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From Plato to Freud to Sartre, why did philosophers of the past take drugs?

2022-07-11 20:36:54Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
From Plato to Freud to Sartre, why did philosophers of the past take drugs?
Why did philosophers take drugs?

Philosophers were not all cold rational thinkers. Some have led promiscuous lives filled with drug use and abuse. Nietzsche preached the Superman, but doused himself in narcotics to calm his ischemia. Freud may have explored the depths of the soul, but he was a man addicted to cocaine. Sartre was so drugged that he saw himself being chased by giant crabs. Not to mention Plato participating in mystical rites by drinking a hallucinogenic cocktail. So philosophers as well as some damn rock stars?

"We are accustomed to see them as secular saints who rely only on the light of reason, while they were still human, with their weaknesses and irrationalities," says Alessandro Paolucci, who in the essay The Amazing History of Philosophy (Il Saggiatore) has shown the lives of eight philosophers who used psychedelics for various reasons: from mysticism to creativity, from the investigation of human knowledge to the cure of some pathologies, with disastrous results. For most of history, drugs have not been perceived as "artificial paradise" but as special drugs, sensationally underestimating addiction and harm to health.

PLATO'S VISIONS. Let's start with one of the fathers of Western thought, the Greek Plato. His philosophy, which exalted the value of the World of Ideas in relation to the errors of the senses, actually had a mystical root: the Eleusinian mysteries, in which the participants received a welcome from the afterlife. In addition to fasting, pilgrimages and dances, during the rites participants drank ciceone, a cereal-based drink. According to historians, those grains were contaminated with a parasitic mold, Claviceps paspali, which has a potency equal to 1/20 of LSD.

And so the passages of the Phaedo, in which Plato describes the knowledge of the Ideas, must be seen in another light: Perfect, simple, unchanging, and happy were the visions we contemplated in a pure light. Not a philosophical exercise, but an artificial mystical one: the psychedelic journey allowed the soul to reunite with the world of ideas by overcoming the illusions of the senses. Plato was not the only intellectual in ancient Greece initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. The list includes Plutarch, Aeschylus, Pindar and Euripides.

MARK AURELI'S PACIFIERS. However, centuries later, the emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius drank a herbal concoction, teriaca, every evening. The medicine was invented by Crautea, the physician of Mithridates, ruler of Pontus, obsessed with the fear of being poisoned as his father had been. Mithridates had asked Crautea to make him immune to all poisons. Teriaca contained about forty ingredients (saffron, ginger, anise, frankincense, and many others) mixed in wine and honey, with the addition of cooked viper meat. If the viper lives in contact with its venom without being killed, the ancients thought, its flesh must contain an antidote.

The medicine also contained old opium, which had a sleeping effect. This guaranteed Marcus Aurelius, an insomniac and hypochondriac, to sleep at night, overcoming the stress of court conspiracies. In short, the coldness which he preached in philosophy was not natural.

FREUD, A COCAINOMANIC . Over the centuries, the discovery of new psychotropic substances influenced thinkers. Starting with Sigmund Freud, who wanted to base his scientific career on cocaine. In 1883, a German army doctor, Theodor Aschenbrandt, sent a shipment of cocaine to Bavarian soldiers, noting that it helped with fatigue and hunger. Freud wanted to investigate the effects of this substance, moved by his experience. "In my last depression, I took coke again, and a small dose took me to the stars in a fantastic way," he wrote in 1884.

For the father of psychoanalysis, the head was like the Asterix drug: it could cure anxiety, depression, eating disorders, hysteria, asthma. But the consumer's enthusiasm led him to make an obvious error in scientific evaluation. He took it upon himself to treat the morphine addict Dr. Ernst von Fleischl-Marxo, which he used to treat chronic pain in an amputated finger. But one drug addiction doesn't cure another addiction, and Fleischel soon started hallucinating until he died.

Freud realized that he was wrong, but he did not stop sucking. And the white powder may also have played a role in his clinical practice. His patients told him about the most embarrassing episodes of their sex lives at a time when doing so with a psychologist was not at all common; perhaps, Paolucci speculates, "Did Freud give patients a small dose of cocaine to help them overcome their embarrassment?"

NICE'S ANALGESICS. Friedrich Nietzsche's case was different as he took narcotics to treat small ischemia of cerebral arteries that caused him excruciating pain. So he used all the substances available: potassium bromide (sedative), atropine for eye pain (hallucinogenic), quinine (toxic), chloral hydrate (heavy sedative), hashish solution and above all opium. "I am a semi-alienato affected by migraines, the long solitude has completely bored the brain. I come to this reasonable assessment of the situation after taking, out of desperation, a large dose of opium. But instead of losing my intellect because of it, I seem to be finally regaining it."

In this letter Nietzsche refers to laudanum, a compound based on alcohol and opium. And so, drugged by sedatives, mood swings and alternating pains, Nietzsche wrote his major works. His aphoristic and fragmentary style was a forced stylistic choice, given that his illnesses did not allow him to write for long. His whole philosophy is an invitation to face the hardness of life, accepting it without illusions. But he succeeded only with the "little help" of chemistry.

In the 20th century, drugs old and new became for some philosophers a laboratory for the study of the workings of the mind: Walter Benjamin considered hashish a means of "profane enlightenment", Michel Foucault saw drugs as a way out from the limits of nature and the repressive cage of power. And Ernst Jünger tried a wide range of substances: LSD, phenmetrazine, niopo (a psychotropic plant from South America), psilocybin, ecstasy.

Sartre's AMPHETAMINE. The most famous was the father of existentialism, Jean Paul Sartre. To maintain his hectic work schedule, he stocked up on Corydrane, a popular "tonic" drug in the 1950s. The tablets contained 500 mg of aspirin and 7 mg of amphetamine. He was taking 20 tablets a day, equivalent to 140 mg of amphetamine. To write the "Critique of Dialectical Reason", which reconciled socialism and freedom, Sartre worked 10 hours a day, chewed Corydrane tablets, "in the end I took 20 a day", he writes. "Amphetamines gave me at least three times the speed of thinking and writing than my normal pace. "Writing in philosophy basically consisted of analyzing my ideas, and a tube of Corydrane meant: these ideas will be analyzed in the next two days," he wrote.

Food for thought, but paid dearly. To sleep, Sartre had to use sleeping pills, but for decades he could not sleep more than 4 hours a night. Sartre also tried mescaline, under its effects he saw umbrellas-vultures, shoes-skeletons, monstrous faces. And the hallucinations continued to haunt him even after the trip. He said he was being chased by giant crabs. It is no coincidence that in "Nausea" it tells about the protagonist's inability to distinguish reality from hallucinations. For a long time Sartre had to live with these visions. "I was talking to the crabs when I was walking and they were standing next to me. After some time I started to ignore them and little by little they left".


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