Psychedelia.dk

Måske er der forkert af mig, at bebyrde denne del af boardet med et indlæg, som hverken handler om hoppende alfer eller spejlvendte psykouniverser...

Chapter 4. Two Classic Trips: Jean-Paul Sartre and Adelle Davis

by Thomas Riedlinger

Although awareness of the use of hallucinogens by prominent individuals in society is generally restricted to the period of the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, these compounds were available earlier in the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre, renowned French philosopher and a founder of Existentialism, had a single mescaline experience in 1935. He encountered a nightmarish vision, which clung to him for months after and became the inspiration for his acclaimed novel Nausea. In this article, writer Thomas Riedlinger examines this poorly appreciated historical phenomenon. And, in contrast to Sartre's descent into psychochemical hell, Riedlinger also describes the exalted experiences of nutrition pioneer Adelle Davis in the late 1950s and early 1960s, catalyzed by LSD. From the terror of Sartre's Nausea to the religious epiphanies of Davis's "chemical Christianity," Riedlinger's description provides a glimpse into the profound impact these compounds have often had on influential figures of the last century. (page 47)

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote that the acids he used to etch poems and art work on printing plates were "salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid." Modern users of a different kind of "acid," LSD, as well as other psychedelics, report a similar effect on human consciousness. These substances, they claim, can melt away the surface dross of daily life and manifest hidden dimensions of the spirit, or at least of the human unconscious.

Some find the experience positive, miraculous, a visionary rocket ride to heaven. For many, it's a terrifying plunge into the darkest depths of hell. Others experience both extremes, transcending the dichotomy by recognizing in it a dynamic union of sacred and profane. But one thing shared by most who brave the journey is a compelling urge to talk about it afterward. As Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar note in their book Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, "it is as though words are never more necessary than when we approach the limits of language."

Not surprisingly then, a review of recent catalogues from booksellers who specialize in

drug-related literature discloses dozens of personal narratives describing the effects of psychedelics. Most of these works are mediocre; some are simply terrible. But scattered among them, like diamonds in clay are a few undeniable classics of the genre, such as Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, Alan Watts' Joyous Cosmology; and Timothy Leary's High Priest.

On the other side of the coin, at least a few of the genre's classics aren't recognized as such. Among them are two representing, respectively, the hellish and heavenly potential of these substances. One is Nausea, Jean Paul Sartre's 1938 existentialist novel that incorporates stark descriptions of the distorted perceptions and grueling emotions he suffered when he took mescaline in 1935. In his 1964 autobiography The Words, Sartre called himself "a chronicler of Hell" for having written it. The other work is Exploring Inner Space (1961), by "Jane Dunlap," a pseudonym for the nutritionist Adelle Davis, who took LSD five times in 1959 and 1960 in a quest for spiritual enlightenment, or, as she playfully put it, to get "chemical Christianity." The following looks at both books.

Nausea

Though still not widely recognized as such, Sartre's Nausea is unquestionably one of the greatest works of psychedelic literature. Insofar as it helped him win the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature (which he refused), it is also the first truly world-class novel that reflects an author's personal experience with a hallucinogen other than cannabinols. (pages 47 & 49)

With a great surge of joy, Davis grasps that all these positive emotions that exist in human beings are actually manifestations of God, and that her visions therefore represent "the very evolution of the soul." She comprehends that God, "Whom I had so long sought and, with the aid of LSD, had so quickly found, was the whole of this paradise which lay deep within each person." (page 57).

In the fourth session, nineteen days later (February 8, 1960), on 150 micrograms of LSD, Davis finds herself transformed into a giant, luminous cobra that becomes at once her persona and her instructor. She starts in ancient India, observing the young Buddha in his father's royal garden, then travels through time and the world to see Jesus at the age of ten and Muhammad as a boy in Mecca. As she watches their various destinies unfold, she concludes that "the teachings of these three great religious leaders were amazingly similar" and that each embraced the same God.

Suddenly, the cobra orders Davis to confront buried feelings of fear that she'd rather avoid. It castigates her cowardice for failing to accept God's love and for seeking fulfillment instead in human love, material comforts, and her career. Each of these errors in turn is manifest symbolically as stoniness, coldness, and darkness. (pages 59 & 60)

Consider the following passage, from Jean-Paul Sartre's 1960 existentialist blockbuster "The Critique of Dialectical Reason":


But it should be noted that this regulatory totalisation realises my immanence in the group in the quasi-transcendence of the totalising third party; for the latter, as the creator of objectives or organiser of means, stands in a tense and contradictory relation of transcendence-immanence, so that my integration, though real in the here and now which define me, remains somewhere incomplete, in the here and now which characterise the regulatory third party. We see here the re-emergence of an element of alterity proper to the statute of the group, but which here is still formal: the third party is certainly the same, the praxis is certainly common everywhere; but a shifting dislocation makes it totalising when I am the totalised means of the group, and conversely.


There are a number of valid responses to these arguments. One might be: They sure don't make public intellectuals like they used to. Another might be: I'm not sure Sartre's arguments constitute more than a footnote to his work in "L'être et le Néant." A third might be: What was he on?

It's a good question. When he wrote the "Critique," Sartre, a lifelong caffeine fiend and serious drinker, was also frying his brains on corydrane, a form of amphetamine mixed with, of all things, aspirin. The philosopher was using corydrane on a daily basis, first to cut through the fug of the barbiturates he was taking to help him sleep—and he was having trouble sleeping not least because of all the corydrane he was putting away—but also to keep him at his desk, churning out the "Critique." "To put it briefly," he told Simone de Beauvoir some time later, "in philosophy, writing consisted of analysing my ideas; and a tube of corydrane meant 'these ideas will be analysed in the next two days.' " Or, as the Ramones used to put it, Gabba Gabba Hey.

We hear a lot these days about drug abuse, but there is also such a thing as drug use—a utilitarian attitude to our body chemistry in which drugs are simply aids to productivity. That's how Sartre treated them, and Marcus Boon argues that "several of Sartre's works show the influence of speed," including "The Idiot of the Family," his incomplete and close to definitively unreadable five-volume study of Flaubert, and "Saint Genet," which, Boon relates, "began as a 50-page preface to Genet's writings, and ended up an 800-page book." Sartre was therefore a recognizable type of speed freak, the type dedicated to obsessive, unfinishable, and, to the neutral observer, pointless toil—the sort who, several hours after taking the drug, can usually be found sitting on the floor, grinding his teeth and alphabetizing his CDs by the name of the sound engineer.

Though still not widely recognized as such, Sartre's Nausea is unquestionably one of the greatest works of psychedelic literature.

Gymnasielærermentaliteten er chokerende. Jeg hader Sartre og hans tøse-eksistentialisme. Kvalme er en ok bog, men er han helt ærligt ikke ved at være lidt passé for alle andre end frelste gymnasie-elever? Som forfatter synes jeg vist, Camus er bedre. Han virker meget mere bitter, indebrændt og sympatisk. Men egentlig vil jeg hellere bruge tid på at drikke min egen urin.

Hvis filosofi blot er en form af litteratur, hvad er litteratur så blot en form af?

Filosofi er bare en slags litteratur.

Det er en noget forbandet vrøvl. Der findes mere filosofi end det der er skrevet ned.

Jeg vil hellere gøre forholdet funktionelt. Hvad kan filosofi, som litteratur ikke kan?

Ja, det sagde du også før (Ud over at du nu giver ringere mening). Og så må det jo nødvendigvis være relativt simpelt at komme med et eksempel på, at jeg tager fejl.