Nested hermeneutics: Mind at Large as a curated trope of psychedelic experience

Abstract

Aldous Huxley's work The Doors of Perception introduced the phrase ‘Mind at Large’ to the lexicon of psychedelic experience in 1954. I argue that its original presentation requires re-evaluation. I present evidence that Huxley manipulates the construction of the discourse he uses to present this phrase as a philosophically legitimate term. His choice of a pivotal quotation implies support from the conclusions of philosophers C. D. Broad and Henri Bergson. A hermeneutic analysis of this discourse highlights problems with this implication and shows that a reinterpretation of Huxley's methods and intentions is warranted. An increase in references to Mind at Large and related terms in studies of the effects of psychedelics motivates this re-evaluation of its implied philosophical value.

Introduction

‘Mind at Large’ 1 and ‘the reducing valve’ are two phrases that were invented and introduced to the lexicon of psychedelic experience by the English writer Aldous Huxley in his 1954 book, The Doors of Perception [hereafter Doors]. They are taken to indicate respectively: an ultimate state of expanded consciousness; and a biological mechanism of the brain that acts to resist and constrain such states. After 30 years as a successful journalist, novelist and essayist, Huxley ostensibly wrote Doors to share descriptions of the altered perceptual and cognitive envelope he enjoyed during his first encounter with mescaline. The book polarised audiences. Among nascent 1950/60s counterculture participants embarking on a period of increasingly widespread recreational use of psychedelics it sold ‘like hot cakes’ according to Thomas Mann. However, it was also criticised by academic peers for advocating indulgent passive inward exploration rather than outward active engagement with world issues. Mann dismissed Doors as a contribution to the ‘stupefaction of the world and to its inability to meet the deadly serious questions of the time with intelligence.’ 2

Along with its successor, Heaven and Hell, with which Doors is usually published, the book became a touchstone of counterculture psychedelic sense-making and discourse. It remains so. Szummer et al. (2017) describe Doors as ‘the most known account of the psychedelic experience’ and propose that its ‘naive phenomenological approach’ helped prepare the way for the 60s psychedelic revolution. It remains one of few popularizations of the interiority of the psychedelic experience by an accomplished and influential literary figure. Michael Pollan's book How to Change your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics joined this cohort in 2018 (Pollan 2018). Mind at Large and the reducing valve have exercised influence ever since in academic as well as literary and popular circles. Using search engine results as a proxy for comparative influence, a constrained Google search on 9 July 2023 for ‘“Mind at Large” “Huxley”’ delivered approximately 109,000 results. By contrast, a constrained Google search for ‘oceanic boundlessness’, – a parallel term based on observations of oceanic sensations of consciousness proposed by French writer Romain Rolland and developed by Sigmund Freud (Fisher 1976, 3) that has been used in the Altered State of Consciousness questionnaire [ASC] since 1998 (Dittrich 1998) – delivered approximately 7,860 results.

Huxley's introduction to mescaline followed a longstanding and eclectic interest in mysticism, religion and the influence of biology on epistemic potential as evidenced in works such as The Perennial Philosophy (Huxley 1946), Brave New World (Huxley 2007), and A Treatise on Drugs (Huxley 1999). In the latter, he conjectured a psychosocial role for the ‘invention’ of drugs: ‘Necessity is the mother of invention; primitive man, like his civilized descendant, felt so urgent a need to escape occasionally from reality, that the invention of drugs was fairly forced upon him’ (Huxley 1999, 26).

And, as his interest grew, he came to see mystical (and later psychedelic) experiences as potential stepping stones for enhanced awareness and social change. In 1953, his chance to act as a ‘guinea pig’ for synthetic mescaline led to Doors (Huxley 1972, 54). The essay is, however, not just a personal travelogue of psychedelic experience; it contains ostensibly philosophical passages that rely on implied conclusions from two established philosophers, C. D. Broad and Henri Bergson. In this article, I offer a critical reading of these passages with a detailed analysis of Huxley's presentation of the phrase Mind at Large, highlighting treatment of quoted material that is consistent with an intention to influence audiences rather than to simply share – and educate via – his own experience. This treatment also impacts claims to its philosophical value.

Popular interpretations of Mind at Large illustrate its pliability as a trope of psychedelic experience rather than acceptance of it as a defined term:

- … ‘a concept proposed by Aldous Huxley to help interpret psychedelic experience’ 3

- ‘A perennial type of knowledge’ … (Dossey 2012)

- … ‘shared oneness with everything at the level of essential being and consciousness’ (Sawyer 2022)

- ‘ … a single universal consciousness … of which individual selves are manifestations, extrusions into the world of space, time, and language’. 4

In Doors, the only putative definition of Mind at Large is located within a direct quotation rather than in Huxley's own words. The syntactical construction guides readers to interpret this quotation at face value but this presents significant problems when examined closely. Huxley relies on the implications of C. D. Broad's quotation, so I draw on the work of philosopher of language, H. Paul Grice, who analyses the conditions for acts of communication to convey meaning successfully by implicature. I show that the presentation of Mind at Large relies on tendentious manipulation of discourse that fails against such conditions. It may be argued that Huxley, as an author of fiction and a former journalist, was simply exercising literary licence and freedoms for impact or entertainment. However, I offer an alternative interpretation on the basis that what he presents differs materially from what a reader is justified in believing he is presenting. This is a bold claim but, unlike other papers that introduce Mind at Large without detailed critical analysis (cf. Baier 2021; Dossey 2012; Gill 2020; Marshall 2021 for examples), I present previously unnoted evidence of misquotation and misrepresentation in Doors. This is masked by a nested hermeneutic structure where Broad presents a cursory summary of Bergson using mixed modes of discourse which Huxley in turn removes from context and alters. My analysis shows that Huxley fails to exercise necessary care and qualification in this presentation and quotation.

This reinterpretation is motivated in part by a resurgence of mentions of Mind at Large and the reducing valve in psychopharmacological and neuroscience literature that investigates neuropsychological models of brain function and neural correlates of consciousness using the lens of psychedelic experience (cf. Swanson 2018, 172; Sawyer 2022 for extended examples). For instance, in her 2022 paper What is the ‘Unitive Mystical Experience’?, Dana Sawyer says ‘I am arguing that Huxley's theory may still have merit – for instance, by making more sense, philosophically speaking, of the therapeutic benefits that result from UMEs [Unitive Mystical Experiences] triggered by psychedelic medicines than the materialist position that no ontologically viable referent is apprehended’ (Sawyer 2022, 6). I argue that, philosophically, there is no credible ‘Huxley's theory’ in Doors.

This article proceeds with an overview of Huxley's curation and presentation of sources in Doors before examining in detail the structure and presentation of the Mind at Large passages. This includes a detailed test of issues in the pivotal quotation from C. D. Broad's paper The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy (Broad 1949). I highlight shortcomings by both Huxley and Broad using analysis of context that Doors omits. Finally, this analysis is situated alongside recent attempts to assist psychedelic sense-making by more carefully describing and categorizing experience. I argue that tropes and – in the case of Mind at Large – curated tropes risk hindering the development of appropriate new terminology for psychedelic experience. Worse, tropes may set inappropriate expectations of the experience that some compounds or doses will give rise to.

The doors of perception: Curation of sources and alignment with filtration theory

Huxley's title, The Doors of Perception, is the first of many references to the works of renowned writers, artists and thinkers that build an impression of intellectual weight via ad hominem cues to the reader. However, in common with other references, when recontextualized its sense is different from that implied by Huxley's application to psychedelic discourse. The phrase originates from William Blake's illustrated poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern’ (Blake 1794).

Early in Doors, Huxley draws on Blake expressing a hope that ‘the drug [mescaline] would admit [him] for at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake … ’ (Huxley 1994, 55). Blake's ‘cleansing’ thus appears to be an appropriate metaphor for Huxley's subsequent psychedelic perspective shift. In context, however, Blake's words were a parodic response to Swedenborg's book, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell from Things Heard and Seen (Swedenborg, Noble, and Hartley 1872). In it, Swedenborg relegates human creativity to a curse brought on by the fall of man that diverts human focus from the pure service of God: a position that Blake passionately railed against (Miller and Venturo 2007). Blake's ‘doors of perception’ is thus a satirical attack on the strictures of Swedenborgism on creativity rather than an appeal to expanded consciousness. The shift is subtle but indicative of Huxley's magpie tendency of compiling fragmented mentions of other writers, artists and thinkers, often without expanding context appropriately. We see this in the seven pages prior to the introduction of Mind at Large, where he describes the early phases of his psychedelic experience in relation variously to Blake; Homer; Eckhart; Plato; Suzuki; Buddha; The Marx Brothers; Euclid; Braque; and Gris (Huxley 1972, 5–11).

The phrase ‘Mind at Large’ itself also warrants consideration. In Middle English, the expression ‘at large’ features occasionally in relation to descriptions of unsanctioned emancipation or freedom. 5 After this, the first notable and widely-read use is in Milton's Paradise Lost Book One (Milton n.d.):

So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay

Chain'd on the burning Lake, nor ever thence

Had ris'n or heav'd his head, but that the will

And high permission of all-ruling Heaven

Left him at large to his own dark designs

As a student of English at Oxford University, Huxley's special subject was John Milton (Bedford 1979a, 53). Paradise Lost is a recurring reference in his work. In an interview regarding his final work of fiction, Island, he said: ‘I haven't worked out the ending yet but I'm afraid it must end with Paradise Lost’ (Nelson 2013). This link is speculative but Milton's use and context resonates with Huxley's theme of potential psychedelic emancipation from socially (and religiously) mediated constraints.

During this, his first mescaline experience with Osmond, Huxley did not experience what might be called a ‘transformative experience’ in current psychedelic research. His experiences were eyes-open perceptions only; a result that he put down to his own aphasia, an inability to visualize (Huxley 1972, 6). He nevertheless interprets them as evidence of limited access to a more universally aware psychedelic state (i.e. Mind at Large). We can speculate that he did not experience what he had hoped for. He remarks: ‘But what I had expected did not happen. … I had not reckoned, it was evident, with the idiosyncrasies of my mental make-up, the facts of my temperament, training and habits’ (Huxley 1972, 6). Nevertheless, he sought to convey apparent knowledge of this ultimate manifestation of consciousness. The reducing valve that he proposes facilitates this interpretation. Huxley proposes that the valve is a biologically mediated filter opened by a lack of glucose in the brain. Biologically this is dismissible. Hypoglycaemia is linked to cognitive impairment and distress behaviours, not to reflective psychedelic experiences. 6 Philosophically, however, it appears to place Huxley in the school of thought known as filtration theory. Thinkers such as William James, Ferdinand Schiller and Frederick Myers regarded the brain and body per se (rather than a component thereof) as the filter that reduces the universal plane of consciousness down to a quotidian filtrate where distractions from the necessities of utilitarian living are stripped away. Filtration theory is, however, far from a unified school. Its roots trace to the process philosophy of Henri Bergson but these were later adopted and adapted by James and other pluralists interested in the psychical phenomena that an increasingly reductive psycho-physicalist scientific community rejected as a hangover from the ages of superstition and magic. Their reverential metaphors of ‘other worlds of consciousness’ resonate with Huxley's tone but contrast significantly with Bergson's naturalistic vitalist view, as I show later.

Throughout Doors, Huxley draws on the revelatory, pioneering tone adopted by James et al. in their metaphors of the perceived value in cutting through to and exploring these ‘other worlds’ and their epistemic potential. For James, these worlds were special forms of consciousness ontologically adjacent and separated by the ‘filmiest of screens’ (James 1929, 388). Later filtrationists used images of light brighter and richer than routine consciousness permits. James says: ‘the dome, opaque enough at all times to the full super-solar blaze, could at certain times and places grow less so, and let certain beams pierce through’ (James 1898). Mind at Large and the reducing valve thus both map to the later metaphorical filtrationist views of revelation and exploration of altered states of consciousness as beneficial for the purposes of enlightenment, epistemic expansion and social change but held back by biology or the matter that realizes it. Schiller says in Riddles of the Sphinx: ‘Matter is an admirably calculated machine for regulating, limiting and restraining the consciousness which it encases’ (James 1898, note 9, added emphasis). The reducing valve becomes Huxley's attempt to pin the same regulation onto a biological function within the brain – somewhat like Descartes pineal gland – rather than a dimension of brains and their configuration per se.

Mind at Large: Origin story

Huxley's first mescaline experience in May 1954 followed a letter to two biochemists – John Smythies and Humphry Osmond –who had produced a psychedelic compound that, he felt, might allow him to experiment with – and extend – his epistemic horizons. Their article in the Hibbert Journal in late 1953 described the biochemical structure of mescaline (Smythies and Osmond 1953, 133–142). Both had experimented with psychedelic compounds in studies of schizophrenia in the early 1950s. They conjectured that schizophrenia, whose marker behaviours are similar to those they had observed in mescal users, might result from biochemical rather than psychopathological causes. Huxley offered himself as a ‘guinea pig’ (Huxley 1994, 3), thus beginning a correspondence with Osmond in 1953 that continued until Huxley's death. They found common ground in speculation regarding the potential of biochemistry to liberate the socially constrained consciousness of everyday life. In April 1953, pursuing this theme, Osmond suggested in a letter that, while aspects of human personality may be described in Pavlovian or Freudian terms:

… when this has been done we are left with great continents of experience, with a stratosphere and a sub oceanic region still untouched. John Smythies and I hope, using biochemical tools such as mescal, lysergic acid and new ones which we are investigating, to make exploration possible. It always has been possible but only, in our view, to a small number of people with unusual personalities combined with unusual body biochemistry.

(Huxley and Osmond [1953] 2018, 6, added emphasis)

Huxley's reply picks up this theme of untapped continents, setting out for Osmond his ‘most satisfactory working hypothesis of the mind’ (Huxley and Osmond [1953] 2018, 5) that references Bergson (or rather ‘the Bergsonian Model’) for the first time in any of his writings. He continues: ‘ … the human mind must follow, to some extent, the Bergsonian model, in which the brain with its associated normal self, acts as a utilitarian device for limiting, and making selections from, the enormous possible world of consciousness, and for canalizing experience into biologically profitable channels’.

This reference bears a striking resemblance to a report in the Times Newspaper in May 1913 7 of Bergson's Presidential Address to the Society for Psychical Research which Huxley joined in 1930 as his interest in parapsychology developed. 1930 was also the year C. D. Broad joined the full council of the Society prior to becoming its President for the first time in 1935 (Peter Johnson, The Secretary Society for Psychical Research, personal communication, 1 March 2023). In the same letter to Osmond, Huxley goes on to describe events that may prompt the ‘normal’ mind to open allowing this ‘“other world” to rise into consciousness’ and stresses the need to find ways to combine the default biological mode necessary for survival with ‘the world of unlimited experience underlying it’ in order to obtain the ‘best of both worlds’.

This correspondence adopts a pioneering tone towards altered states of consciousness. Both use the language of exploration, discovery, enlightenment and nascent possibility. Both saw epistemic potential in expanded vistas of consciousness adopting normative tones, mirrored later in Doors, regarding the potential for biochemical liberation. Note the pejorative quotation marks around ‘real’ when Huxley in the same letter says: ‘Under the current dispensation the vast majority of individuals lose, in the course of education, all the openness to inspiration, all the capacity to be aware of other things than those enumerated in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue which constitutes the conventionally “real” world’ (Huxley and Osmond [1953] 2018, 6). By 1953, Brave New World was already one of Huxley's most famous and controversial works. It details the biochemical mediation of social strata, leisure and satisfaction in a future dystopian society. In the same Osmond correspondence, both convey their excitement that biochemistry was realizing its potential to become a vehicle of social liberation.

Osmond visited Huxley in Los Angeles during May 1953 to administer 0.4 g of mescaline to Huxley who experienced eyes-open perspective shifts that altered his perceptual intensity and perceived subjectivity, transporting him to a state where he perceived the ‘objective world’ and became a ‘not-self’ (Huxley 1994, 11). He describes a degree of egolessness, yet his descriptions remain located throughout in a theatre of eyes-open (and, later in the book, ears-open) self-situated perceptual orbit. The aesthetically enhanced chair legs he famously re-describes remain chair legs; draperies remain draperies; each signifier remains connected to its signified. His sense of what these percepts mean and how much they matter deepens but the contents never break free of the physical limits of his senses. Shortly after these early passages Huxley breaks from descriptions of his experience into a philosophical register and introduces the passage from C. D. Broad's (1949) paper ‘The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy’ that is central to this article. I set out Huxley's ‘top and tail’ plus the Broad quotation in full exactly as it appears in Doors:

Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad: ‘that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense-perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense-organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening anywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge … leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.’ According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But insofar as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.

(Huxley 1994, 12, added emphasis)

This construction relies on implicature. With ‘reflecting on my experience’, Huxley locates his ‘reflections’ in the mescaline experience and thus his agreement with the content sentences of the Broad quotation. Immediately after, the phrase ‘According to such a theory … ’ locates the meaning of Mind at Large inside ‘such a theory’, implying one articulated in the quoted passage. Immediately, it is under-informative and so unclear whose theory: Broad's or Bergson's. Broad only says that we should ‘consider more seriously … the type of theory that Bergson put forward’ (added emphasis). Thus, Huxley guides us to the two key assertoric sentences in the passage: ‘Each person is at each moment … ’ and the sentence that follows immediately regarding the function of the brain. This reading is reinforced by a later reference in Doors:

As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. In some cases, there may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. In the final stage of egolessness there is an ‘obscure knowledge’ that All is in all – that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to ‘perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.

(Huxley, Doors, 14, added emphasis)

The repetition of ‘perceiving everything’ in quotation marks reinforces the implication that a definition of Mind at Large lies within Broad's ‘each person’ sentence. Yet, despite Huxley's reference to this sentence being prompted by his reflection on his own experience, the range of Mind at Large effects he notes in this passage (including here ESP) were not his experience: he ascribes them to ‘others’. Implicature is manipulated because the Broad and Bergson definition of Mind at Large invoked by Huxley reflecting on his own experience and expanded in this range of effects were not his experience. That experience remained psychedelically mild, predominantly aesthetic and throughout he remained capable of taking instructions and questions from Osmond (Huxley 1994, 6). The vistas asserted for Mind at Large via Broad are presumed rather than lived.

In the next section, I investigate three alterations that Huxley made to Broad's original text that further manipulate implicature. At this stage, usefully, these changes allow us to gauge the prominence of both versions post-Doors: An internet search for ‘Each person is at each moment … ’ as set out by Huxley (i.e. including the misquotations discussed next) returns 1,530 web pages in May 2023 that reproduce this exact phrase, most misattributing it directly to Huxley. By contrast, the verbatim text of Broad's original paper yields just five results. 8 The original has been eclipsed and, in the majority of cases, Broad has too.

A Gricean critique of Mind at Large

I now expand my critique by drawing on Paul Grice's work on the pragmatic principles that guide cooperative communication in speech acts where implicature plays a role in shared understanding. In his work Logic and Conversation, Grice argues that most utterances taken on strict referential, semantic readings cannot sufficiently explain ‘between the lines’ meanings that are often conveyed or mis-conveyed. Speakers may convey meaning indirectly by implying something quite other than what is uttered. For example, the exchange ‘Q: How are you? A: Well, I'm not dead yet … ’ relies on implicature from shared context rather than a simple semantic understanding for the questioner to glean that this response implies ‘things could be better’. To avoid misunderstanding in the presence of implicature, discourse participants act to proceed constructively towards a shared understanding. Grice captures this with his Cooperative Principle based on four categories of maxims for constructive communication: quality, quantity, relation, and manner. In short, when communicating we should give the right quality of information and as much as is needed to establish an understanding. Further, what we say should align with our intended meaning and be expressed in an appropriate manner. Grice's maxims thus serve as non-normative signposts for mutual cooperation and avoidance of miscommunication in conversation or written communications where participants may be led by implicature (Grice 1975).

In Doors, Huxley's tone and register indicate a cooperative pedagogic act: a transparent sharing of the revelations he experienced under mescaline and his interpretation thereof. The curation of supporting references builds the implication that this renowned author's account of his first-hand experiences can be accepted at face value and that he has exercised appropriate care in regard to the quality, quantity, relation, and manner of communication in the development of his apparent conclusions to which Mind at Large is central. Further, given his reliance on imported commentary, there is a further tacit assumption of appropriate care in the selection and presentation of this commentary and the surrounding discourse. Unfortunately, Huxley's is persuasive and cogent but, I argue, not cooperative. Other Gricean categories are examined in due course, but the most serious failure is that of quality. In making C. D. Broad's words the source and locus of an apparent theory that Huxley is agreeing with, we must expect as a minimum that this quotation is both accurate and believed to be so by Huxley. This is not the case.

Huxley's record of Broad in Doors contains three significant misquotations in just 123 words quoted. 9 I set these out below, showing Broad's original words inside square brackets. In the first two sentences the words in square brackets are omitted, in the third ‘anywhere’ is replaced:

‘ … the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with [normal] memory and sense-perception’.

‘Each person is at each moment [potentially] capable of  … ’.

‘ … and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere [anywhere] in the universe’.

These errors may have been accidents of recall, of transcription or of over-enthusiastic editing. However, Huxley's biographer, Sybille Bedford's book Aldous Huxley: A Biography, The Apparent Stability includes references by Huxley to his own thorough checking of returned typescripts (e.g. Bedford 1979a, 374). Further, the omissions remove two essential qualifications (‘normal’ and ‘potentially’) from Broad's summary of Bergson as we shall see later. One way to view these misquotations is simply to disregard the Broad passage wholesale – but Mind at Large then loses its only putative definition. The remainder of Doors contains oblique references to the phrase but, beyond the passage above, it is treated and referenced as if a defined term. For example:

That which, in the language of religion, is called ‘this world’ is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various ‘other worlds’ with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large.

(Huxley 1994, 12)

The phrase ‘the totality of awareness’ here, viewed as an analogue of ‘perceiving everything … ’ in the Broad quotation, again reinforces the implication that the definition of Mind at Large lies in the fragment of Bergson-as-summarized-by-Broad.

In the next section, I examine this in further detail, but and indicator of Huxley's personal commitment to the phrase after Doors is offered by lexical and biographical analysis. Mind at Large vanished from Huxley's writings once Doors was published to a mixed and sometimes hostile reception from the intellectual community (cf. Watt 2013, 27–28; Bedford 1979b, 162). The phrase is ephemeral; entirely absent in Huxley's sequel Heaven and Hell and appears nowhere else in his published oeuvre. In the posthumously published volume Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience that covers Huxley's psychedelic writings from 1931 to his death in 1963, it appears twice – both times in the words of his second wife, Laura, who recalls: ‘In The Doors of Perception, where Aldous reports his first psychedelic experience, he speaks at length of this theory of Bergson's and says that it should be seriously considered’ (Huxley 1999, 265).

This false recollection repeats the misattribution already noted (i.e. of Broad's words to Huxley) and serves to illustrate the effect of Huxley's presentation even on those closest to him. Contrary to Laura Huxley's assertion, the only reference to Bergson in Doors is contained within Broad.

Considerations of discourse in the nested hermeneutics of Doors

A hermeneutic approach involves examining a text to interpret underlying or hidden meanings plus cultural, historical and social contexts that shaped its creation. This is often inherently complex and layered with readers also playing their own role in interpretation based on their experiences, perspectives and cultural backgrounds. In the passage we are examining in Doors, the nesting of Bergson inside Broad inside Huxley conflates three modes of discourse, each with different hermeneutic nuances that I examine in turn below:

Huxley's quotation of Broad is direct discourse: reported speech or writing from a third person. In this case, it is an inaccurate quotation. In the context of accessibility (or perhaps checkability) in 1954 when there was no easy public access to Broad's original paper, the communicative onus rested on Huxley to provide an accurate transcription in order for the ad hominem effect of his attribution ‘the eminent Cambridge philosopher’ to add legitimate weight to the contents of the quotation.

Broad's summary of Bergson is then set out in indirect discourse, a summary without quotation marks such that an interpretive act has already taken place. The demonstrative ‘that’ usually indicates the commencement of a paraphrase that constitutes the quoting author's own interpretation of the quoted person's original words in their original context: in this case Broad of Bergson. The philosopher of language Donald Davidson notes in his book Truth and Interpretation that semantic issues often arise in relation to the distinction between use and mention in the content sentences of indirect discourse following the word ‘that’ (Davidson 1985, 93–108). Contrast the following: ‘Trump said that we should fight like hell’ and ‘Trump said that we should storm the Capitol’. In the context of the events of 6 January 2022, the former is a mention of a spoken statement whereas the latter is an interpreted use of the words spoken. Thus, mentions rely on accuracy whereas uses require us either to take an implied interpretation on trust or else to step out of the summarizer's hermeneutic circle and into that of the summarized (in order to check quality and fairness of interpretation) before stepping back again. Davidson argues that in this move between direct and indirect discourse the word ‘that’ is best understood as the position marker whereafter the two parties are to be understood as samesayers, where samesaying indicates that what the words meant then in the mouth of the person summarized is the same as what they mean now in the mouth of the summarizer mouth (Davidson 1985, 102). It is beyond the remit of this article to go further on this point but this notion becomes useful as we look in more detail at the content sentences of Bergson within Broad within Huxley.

In the quoted passage, Broad then moves into free indirect discourse [hereafter FID] with the sentence ‘Each person is at each moment … ’. FID is a more problematic and esoteric mode of discourse where an author offers their own representation of another character's or thinker's thoughts rather than simply summarizing them. It appears to the reader as if the author has gained direct access to – and is relaying – the inner thoughts, perceptions, and motivations of the person initially invoked in indirect discourse. 10 In literature, this allows a narrator to move from observations about a character to extrapolations as if from within that character's mind (cf. Gunn 2004 for an excellent discussion of the use of FID by Jane Austen). In philosophy, this mode of discourse is unusual due to referential and hermeneutic issues that arise. Giles Deleuze's works on Bergson and Foucault contain extensive passages of FID that are Deleuze's own free extension and extrapolation of others’ thoughts that were never (and likely never would have been) expressed similarly by them (Kokubun and Nishina 2022). To interpret Broad's quotation requires us to note his move from indirect discourse into FID which introduces a form of philosophical ventriloquism by Broad of Bergson. 11 The content sentences that begin ‘Each person is at each moment … ’ do not report Bergson's words but – framed in FID – they are not Broad's either. Broad's cursory sketch of Bergsonian thought is delivered in an indeterminate voice whose manner, in Gricean terms, has shifted modally into speculation. Huxley, by quoting it without context, masks this.

Both types of indirect discourse require care on the parts of both authors and readers. An author must provide what they believe to be a fair and accurate representation of the original, avoiding the fallacy of ignoring qualification by taking pains to comply with the Gricean maxims regarding the necessary quantity and quality of contextual information. Omission may mask a contextual shift that an uncritical reader will struggle to detect. FID offers very wide persuasive freedoms to an author but places the reader in an indeterminate referential position: they cannot, in principle, know who is speaking and so the status of the content sentences. To speak asertorically as if articulating the thoughts of another is to locate the statements within clairvoyance rather than argument.

Huxley's misquotations are serious. Broad did not write the words quoted. Consequently, we may regard Huxley as doing something with this manipulation rather than meaning what Broad originally intended his words to mean. Certainly, we should withhold attribution of samesaying in the presence of clear misquotation. Walton and Macagno's comprehensive 2011 paper on misquotation sums this well: ‘ … misquotation is not an end in itself, but a means to pursue a particular dialogical effect’ (2011, 40). Often the desired effect is to persuade, convince or incite an audience rather than to cooperatively convey meaning as intended by the original speaker. Assessment in the light of a revealed misquotation requires the reader to step out of the quoting work and into the quoted work in order to consider the part altered in the light of the whole in which it originally appeared. This provides the basis of a broader hermeneutic judgement: Was this an unacknowledged quest for brevity? An accident with little or no semantic effect? Or a deliberate tactic to garner unjustified ad hominem force? Only after this exercise can we re-establish the original hermeneutic frame and assess the quoting work in the light of our analysis. If we judge that the misquotation was deliberate, our primary goal is not interpreting these new words but deciding what action has taken place. What led the author to misquote deliberately?

In sum, an assumption of Gricean cooperative communication must cease if a misquotation is deliberate and divorces the result from the original author's semantic intentions. The reader's task transforms into a meta-assessment of intention. This stepping out-and-in is the basis of what I have called a nested hermeneutic analysis. In the following sections, I use these perspectives to extend my argument.

Bergson presented by Broad; Broad presented by Huxley

Grice's quantity maxim guides cooperative communication away from being under- or over-informative: speakers should aim to the right amount of information necessary to establish a mutually accepted direction. In relation to Huxley's misquotation of Broad, the two words omitted ‘normal’ and ‘potentially’ are necessary information. As misquoted in Doors, Broad's words become under-informative in a way that divorces them from the original author's intention. Both words are contextual signposts to the historical development of filtration theory from Henri Bergson's naturalistic view of perception and memory to the supernatural tones of thinkers among the wider cohort of filtration theorists aligned to the Society for Psychical Research.

It is beyond my remit here to provide a full account of Bergson's holistic process philosophy but for him the filtration of the universal plane of virtual memories (that he saw in an adapted form of dualism as ‘spirit’ that is focused by – but not present in – the brain) and perceptions is part of a naturalistic ontology of normal perception. The totality of perception and memory is virtual, continuous and accessible to every person; for Bergson it is the normal state of brain and body to select and focus what is necessary from this totality to create the action required for vital present actual states. In Matter and Memory the qualifier ‘normal’ appears throughout the work in relation to his processual view of perception and memory. He says: ‘The activity of the mind goes far beyond the mass of accumulated memories, as this mass of memories itself is infinitely more than the sensations and movements of the present hour; but these sensations and these movements condition what we may term our attention to Life, and that is why everything depends on their cohesion in the normal work of the mind  … ’ (Bergson 2021, 173, added emphasis). This speaks to Broad's inclusion (and Huxley's omission) of ‘normal’ and ‘potentially’ as necessary qualifiers. For Bergson, the circumstances and pure perceptions of any given moment crystallize pertinent memories from a virtualized totality into the moment. This is a potential outcome for any person but not a capability that can be willed or accessed at will. In Mind Energy, Bergson sets this out as follows:

… our whole past is always present behind us, and to perceive it we have but to look back; only, we cannot and we must not look back. We must not, because our end is to live, to act, and life and action look forward. We cannot, because the cerebral mechanism is fashioned to this end, – to mask from us the past, to let at each moment only so much pass through as will throw light on the present situation and favour our action.

(Bergson 1920, 77, added emphasis)

This highlights a key difference between the positive function of vitalist filtration in Bergson and the negative restrictive function ascribed by the later filtrationists, which Huxley transforms into an epistemic and social barrier to progress. Thus, Huxley removes qualifications that Broad was at pains to include. For Bergson, psychedelic expansion is not required to participate in the virtual totality of perception and memory as each of us does so continuously in the focusing of both into action-focused present actual states. This ever-active filtration distinguishes us from unconscious matter. Bergson says: ‘to perceive all the influences from all the points of all bodies would be to descend to the condition of a material object’ (Bergson 2021, 49). The exclusion that Huxley views as epistemic constriction is for Bergson the route to effective action by a flourishing organism (Barnard 2011). In Creative Evolution Bergson expresses this succinctly: ‘Each being cuts up the material world according to the lines that its action must follow: it is these lines of possible action that, by intercrossing, mark out the net of experience of which each mesh is a fact’ (Bergson [1998] 1911, 367). In sum, for Bergson there is no adjacency of parallel worlds or ‘cutting through’ into alternate planes of consciousness as per the metaphorical presentation of Huxley and the later filtrationists; rather, there is a single universal plane that everyone interacts with organically each moment. In Doors this context is masked by the removal of the sentence by Broad that precedes the one Huxley selectively introduces:

To sum up about the implications of the various kinds of paranormal cognition. It seems plain that they call for very radical changes in a number of our basic limiting principles. I have the impression that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with normal memory and sense-perception …

(Broad 1949, 306, emphasis indicates the words Huxley subsequently omits)

By starting his quotation with Broad's ‘that’, Huxley interrupts both paragraph and sentence to remove the preceding qualifications necessary to convey Broad's meaning. In doing so readers are deprived of the appropriate hermeneutic frame for the remarks that follow. By these lights, the subsequent omission of the word ‘normal’ is then required to maintain the implication that Broad's apparent conclusion is relevant to psychedelically enhanced states rather than to Bergson's view of the mechanism of everyone's memory and sense-perception. In Bergson's philosophy, ESP is not a supernatural event but interruptions leaking from a ‘ … fringe of perceptions, most often unconscious, but all ready to enter into consciousness’ (Bergson 1920, 96). By these lights, Broad's consideration for taking Bergson ‘more seriously’ relates to the philosophical desirability of a move from a supernatural to a more naturalistic explanation of paranormal cognition. I now consider this more closely by examining Broad's original paper to elucidate the change in register of the passage that Huxley misquotes.

Broad's discourse in context

Broad's long-standing interest in the philosophical implications of psychical events and paranormal cognition underpins his 1949 paper The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy that considers evidence of exceptional individuals’ apparent ability to demonstrate empirically verifiable paranormal cognition – ESP in the central case study. Broad, along with Sir Cyril Burt and other members of the SPR, were aware of the fame (and often cash) gained by fraudulent and contrived psychics. They observed and debunked many, paying serious attention only to those cases documented by individuals with apparently sound methodology and scientific approaches. Unlike many of his contemporary philosophers, Broad saw psychical research as ‘pursuitworthy’ on the basis that a single instance could force radical changes onto the scientific, psychological and philosophical canons because of the resulting conflict with one or more of the basic limiting principles that are ‘commonly accepted as constituting the framework of all possible natural phenomena’ (Broad 2022, 308). He sets out these Basic Limiting Principles [hereafter BLPs] in this paper to mark ‘the framework within which all our practical activities and our scientific theories are confined’ (Broad 1949, 291). They cover causation, the action of mind on matter, the dependence of mind on brain, and limitations on the acquisition of knowledge. Broad realized that accepted principles that have been derived from induction require only a single veridical counterexample for a deductive rejection. Amid growing intellectual hostility to parapsychology and paranormal phenomena at the time, he believed that many philosophers and scientists found it easier simply to reject such phenomena as if on a priori grounds rather than undertake the necessary but ‘unpalatable’ research. (cf. Walmsley, Broad, and Blackburn 2022, Pt.4 for a fuller account of Broad's reasons).

Against this background, Broad presents detailed evidence of experiments conducted by Dr Samuel Soal at Duke University between 1941 and 1943 on a subject, Basil Shackleton, who was, according to Soal's data analysis, able to predict (or ‘pre-cognize’ given the displacement effects) unseen Zener cards to a degree that indicated a ‘billions to one’ certainty of extra-sensory perception (West 2015). Later the results were revealed as fraudulent. 12 This case, however, ostensibly violated Broad's BLP 4.1 that states: ‘It is impossible for a person to perceive a physical event or a material thing except by means of sensations which that event or thing produces in his mind’ (Broad 1949, 294). Broad's intention to examine the relevance for philosophy leads him to consider potential theory candidates that could accommodate such a breach of the BLPs.

Broad was acutely aware of the magnitude of the evidence and its implications for time, causation, natural science and philosophy. We see this in the paper as his language undergoes a clear register shift: a switch of voice from forensic examination to conjecture. Qualifying expressions such as ‘seems plain’; ‘I have the impression’; and ‘we should do well to consider’ all replace his prior register framed in analytical language and construction. Thus, far from being a conclusion or statement of theory, the passage that Huxley quotes is speculative consideration that culminates, as we have seen, in a move from indirect discourse about Bergson into free indirect discourse as if Bergson. The words at the centre of this article can thus be re-framed not as a theory or conclusion but a three-sentence sketch of Bergsonian thought delivered in an indeterminate voice. Huxley goes out of his way to mask a clear modal shift to speculation by Broad.

Hermeneutic conflation

Guided by Huxley's grammatical and semantic cues, a reader approaching this passage with an expectation of cooperative communication should expect that the discourse has been chosen and presented as samesaying between Huxley and Broad. It is open for Huxley to quote Broad fully, accurately and to argue for similarities between paranormal cognition and psychedelic experience. This option is masked when Broad's original context is hidden by the omission of its prior qualifying sentence. To use Walton and Macagno's term, Broad has been ‘wrenched from context’ (Walton and Macagno 2011). Thus, three discrete hermeneutic circles are conflated to create an impression of philosophical support. The choice and construction of discourse derives force from the combination of Huxley, Broad and Bergson around the words ‘this theory’. There is, however, no legitimate statement of theory.

I have thus shown five indicators of manipulation by Huxley in regard to a ‘theory’ of Mind at Large as implied by the use of the Broad quotation that undermine the basis of samesaying:

The omission of the psychical research and paranormal cognition context of Broad's paper that situates the quoted passage and its observations within a different subject area from Huxley.

The grammatical construction around the quotation that characterize the contents of the quote as a theory linked to psychedelic experience and one whose articulation by Broad Huxley agrees with.

The absence of Broad's contextual marker (‘the various kinds of paranormal cognition’) that sets what follows in a different subject area from Huxley's.

The lack of acknowledgement of performative expressions preceding the excerpt that change Broad's voice from evidential to speculative. If included, these would also damage Huxley's implication that Broad is articulating a theory.

The omission by Huxley of the two words ‘[normal] perception’ and ‘[potentially] capable’ used by Broad to qualify Bergson's position regarding the mechanism of normal perception and the logical implications of a BLP4.1 counterexample.

A challenge to point (iii) above is the wider question: do paranormal cognition and psychedelic experience in fact occupy the same subject area due to congruence between the two. I argue not. Paranormal cognition is the supposed ability of exceptional individuals to demonstrate verifiable empirical knowledge without sensory causation. By contrast, there is no exceptionalism in psychedelic experience: anyone with access to psychedelics is likely to experience psychedelic states. Further, psychedelic experiences have an observable naturalist association with changes in biochemical and neural brain activity while psychic events remain stubbornly supernatural. I note that David Luke and Marios Kittenis's research has suggested that psychedelics may promote above chance increases in uncaused cognition – such as the sensation of ‘remote staring’ (Luke and Kittenis 2005) – but so far insufficient evidence is forthcoming that psychedelics give rise to the types of specific, deliberate uncaused cognition that became the focus of the research project at Duke University in the 1930/40s. 13 Indeed, Samuel Soal's latter findings are now regarded as fraudulent even by the Society for Psychical Research. 14

Psychedelic tropes and sense-making

I have argued that the implied definition of Mind at Large fails due to manipulation of discourse and implicature in Doors. As we have seen, the phrase persists as a trope of psychedelic experience to which literary and popular authors have applied diverse and wide-ranging interpretations. Its appeal speaks to a need for clearer descriptions of states characterized as ineffable but now more accessible and entering mainstream research again. This presents a challenge for cooperative communication in psychedelic research. Metaphors and tropes in psychedelic discourse add to the challenges inherent in the communication of experiences between the experienced and the naïve; psychedelic therapists and their patients. Huxley's quest for ‘other worlds’ that might liberate epistemic potential made mescaline, for him, an ‘ … experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially the intellectual’ (Huxley 1994, 51). He adopts a social view of the potential of psychedelics to liberate stagnant perspectives: ‘This is how one ought to see, how things really are’ (Huxley 1994, 21, added emphasis). This statement echoes the perspective shift that many psychedelic subjects may hope for. His normative tone offers a lens for my re-examination of the presentation of a trope that has exercised widespread and persistent influence.

Attempts to categorize and describe the phenomenology of the states that subjects may experience in psychedelic states have increased (Beswerchij and Sisti 2022; Sjöstedt-Hughes 2023; Watts and Luoma 2020) alongside the resurgence of academic, commercial, and popular interest in potential therapeutic benefits (see Carhart-Harris and Goodwin 2017 for an extended discussion). Inherent difficulties arise in attempts to communicate the phenomenology of transformative experiences to the psychedelically naive or curious because they fall outside the qualitative envelope and cognitive dynamics of waking life. Terms such as ‘oneness’ and ‘connectedness’ are interpretations of the sensations elicited by such experiences rather than descriptions of the particulars of cognized contents.

Many subjects who experience psychedelic episodes face challenges as they seek to interpret and describe experiences that diverge phenomenally from the experience and discourse of everyday life. Intra-trip objects of perception may not correspond to extra-trip objects of cognition; concepts considered stable may be re-framed by new experiences. Confronted with novel entities, affects, sensory qualities, interactions, scenes and even worlds which resist straightforward integration with the stable frameworks of everyday experience, subjects may resort to metaphor to frame and express the contents of the otherwise ineffable. These in turn may cluster around recurrent tropes or motifs that facilitate sense-making. Terms such as ‘oceanic boundlessness’ offer metaphors for ineffable experiences. As figurative devices these can help but at the expense of neglecting the terminological development required in order to establish an appropriate lexicon of psychedelic states and metaphysical shifts.

Tropes also risk setting expectations wrongly, leading to dosage escalation or disillusionment. Consider a subject who takes psychedelics hoping for an experience akin to Huxley's implied transpersonal expansion of consciousness in a state of Mind at Large. If this does not occur, it may lead to a belief of underdosing or personal failure. Therapeutic psychedelic experiences rely on cooperative acts of talking, writing or group dynamics to enable participants to make informed decisions of what they might expect from and within those experiences. I argue that, in these contexts, experiential tropes such as Mind at Large risk encouraging experiential expectations. Such a trope should therefore be regarded with caution. It is best viewed through a literary lens despite its quasi-philosophical presentation by Huxley in Doors.

Conclusion

The nested hermeneutics of a pivotal passage in Doors, coupled with misquotation and misrepresentation, necessitates a reinterpretation of the discourse that Huxley employs to frame Mind at Large as a state of epistemic expansion. The unusual construction requires separation of the hermeneutic circles of Broad within Huxley and Bergson within Broad. This creates an opacity to cooperative interpretation inconsistent with Gricean principles. The presentation creates a manipulated implicature whose fault-lines are inaccessible to an uncritical reader of Doors without a hermeneutic examination of the accuracy of quotation and the contexts that surround Huxley, Broad and Bergson. I have argued that Huxley, Broad and Bergson cannot be integrated in a Davidsonian act of ‘samesaying’ because each circle intersects only tangentially with its parent. They are conflated by Huxley, but illegitimately so. This has wider implications in the context of both the experience philosophy of psychedelics and altered states of consciousness.

Doors is a paradigmatic work of description but I conclude that Huxley's primary intention in framing Mind at Large was to gain popular influence rather than to exercise psycho-philosophical rigour. He is widely regarded as one of the bookends of filtration theory opposite Bergson, with William James et al. in the middle. However, while Doors is an influential literary work it is disconnected from this philosophical heritage. The short but highly influential passage that I have examined lacks philosophical integrity, transparency and merit. ‘Each person is capable … ’ is a radical epistemological claim that appears in Doors as if located and curated cooperatively in the context of psychedelic experience. It has been widely recycled and repeated as Huxley's inspirational conclusion about the potential of psychedelics for epistemic (and social) liberation. The phrase as quoted is not accurate, it is not Huxley's and it does not recount his limited psychedelic experience with Osmond that gave rise to Doors. The proselytizing language he adopts when contrasting restricted (i.e. normal) and expanded (i.e. mescaline facilitated) states of consciousness does not reflect Bergson's vitalist philosophy that it appears to rely on. It also does not reflect Broad's analysis of paranormal phenomena that includes the Bergson FID.

In the current psychedelic renaissance of research and experimentation in academic, therapeutic and recreational contexts, caution is necessary with psychedelic tropes. Hermeneutics has an important role to play in understanding the experience of others; particularly when these are set down in influential publications, novels and online sources. Mind at Large is demonstrably one of the most influential and popularized psychedelic terms to enter public discourse in the last 70 years. If – as I have argued – there are grounds for dismissing its merit, this informs the debate on how we should approach description and communication of experiences that are by definition characterized by their ineffability.