A hardcover version of Michael Rinella’s book covering Plato’s reaction to ecstatic states is due out soon. Hopefully a paperback will follow shortly.

He posted some info about the book in a comment on my Narco Polo post:

My book Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens (Lexington Books, May 2010) is loosely based on my dissertation. The order of the chapters is quite different, much material reviewing the secondary literature was dropped or moved to the notes, and the entire work was brought up to date with more recent research. There is also a long afterword that was not present at all in the dissertation.

Here’s an interview with him. In the interview he covers presentism among modern scholars, symposium drinking parties, the drug-based nature of ancient ‘wine’, and other topics.

I’m looking forward to this as a scholarly counterpart to David Hillman’s The Chemical Muse. Hillman’s was like a blast against the academic establishment for systematically ignoring and spinning around the evidence for widespread, culturally integrated drug use in antiquity. He however sometimes relied too much on the rhetoric of his arguments rather than rigorous documentation from primary sources. His argument is wide ranging, rather than deep. It looks like Rinella’s book will provide a similar critique of contemporary academics, but will support that with a close analysis of a particularly time, place, and author. Both approaches are valuable.

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His argument seems to be that Plato rejected ecstatic state wisdom in favor of sober philosophy. I’m looking forward to reading his arguments that Plato had very little use for ecstatic state wisdom. From what I’ve read, Plato’s writings show familiarity with the ecstatic state and many of his famous arguments and metaphors seem to be based on altered state experiencing.

I’m thinking of :

envisioning a timeless set of eternal Forms that are the true substance behind the representations presented to our senses;

the idea that the world presented to our senses is not true reality;

the Cave in the Republic (briefly): people are chained in place, looking at shadows on a wall (i.e. their senses are locked in one way of viewing and what they are viewing are only images of reality), one person is freed and turns around to see the source of the light at the back of the cave  that creates the shadows (i.e. One’s perceptions are loosened in the altered state; One turns one’s mental gaze back to look at the source of representations), that person then leaves the cave to look at things as they really are in the real light, the light is too strong at first, but eventually he learns to see things (i.e. theme of ascent out of the cave, which is a frequent metaphor for cosmic determinism, continued theme of changed perception and learning to see things as they really are; white-light perceptual feedback at the peak of a trip), this person must then return to the cave (a drug trip ends), he has difficulty engaging in the games the other locked up inhabitants of the cave engage in (people often experience difficulty re-integrating their altered state insights into normal society, the activities of normal society seem like mere games to the one who has acquired transcendent knowledge), if he tries to free people from their chains, they resist and kill him (difficulty of convincing people unfamiliar with altered state wisdom of value of altered state wisdom).

Metaphor in the Phaedrus about soul after death ascending to realm of Forms as chariot driver struggling to control two horses. There, the soul gazes on the Forms and gains knowledge of them. How much the soul can view the Forms depends on how well the chariot driver (the rational, leading part of the soul) can control the two horses (the passions, emotions, etc. – one is some kind of good passions, the other is bad). If the chariot driver controls the passions tightly, the soul will gaze on the Forms for a long time and will return to life on earth with much knowledge of them. If the chariot driver cannot control the passions well, the soul will not have much time to gaze on the Forms and will return to life on earth without much knowledge of them. All this is blatant metaphor for egodeath/rebirth, acquiring transcendent knowledge, etc.

The transcendent definition of Love Socrates gives in The Symposium.

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I suspect that Plato was against what he saw as a sloppy, anything-goes approach to acquiring transcendent knowledge typical of democratic Athens. Plato seems to have favored what he saw as a more sophisticated, more systematic approach to transcendent knowledge. Plato seems to have been against conventional Greek morality at the time and argued for an ethics based on a certain interpretation of altered state insight.

Socrates’ ability (in the Symposium) to drink endless amounts of wine and not get drunk reminds me of the ideas of “elevated sobriety” and “sober drunkenness” used in later Christian writings. I need to read up more on this phrase at egodeath.com. The gist: mystics view drugs not as making them intoxicated but as making them truly sober. Viewed from a post-initiation standpoint, pre-initiation thinking and perceptions seem to be intoxicated, drunk – or fake, unreal – as opposed to post-initiation, which is truly sober – or real.

Plato was engaged in cultural combat against various other systems of describing and packaging ecstatic wisdom. He argues that all the other systems are lacking in someway when compared to his own. He criticizes them for their lack of coherence, their poor ethics, the societies and governments that result from them, etc. In place of them he defends Socrates, Socrates’ method of ethical dialogue, as well as his own arguments about the Forms, the ideal society, etc.

I’m curious to see if Plato argues against all forms of ecstatic state wisdom, against the idea of ecstatic state wisdom itself, or against the systems of packaging altered state wisdom then predominant in the culture of ancient Greece, specifically Athens.

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