What follows are a list of some conceptual stumbling blocks that I have encountered (thus far) in my ongoing attempts to understand and appreciate "The World as Will and Idea" by Arthur Schopenhauer. This essay is sure to be unpopular because it deals with abstract philosophy, but the patient reader will find that each of the three issues that I have raised below have real-world consequences when it comes to how human beings, and westerners in particular, conceive of the topic of drugs.
1) Schopenhauer tells us that the genius sees the world with "pure objectivity of perception," and is thus able to create great art, whether in the field of painting, poetry or even philosophy.
"The state which is required for pure objectivity of perception has partly permanent conditions in the perfection of the brain and the general physiological qualities favourable to its activity, partly temporary conditions, inasmuch as such a state is favoured by all that increases the attention and heightens the susceptibility of the cerebral nervous system, yet without exciting any passion."
I think I get it. The genius is expressed (or finds its outlet) in a combination of will and motive, which in turn requires a receptive brain. My problem arises from the fact that Schopenhauer immediately follows this statement with some Christian Science pablum worthy of any card-carrying Drug Warrior and/or behaviorist/reductive materialist:
"One must not think here," Schopenhauer writes, "of spirituous drinks or opium; what is rather required is a night of quiet sleep, a cold bath, and all that procures for the brain activity an unforced predominance by quieting the circulation and calming the passions."
How psychologically naïve can you get! Such patently false statements are worthy of the seemingly endless roster of self-help authors of 21st-century America who pretend that drugs do not exist and who use "words, words, words" in a vain attempt to give their readers the positive states of mind wherewith certain strategic and informed drug use could have inspired them in a trice. In the real world, a cold bath and a good night's sleep do very little, if anything, to get one outside of one's own ego and to see the world in terms of universals, just as the many feel-good magazine articles about conquering depression in 3, 5 or 10 easy steps have never put a dent in depression statistics. People need strong psychological medicine to make real progress in how they see the world, not the maternal platitudes of a philosophical Pollyanna. Maybe Schopenhauer was different in this regard, maybe a good night's sleep allowed him to truly see a world in a grain of sand, but if that was so, he rashly presupposed that the rest of us should also need only his own puritanical protocol to transcend self and see the world from the point of view of a genius, namely, as an abstract expression of the will writ large.
De Quincey used opium to appreciate opera from the point of view of a genius, which means, in Schopenhauer's own language, to sense the universal in the music and not the particular. The effect of the opium was to leave De Quincey's particular self in abeyance and to allow him to hear the joys and sorrows of humanity writ large in the music. The opium thus helped him bring out his genius. It was not necessarily a positive attribute of opium that accomplished this: it did not necessarily create the beauty and pathos born of ultimate considerations; rather, the drug silenced the background noise of "self" and/or "ego" that would have otherwise precluded the author from hearing the music at its deepest possible emotive level, something for which the author had a latent capacity thanks to his advanced intellect.
In short, opium did not impair De Quincey's ability to think like a genius, it facilitated it. This is all psychological common sense! Such drugs get us "outside of our head" and away from our sober grasping ego - or rather they have the potential to do so when used creatively and strategically by an educated person.
Yet Schopenhauer's prescription for "getting outside ourselves" and "experiencing the universal" is to get a good night's sleep and take a cold bath!
Poet Percy Shelley could have been speaking of this naïve prescription for genius when he wrote the following in his eulogy for John Keats:
"Frail spells whose utter'd charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,
Doubt, chance and mutability."
Conclusion: Like modern Drug Warriors and materialists, Schopenhauer presupposes that the "sober" mind (as that term is hypocritically defined by Westerners) is the best conduit for artistically grasping ultimate realities -- and nothing could be further from the truth, at least when it comes to the lion's share of humanity. In recommending sleep and a bath as a way to transcend the ego, the German pessimist betrays his ignorance, not just of drugs, but of common-sense psychology, the same common sense that is still ignored to this very day by self-help authors and drug researchers.
2) Schopenhauer's case for pessimism has its weak points.
Like Darwin, the German philosopher justified his pessimism about nature by frequent detailed appeals to the horror stories that occasionally play out in it.
"The wasps, for instance, who through the whole summer have with great care and labour fed their larvæ on the produce of their plundering, but now, in October, see the last generation of them facing starvation, sting them to death."
When pessimists wring their hands on the behalf of insects, they are basically saying the following:
"Wouldn't it be horrible to know that one lived in such a world?"
And yet the fact is that the insects (as far as we know) have no idea that they are living in such a world. We no more know what it is like to be an insect than Thomas Nagel knows what it's like to be a bat. For all we know, the insects feel an empowered sense of joy in performing all their busybody activity. Maybe they downright enjoy their workaday world. Whatever they do or do not experience, however, we can surely all agree that insects do not possess the foresight and reflection which alone could render their lives truly wretched and so justify philosophers in trotting out their life stories as a reason for regarding nature pessimistically.
3) Regarding Schopenhauer's view of pointlessness.
Schopenhauer does not precisely conclude that life is meaningless, but he certainly claims that most signs point in that direction. He cannot imagine any plausible reason for all this suffering.
Let me suggest one possibility. It may not be a knockdown blow against philosophical nihilists, but it might suggest some new productive lines of inquiry.
Schopenhauer tells us that as individuals we are all after personal happiness. Well, then, one might say that life is a giant jigsaw puzzle made up of millions of "parts" that have been thrown out in front of us as human beings. The implicit challenge for us, given this state of affairs, is to figure out how to put these pieces together in such a way as to render human beings happy. Seen in this light, the pessimists are like a man sitting in a boat who is complaining that the boat is sinking while failing to realize that the situation cries out for him to start bailing, that bailing is the whole purpose of his life, at least with regard to this particular scenario in which he finds himself. Instead, he keeps saying: "See? Life sucks, and this boat situation proves it!"
My goal is not to moralize here, but just to be rational. Let me place my idea in the form of a syllogism:
1: We value happiness.
2. Life does not give most people such happiness.
Conclusion: We need to put together "the pieces" given us in this puzzle of life in such a way as to create far more happiness. THAT is the point of our lives.
Most people would despair of such a goal of increasing the quotient of worldwide happiness, but that is only because most people dogmatically ignore the almost completely untapped potential of mood-elevating drugs to improve human life. Why? Because racist politicians decided long ago that America must be a drug-hating Christian Science theocracy and that we should never use "drugs" for the benefit of human beings. To this end, the racists have indoctrinated the entire world in the ideology of substance demonization and so deprived us of the one ace that humanity still has up its sleeve when it comes to battling for our species' survival in a hate-filled world overloaded with thermonuclear weapons, namely "drugs," or what could be far more accurately referred to as "potential godsend medicines." Drugs can lift our mood and help us reliably perform the many positive acts that the milquetoast authors of self-help books implicitly claim that we should be able to do without drugs. Schopenhauer might argue that the will cannot be changed, but we risk turning that into a self-fulfilling prophecy when we outlaw drug use for the purpose of changing basic mindset.
As a teenager, Paul Stamets overcame his stuttering habit in one afternoon after consuming a handful of mushrooms. The effect of the shrooms was to transport him outside of his ego, into an objective state viz. himself, wherein the then-budding mycologist could see his life situation in a new way and so change his maladaptive behavior. This is the kind of real politique that we need to bring to our attempts to improve mind and mood, rather than relying on politically correct cures concocted by self-help authors - or by philosophers, for that matter.
So when Schopenhauer says we cannot improve things - when he tells us that our selfish individual wills are destined to play out in a selfish and thus a destructive way - he is reckoning without drugs - just like almost every other philosopher who has ever opined on such topics.
Human beings have never honestly set out to find, understand and then strategically use the vast variety of natural and synthesizable empathogens and entheogens and other mood-elevating drugs in creative protocols that truly buoy mood and change outlooks, etc. Our ongoing failure to do so comes from our brainwashed allegiance to the substance-demonizing ideology of the Drug War. Depressed patients have reported making more progress in one single counseling session facilitated with MDMA than they had experienced in their previous six years of drug-free therapy sessions. Yet the penny refuses to drop. This is because the Drug Warriors have taught us to fear drugs rather than to understand them. And so we outlaw almost all drugs that affect mood and mind, which is just as cruel and senseless as it would be to outlaw drugs that affect physical conditions. This is ironic because America is the most drug-taking society in the world. It's just that the Drug War has given Big Pharma a monopoly on mind and mood medicine and almost all competition, natural or synthetic, has been ruthlessly outlawed.
But let's suppose that my supposition is correct, that the whole point of life is for us to find a way to render as many people as happy as possible. How would we proceed - realistically speaking, I mean, and not in the opinion of feel-good self-help authors? Feeling good means changing attitudes, after all, and that needs strong medicine - not simply a good night's sleep and a nice cold bath.
The first REALISTIC step toward maximum happiness would be to relegalize psychoactive drugs. We would then empower drug-savvy empaths to study all mood- and mind-altering substances to develop safe and sane ways to treat the hatred and gloom which is the hallmark of the modern westerner. Notice I say empaths, not scientists, for it has always been a category error to place materialist scientists in charge of mind and mood medicine. The absurd outcome of so doing is the proof. The behaviorists and materialists in modern medicine dogmatically ignore all the blatantly obvious benefits of outlawed drugs. Their idea, in particular, that opium has no positive uses is absolutely insane. The drug was considered a panacea by such ancient physicians as Avicenna, Paracelsus and Galen, and was used in religious rituals thousands of years ago in ancient Greece. To say it has no positive uses is therefore a political statement, or a behaviorist's "position statement," not a statement of fact. And then the Drug War chimes in to tell us that we are babies with respect to drugs, that we can never learn to use them wisely. We can put a man on the moon and create the Internet, but we cannot wisely use the plants that grow at our very feet.
We have to end this hateful defeatist idea that creative minds can never come up with a way to use such drugs safely - while also understanding, as if we were actual ADULTS, that all risky activity has victims, and that this fact should never make us outlaw activities but to teach safest possible use. If we feel otherwise, then we should outlaw drinking liquor and riding horses and driving a car and swimming and hunting - all of which activities kill many times those the number that die from drugs - except when we include the totally unnecessary deaths that are caused by drug prohibition itself, which causes drive-by shootings and civil wars overseas while ensuring contaminated product and failing to teach safe use.
I should note in closing that happiness does not have to mean hysterical laughter. Meister Eckhart, the German quietist whom Schopenhauer frequently praises in "Will and Idea," tells us that a human being who completely identifies with God (that is, with the will writ large) would be happy even in hell. Happiness here is not just the frenzied wisecracking of a teenage delinquent, which is the only species of happiness that the Drug Warrior would have us consider in this context.
Finally, my goal has not been to take potshots at an easy (i.e., long-dead) target. I find much of value in Schopenhauer's work, not just from what he says but what he hints at. I have highlighted the late philosopher's problematic contentions because of the negative effect that their unchallenged appearance may have had on his readers in the past and to lessen their likelihood of misleading readers in the future, especially those who, like almost everyone these days, have been indoctrinated by the state since grade school in the drug-hating ideology of Christian Science.
Author's Follow-up: January 27, 2025
I am the first philosopher to reveal the hidden Drug War prejudices of Arthur Schopenhauer. And these are highly relevant to an understanding of his principal work, "The World as Will and Idea/Representation," wherein he presupposes predestination and an unknowable Will. For he does so in total ignoration of both the psychological and mystical effects of a wide variety of psychoactive drugs. The mindful use of a variety of drugs, including opium, can get ourselves outside of our biasing and limiting ego, which is, after all, the fundamental goal of the mystics whom Schopenhauer praises. Yet the German pessimist appears to be unaware of this potential, which I argue, however, exists (at least to a certain degree) as a matter of psychological common sense. Moreover, psychedelics give us glimpses of those potentially noumenal worlds that William James said we must study in order to understand the nature of ultimate reality. While the ontological status of such drug-inspired (or drug-facilitated) worlds may be debated, they cannot be dismissed out of hand as philosophically irrelevant, and that appears to be what Schopenhauer has done.
More accurately, he appears to have been totally unaware of the very existence of the sorts of drug-induced states involved here. Of course, Schopenhauer died when the American philosopher was just 18 years old, but the ideas that James championed in his lifetime date back thousands of years, to the use of soma in the Vedic religion, to the use of opium in ancient Greek ritual and to the use of psychedelics in the Eleusinian Mysteries. It is also worth noting that the high-profile recipients of the kykeon at Eleusis often couched their praise of the rite in the awed and reticent language of mystics like Meister Eckhart, whom Schopenhauer holds up as a kind of role model for true understanding, or rather the truest possible understanding available here below to humans as such.
Schopenhauer considers that we essentially are our "wills." Our very bodies are merely the incarnation of our will. This will, moreover, is determined once and for all, even before our birth. Our behavior is thus causally determined and is the inexorable result of our will employing the specific motives available to it in life (in light of the particular nature of its psychological and physical environment) as necessary to "have its way." One can apparently transcend this determinism, however, by denying one's will (that is, by transcending the ego), something of which only geniuses (or at least potential geniuses) are thought to be capable -- geniuses and madmen, perhaps, a duo which Schopenhauer tells us have much in common. Schopenhauer's shortcoming consists of his failure to understand that many psychoactive drugs help one transcend ego, if only in psychological ways, and that some drugs, psychedelics in particular, have the potential to disable perceptual filters that keep us from obtaining faint glimpses of the noumenal world of Immanuel Kant, or what Schopenhauer would refer to as the Will writ large. To repeat: the ontological status of such drug-facilitated glimpses may be debated, but the first step is for philosophers to acknowledge the simple fact that such states exist.
Of course, most modern philosophers are worse than Schopenhauer. They rule out mystical states a priori in the name of hateful behaviorism. Among these are the materialist doctors of our time who are complicit in the government-sponsored lie that time-honored medicines have no known positive uses whatsoever. They do not care that laughing gas makes depressed folk like myself laugh, nor that its use gives us something to look forward to, and that this anticipation is therapeutically beneficial in itself. No, they ignore all psychological common sense. Nor do they care that opium was considered a panacea by ancient physicians, nor that coca can clearly help certain lethargic and depressed individuals to finally get things done in life. They want to know if such drugs "really" can help us depressed folks -- which means they are on a metaphysical quest for the holy grail of reductively-determined cures -- one whose achievement would flatter their purely materialist understanding of the world. And so they continue pursuing their Quixotic but well-funded quest to prove the omnipotence of materialism, while the depressed pay the price by going without blatantly obvious godsends, some of which grow at their very feet.
In reality, of course, it is a category error to put materialists in charge of mind and mood medicine. The experts in that realm are first and foremost, the living, breathing human beings themselves, the drug users themselves, who are the best acquainted with their own psychospiritual needs and desires. Their relevant helpers, in turn, are a class of empathic individuals with an extensive knowledge of how a wide variety of drugs can be used strategically and as safely as possible given the "patient's" own risk tolerance when it comes to bringing about the psychospiritual states that he or she desires. The relevant helpers, in short, are modern-day shamans, a category that has scarcely yet been imagined, let alone populated with the appropriately caring and knowledgeable individuals. The materialists are of no use here and in fact are an actual hindrance. Their world is all about quantities, not qualities, and their intrusion into the psychological realm is based on a view of human beings as biochemical robots, hence the psychiatric pill mill and its one-size-fits-all cures for whatever ails us.
Finally, despite Schopenhauer's criticism of materialists, he shares their irritating habit of looking at nature and saying, in effect, "Nothing to see here!" -- in the sense that what we are seeing could not have been otherwise than what it is. It is just that in the case of Schopenhauer, it is the individual will that inexorably determines events (in interaction with "motive" -- i.e. environment -- and with the wills of other people, animals and things), whereas the materialist cites the mere interaction of goal-free matter. Schopenhauer thus believes in teleology but not design. The will seeks its own fulfilment in life, hence the teleology, but the resulting world at large is simply a predetermined outcome of the interacting expressions of wills of countless creatures and things (for even the stones at our feet have a kind of basic will that is expressed in their peculiar material properties), and so what it produces in the aggregate -- i.e., nature as we know it -- is a necessary result. That is to say, it is not the result of any conscious design on the part of an entity that we call "nature" to create what we think of as beauty.
As I am new to Schopenhauer's views on this topic, I hesitate to criticize them here. I fear I may say something that I will have to take back -- or at least to qualify -- upon further study. Moreover, Schopenhauer's pronouncements are sometimes self-contradictory and the reader is thus obliged to infer some greater context in which they would make sense given his overall philosophical stance. Let me just tentatively suggest, however, that I can imagine a world in which the interaction of wills as mentioned above would result in a constantly changing world of patterns in the physical world, none of which patterns would strike the onlooking human being as particularly beautiful or consistent. And yet the nature that we see is, indeed, both beautiful and consistent, according to no less a judge than Schopenhauer himself! One therefore cannot help but suppose that there is a meta-design element involved here, something that the individual will itself may be "unaware of" but for which the will itself is but a cog in a wheel -- a wheel of the Will writ large, a wheel that has been inexplicably rigged to collectively output something that we, (i.e. our individual wills) would consider to be beautiful.
This is design at several removes, perhaps, but it is still design. The alternative would be to suggest that the perceptually beautiful end result of the interaction of wills is just a coincidence, and such an outcome would be a clear violation of our concept of probability. Even staunch evolutionists agree with that latter statement, whether they realize it or not. They may never say that they agree, but their actions prove that they do. Francis Crick would not have postulated panspermia (the alien seeding of our world with life) had he clearly seen a way in which our beautiful and consistent natural world could have come
The DEA should be tried for crimes against humanity. They have been lying about drugs for 50 years and running interference between human beings and Mother Nature in violation of natural law, depriving us of countless potential and known godsends in order to create more DEA jobs.
Pundits have been sniffing about the "smell" of Detroit lately. Sounds racist -- especially since such comments tend to come from drug warriors, the guys who ruined Detroit in the first place (you know, with drug laws that incentivized profit-seeking violence as a means of escaping poverty).
Thanks to the Drug War, folks are forced to become amateur chemists to profit from DMT, a drug that occurs naturally in most living things. This is the same Drug War that is killing American young people wholesale by refusing to teach safe use and regulate drug supply.
We need a scheduling system for psychoactive drugs as much as we need a scheduling system for sports activities: i.e. NOT AT ALL. Some sports are VERY dangerous, but we do not outlaw them because we know that there are benefits both to sports and to freedom in general.
In his book "Salvia Divinorum: The Sage of the Seers," Ross Heaven explains how "salvinorin A" is the strongest hallucinogen in the world and could treat Alzheimer's, AIDS, and various addictions. But America would prefer to demonize and outlaw the drug.
Both physical and psychological addiction can be successfully fought when we relegalize the pharmacopoeia and start to fight drugs with drugs. But prohibitionists do not want to end addiction, they want to scare us with it.
One merely has to look at any issue of Psychology Today to see articles in which the author reckons without the Drug War, in which they pretend that banned substances do not exist and so fail to incorporate any topic-related insights that might otherwise come from user reports.
We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for the losers who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.
Our tolerance for freedom wanes in proportion as we consider "drugs" to be demonic. This is the dark side behind the new ostensibly comic genre about Cocaine Bears and such. It shows that Americans are superstitious about drugs in a way that Neanderthals would have understood.
It's interesting that Jamaicans call the police 'Babylon,' given that Babylon denotes a society seeking materialist pleasures. Drug use is about transcending the material world and seeking spiritual states: states that the materialist derides as meaningless.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Schopenhauer and Drugs published on January 26, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)
You have been reading an article entitled, Schopenhauer and Drugs published on January 26, 2025 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)