Revelation: Philosophy Students Do The Most Drugs!
According to a poll of 21 UK universities, philosophy students do more drugs than their peers. But why?
Nearly 90% of philosophy students surveyed have taken drugs before, according to the study.
This is a significantly higher proportion than in any other discipline.
The Tab's survey of more than 5,000 students reveals that 87% of philosophers polled had taken drugs, compared with 57% of medical students.
But why this discrepancy?
Is it because philosophy is easier than medicine and thus offers more recreational downtime? Really? Is grasping the Kantian noumenon less demanding than dissecting corpses?
The Tab's editors, sensibly, say the survey should be taken with a pinch of salt since respondents are self-selecting.
But if so, why would philosophy students be more likely to self-select than others?
Is it – and this is just a theory – that relative employment prospects drive philosophers to seek solace in drugs?
If so, why would a higher proportion of business administration students than lawyers claim to be drug users?
Another theory is that philosophy – more than any other intellectual discipline – requires one to recalibrate the portals of one's consciousness in order to get one's intellectual freak on.
In other words, you need to get high to do philosophy...
For instance, in his superb essay "What is it Like to be a Bat?" great philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote:
'I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.'
Nagel didn't think to take drugs to expand those resources, but other philosophers have.
William James took nitrous oxide and found, as he reported in The Varieties of Religious Experience, that it served to 'stimulate the mystical consciousness to an extraordinary degree.'
It was only then he understood Hegelian philosophy's notion of god: '[T]o me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic states of mind.'
Perhaps James's drug experimenting is inspiring today's philosophers: 45% of students polled claimed to have taken laughing gas.
Or perhaps not – 68% had taken cannabis. Until a cross-referencing of which types of students favor what kind of drugs, we are lost in a world of diverting speculation.
An Oxford philosopher described his/her drug experiences in the survey:
'Having dinner with parents while seeing the world in monochrome and feeling supremely dizzy! I think my speech was barely coherent.'
Other drug experiences recounted to the Tab are more entertaining:
The Oxford math student who took MDMA, ketamine and laughing gas: 'I thought I was Godzilla.'
Send Comment