Nearly everyone struggled during the pandemic, but Justin Smith-Ruiu’s struggle took a particularly disturbing form. An American philosopher who teaches at the University of Paris, he was on a fellowship in New York in March 2020 when the city shut down, stranding him in a rental apartment in Brooklyn. He caught Covid the same month, and though he recovered from the virus, he sank into a deep, existential despair.
His job, his career milestones, even the homes, schools, hospitals and other institutions around which human social life revolved: All of it suddenly seemed flimsy and meaningless, like so much make-believe. “I had the sharp sense that the things that we take to be real just aren’t real,” he told me. “It was quite extreme.”
Smith-Ruiu, 53, could have sought counseling or joined the Great Resignation by quitting his job. Instead, he turned to drugs — first cannabis, then psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and, finally, muscimol, a psychedelic made from another mushroom, the fly agaric.
Yet his interest in mind-altering substances was as much professional as personal: His crisis of belief in the world around him was also, he concluded, a problem for his field. Philosophy is concerned with some of the most fundamental questions — about the nature of reality, time, the self and other minds. So why did the discipline automatically exclude from consideration experiences that challenge, in spectacular if temporary ways, our basic understanding of these concepts?
This conundrum led first to a story in Wired magazine, and then to a book: “On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality,” which will be published on Tuesday. Why assume that our minds, in their sober “default state,” are naturally designed to grasp reality as it really is? Smith-Ruiu asks. Why not “explore all the modes of consciousness available to us”? What might they tell us about “the relationship between mind and world?”
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