One common feature in the psychedelic experience, is the ineffability of said experience–it is too great or extreme to describe in words. In fact, this is one of the key features of the mystical experience that William James elucidates. Ask someone to describe their psychedelic or another profound experience they have had and they will likely stumble for words. They might even just respond with “I can’t describe it” or “it is too hard to describe.” What is so hard to describe? And why is it so hard to describe? The reality of the experience. The psychedelic experience undermines our usual sense of what is real and what is not. It immerses us in another mode of consciousness, reiterating the point that William James made that there are multiple modes of consciousness and one is not anymore real than another.
Will the Real Mode of Consciousness Please Stand Up?
Most might describe their current, ordinary state as being the real state, having some sort of ontological superiority over other states, but this is influenced by the dominant culture and collective consciousness. The “reality” of the experience, or the “reality” of the entities that one encounters in are subject to scrutiny based on the experiencer’s language used to describe their experience. Why? Because the dominant culture does not have that type experience to fall back on as a reference point. In trying to describe these experiences the limitations of descriptive language compared to direct experience are apparent.
In his book, Psychedelia, Patrick Lundborg explains this astutely: “The problem is not the presumed ‘ineffability’ that scholars of mysticism lament. Such a notion seems rooted in the assumption that a description of an experience must equate the experience—an idea which is not only unrealistic, but fundamentally impossible.”
Someone can write a description of what they experienced as they walked through the giant redwoods for the first time, but the written or spoken word will always fall short of the actual experience. Lundborg continues, “Human language can never fully capture the transcendental moment of Now and Here”. (The show Sense8 brilliantly captures what it might look like to capture and transmit the Now and Here to another person and share actual experience without the need of language.) Language has served as and is a tool for communication, rather than replication. It is impossible to replicate a psychedelic experience merely through words. It might be easier to understand someone’s description of a psychedelic experience if you’ve had one of your own. It becomes easier to communicate the complexities of the experience and perhaps induce a memory (a weak replication) of your own experience, but it cannot replicate the original experience.
Analytic Philosophy of Language
Lundborg argues, and I find it compelling, that language isn’t intrinsic to itself, the problem is of its inflated status in the modern mind as an instrument of thought. One only has to look at the clusterfuck that is the history of analytic philosophy of language to see what he means. (Don’t get me wrong, I really love getting into the weeds in philosophy of language, and I’m sort of making it a strawman to make a point). The endless breaking down of propositions, referents, senses, descriptions, names, watered-down semiotics, and so on is exhausting and we don’t have space to break it all down here.
Briefly though, the early analytic philosophers of language, Frege, Russell had to deal with how to make sense of the subject-object distinction. You have a subject, Dan, pointing to an object, let’s say a chair and saying “chair” to Emily, another subject who is supposed to hear his utterance, and form the same sort of mental representation and understand the meaning behind his utterance as that thing, the physical object, is chair. And so on, which we don’t have room for. The important take away is the subject-object distinction and the breakdown of language to its Aristotelian applications promotes limiting reality to what we can linguistically or mathematically quantify, both of which are excellent tools but don’t capture the ineffable. They promote the destruction of experience in the sense of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, which I have written about here.
Terence McKenna and Jung’s Solution
One interesting thing is that a large number of psychedelic thinkers, perhaps most notable historically, Terence McKenna, are interested in how psychedelics seem to obliterate the subject-object distinction. He was also interested in the way we have used language historically, via symbolic religious and psychological systems, to structure our consciousness.
McKenna thought that technology, psychedelics, offered a possibility of creating something else–a sort of post-metaphorical medium to bypass these anthropological factors as Erik Davis explains in his book High Weirdness. McKenna was trying to create the philosophers stone, combining mental and physical realities–subjective and objective. Jung was Terence’s alchemical inspiration and in the history of science Jung saw a visionary religious literature and iconographic universe that was the stage for the work, the opus, of individuation (100-101).
The opus, whether considered as a mystical or physical function (although Jung thought it couldn’t be decoupled from either) requires an “experimental” attitude towards the transformation of mind and matter. It requires a singular framework that its cobbled together from various sources (philosophy, chemistry, psychology, etc. think subjective and objective if you will), a framework which isn’t only conceptual or technical, it is semiotic, it is meditative, and it is material. The subject’s psyche makes up the medium of the work and is a cause and the point of departure (Davis, 101).
In other words, McKenna saw psychedelics as a tool for overcoming the old linguistic constructs developed by religions, psychologies, and cultures. A technology to bootstrap the ineffable. Psychedelics can perhaps show the way to a new form of language, a new technology of communication. There are some interesting semiotic and biosemiotic approaches to this that I will explore in another post.
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