With rare exceptions, cannabis education programs are taught like trade schools, focusing on practical skills like cultivation and extraction to prepare students for work in the cannabis industry. Class discussions about different methods of cannabis cultivation tend to evaluate them in terms of the benefits they offer either to the plant or to us as growers.
However, this either/or approach makes it hard to appreciate that the process of cultivation involves a relationship between growers and the plants they nurture. This relationship takes shape in accord with our philosophical presuppositions about the nature of our connection to plant life.
We can also understand the enduring stigma attached to cannabis in light of philosophical assumptions about nature, pleasure, and ethics that are foundational to the Western tradition of philosophy—starting with Socrates. If the goal of an educational program is not merely to train students for the workforce but to empower them to think critically and improve the conditions of labor, then we need to teach Philosophy of Cannabis.
Academic philosophers often point out that we don’t live in a world of facts, but rather a world of meaning in which facts are always interpreted in a specific way. For example, we are always reading what we see, as this allows us to make sense of what is perceived—even and especially when we are not consciously aware of doing so.
Jewish philosophers, in particular, have regularly upset the Western cannon with their devotion to unmasking the meaning-making behind so-called “objective truths.” This is what led Marx to insist that material conditions engender ideas to justify those conditions—creating the practice of critical theory and disrupting the status quo.
Another German Jewish philosopher, Ernst Cassirer, was so enthralled by our meaning-making activity that he wrote four volumes on the “Philosophy of Symbolic Forms” to examine the different systems — such as language, art, and science — by which we mediate facts through abstract symbols.
The rise of positivism in the 20th century led yet another German Jewish philosopher, Edmund Husserl, to protest the scientific reduction of meaning to “facts” in his unfinished masterpiece Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology—cut short by his untimely death suffering under the Nazi regime. Here Husserl introduces his influential notion of the “life-world” to explain how scientific advances can coincide with cruelty and cultural regression. He argues that when we refuse to examine the way that we interpret scientific facts, science loses its meaning for life itself (l’chaim).
Why are Jewish philosophers so preoccupied with the relation between fact and meaning? And what does this have to do with cannabis?
The Greco-Roman tradition of thought stands in tension with the Jewish tradition because it is informed by the Socratic insistence that “it’s not life, but the good life that matters.” Socrates believed that the “care of the soul” and the care of the body were mutually opposed; we cannot be ethical if we are concerned about our health and wellbeing, rather than acting in accord with abstract values like the Good and the Just. Thus in order to be ethical, the mind can and should be severed from the body.
In contrast, Jewish philosophy is informed by the view that acting with respect for the sanctity of life is the highest value, and the aim of ethics is to protect life. As outsiders to the Greco-Roman-Germanic tradition of thought, Jewish philosophers have sought to expose the underlying desires for power and self-preservation that shape its content and methods (a lá Freud).
This provides context for the Jewish history of cannabis advocacy, which is motivated by the desire to recover and honour the meaning of cannabis in life and culture as a plant that enhances our ability to feel joy and respect others.
If the aim of the cannabis movement is to dismantle the stigma through education, then we need to critique the philosophical assumptions that allow it to make-sense and examine how cannabis—as a plant with unique properties and cultural significance—throws them into question.
If the aim is to empower students to improve the cannabis industry, then we need to teach Philosophy of Cannabis to question and disrupt the reproduction of systemic inequalities that characterize every industry in our late-stage capitalist economy.
And if the goal is to reduce suffering, then the philosophical effort to reexamine the meaning of what we know about cannabis should be a prerequisite of cannabis education.
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