.

This concludes the first theme. If I were to make one observation it is that nearly all of these interpretations regard psychedelics in a positive light, stressing the potential benefits of our soaring angelic. Given the still overwhelming hostility towards psychedelics from politicians and in some cases the right wing media, as well as a certain ambivalence within science, this is an understandable corrective not an oversight. Nonetheless, a complete understanding of psychedelic phenomenology must ultimately include dissonant voices, those who have also fathomed hell. There is a hint of this in Dickens’ use of the sublime, in which terror proves key, but a richer treatment must surely await future research. Here also we might want to broaden out our remit to include indigenous perspectives from those traditions where psychedelics have been normalized, and that often possess cartographies and technologies for explaining and dealing with the less than pleasant aspects.

There is more friction in the second theme, contained in just four chapters, that looks more toward the political and ethical consequences of a world in which psychedelics, or more probably psychedelic-assisted therapy, become normalized. Kyle Buller, Joe Moore, and Lenny Gibson provide ‘A Cultural History of Psychedelics in the US’ (chapter 3), and place today’s renaissance against a backdrop of 60s utopianism crushed by 70s prohibition, one that is only now starting to be lifted. Though helpful, in fairness theirs is a version of the story that has been told many times, and for me this chapter lacked the critical bite of many of the others, and indeed recent drug histories.

By contrast, Osiris Sinuhe Gonzales Romero makes a trenchant, persuasive, and necessary case for ‘Decolonizing the Philosophy of Psychedelics’ (chapter 5). He critiques what he calls the internal colonial bias of philosophy, which fails to address indigenous and feminist perspectives, and the emerging psychedelic capitalism that allows only two legitimate contexts of consumption: the hospital and the church. Given that a number of key psychedelic compounds (such as psilocybin, DMT, and ibogaine) were first extracted from plants and fungi used in traditional indigenous practices, and given the scale of the expected profits to be made by Western companies, some kind of reckoning needs to occur. Furthermore, the role of women (not to mention BIPOC and LGBQT+ communities) in the history of psychedelic culture has been underplayed or ignored, while little attention has been paid to what kinds of knowledge might be generated by psychedelic experiences. Gonzales Romero calls, therefore, for a psychedelic humanities that might begin addressing these, and other related questions of politics, ethics, knowledge, and power.

In a similar vein, Christine Hauskeller (chapter 7, ‘Individualization and Alienation in Psychedelic Psychotherapy’), brings Critical Theory to bear on the growing medicalization of psychedelics in the West, revealing a fundamental Foucauldian paradox: namely that, to cure madness, psychedelic therapy must first induce it. However, and as I evidence above, the ‘nature of psychedelic exceptional experiences is anathema to the scientific rationality of psychiatry’ (p. 125), and so she cautions against scientists and clinicians impulsively imposing their own worldviews upon patients. Most troublingly of all, psychedelics are, she argues, being instrumentalized ‘to sustain an alienating order and system of power’ (p. 128), one that lies at the root of the very illnesses they are being used to cure. This is a powerful critique that hits at the foundations of the psychedelic renaissance.

Finally, in chapter 8, ‘Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse: Psychedelics and Revolution’, Fernando Huesca Ramon brings a Marxist perspective by investigating the drug experiences of these two writers of the Left. Benjamin’s writings on hashish are probably better known than Marcuse’s on LSD, but in ‘the trip’ Marcuse saw an ‘artificial and short-lived dissolution’ (p. 145) that anticipated a wider social liberation. Here Huesca Ramon is keeping alive the revolutionary potential of psychedelics, so potent in the 1960s, regarding them as rightfully emancipatory and critiquing their reduction to positivistic discourses and capitalist markets.

The whole collection of essays is, I should finally add, contextualized by a very good introduction written by the two editors. It should be clear by now that psychedelic experiences can be ghastly, noetic, astonishing, or just plain weird. They can result in empty platitudes or speculative metaphysics; rampant capitalism or revolutionary zeal. In the eighty years since the publication of Huxley’s famous essay we are only now beginning fully to plumb the depths of psychedelic phenomenology and to explore the wider societal, cultural, and philosophical implications. So, while it’s premature to answer the question of what to do about the woo, this pioneering book very much points us in the right direction.

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Notes on contributors

Andy Letcher

Andy Letcher is Senior Lecturer in Psychology (Psychedelics) at the University of Exeter, and Senior Lecturer and Programme Lead for the MA Engaged Ecology at Schumacher College, Devon, UK. He is the author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom and many papers in the burgeoning field of Critical Psychedelic Studies.

Notes

1 Here, I make no claim about the existence or not of God(s), about which I remain genuinely agnostic. But I do take the position that as this matter cannot be determined experimentally – or falsified, in Popperian fashion – it cannot be answered by, and so lies outside the purview of, science. Consequently, any final statement on the matter remains theological, an article of faith, irrespective of the weight of argument proffered.

2 The psychedelic guru and proselytizer, Terence McKenna (1946–2000) drew heavily upon Whitehead.