1882: William James on Nitrous Oxide

Author: William James (1842-1910)

Date: 1882

Source: “Note” attached to William James, “On Some Hegelisms,” in Mind: A Quarterly Review (April, 1882), No. 26., 206-208.

"William James in Brazil after the attack of small-pox": portrait photograph, 1865 (MS Am 1092 (1185), Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

TRANSCRIPTION

[from pages 206-208]

NOTE — Since the manuscript of the preceding article was committed to the Editor’s hands, I have made some observations on the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and the weakness of Hegel’s philosophy. I strongly urge others to repeat the experiment, which with pure gas is short and harmless enough. The effects will of course vary with different individuals, just as they vary in the same individual from time to time; but it is probable that in the former case as in the latter a generic resemblance will obtain. With me, as with every other individual of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendous exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snow peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand.

The immense emotional sense of reconciliation that characterises the “maudlin” stage of alcoholic drunkenness, a stage that seems silly to lookers-on, but the subjective rapture of which probably constitutes a chief part of the temptation to vice, is well known. The centre and the periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and its objects, the me and the not me, are one. Now this, only a thousandfold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its first result was to make peace through all with untamable power; the conviction that Hegelianism was true after me, and that the deepest convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong. Whatever idea or representation occurred to the mind was seized by the same logical forays, and served to illustrate the same truth, and that truth was that every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanishes in a higher unity in which it is based; that all contradictions, so called, are but differences; that all differences are of degree; that all degrees are of a common kind; that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being; and that we are literally in the midst of an infinite, to the recess the existence of which is the utmost we can attain. Without the same as a basis, how could strife occur? Strife presupposes something to be striven about; and in this common topic, the same for both parties, the differences merge. From the hardest contradiction to the tenderest diversity of verbiage differences evaporate, yes and no agree at least in being assertions,— a denial of a statement is but another mode of stating the same, contradiction can only occur of the same thing, all opinions are thus synonyms, are synonymous, are the same. But the same phrase by difference of emphasis is two; and here again difference and no-difference merge in one. It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxixation, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thous, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term belonged to its contrast through a knife-edge moment of transition which it effected, and which, perennial and eternal, was the nunc stans of life. The thought of mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgement of opposition, as "nothing—but," "no more—than," "only—if," &c. &c.., produced a perfect delirium of the theoretic rapture. And at last, when definite ideas to work on came slowly, the mind went through the mere form of recognizing sameness in identity by contrasting the same word with itself, differently emphasized, or shorn of its initial letter. Let me transcribe a few sentences.

What's names but a kind of take?

What's names but a kind of -ness?

Sober, drunk, —unk, astonishment!

Everything can become the subject of criticism—how criticism without something to criticise !

Agreement—disagreement ! !

Emotion—motion ! ! !

Die away from, from, die away (without the from),

Reconciliation of opposites ; sober, drunk, all the same !

Good and evil reconciled in a laugh !

It escapes, it escapes !

But——

What escapes, WHAT escapes ?

Emphasis, EMphasis, there must be some emphasis in order for there to

be a phasis.

No verbiage can give it, because the verbiage is other.

Incoherent, coherent — same.

And it fades ! And it’s infinite ! AND it’s infinite!

If it wasn’t going, why should you hold on to it ?

Don’t you see the difference, don’t you see the identity ?

Constantly opposites united !

The same me telling you to write and not to write !

Extreme—extreme, extreme ! Within the extensity that “extreme” contains is contained the “extreme” of intensity.

Something, and other than that thing !

Intoxication, and otherness than intoxication.

Every attempt at betterment,— every attempt at otherment — is a ——.

It fades forever and forever as we move.

There is a reconciliation !

By God, how that hurts ! By God, how it doesn't hurt ! Reconciliation

of two extremes.

By George, nothing but othing !

That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense !

Thought deeper than speech —— !

Medical school; divinity school, school ! SCHOOL ! School ! Oh my God, oh

God, oh God !

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees

of difference and no difference. &c., &c., &c.

That last phrase has the true Hegelian ring, being in fact a regular sich als sich auf sich selbst beziehende Negativitat ["the negativity that relates to itself as itself.” This phrase refers to a concept in Hegelian philosophy where "negativity" is not just a lack or absence but a process of dialectical thinking]. And true Hegelians will überhaupt [in general] be able to read between the lines and feel, at any rate, what possible ecstasies of cognitive emotion might have bathed these tattered fragments of thought when they were alive. But for the assurance of a certain amount of respect for them, I should hardly have ventured to print what must be such caviare to the general.

But now comes the reverse of the medal. What is the principle of unity in all this monotonous rain of instances? Although I did not see it at first, I soon found that it was in each case nothing but the abstract genus of which the conflicting terms were opposite species. In other words, although the flood of ontologic emotion was Hegelian through and through, the ground for it was nothing but the world-old principle that things are the same only so far and not farther that they are the same, or partake of a common nature --- the principle that Hegel most tramples under foot. At the same time the rapture of beholding a process that was infinite, changed (as the nature of the infinitude was realized by the mind) in to the sense of a dreadful and ineluctable fate, with whose magnitude every finite effort is incommensurable and in the light of which watever happens is indifferent. This instantaneous revulsion of mood from rapture to horror is, perhaps, the strongest emotion I have ever experienced. I got it repeatedly when the inhalation was continued long enough to produce incipient nausea; and I cannot but regard it as the normal and the inevitable outcome of the intoxication, if sufficiently prolonged. A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence and indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesia, but in the fact that whichever you choose it is all one --- this is the upshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright.

Even when the process stops short of this ultimatum, the reader will have noticed from the phrases quoted how often it ends by losing the clue. Something "fades," "escapes"; and the feeling of insight is changed into an intense one of bewilderment, puzzle, confusion, astonishment. I know no more singulr sensation than this intense bewilderment, with nothing left to be bewildered at save the bewilderment itself. It seems, indeed, a causa sui, or "spirit become its own object."

My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, the law of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived, engender a very powerful emotion; that Hegel was so unusually susceptible to this emotion throughout his life that its gratification became his supreme end, and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to means he employed; that indifferentism is the true outcome of every view of the world which make infinity and continuity to be its sessence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to the mere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that the identification of contradictories, so far from being the self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.

The original 1882 print edition of William James’ adventures with nitrous oxide and Hegel, which are transcribed above.