E10| The Psychedelic Philosopher, Peter Sjöstedt-H, Part Two
This is the second and largest part of our mini-series with the psychedelic philosopher, Peter Sjöstedt-H.
I think the episode stands alone quite well; bear with it at the beginning, it certainly jumps straight in. Do check out our previous episode if you’d like to get more familiar.
Listen to the first part here:
In part 1 we cover some core aspects of Peter’s approach to philosophy, and discuss how psychedelic experience may be brought to bear on this approach. We also discuss Bergson’s notion of duration, one of those less common concepts which I think is centrally important to grapple with if we want to characterise the real appropriately.
Episode 10 (Part II) Notes
In episode 10, we pick up the conversation at the close of a discussion about the relationship between psychedelic experience and death. Loosely, the idea was something like that psychedelics, perhaps, offer an insight into what it is to experience a state in which your ordinary sense of self is at least significantly diminished, where such a state might speculatively be considered analogous to a metaphorical, and perhaps other than just metaphorical, sense of death.
Now, this conversation begins with my transitioning to the link between this psychedelic state and the mystical, or religious experience, but moreover to the process which seems to characterise the journey to and from such a domain. The idea I lay out in this opening is largely central to what follows.
We touch on Nietzsche, Bergson, Jung, Schopenhauer, Whitehead, Jordan Peterson, myth, telos, the relation between left and right, and Peter’s own meta-ethical view named Neo-Nihilism, a position which denies the existence of objective values while preserving the notion of subjective values. To this I try to promote to Peter a view grounded on an affirmation of life, construed as a transformative, adaptive, harmonising process.
Waypoints
- On psychedelics, death, and the mystical domain.
-
On life as the harmonising force between the actual and the potential.
-
On Schopenhauer and the Will.
-
On Nietzsche as against Schopenhauer.
-
On psychedelics and the Will.
-
On Peter’s experience of ultimate forms of beauty in the psychedelic state.
-
On the ego and the Will.
-
On Jung and individuation.
-
On the revaluation of morals and beyond good and evil.
-
On Jordan Peterson and the interplay of chaos and order.
-
On Ragnarok, Whitehead, and the importance of progress.
-
On tragedy, life and telos.
-
On Christianity, consciousness and suffering.
-
On socialism as the continuation of Christianity.
-
On Neo-Nihilism and the affirmation of life.
-
On the right and left.
-
On William James and faith.
-
On psychedelics and traversing holonic levels.
- On the limits of knowledge and the utility of speculative metaphysics.