Queries, #1

Weigh in on the Air-Soul, the Mother-Soul, Beatific Visions, the Psychedelic Renaissance, &c. Plus: The Oort Cloud Review Gets “Manifested”

1.

There have been several key moments in my long slow awakening to the fact that I was never going to be “a good philosopher” — not in the sense of not being “good enough”, but in the sense of being a bit of a “behavior child”, as I hear they say of naughty kids in public schools in the US these days, in the sense of being unable to respect the somehow ever-changing yet always rigid norm of keeping away from all the stuff that is deemed “not philosophy” in a given era, unable ever to forget that “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (In fact it seems to me that the two sorts of “not being good” as a philosopher collapse into one another — to be lauded as “a good philosopher” is to exemplify the values and the habitus of the ones doing the lauding.) But perhaps foremost among these moments was the year I spent in Germany as a graduate student, when I was supposed to be reading all the relevant philosophical literature for my topic, but just kept found myself being pulled back as if by magnetism to the complete set of issues of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London that the library at my German university had on its shelves (I suppose it wasn’t really “complete”, but it did include all of the issues from the journal’s founding in 1665 until at least the early eighteenth century).

If you have but looked at this publication, you will know that the vast majority of topics its contributors covered would not count as “philosophy” by today’s standards: a report of a two-headed calf from the Isle of Man, the electrical discharge of a catfish, some experiments touching upon the refrigerative properties of saltpeter. What are we to make of all this? Should we assume that we know what philosophy is, and they didn’t? Honestly, as I think I showed pretty compellingly in my 2015 book, if we were simply to tally up the different ways the term “philosophy” has been used over the past few millennia, the vastly greater part of its occurrences would have to do with things like the properties of saltpeter, than with, say, the “ethics of apology: was Louis CK sufficiently contrite before attempting his comeback?”, or whatever the current generation is succeeding in pulling out of the pop-cultural ether and shoehorning into its simulation of reflection sub specie aeternitatis.

Who’s right? Who knows! All I know is I really, deeply enjoy reading the Philosophical Transactions. It is a weird, wild body of work, almost as if spun right out of someone’s imagination. (Recently a subscriber wrote to me to ask me what he should be reading if he wants to become a writer, and I insisted that the very idea of “reading recs” is deeply offensive to me, but that I could at least report that nothing fired my imagination in my efforts to find my own voice as a writer more than Early Modern English non-fiction, above all the Philosophical Transactions, but also, notably, Robert Burton and Thomas Browne — the latter of whose Garden of Cyrus, or, The Quincuncial Lozenge is in my view the perfect sublation of the opposition between fiction and non-fiction.) I spent that year in Germany fueling my imagination, when I was supposed to be making myself more rigorous, as in the intellectual equivalent of that inevitable scene in Rocky and its sequels where they show our hero all alone jumping rope in a dark basement or running in the snow while pulling Burgess Meredith on a sled behind him. I was supposed to be doing that, with my intellect, but instead I was having some kind of illicit affair with the electric catfish.

Anyhow, my favorites section of the Transactions was the one that comes at the end, under the heading of “Queries”. These are to some extent a holdover from medieval philosophy, and the convention familiar from St. Thomas Aquinas of starting a new section of a text with “Quaeritur” (“It is asked”), or “An” (“Whether”). But in the era of the first globalization, to issue queries was typically to attempt to capture the attention of some traveller heading off to some distant land still shrouded in rumors, or to help resolve an enduring problem of navigation such as the declination of the magnet and the determination of lines of longitude.

But concretely, at the present moment, I really do have some queries, and it seemed to me that I might make use of The Hinternet to obtain answers to them. Search engines and AI remain remarkably stupid when we are dealing with questions not reducible to keywords. I hear the Bibliothèque Nationale has set up a “human search engine” that will answer any question you put to it within 72 hours. But as with every alternative technology this prideful country comes up with in the futile aim of resistance to the absolutely ruthless bulldozing effects of global capitalism, I’m sure there would be a mass of online forms to fill out in order to get access to it, the interface would hurt my eyes to gaze upon even for a second, and anyhow I’m sorry but that just seems like too long to wait.

2.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the tripartite soul, not the familiar one we know from Aristotle, which divides the ψυχή into its rational, sensitive, and vegetative parts, but rather the three levels of the soul (кут) as conceptualized in traditional Yakut religion, which gives us:

Салгын-кут — literally “air-soul”, which is to say intellect or reason;
Буор-кут — literally “earth-soul”, which is to say the living body;
Ийэ-кут — literally “mother-soul”, which is to say tradition or culture.

Prima facie this seems to me at least as plausible a way of carving things up as either the Aristotelian triple-soul, or the Cartesian dualist account of the constitution of the person out of the exclusively rational soul on the one hand and the entirely non-soul body on the other, or indeed the prevailing scientific account today, which takes properties and capacities ascribed to the soul as emerging from the organization of the brain and central nervous system.

In other words, the Yakut theory represents as respectable an effort as any other to arrange the cutlery, and if philosophy were really doing its job it would take such expressions of human self-accounting as might trickle in from the far Northeast of Siberia at least as seriously as it takes the idea that the soul simultaneously vegetates, senses, and thinks. This would not be, if I were the philosophy tsar, in the interest of satisfying empty-headed DEI initiatives, which end up representing different belief systems as interesting only to the extent that they are themselves instances of “diversity”, thus reducing them and caricaturing them in a way that calls to mind nothing so much as a Soviet museum showcasing the traditional ethnic costumes of all the socialist republics and their autonomous oblasts and okrugs. Rather, if I were philosophy tsar I would convey to my faithful subjects that it is eminently worth studying non-Western and Indigenous ways of carving up the world because we are interested in the truth itself.

Have you really not figured out yet that metaphysics is no different from table manners, in that there are all sorts of ways to set the table, all of which will look “wrong” from the outside, but all of which work just as well as any other for those who adopt them? This does not at all mean that there is no truth in such matters. We just have to move up a level: the truth is to be found in the range of variations. Philosophy began to take an interest in this range around 1704, but rather than retaining proprietary interest in the project, it allowed cultural variation to branch off from it into a new discrete field that would soon enough go by the name of “ethnology” or “anthropology”, as also happened with the study of saltpeter and catfish around the same time as these broke away and began to develop into independent sciences. Meanwhile, philosophy got stuck with Louis CK and whatever else it managed to scrape off the cutting-room floor of the history of the Wissenschaften.

But I’m interested in particular in the idea that at least one third of the soul is constituted by tradition, while the other two equal parts are constituted by what we would conceptualize as the opposed pair of “body” and “mind”. Does this happen elsewhere? Sometimes, indeed, tradition does enter into reflection on selfhood and identity in Western traditions. But when it does so it is usually conceptualized as a social value associated with communal belonging, not as constitutive of the self in the same immediate way as, say, the intellect. In Romanticism and related currents of thought, particular folkways connected to a particular territory become so important as perhaps to be conceived as constitutive of an individual’s identity. But it may be only in truly Indigenous contexts, rather than in the artificially constructed Indigeneity of, say, nineteenth-century German nationalism, that tradition is so central to who one is that one could not imagine losing it without experiencing literal ego-death as a result. I recall when I was a child learning that many Native American groups practiced banishment as the ultimate punishment. Living in a vacuum of tradition, as I did, I remember thinking those punished in this way got off easy, and that if the same thing were to happen to me I would “just go do something else”. I see now, however, that if one were to belong to a society in which an entire third of the soul is the “mother-soul” in the Yakut sense, then indeed such a significant operation of partial psychectomy could easily be seen as unsurvivable.

It’s interesting to note, here, though I won’t go into detail, that at various moments the air-soul has also been conceptualized, even in Greco-Latin-Arabic-European tradition, as communal, perhaps in more or less the same way as the mother-soul. That is, in a transcendental theory of Ideas, or in Averroës’s theory of the unity of the intellect, the Idea of, say, Triangularity or of Justice is not something we possess as individuals, in our minds, but some kind of shared resource in which we are granted a fleeting usufruct. In this regard it seems the mother-soul and the air-soul might not necessarily be differentiated by the fact that the latter is individually “ours”, that it is characterized by Jemeinigkeit, or however else you want to put it, while the former is passed down by others like a family recipe or a village dance. It all depends “what your priors are”, as some idiot might say — that is, it depends on what sort of entity you take “the idea of Justice” or “the village kumiss recipe” to be. It seems likely that in more traditional societies the difference between these two entities would not be as stark or obvious as it seems to be for us.

As far as I have been able to determine, something like the Yakut tripartite soul is characteristic, with variations, of a broad swath of Mongol-Turkic Siberian cultures — roughly those at the ground zero of “shamanism”, the part of the world where it makes sense to use that term if it makes sense anywhere. My first query concerns other cultural-geographical domains. Are there other societies, in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australasia, that explicitly represent cultural tradition as constitutive of the soul-principle of an individual human being, or of whatever is closest to the soul-principle?

3.

My second query is related to the research for the book I am currently writing, entitled On Drugs: Philosophy, Psychedelics, and the Nature of Reality, to appear from Norton/Liveright in 2025. My work on this project has run into an unexpected hitch, as in the course of it I have more or less shifted from a pro-psychedelics stance to an anti-psychedelics stance. I will never be a Nancy Reagan with a “Just Say ‘No’” message. I’m a philosopher, for better or worse, like it or not, and I can only ever heed the imperative, “Just Say, ‘Why?’” But when I try to answer that why-question, to give good reasons for the value of psychedelic experience in the course of a life well-lived, I find I am falling short.

It is still going to be a good book, I think. Sometimes I get the sense that all of my books repeat the experience of Richard Klein in his magnificent Cigarettes Are Sublime (1993), a paean to smoking that alone was able to bring him to quit smoking. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is certainly worked like that for me — nothing could break me of my social-media addiction except to write a book, in part, about it. I never had a psychedelic “habit”, just a bit of experimentation, certainly less than average for the circles I’ve spent good parts of my life running in. But it did seem to me that there was a strange gap in the literature, between the curious and singular phenomena associated with the psychedelic experience, on the one hand, and on the other the amount of attention analytic philosophers were willing to pay to these phenomena. It seemed to me that in the end their silence had more to do with concerns about professional reputation than any considered judgment of the subject’s merits — with, that is, the fact that they are a bunch of squares. So it seemed to fall to me, as a non-square in their midst, to fill the void.

My thinking now, however, I confess, has been profoundly shaped by the relatively square arguments given by the Oxford comparative-religionist and Avestan scholar R. C. Zaehner, who in 1954 wrote a withering critique of Aldous Huxley’s account earlier that same year of his own experiences on mescaline, The Doors of Perception. Over the next decade Huxley’s text would become a sort of clavis for the tremendous explosion of cultural interest in psychedelics, and many of his clichés would enter into our culture and survive all the way to the most recent “psychedelic renaissance” of the twenty-first century. Things would have been very different if we had listened to Zaehner instead.

I’ll save the full story for the book, and I’ll be as impartial as can be in my final account of their dispute. But, to put it succinctly, what strikes me now with great force, as Zaehner insists, is that there are no shortcuts to beatific vision. You can’t see the face of God, except perhaps as the ultimate capstone of your soul’s long progress through the eons, and if you think that’s what you’re seeing when you are tripping, or something like it, as Huxley clearly did, then you are effectively making a mockery of our mortal condition and of those mortals who aspire to some kind of relationship with the transcendent through the long hard work of meditation, ritual, piety, and prayer. I think, again, I can still do the topic justice, and I was never exactly a Timothy Leary-type to begin with. Now, however, my voice is inevitably more critical, and clinical, than it was when I first began thinking about the topic, and found myself veering into something close to advocacy.

Be that as it may, it still surprises me that, as far as I know, throughout the psychedelic revolution of the twentieth century all the Anglophone philosophers kept right on writing about cats on mats and whatever else even as a good number of their students were probably seeing cats with glowing auras floating above their mats, and even as the cool philosophers from France were getting so loose and easy as to start favorably quoting Carlos Castañeda’s made-up stories about his mescaline experiences under the guidance of a Yaqui shaman (Deleuze and Guattari), or were declaring in interviews that they’d had it with sipping wine because it doesn’t pack a punch like acid does (Foucault). So what I want to know is this: am I missing anyone? Were there any Anglophone academic philosophers in the analytic tradition writing between, say, 1950 and 1975, who offered a first-person account of their own experience on psychedelic drugs? I mean, some of those dudes were kind of cool, and got into the spirit of the times. I can imagine, say, Paul Feyerabend giving LSD a try, and writing about it. But I’m drawing blanks here. Citations, please!

4.

I think those are my only queries for today. Maybe I should have come up with a few more to launch this new “Queries” feature in earnest. You can go ahead and tell me if you’ve seen any two-headed calfs or the like, I suppose. Been shocked by a catfish recently? Trekked through the desert with a cylinder of saltpeter? Speaking of deserts, is it true what they say of the great Karakum, that it is as an ocean of sand, across which the nomads travel in vehicles outfitted with such sails as we see on boats? &c.

I also wanted to make an announcement regarding a project currently in development. The Oort Cloud Review, which was first mentioned in this space in a strictly metafictional context, that is, which spent the initial phase of its life as an imaginary entity, enjoying “subsistence” but not “existence”, to speak with Meinong, will pass into the domain of actual entities, with actual physical tokens of it, in late 2024. We’ve put together a great editorial team and are currently bringing some incredible writers on board. I am so excited about this — it is one of the most ridiculous and gratifying things I’ve ever undertaken: gratuitous creativity for its own sake.

Our funding model is a mixed bag, with both traditional mécènes, as well as traditional advertising. But we could also use some of that less traditional crowdfunded money. To that end, I’m announcing a contributions drive here today. Anyone who signs up for an annual subscription to The Hinternet between now and January 1, 2024, will receive a complimentary copy of The Oort Cloud Review in the Fall. Anyone who signs up for a founding membership will receive a complimentary copy and will have their name listed as a sponsor of this august new publication. As always, your support and encouragement are immensely appreciated — they mean the world to me. —JSR