L'uomo metafisico - Sospensione del Weltbild e metamorfosi del mondo vissuto nell'esperienza mescalinica

Abstract

This thesis investigates the mescaline experience as a peculiar and radical form of phenomenological reduction. It begins by examining the constitution of the human lived world through Wittgenstein's concept of Weltbild and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and embodiment. The argument distinguishes between a pre-predicative, perceptual “first world” and a linguistically and culturally articulated “second world”, showing how the latter sedimentates into the former and becomes an apparently self-evident horizon of meaning. Philosophy, understood through Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, is consequently presented as a practice of clarification and disillusionment capable of loosening the grip of such sedimented structures. Yet this activity encounters a structural limit: it cannot fully clarify or suspend the horizon of meaning from within which it itself operates. Its attempt to render the conditions of intelligibility explicit necessarily takes place from within the linguistic and experiential structures it seeks to disclose or unsettle. Against this background, the thesis turns to phenomenological presentations of the mescaline experience, with particular attention to the writings of Aldous Huxley and Henri Michaux. It argues that mescaline can induce a distinctive form of reduction — here termed “mescalinic reduction” — characterized by the passivity of the reductive process. Unlike classical phenomenological reduction, in which suspension is deliberately enacted by the subject, mescalinic reduction is not performed but undergone: the subject is not the agent of the suspension, but the site in which it takes place. Precisely because the suspension is not actively enacted from within the existing horizon of meaning, but passively undergone, mescalinic reduction can circumvent the structural limitation inherent in philosophical clarification: it does not attempt to step outside the structures it seeks to suspend, but allows their normative and organizing force to be temporarily withdrawn. The lived world itself is thereby stripped of its historically acquired determinations, exposing the contingency of structures that ordinarily present themselves as self-evident and bringing into view the “first world” ordinarily obscured by the “second world.” This suspension does not result in the absence of structure or meaning. Rather, it exposes a less sedimented and more plastic field of experience — a “wild” dimension of perception — in which perceptual configurations can be dissolved and reconstituted. The mescaline experience thus reveals the contingency of the ordinary organization of the lived world not merely as an abstract proposition, but as something directly encountered in experience. In this sense, mescalinic reduction provides a radicalized and passive counterpart to phenomenological reduction: by circumventing the structural limitation of philosophical activity, it succeeds in illuminating the contingent and constructed character of the world through which ordinary experience becomes intelligible — a disclosure that philosophical activity can only approach, but never fully accomplish.