John Kaag: “James says, no, reality always outstrips the descriptions of it — and that’s for the best.”

NYTimes: Psychedelics Blew His Mind. He Wants Other Philosophers to Open Theirs.

"The findings of psychedelics wouldn't have surprised Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche and, most certainly, William James," John Kaag, a philosopher at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an expert on James, told me. Only over the past 100 years has the discipline, through an "analytic turn," been "trying to reduce all of human experience to the understandable, to the explicable," he said. "And James says, no, reality always outstrips the descriptions of it — and that's for the best."

nyt