Psychedelic ontogenesis: A philosophy of psychedelic experience via Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract

In this dissertation I examine the profoundly subjectively transformative experiences afforded by psychedelic plants and chemicals. Beginning with a broad overview of the long histories of use of these substances in myriad diverse contexts, I observe that a surprisingly consistent set of core features of the psychedelic experience has been elaborated in very different times and places. These features include an understanding of psychedelics as agents of death, rebirth and transformation, whether this is construed as a return to the fons et origo (the source of being), as drug-induced ego death, as a journey into metastable hyperreality or as the individuation of a pre-individual field into new expressions of being. I trace this core notion of psychedelic rebirth, along with several other key salient features of the psychedelic experience, from several thousand years BCE to the 1960s, paying specific attention to the ways in which such experiences have been thought about philosophically. I then turn to the current wave of interest in psychedelics unfolding in scientific research laboratories. I examine, and in some instances critique, various models of psychedelic experience that seek to ground themselves in, or explain the findings of, cutting-edge neuroscience, and I show how in many cases these models reiterate much older views on the relationship between psychedelics, consciousness and subjectivity. I also show how dominant models of the mind - and of psychedelic experiences by extension - view it as an emergent and chaotic expression of multiple interacting neurobiological dynamics at various scales of organisational complexity, from neurochemistry to the complex spatiotemporal patterns exhibited by whole brain activity. Such views challenge reductionist approaches to understanding the connection between brains and minds and call for a different approach to the slippery subject of consciousness. Here I turn to the enactivist critique of still dominant functionalist, computationalist and representationalist models of cognition. I argue that understanding minds as expressions of complex, precarious entanglements of living systems affords us a much more realistic view in this regard, with consequences for how we think about the contexts within which psychedelic experiences take place - contexts that can dramatically affect the course of such experiences. Finally, I turn to Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to develop a sustained philosophical account of the transformative nature of psychedelic experiences as a form of what Simondon calls individuation and what Deleuze and Guattari call becoming. I argue here that these philosophies, grounded as they are in the primacy of process, individuation and ontogenesis, allow us to better understand the dynamics of subjective dissolution and transformation wrought by psychedelics; dynamics that can, if we understand them well enough, be employed for, among other things, healing, insight and creativity.