I’ve just finished reading consecutively a book that previously, from time to time over the years, I’ve only browsed through. The very title, The Afterdeath Journal of An American Philosopher: The Worldview of Williams James, might scare off any readers who take themselves to be sensible fellows. Its main author is either a professed psychic woman named Jane Roberts, or (if you take the book’s contents at face value), the late American philosopher William James (1842-1910).

For many decades, James was routinely dismissed as “naïve.” But now that an array of more hardnosed philosophers have been found to have their limitations, James is being revisited and taken more seriously. He doesn’t proceed from an articulated framework nor cull experience to lift out just what will fit within that kind of framework. Rather, he’s a thinker prepared to take in experience, removing the blinkers, curious to see what our experience has to teach us. (As it happens, William’s brother was the novelist Henry James. Like any master of his craft, James the writer of fiction lets his characters and their stories unfold, maybe even teaching the author what their lives will reveal.)

All that might explain why the published William James, the philosopher we know, is of enhanced interest today. But why would any sensible person read a book purporting to tell what the late William James, communicating from the afterlife, said in 1978 through a supposed psychic?

My open-mindedness may be temperamental, but there is also a back story to it. Some years ago, as I’ve probably mentioned in these columns, I underwent a lumpectomy to remove cancerous tissue, a procedure followed by radiation treatment. In its entirety, the whole course of care was completed at three different New York hospitals, each highly-regarded and backed institutionally by its own religious denomination. 

So, as I sometimes sum it up: I’ve been humiliated the Protestant way, the Catholic way and the Jewish way. These differences would be of interest to a sociologist. They were of no interest to me. When, a year later, I was assured by the same credentialed experts that another round of search-and-destroy treatments would be indicated, I said sincerely:

I’d rather die.

That didn’t mean I actually wanted to die at that point. Rather, in pursuit of life and health, I turned up a wide array of healers, including psychics. Only one time did I feel that I had been ripped off. The rest were at least interesting, and often really insightful. Of how many total strangers can one say that? And by the way, I didn’t die. 

I wouldn’t recommend the strategy I followed. It happened that I was at a moment in life when no one depended on me. Also, I didn’t see anybody around who’d break down in grief if I were gone. It was actually a very sad interlude in my life. So I felt I could afford the wild gamble.

That background may help to explain why I brought an open mind to a book purportedly dictated by William James from the afterlife. Here’s a sample from the “James” communications: It was only after death that I understood life’s full achievement; appreciated the fine focus of consciousness tuned so precisely and triumphantly to one place and time; and felt the power of earth-dimensioned life as in life I had never known it. As a result, I came to terms with my own spirit, and gave it its freedom while in life I overtended it, believing that it was ill served by mortality’s experience (46).

Here’s how this James sees the cultural effects of Darwin’s and Freud’s new dogmas: It seemed sheer idiocy to look [in the human psyche] for any of man’s redeeming characteristics, for altruism and greed alike were seen as the result of mechanical, repetitive psychological processes that caused men to act in a given way. Predestination was given new biological and scientific clothes. In such a framework, men could not take credit for their achievements or be held responsible for their blunders, and self-determination was sorely undermined. … Not only was man robbed of true satisfaction with creative work, but he was led to preserve his own doubts and torments, since they were seen as responsible for art’s achievement: … and the artist in whatever field began to hoard conflicts, imagining that they were the source of his creativity (61).

These observations from the possible James tally interestingly with those of a living woman, Evelyn Fox Keller, who is professor emerita of History and Philosophy of Science at M.I.T. Fox Keller was the winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and is the author of fourteen books. What she notes in Making Sense of My Life: A Memoir, is that overlapping fields like ecology and genetics deal with the same data yet give that data different – often incompatible and metaphoric – interpretations. Either the findings are viewed as evidence of a “deadly struggle between organisms (or species)” or else as processes of adjustment to “resource scarcity” which may not involve direct competition at all. Overall, Fox Keller sees a neglect of “the longstanding (and easily documented) … role of cooperation in population dynamics (152f).”

Though Fox Keller notes that metaphors of deadly competitive struggle have masculine (as opposed to feminine) overtones, her more fundamental questions remain epistemological: How and why (with what background assumptions) do we seek knowledge? Are the boundary conditions of our search such as to foreground certain domains of knowledge while occluding other possible fields of inquiry?

Although her relations with well-known feminist colleagues in academe appear to have been excellent, both productive and supportive, she found that lines of inquiry not wholeheartedly celebratory of current feminist assumptions were quickly occluded – there too relegated to the shadows.

Vaguely, as if through fog, I get the sense that all this – the premature slicing and dicing of fields of experience, the culturally driven dichotomies that may conceal deeper bonds and connections – has a bearing on my own history, personal and intellectual. However, at this writing, I’m not sure how. 

For me at least,

it’s not yet articulate.

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