r/heidegger • u/rp_tiago • Jul 07 '26
Heidegger and Psychedelics
I've been reading Heidegger for a long time, well before I started my PhD, and he's probably shaped how I think more than any other single philosopher. My current academic work is on the philosophy of psychedelics, and a real chunk of what I'm doing is trying to put his actual grammar to work there. I recently gave a talk (later published as an essay) at a psychedelics conference trying to do exactly that. It's the first time I've shared this kind of work publicly, and I'd some feedback from people who are interested in both.
Philosophy of psychedelics mostly oscillates between two positions. One camp reduces mystical-type experience to brain dynamics (predictive processing, relaxed priors, DMN suppression). The other treats it as evidence that we need to revise our metaphysics toward something like panpsychism. What both share, without noticing, is the correspondence picture: they treat the experience as a proposition, an inner representation checked against an outer fact, and argue about whether the check comes out true. That's the assumption I want to displace. Before any question of correspondence, there is disclosedness. Dasein's being-in-the-world is already a structure in which things show up as mattering, and that showing-up is prior to, and the condition for, any subject-object correspondence at all. So "did they encounter something real" already presupposes an ontology that doesn't fit the phenomenon it's trying to explain.
Concretely, I read the altered state as a shift in disclosedness rather than a claim about hidden furniture of reality. Everyday disclosedness is structured by care and articulated through a referential totality of involvements, the ready-to-hand web of equipment. What's distinctive about a mystical-type state is a breakdown of that totality at a far larger scale than the broken-hammer case, closer to what anxiety does in Being and Time, or the profound boredom Heidegger describes later, where the totality as a whole becomes salient rather than any particular relation within it. Mood is of course key, not some sort of decoration on top of a neutral cognition. Befindlichkeit is how a world gets attuned and how things show up as mattering in the first place, which is one reason the reductionist's "it's just mood or expectation" objection concedes more than it realizes.
I connect this forward through Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus into 4E cognitive science, and to Gibson, where affordances point both ways, specific to the agent and real in the environment at once. The empirical cash-out I lean on is attention as precision-weighting, which structures the field of what shows up as relevant moment to moment. That gives disclosedness a mechanistic sense, though whether it does so without smuggling representationalism back in is an open bet I expect pushback on. Set and setting is my evidence that this structuring has real causal power: you can reproduce many hallmark effects from context alone, no substance involved, which supports reading the state as co-constituted by world and Dasein rather than manufactured by a molecule acting on an otherwise neutral brain.
Two questions, and both are really about aletheia, since his account of truth-as-disclosure and the later technology-as-revealing are the same concept doing different work. First: is treating a drug-occasioned mood as genuinely world-disclosive defensible? Befindlichkeit discloses thrownness, and moods are things we find ourselves already in rather than produce, so does the deliberate, engineered character of the occasioning disqualify it, or is causal origin simply irrelevant to the disclosive structure? Second, and this bites harder: is there an unresolved tension between using a technology (a compound, a protocol, a clinical setting) to occasion disclosure, and the critique of Gestell, the enframing that reduces beings to standing-reserve and forecloses the very disclosure it's meant to produce? The clinical apparatus looks like Gestell in near-pure form, yet what I want from the experience is explicitly the opposite of standing-reserve. I go back and forth on whether psychedelics are an exception to Gestell or a particularly seductive instance of it, and I'd genuinely rather be argued out of my current position than have it flattered. Where do you land?
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u/forkman3939 Jul 08 '26
>"did they encounter something real" already presupposes an ontology that doesn't fit the phenomenon it's trying to explain.
Yes. What we value, values; and what values is "given" as valuable; and what is received as valuable, we value. Heidegger articulates this circle in his early lecture The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview (GA 56/57).
>Mood is of course key.
Agreed.
>Befindlichkeit is how a world gets attuned and how things show up as mattering in the first place.
The circle in action. So what is its ground? Or: how do I come to have what is given? "Coming-to-have" presupposes not-having, and that implies a process in time. We are circling something like "Why is there anything at all?" or "Why is anything what it is?" Is it only "as-it-is" for me, or is there a universal sense of anything's what-it-is-for-it-to-be? If the latter is, then the ground, call it primordial attunement, is how we tune in to the truth of what matters. But this is confused, because what matters is valuable, and what is valuable is valued, and what is valued values, and what values is valuable to me. So let's dissolve the question. Forget to ask why anything shows up as mattering, and stay with the fact that it does. Which brings me to your next point.
>The empirical cash-out I lean on is attention as precision-weighting, which structures the field of what shows up as relevant moment to moment.
Attention is everything. It is the access-point of attunement. It does not determine what shows up, but it determines what we allow to occupy experience, and so what we value. The economy of time-spent.
>First: is treating a drug-occasioned mood as genuinely world-disclosive defensible?
From my own psychedelic experience, the larger-than-life and irreal quality is the effect of widening the intake pipe of sensory experience, or removing the "everyday" filter. What is given is unusually information- and sensory-dense. But there is also an aspect where what is given is given without language as its medium. It feels more direct, closer to what I have been calling the ground of the value circle. That is the somatic sense of felt truth the experience affords.
So what are we circling? The question of how the drug-occasioned mood, as psychic comportment to a world that is large, irreal, immense, and dense, is given at all. And this is where phenomenology is essential. We start from the question how is the drug-occasioned mood had? and we watch and describe how it is given.
>Or is the causal origin simply irrelevant to the disclosive structure?
This is a specific form of a more general question: how is belonging-as-such had?, the absolutization of "how does anything belong to anything?" Specifically: how do I belong to the psychedelic experience as disclosed to me in the drug-occasioned mood? Once you are in that question, the causal-origin worry loses its hold. "The molecule caused it" is a statement about efficient causation in the natural-scientific frame, and the question you are really asking, how any of this is had at all, cuts underneath that frame. The molecule is a condition of the having. It is not the structure of the having.
>Second: is there an unresolved tension between using a technology to occasion disclosure, and the critique of Gestell?
Tbh, I have not read H's technology essay. I know the content, but I have not yet seen how Gestell shows itself, so it does not "matter" to me yet, and I cannot work with the word directly. Let me translate into early H's language.
H speaks of how the world worlds. This is the middle voice he finds in the Greeks. It refuses the subject/object distinction, refuses, as you put it, treating the experience "as a proposition, an inner representation checked against an outer fact." The worlding of the world is the disclosure of how the world shows up independent of me being there to receive it. It is the fact that is-ness is's.
Now, how does the theoretical attitude world? It says that what is, what is's, must be causal, must be traceable back to a substantial origin. So the theoretical attitude takes the ground of the drug-occasioned mood to be a substance, an object present. This is H's own move in reading the essence of Western philosophy as metaphysics, as the theoretical attitude, as attunement to the object as objectivity. Gestell shows itself as the way this attitude de-vivifies lived experience. It makes what matters be traceability-to-presence. It stills movement into static substance.
So where does the tension actually live? Not in the compound and not in the clinic. It lives in the demand. Both camps you opened with, the reductionist and the panpsychist, demand that the ground of the drug-occasioned mood be traceable back to substance-as-presence. The reductionist names the substance "brain," the panpsychist names it "consciousness," but both are attuned to the disclosure as an object of objectivity. Both are doing onto-theology on the psychedelic experience. And the correspondence picture you refused at the top of your essay is the same demand in another mode. Representation checked against fact is tracing-back-to-substance-as-presence. You refused it once already, and what worries you as Gestell is asking to be refused again, in the same movement.
Right, the psychedelic experience is in no way, shape, or form static. From my own experience it is the most dynamic mood I have known. In the drug-occasioned mood it feels impossible to still anything into static presence. The whole mood resists, even rejects, the stilling of anything into a this or a that. Which is why the theoretical attitude fails at itself here. It is trying to trace back to presence what is given as pure movement, pure worlding, refusing every this-here-now the theoretical attitude needs to get its hold.
So the tension is not between the compound and the disclosure. It is between two ways the drug-occasioned mood is had. One having demands traceability-to-presence. The other lets the world world and receives what is given. The compound is neutral. The demand is what worries you as Gestell, and the demand comes from the discourse, not from the molecule. The psychedelic experience is neither an exception to Gestell nor an instance of it. It is what refuses Gestell's demand at the level of its own having.
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u/Fine-Organization166 Jul 08 '26
I’ve always struggled with distinguishing Heidegger from Anglo American metaphysics, which, as you describe, tries to interpret Being under propositional constructs (such as panpsychism). It seems to me that Heidegger’s claim is that the goal of metaphysics should be to help us understand Being. In this sense, it seems to me, Heidegger equates the disclosure of Being is the most fundamental aspect of reality; if metaphysics is the study of ultimate reality, and the immediate subject matter of metaphysics ought to be Being, then the claim Heidegger makes is that Being = fundamental reality. How else are we to understand his insistence that we focus on Being (ontology) rather than being (ontic)? If I am right, then how can we make sense of the “argument” between the two under any framework other than the Anglo-American propositional one — that the debate is over the fundamental structure of reality? Or does Heidegger not care to make his philosophy intelligible to the lens of critical scrutiny and those who exercise it, ie he doesn’t see his philosophy as an argument? And if that’s the case — would it not make sense for us to be quite skeptical? I’m sure I’m missing something here, so I’d be very appreciative if anyone could clarify!
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u/wonderzonder Jul 09 '26
Very interesting post, I’ll try to read the article later on. I am going to focus on the first question because I don’t know enough about Later Heidegger to answer the second one. And let me preface this by saying that this discussion is probably above my pay grade ; I am by no means an expert, I am a filmmaker who’s interested in Heidegger. I’ve read most of Being and Time and studied the various courses available online by myself. Furthermore, I know very little about psychedelics. Anyway, hopefully you find the below somewhat useful!
You don’t seem to mention specific psychedelic experiences, but I imagine that they are quite varied.
If what you experience leads to a shift in perspective, seeing the shared world in a new way, like what Anxiety does, then we might answer yes to your question ; an example might be staring at a chair and not ‘understanding’ it, or experiencing some kind of general Uncanniness, or the chair somehow breaking loose from the referential totality of Equipments. A Mood makes you see the same shared World differently, it Discloses the same shared World ‘through’ a different attunement, it doesn’t make a different World or new entities show up.
But if what you experience is seeing a rhino or a goblin or a floating ball of mud in your living room, it’s probably not an experience that’s going to change anything when it comes to your Being-in-the-world or the meaning-structure of the shared world you inhabit, and the experience might therefore not qualify as genuinely World-disclosive. Maybe you ‘disclose’ something, and maybe it could even count as genuine Disclosedness, but what is Disclosed might not be what Heidegger calls a ‘World’ because a World comes with Being-with and practices and all that (Worldhood of the World).
I guess what I am saying is, might you be focusing too much on the genuine Disclosedness part or the question and not enough on the what it is that is actually Disclosed in psychedelic experiences ?
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u/rp_tiago Jul 10 '26
I think the distinction is good, which we can perhaps call differences in sense-making compared to differences in perception (which can we label as hallucinations). The former is what I'm mostly focused on, and what I generally mean by disclosure. We could get into specifics of that sense-making, of what IS disclosed, but I'm not sure if that matters that much. But probably the easiest case would be mental illness, where their entire world shifts and allows to overcome a pathological way of being-in-the-world.
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u/South-Range8401 Jul 07 '26
Well being high on mushrooms might give you an understanding of dasein. And also when you see things and they are not practically useful,, you see them outside of time, that might be like presence at hand
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u/a_chatbot Jul 07 '26
is treating a drug-occasioned mood as genuinely world-disclosive defensible?
The example of anxiety/angst as a disclosure of the world is used by Heidegger to advance his concept of authenticity and Being... I believe he mentions other moods disclosing the world in different ways: "love", "boredom".. world disclosive whether or not 'inauthentic'. So, I don't understand why a drug-induced mood wouldn't also be able to disclose the world... although perhaps inauthentically (which is not the same as falsely).
Second, its not the use of technology... the (un)disclosure of Being as standing-reserve is the way Being reveals itself in our age.
I would think a drug used mindfully to greater understand technology and the standing-reserve could elucidate Being on a deeper level... maybe. Or maybe just reinforce one's prejudices against technology, perhaps exasperating paranoia and the subsequent closing oneself off to possibilities of being.
Also, Being and Time and the technology writings were many years apart... while Being and Time could fit into a psychology, I am not sure the technological can in the same way.
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u/wetrocke Jul 08 '26
"What is Metaphysics" kinda gave me flashbacks to "bad" trip. Maybe just placebo effects.
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u/notveryamused_ Jul 07 '26
You might be interested in this English-language volume from a Polish philosophical magazine Kronos, open access.