Symposium: Paradoxical Place of Psychedelic Humanities in Consciousness Culture | Nicolas Langlitz

Prof. Dr. Nicolas Langlitz: For the most part, the revival of hallucinogen research has been confined to the medical sciences. In recent years, however, psychedelics have also become the focus of a growing body of humanities scholarship. But aren’t psychedelic humanities an oxymoron? If the job of the humanities is to open up alternative and maybe even mutually exclusive ways of looking at the world, their commitment to a polemic staging of possibilities would be at odds with a conception of the psychedelic experience as inherently unitive. Like all paradoxes, this one calls for resolution.

-----------------

Prof. Dr. Nicolas Langlitz is an anthropologist and historian of science who uses ethnographic fieldwork to think through philosophical questions. In his symposium talk, he offered a critical perspective on the place of psychedelic humanities in a consciousness culture. Thereby, he provoked interesting discussions about the limitations of a consciousness culture.