Though the crabs themselves had disappeared, hallucinations lingered on well into his later years, reappearing in moments of stress or loneliness. Mescaline did more than scare Sartre. It completely collapsed his belief in perceptual certainty (the individual experience of reality) and shifted his intellectual interest away from the abstract notion of phenomenological discourse to an exploration of the horrific reality of the lived experience of freedom at the heart of our reality.
An extremely unimpressed Simone de Beauvoir believed Sartre’s consumption of mescaline to be misguided. She believed he had placed himself in a position where he forfeited control over his own thoughts, which negated what it meant to be an intellectual. Ironically, Sartre’s developing theories very much agreed with this idea of a lack of control over one’s thoughts, but they posited that that was simply the reality of human existence as a whole.
This YouTube video from the BBC, wonderfully narrated by Stephen Fry, provides a detailed explanation of Sartre’s conception of existential choice.
To summarise, though, the concept is: we are pushed into existence against our will, and once we arrive, we have to make choices. We cannot avoid creating ourselves, no matter how limited the options; there is no way to opt out. Even not making choices is a choice.
“According to Sartre, there is no design for a human being,” says Fry, in the video, co-opting Sartre’s famous phrase: “existence precedes essence.”
We simply arrive in a world with no plan, no consensus of what it means to be human, and yet have to make endless choices and decisions that have a tangible impact. The absurdity of having little to no control over the decisions we make, why we make them, and the potential weight these decisions have on individuals and the future is the root of Sartre’s philosophy.
I’m sure those of you with prior experience of psychedelics will recognise some of these thought-trains the young philosopher travelled down, especially the detachment from our prior cultural biases or experiences. The separation from self, to a position from which you actually see the complete lack of grounding beneath how and why you act the way you do in the world, can be a scary realisation.
For me personally, it was a profound alteration of how I see myself and the world, and the perceived, seemingly self-evident, separation between the two.
To further enlighten us as to the powerful effects mescaline had on Sartre’s conception of existentialism, let’s first consider two of his most well-known works: his debut novel, Nausea, and his true magnum opus, Being and Nothingness.
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