Escape from Reason by Francis A. Schaeffer

Author:Francis A. Schaeffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

UPPER STORY EXPERIENCES

Man made in the image of God cannot live as though he is nothing, and thus he places in the upper story all sorts of desperate things. In order to illustrate that it does not matter what one places in the upper story, I shall try to show how manifold these things are. We have had examples of Sartre’s “existential experience,” Jasper’s “final experience” and Heidegger’s “Angst.” In each case man is dead, as far as rationality and logic are concerned.

Aldous Huxley made a titanic addition to this way of thinking. We find him using the term “a first-order experience.” In order to have such a first-order experience he advocated the use of drugs. I have worked with many intelligent people taking LSD and have found hardly any of them who did not realize what they were doing was related to Aldous Huxley’s teaching in regard to a “first-order experience.” The point is that in the lower story—nature—life makes no sense; it is meaningless. You take a drug in order to try to have a direct mystical experience that has no relation to the world of the rational. Jaspers, as we saw earlier, says you cannot prepare for this experience. Huxley, however, clung to the hope that you can prepare for it by taking drugs. So, as people are deciding that our culture is, in the words of Timothy Leary, a “fake-prop-set society,” they too are turning to drugs.

The basic reason that drugs are seriously taken today is not for escape or kicks but because man is desperate. On the basis of rationality and logic man has no meaning, and culture is becoming meaningless. Man is therefore trying to find an answer in “first-order experiences.” This is what lies behind the modern drug mania. It is related to a thousand years of pantheism, for Eastern mystics have taken hashish for centuries to achieve religious experience. So it is nothing new, even though it is new to us. In The Humanist Frame,2 in which Aldous Huxley wrote the last chapter, he was still, right before his death, pleading for the use of drugs by “healthy people” for the “first-order experience.” This was his hope.

Optimistic Evolutionary Humanism is yet another illustration of the fact that, once one accepts a dichotomy of the upper and lower stories, what one then places in the upper story makes no difference. Julian Huxley has propagated this idea. Optimistic Evolutionary Humanism has no rational foundation. Its hope is always rooted in the leap of “mañana.” In looking for proof one is always diverted to tomorrow. This optimism is a leap, and we are foolish in our universities to be intimidated into thinking that the humanists have a rational basis for the “optimistic” part of their slogan. They have not—they are irrational. Julian Huxley himself has, in practice, accepted this, for he has put down the basic proposition that men function better if they think that there is a god. There is no god, according to Huxley, but we will say there is a god.

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