I know what it takes to keep my head on straight
Putting shit in my mind and body is not the way
I don’t need the drugs, I don’t need a crutch
My mind is all I’ll ever need to stay in touch

Uniform Choice – “No Thanks”

A paradigm shift that has been reshaping philosophy, theology, and religious studies since the late twentieth century. Experience is embraced, theory is held at a distance. This shift been labelled with different terms: corporeal turn, empirical turn, subjective turn. While these labels point to different starting points and scholarly perspectives, one way to understand the continuum from which they emerge is to contrast them with earlier paradigms and to analyze how these earlier paradigms have become suspicious.

The central, shared concept of premodern philosophy and theology is knowledge. Knowledge is, at ancient, medieval, and early modern times, the structural and dynamic point of focus around which philosophical and theological thought gravitated. What motivated people to reflect on fundamental questions was the desire to know truth, to know reality, or to know God. The progress from one stage of knowledge, one idea, to the next, superior stage was grounded in the conviction that by progressing through these stages, one can be brought closer to some ultimate reality and full knowledge.

The basis for this idea of progress is mediation. Here, “mediation” means that a certain thing is not known immediately by itself, but through the assumptions and tools provided by a certain historical and cultural framework. These assumptions and tools constitute tradition. When, for example, ancient Greek philosophers studied the notion of substance (οὐσία), the did so on the basis of a development beginning with the presocratic philosophers, culminating in Plato and Aristotle, and unfolding in the commentarial tradition of late antiquity. Reflecting on a certain thing is not an immediate process of connecting intellectually with that thing. Rather, it is a process of historical and conceptual mediation: one takes up a concept, reflects on its context, and proposes possible correctives or additions. Philosophical and theological knowledge thus evolves progressively.

In his Phenomenology, Hegel calls this process “working of the concept” (Arbeit des Begriffs). The working of the concept marks the difference between a self-declared genius’s sense of superiority on the one hand, and “educated and complete knowledge” (gebildete und vollständige Erkenntnis) on the other hand. Science (Wissenschaft) is the result of conceptual labor insofar as acquires depth and coherence through the slow progress of mediation. Mediation, the working of the concept, and science are the characteristics of philosophical and theological knowledge.

The paradigm shift of the twentieth century is the result of a new conception of knowledge. Scholars started doubting that the working of the concept yields meaningful results, or leads to a better understanding of the world. William James suspected that religious experience comes first and religious institutions or institutionalized knowledge second, Heidegger thought that the Western metaphysical tradition beginning with Plato concealed being instead of making it accessible, Bultmann criticized that traditional theology made the real meaning of Christianity invisible to us. After all, what does conceptual work accomplish, if it doesn’t relate to anything inside one’s life? Why should we speculate about ideas and use the old material that traditions provide, when our real interest lies in our world and individual destiny? Mediation could be an obstacle to knowledge and not a tool to generate it.

The real place for religious and philosophical knowledge is the immediate. The immediate is that which does not dialectically rely on a previous element or starting point. For example, in answer to the question: “How does experience work?”, one could say that experience is a mode of knowledge that has various sources, such as the senses and the mind, and that has been variously accepted as the unique source of knowledge, or as knowledge subjected to conceptualization, etc. But one could also say: “This, here, my hearing of this sound is an experience.” Or: “I experience the world all the time.” This second type of answer is immediate because it is personally meaningful and relatable. It happens here and now, and one can just point it out to explain what it is.

Accordingly, the new philosophical and religious paradigm articulates itself in terms of experience and of the body as the locus of experience. Institutional knowledge is a figment of knowledge. What the past conceived as knowledge was a product of past cultures and beliefs. Times have changed and the past cannot be an object of experience anymore–it is not personally meaningful. Hence, seeking mediation in certain traditional tools, contributing to the working of the concept, cannot really produce anything meaningful. Instead, it is the body and its immediacy that determine the accessibility, meaning, and modalities of knowledge. Religious and philosophical ideas are worthwhile if they can be brought to flourish here and now, if they bring about some change or impact on the questions to which societies and people are presently confronted. But their accessibility or meaning does not come from, or through mediation.

Westernized yoga, meditation, and psychedelia produce knowledge. Not through a reflection on what their conceptual content and historical formation are, but through practice. If one wants to know what is really the case, one should not take a step back to the previous point where that question was raised by somebody else. Instead, one leaps forward without seeking the mediation of a concept; one accepts the experience as the answer of reality to one’s initial question.

The belief underpinning this knowledge production is that experience and personal meaning is unmediated. If one chooses to consume psychoactive mushrooms or ayahuasca, the experience is unmediated because it arises from itself, inside of oneself. Its response to one’s expectation is not conditioned by some exterior, institutional or traditional authority, but it arises immediately. One can see reality instead of entrusting some tradition with the task of presenting that reality. One can free oneself from the grip of religious institutions or philosophical theories because what one sees is undoubtedly what one sees.

Psychedelic research in religion and philosophy is a foremost example because it combines all features of the new paradigm. Psychedelic experience is universal and preconceptual; it does not depend on institutional initiation or restrictions; it goes without the necessity of belief or any commitment to predefined frameworks; it gives access to insight without any educational prerequisite. Thus, a psychedelic church can live off the experience that unites people. Psychedelic experience paves the way for a new, cerebral and non-religious ontology. Mescaline produces a “sacramental vision” that suddenly enlightens Buddhist ideas about ultimate reality, as it did for Huxley. Psychedelia fill the gap that mediation could only describe through concepts: the gap between the individual and the Absolute.

But is it really so simple?

To begin with, what is the difference between mediated knowledge and unmediated or experiential knowledge anyway? Hegel says about this difference:

“It is natural to assume that, before one can begin the task of philosophy, that is, to work on the knowledge of that which is truth, it is necessary to find an agreement about those aspects of knowledge which are considered as the tools by which one aims to attain the Absolute, or the intermediate through which one apprehends it.”

Hegel thinks that it is only possible to attain the Absolute through Aufhebung, “sublation.” Sublation works through mediation. For example, if I try to define substance, I can use some previous understanding of it, such as Aristotelian substance, negate it through a criticism established in the history of philosophy, and articulate a new, more adequate definition. The original standpoint and the negation are contained, in a sublated form, in the new concept. This is the “intermediate” (Mittel) that characterizes science as the attainment of the Absolute. Only through such progression can one make sure that knowledge is not just an eruption of some personal conviction, something that one simply wants to believe, or some incommunicable intuition, but the communicable, justifiable, and conceptual result that paves the way to the Absolute.

The difference between mediated and unmediated knowledge is a constitutive difference. Unmediated knowledge is empty of sublation; it is conceptually empty because it does not carry any information. Consuming psychedelia is not a philosophical act, buying crystals is not theology, simply because there is no conceptual or theoretical agency involved in these things. No use of a non-conceptual tool to suppress conceptual mediation can replace that mediation, or produce anything similar to it. If I want to know what reality and being are, what the categories of knowledge are, how experience works, there is no way to attain these insights without the difficult and strenuous labor of the concept. I have to reflect on what people before me thought, or else my knowledge falls short of any sublated conceptual content.

If one were to ask what kind of intuition has made us depart from the concept and accept immediacy, one could speculate that the confrontation of different religions and philosophies in the twentieth century has brought about the temptation to think that, since so many religious and philosophical ideas seem to be common to so many different cultures, there must be some underlying experience that has made this shared knowledge possible. There must be something like “mystical experience,” i.e. independent, self-arisen, immediate apprehension of the absolute–how else could the many similarities across the civilizations be explained?

One way to relativize this objection is to look at foundational philosophical and theological texts and to see how these texts deal with the idea of such experience. Pseudo-Dionysius does not leave any room for doubt: the Absolute, the cause of all causes “is not an object of experience, nor perceptible” (οὐδὲ αἰσθάνεται οὔτε αἰσθητή ἐστιν). One could put the body, experience, psychedelia, and all kinds of other experiential loci to use in all possible ways–the concept, knowledge, cannot arise without the efforts of the mind.

There is no secret or magical way to truth, there are no supernatural means, no hidden traditions, no buyable or consumable realizations. As Rashi, the eleventh-century commentator on the Talmud, writes about a passage in Leviticus: “You shall toil in the study of the Torah.” In the working of the concept, as in other forms of labor, one has no choice but to work hard, and not to seek a shortcut.