{"id":76916,"date":"2014-09-17T15:50:50","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T19:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=76916"},"modified":"2014-09-17T15:50:50","modified_gmt":"2014-09-17T19:50:50","slug":"extreme-extreme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/17\/extreme-extreme\/","title":{"rendered":"Extreme, Extreme!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The literature of laughing gas.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Laughinggas1\"<\/a>

\u201cThis is not the Laughing, but the Hippocrene or Poetic Gas, Sir.\u201d Colored etching by R. Seymour, 1829, via the Wellcome Library.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

What’s mistake but a kind of take?
What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea?
Sober, drunk, -unk<\/em>, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of criticism\u2014how criticise without something to <\/em>criticise? Agreement\u2014disagreement!!
Emotion\u2014motion!!!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These words were set to paper in 1882 by William James, one of the most celebrated proponents of the new science of psychology, and a newly minted assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard. James was in many ways the paragon of an eminent Victorian\u2014his writing tends to summon images of the author ensconced beside a roaring fire in some cozy wood-paneled study in Cambridge. And yet here James comes off as utterly, absurdly stoned.<\/p>\n

Because he was.<\/p>\n

After huffing a large amount of nitrous oxide, James set out to tackle a prominent bugbear of 1880s intellectual life: Hegelian dialectics. He came up with a stream of consciousness that centered on a kind of ecstatic binary thinking:<\/p>\n

\n

Don\u2019t you see the difference, don\u2019t you see the identity?
Constantly opposites united!
The same me telling you to write and not to write!
Extreme\u2014extreme, extreme! Within the ex<\/em>tensity that \u201cextreme<\/em>\u201d contains is contained the \u201cextreme\u201d of in<\/em>tensity
Something, and other <\/em>than that thing!
\u2026.
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it\u2019s pure on<\/em>sense!
Thought much deeper than speech \u2026 !
Medical school; divinity school, school<\/em>! SCHOOL!
Oh my God, oh God; oh God!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

James acknowledged to his readers that these ravings were the product of a mental state that, like alcohol intoxication, \u201cseems silly to lookers-on.\u201d But he came away from the experience with a remarkably positive take on nitrous oxide. James had argued that drunkenness produced a kind of \u201csubjective rapture\u201d occasioned by its ability to make \u201cthe centre and periphery of things seem to come together.\u201d Nitrous oxide, he believed, produced a similar effect, \u201conly a thousandfold enhanced.\u201d On the gas, his mind was \u201cseized \u2026 by logical forceps\u201d and jolted into a new order of consciousness which, he thought, made the logic of Hegelian dialectics perfectly obvious to him.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about James\u2019s experience report<\/a> is that it didn\u2019t appear in a private diary or letter, but in public, in one of the most eminent psychological journals of his day. What today might be taken for sophomore-dorm drug ramblings was, in the 1880s, novel enough to be cutting-edge science. Nor was James alone in his fascination with recreational drug use. Three years later, a young Sigmund Freud would publish \u201c\u00dcber Coca,\u201d<\/a> usually regarded as the first scientific study of cocaine\u2014but also a paean to the recreational abuse of the drug, which Freud engaged in with considerable gusto.<\/p>\n

\"WilliamJames\"<\/a>

A young William James looking decidedly anachronistic in Brazil, 1865. Image via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

Cocaine, of course, would rise to prominence in the twentieth century. It was immortalized in hit songs; it fueled (fuels?) Hollywood; Woody Allen sneezed in it. There\u2019s no comparable cultural space for nitrous oxide. Today, the drug summons up vague images of wayward fifteen-year-olds huffing cans of Reddi-wip in muddy parking lots.<\/p>\n

Things were different once. In a recent article<\/a> for The Public Domain Review<\/em>, Mike Jay explores the summer of 1799, when the newly discovered \u201claughing gas\u201d became a surprise hit among a group of adventurous London aristocrats that included Sir Humphry Davy and Coleridge.<\/p>\n

The early reviews were rapturous. \u201cWhen the bags were exhausted and taken from me,\u201d wrote<\/a> one early user, \u201cI continued breathing with the same violence, then suddenly starting from the chair, and vociferating with pleasure, I made towards those that were present, as I wished they should participate in my feeling.\u201d Coleridge described \u201ca highly pleasurable sensation of warmth over my whole frame, resembling that which I remember once to have experienced after returning from a walk in the snow into a warm room.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sir Humphry Davy was the drug\u2019s most ardent proponent. During full moons in the summer of 1799, Jay writes, Davy took to \u201cinhaling the gas under the stars and scribbling snatches of poetry and philosophical insight.\u201d By winter, Davy had progressed to building \u201can air-tight breathing-box,\u201d which he entered \u201cwith a curved thermometer inserted under the arm, and a stop-watch,\u201d and proceeded to pump full of nitrous oxide. Davy proceeded to get ever-more intoxicated: first he felt a warm sensation in his chest, then points of light in his eyes and \u201ca sense of tangible extension highly pleasureable [sic<\/em>] in every limb.\u201d At length, \u201cas the pleasurable sensations increased,\u201d Davy \u201clost all connection with external things\u201d and fell into a fugue state. \u201cI existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas,\u201d he remembered<\/a>. \u201cI theorized; I imagined I made discoveries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Davy\u2019s takeaway from this experience\u2014\u201cNothing exists but Thoughts!\u201d<\/em>\u2014bears a family resemblance to James\u2019s Hegelian ranting of eighty years later. In both cases, eminent scientists engaged in an extreme form of nitrous oxide intoxication and came away from it with what they believed to be a new understanding of epistemological fundamentals. And in both cases, neither of their insights made much sense to sober audiences.<\/p>\n

Despite this, James\u2019s experiment seems to have had a real effect on his philosophical thought. In December of 1880, James had written<\/a> to his friend Charles Renouvier that \u201cmy principal amusement this winter has been resisting the inroads of Hegelism in our University,\u201d calling it \u201cfundamentally rotten and charlatanish.\u201d After his 1882 nitrous encounter, James had undergone a shift in thinking. The gas\u2019s \u201cfirst result,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwas to make peal through me with unutterable power the conviction that Hegelism was true after all, and that the deepest convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Twenty years later, in his most famous work, The Varieties of Religious Experience<\/em> (1901), James would cite the nitrous experiment as the basis for one of his most celebrated and oft-quoted observations about human consciousness:<\/p>\n

\n

I myself made some observations on \u2026 nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sixty years later, another young professor of psychology at Harvard would argue something similar: his name was Timothy Leary. But there\u2019s something about the reports of James and Davy that make them, for me, at least, far more compelling than the self-indulgence of the 1960s drug writers. They\u2019re not only trippy\u2014they\u2019re exuberant, experimental, playful, funny, honest, and intellectually curious. The literature of laughing gas turns out to be worth a huff or two.<\/p>\n

Benjamin Breen is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin and the editor-in-chief of<\/em> The Appendix<\/a>, a new journal of narrative and experimental history. His writings have appeared in<\/em> Aeon, <\/em>The Atlantic, <\/em>The Public Domain Review, and <\/em>The Journal of Early Modern History. He is currently writing a book on the origins of the global drug trade<\/a> and is on Twitter<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The literature of laughing gas. What’s mistake but a kind of take?What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea?Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.Everything can become the subject of criticism\u2014how criticise without something to criticise? Agreement\u2014disagreement!!Emotion\u2014motion!!! These words were set to paper in 1882 by William James, one of the most celebrated proponents of the new science of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":701,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12695],"tags":[15341,862,8031,15339,15342,15089,15343,15344,15340,15197,15345,374],"class_list":["post-76916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-drugs","tag-cocaine","tag-drugs","tag-drunkenness","tag-experimentation","tag-getting-high","tag-hegel","tag-huffing","tag-inhalants","tag-laughing-gas","tag-nitrous-oxide","tag-sir-humphry-davy","tag-william-james"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Literature of Laughing Gas<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Benjamin Breen on eighteenth and nineteenth-century drug writers.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/17\/extreme-extreme\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Extreme, Extreme! by Benjamin Breen\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 17, 2014 \u2013 The literature of laughing gas. 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