Kant and Hegel on Adderall

Immanuel Kant turned up in an unlikely place over the weekend: an article in the Times on Adderall addiction.  

It's the briefest of cameos. A college student, cowed by an assignment, is offered an Adderall and begins a roller-coaster ride of focused intensity alternating with severe anxiety and depression.

My friend pulled two blue pills out of tinfoil and handed them to me. An hour later, I was in the basement of the library, hunkered down in the Absolute Quiet Room, in a state of peerless ecstasy. The world fell away; it was only me, locked in a passionate embrace with the book I was reading and the thoughts I was having about it, which tumbled out of nowhere and built into what seemed an amazing pile of riches. When dawn came to Providence, R.I., I was hunched over in the grubby lounge of my dormitory, typing my last fevered perceptions, vaguely aware that outside the window, the sky was turning pink. I was alone in my new secret world, and that very aloneness was part of the great intoxication. I needed nothing and no one.

I would experience this same sensation again and again over the next two years, whenever I could get my hands on Adderall on campus, which was frequently, but not, I began to feel, frequently enough. My Adderall hours became the most precious hours of my life, far too precious for the Absolute Quiet Room. I now needed to locate the most remote desk in the darkest, most neglected corner of the upper-level stacks, tucked farthest from the humming campus life going on outside. That life was no longer the life that interested me. Instead, what mattered, what compelled, were the hours I spent in isolation, poring over, for instance, Immanuel Kant’s thoughts on “the sublime.”

And that's it, for the Sage of Konigsberg. He pops in just long enough to provide content for our protagonist's chemically-compulsive studiousness, and exits. He doesn't even get the opportunity to tell our focused young scholar to skip the pills, bite the bullet, and just sapere aude. If he'd been invited to hang around he'd also have asked if writing a paper on Adderall is an act the maxim of which you could will to be a universal law. He'd have said you should do your duty and ditch the pharmacological cheat.

We'll ask about that ourselves today, in CoPhi. And we'll ask what Hegel would say about all this too. Hegel on Adderall would be an experience, possibly to rival James on nitrous oxide. Some Hegelisms, maybe most, are easy to parody. But wouldn't it be nice if we were, in fact, spiritual beings having the material experience of coming at last to a full consciousness and realization of freedom, if the real were the rational, if history made permanent progress?

On that last point, it's nice to note that Peter Singer - no Hegelian, but he too speaks of an expanding circle of empathy and ethical inclusion - says the world is in fact becoming a better place. Our better angels may triumph in the end. Or not. "Inevitable" progress can crash, like students on pills.

6 am/6:58, 62/87, 6:06
podcast

Postscript. Progress?: "It was on this day in 1933 that Albert Einstein officially moved to the United States to teach at Princeton University... In 1938, incoming freshmen at Princeton ranked Einstein as the second-greatest living person; first place went to Adolf Hitler." WA