William James in the Borderlands: Psychedelic Science and the "Accidental Fences" of Self

8/7/2019 William James in the Borderlands: Psychedelic Science and the "Accidental Fences" of Self

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William James in the Borderlands: Psychedelic Science and the

"Accidental Fences" of Self

Jodie Nicotra

Configurations, Volume 16, Number 2, Spring 2008, pp. 199-213 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

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1. The term psychedelicliterally, mind-maniestingwas coined in 1957 by the

psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who used LSD to treat patients with addiction and

other psychiatric ailments. Osmond considered several other names or these sub-

stances, includingpsychephoric, mind-moving;psychezynic, mind-ermenting; and

psycherhexic, mind bursting orth, beore nally settling onpsychedelic, because, as he

said, it was clear, euphonious, and uncontaminated by other associations (Osmond,

A Review o the Clinical Eects o Psychotomimetic Agents, Annals o the New York

Academy o Science 66 [1957]: 418). Psychedelics are associated in the popular mind

with hallucination-producing drugs like LSD and psilocybin, not anesthetics like

Abstract

While William Jamess investigations into paranormal phenom-

ena, mysticism, and the eects o drugs upon consciousness have

been typically dismissed or overlooked by scholars, they actually

prove to be consistent with his more reputable philosophical claims

about pluralism, radical empiricism, and the role and purpose o sci-ence. Jamess sel-experiments with nitrous oxide and other drugs

challenged the limits o scientic practice, implemented an alterna-

tive rhetorical economy or scientic experiment, and revealed nor-

mal waking consciousness to be a habit that conceals the sels na-

ture as something thoroughly enmeshed with and inseparable rom

the world. James argues or the implementation o practices that

might eect the blockage or closing o o this habitual sel in order

to make way or dierence or transormationthat is, or a more

open, responsive, and ethical relation to the world.

William James is rarely thought o as a pioneer in the eld o psy-

chedelic science.1 In act, Jamess requent incursions into what he

199

William James in the Borderlands:

Psychedelic Science and the

Accidental Fences of Self

Jodie Nicotra

University o Idaho

Confgurations, 2008, 16:199213 2009 by The Johns Hopkins

University Press and the Society or Literature and Science.


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called the border-land o human experienceinvestigations o

drugs eects on consciousness, and his studies o automatism, hyp-

notism, thought transerence, and mystical experience o all sorts

have been most oten regarded by biographers and scholars as his-torically interesting oddities, distractions rom his more respectable

intellectual pursuits in the elds o early psychology and pragmatic

philosophy.2 Ralph Barton Perry, or instance, Jamess student and

the author o an authoritative early biography, les Jamess experi-

ments with nitrous oxide under the chapter title Morbid Traits,

thus indicating how those in Jamess day and ater regarded these

experiments: with discomort and more than a little embarrassment.

O Jamess comparison o the nitrous oxide revelation with Hege-

lism, Perry writes: Now this incident suggests the child playingwith matches, or irreverently mocking the devout. It was, in act,

both o these things. James was incorrigibly and somewhat reck-

lessly curious, and he derived enjoyment rom defating the solem-

nity o pundits.3

Perrys scolding tone in this passage paints James as a mischie-

vous schoolboy, thumbing his nose at his elders. But despite Perrys

and others misgivings, what may appear to be irreverent mocking

o the academic establishment actually masks a serious investigation

into the ethical relation between sel and universe, an investigationthat also revealed to James (and his readers) the constraints o nor-

mal or habitual consciousness. As the amount o recent scholarship

suggests, Jamess ideas are currently being rediscovered in a number

200 Confgurations

nitrous oxide; however, or the sake o remaining consistent with the title o this spe-

cial issue and in keeping with the purposes or which James used nitrous oxide and

other drugs, I decided to usepsychedelicto describe Jamess drug experiences. The ap-

propriateness o this term in relation to Jamess sel-experiments is also suggested by

Osmond himsel. In the same article in which he coinedpsychedelic, he says: The great

William James endured much uncalled-or criticism or suggesting that in some people

inhalations o nitrous oxide allowed a psychic disposition that is always potentially

present to maniest itsel briefy (ibid.).

2. William James, Circulars o the American Society or Psychical Research (1884

1906), inEssays in Psychical Research, ed. Frederick Y. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Har-

vard University Press, 1986), p. 7.

3. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character o William James (Nashville, TN: Van-

derbilt University Press, 1948), p. 363. As o late, however, several scholars have con-

sidered Jamess nitrous oxide use more seriously, including especially Dmitri Tymoczko,

The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher,Atlantic Monthly277:5 (1996): 93101; and G. Wil-liam Barnard,Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the Philosophy o Mysticism

(Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). For an interesting use o Jamess experiments with nitrous

oxide and alternate orms o consciousness, see the Center or Cognitive Liberty and

Ethics The William James Project, at http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/wjp/stmnt.htm.


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o dierent elds. His oten-overlooked work on drugs and the para-

normal, ar rom being irrelevant or ephemeral, suggests important

and surprisingly contemporary questions about identity and the

limits o the human. Jamess deliberate scientic attempts to studythe limits o the sel while under the infuence o various sub-

stancesnitrous oxide, mescal, ether, chloral, and amyl nitrate,

among othersprovide both insight into the eects o habit on the

sel and glimpses o a new mode o existence, one that recognizes

the sel as being inextricably bound up in an ecology with all other

beings.

Psychedelic Science

What makes James a pioneer in the eld o psychedelic sciencerather than just another intrepid explorer or recreational dabbler

was his desire to study the subjective eects o drugs scientifcally.

Somewhat paradoxically, by undertaking such sel-experiments in

the spirit o scientic inquiry, James helped to crystallize a small

community o scientists devoted to the subjective investigation o

nitrous oxide and other drugs. The object o study, then, was not

so much the physiological and mental eects o the drugs as the sel

itsel. Understanding what makes these sel-experiments especially

interesting, though, requires an explanation o Jamess view o therelationship between science and the phenomena that he classied

as mystic or psychical, phenomena that have been traditionally

excluded rom the purview o orthodox science.

Running parallel to Jamess more respectable (as dened by the

nineteenth-century academic and scientic establishment) studies

in psychology and pragmatist philosophy were his career-long pur-

suits in the areas o the paranormal (then called psychical) and

religious experience, areas o study that were at best ignored and at

worst mocked by his more conservative scientic colleagues.4 In thehopes o establishing a semi-institutional space or the study o psy-

chical phenomena, James helped ound the American Society or

Psychical Research (18841906). The society was a sister organiza-

tion to the English society o the same name, which billed itsel as

existing or the purpose o making an organized and systematic

Nicotra / William James in the Borderlands 201

4. In the interest o proper classication, I should point out here that these areas o

study are not identicalthat is, James didnt consider his investigations o automatism,

thought-transerence, and spiritual mediumship to be the same thing as religious ex-perience, o which he considered his experiments with nitrous oxide to be a part;

however, since both areas o study treat what Eugene Taylor calls consciousness be-

yond the margin, and since in both cases James was interested in integrating these

modes o inquiry with science, it seems appropriate to talk about them both together.


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attempt to investigate that large group o debatable phenomena

designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical, and

spiritualistica veritable nineteenth-century X-Files.5 While the

societys charter did not specically include the systematic investi-gation o the eects o drugs in its spheres o investigation, most o

the nitrous oxide philosophers whom James persuaded to repli-

cate his psychedelic experiments also happened to belong to the

society.6 Investigating psychic phenomena and sel-experimenting

with drugs provided dierent routes or means o access to those

states o mind that coexist on the ringes o ordinary consciousness.

Thus an examination o Jamess ocial work or the society sheds

some light on his studies o anesthetics and hallucinogens as well.

By yoking together science and mysticism, James wanted morethan to simply use scientic methods to debunk mystical claims.

His interest grew rom what he perceived as limitations in both

modes o inquiry, and the philosophical issues that undergirded

these limitations. In his 1892 essay What Psychical Research Has

Accomplished, or example, James diagnoses an alarming allergy to

thought prevalent in both the scientic establishment and in the

vast (i unauthorized) body o mystic writings. Mysticisms pro-

pensity to avoid rigorous examination o its phenomena was an an-

noying problem; even so, however, James ound the mushy-headed-ness o mysticism to be less egregious than the more subtle and in-

sidious closing-down o thought that pervades ordinary science.

The ideal o every science, James wrote,

is that o a closed and completed system o truth. The charm o most sciences

to their more passive disciples consists in their appearing, in act, to wear just

this ideal orm. Each one o our various ologies seems to oer a denite head

o classication or every possible phenomenon o the sort which it proesses

to cover; and so ar rom ree is most mens ancy, that, when a consistent andorganized scheme o this sort has once been comprehended and assimilated,

a dierent scheme is unimaginable. No alternative, whether to whole or parts,

202 Confgurations

5. James, Circulars (above, n. 2), p. 5. While the American Society or Psychical Re-

search itsel lasted only ve years (because, as James pointed out rather accusingly, its

members were generally too occupied with other pursuits to do the amount o empiri-

cal research on psychic phenomena necessary to sustain the operation), its members

regrouped as the American branch o the English Society or Psychical Research (SPR),

which lasted until 1906, when it nally disbanded. The SPR had two major publica-

tions: the annualProceedings o the Society or Psychical Research, which was made avail-

able to the general public, and a monthly journal, available only to members o the

society, that published ragments, cases, and bits o inormation.

6. This characterization comes rom Tymoczko, Nitrous Oxide Philosopher (above, n. 3).


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can any longer be conceived as possible. Phenomena unclassiable within the

system are thereore paradoxical absurdities and must be held untrue.7

The very language o this passageclosed, completed, de-

nite, assimilatedsuggests Jamess distaste or the rationalistbent that dominated late nineteenth-century science. Such a mode

o inquiry, James argued, characterized as it was by a earul closed-

mindedness and intolerance or irregularity, essentially enclosed the

world in a boxa position that had detrimental eects on thought

and, by extension, on lie itsel. Jamess critique o the excesses o

science here echoes his critiques o neo-Kantian and Hegelian abso-

lutism in philosophy, which by dierent means tended toward the

same closures. In both cases, the love o systematizing elements o

experience into one knowable whole does violence to the teemingand dramatic richness, the mightily complex aair that is lie as

we ordinarily experience it.8 James wrote that [i]t is a monstrous

abridgment o lie, which, like all abridgments is got by the absolute

loss and casting out o real matter.9

In contrast to this shutting down o thought, Jamess philosophy

o pluralism (alternately called pluralistic empiricism or radical em-

piricism) attempted to account or lie in all o its wild, messy im-

mediacy, the fux o sensation and the clashes or anities o multi-

ple perspectives. He writes that radical empiricism allows that the

absolute sum-total o things may never be actually experienced or

realized in that shape at all, and that a disseminated, distributed, or

incompletely unied appearance is the only orm that reality may

yet have achieved.10 Not so much an either/or philosophy, which

makes a zero-sum game out o perspectives (i.e., the more right

my way o thinking is, the less right is yours), pluralism says both/

andever attentive, as its name suggests, to a plurality o perspec-

tives. The questions that arise rom such a philosophy ocus not so

much on judging positions, but on tallying the dierences between

them and considering them or possible modes o linkage. Plural-

ism, like drunkenness (lauded by James in The Varieties o Religious

Experience), expands, unites, and says yes.11


7. William James, What Psychical Research Has Accomplished, inEssays in Psychical

Research (above, n. 2), pp. 299300.

8. William James, The Sentiment o Rationality, in The Will to Believe and Human Im-

mortality(New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 6970.

9. Ibid., p. 4.

10. William James,A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University o Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 44.

11. William James, The Varieties o Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library,

1929), p. 378.


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As such, James was always on the lookout or ways to locate and

bolster linkages between seemingly incompatible ways o thinking.

So although he disapproved o orthodox sciences attempts to shut

down thought, he did not disapprove o science in general, or evennecessarily o the ordinary empiricism that he critiques elsewhere

in his writings. In act, James goes out o his way in his address to

the scientic community on psychical research to establish himsel

and his cronies in the Society or Psychical Research as among the

hardest-headed o the hard-headed scientists, and tough-minded in

the extreme (to an almost comic extent; one wonders i the lady

doth protest too much!). For instance, James characterizes the cur-

rent head o the society, Henry Sidgwick, as an academic known

widely as the most incorrigibly and exasperatingly critical andsceptical mind in England, and speaks approvingly o the other

higher-ups in the society: the hard-headed Arthur Balour and

the hard-headed Pro. J. P. Langley.12 Jamess eagerness to persuade

the scientic community o the legitimacy o the societys enterprise

speaks to more than just his own desire or credibility in a question-

able area o research; rather, James saw that attending to the ways o

knowing implicit in mysticism could make science more truly scien-

tic. That is, an ideal science in Jamess view would be one that lived

up to its name: one characterized less by ruitless attempts to createa closed, rational system, and more by a genuine curiosity toward

events and phenomena and an attentive, open-ended style o in-

quiry. Attending to mystical phenomena would be one way to prac-

tice in this spirit o inquiry. Repugnant as the mystical style o phi-

losophizing may be, James wrote,

there is no sort o doubt that it goes with a git or meeting with certain kinds

o phenomenal experience. The writer o these pages has been orced in the past

ew years to this admission; and he now believes that he who will pay attention

to acts o the sort dear to mystics, while refecting upon them in academic-

scientic ways, will be in the best possible position to help philosophy.13

Although this passage contains just enough skepticism o mystical

phenomena to bolster his ethos with his scientic audience, the

problem as James saw it was not with the particular style o thought,

but with the limitations entailed by clinging too rmly (and ear-

ully) to one mode o inquiry or the other.

Living with the pluralistic nature o experienceholding the sys-

tem open and attending to new possibilitieshas practical boons

204 Confgurations

12. James, What Psychical Research Has Accomplished (above, n. 7), p. 299.

13. Ibid., pp. 302303.


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or science as well, James argued, in a ormulation that anticipates

Thomas Kuhns theory o the paradigm shit in The Structure o Scien-

tifc Revolutions:

Only the born geniuses let themselves be worried and ascinated by these

outstanding exceptions, and get no peace till they are brought into the old.

Your Galileos, Galvanis, Fresnels, Purkinjes, and Darwins are always getting

conounded and troubled by insignicant things. Any one will renovate his

science who will steadily look ater the irregular phenomena.14

In other words, attending to the apparent irregularities consti-

tuted by mystical and psychical phenomena creates a livelier, more

robust science as well. Likewise, James wanted more than just an

Im OK, youre OK tolerance model or mysticism. Rather thansimply clearing a bit o space in hard-headed, stodgy old science or

psychical and mystical phenomena, James also wanted to account

or them scientically or empirically; that is, he was genuinely inter-

ested in not only improving science by opening it up to areas that it

ordinarily let untouched, but also in subjecting mystical and para-

normal phenomena to scientic experiment. Necessary or such an

endeavor was a close attention to the dierent ways that what James

dubs (not unproblematically) the scientic-academic mind and

the eminine-mystical mind encounter the world:

Facts are there only or those who have a mental anity with them. When

once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the academic and critical

minds are by ar the best tted ones to interpret and discuss them,or surely

to pass rom mystical to scientic speculations is like passing rom lunacy to

sanity; but on the other hand i there is anything which human history dem-

onstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary academic and

critical mind acknowledges acts to exist which present themselves as wild

acts, with no stall or pigeon-hole, or as acts which threaten to break up the

accepted system.15

The dierence in the two types o minds (whether or not one

agrees with Jamess insistence on discerning only two types o minds)

is less a matter o correctness, then, than a matter o speed and a-

nities. Mystic minds are ast generators o wild acts, careening

carelessly up against the walls o careully established systems o

knowledge and thought, while academic minds are slow, patiently

grinding out analyses and resultant theories. Both ways o knowing,

James suggests, are necessary or an honest, encompassing, and


14. Ibid., p. 300.

15. Ibid., p. 302.


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rigorous approach to experience. It was with such intellectual in-

vestments that James approached the study o the subjective eects

o nitrous oxide and other drugs.

The Rhetorical Economy o the Sel-Experiment

Drugs in nineteenth-century Americaalcohol, naturally, but

also opiates, ether, cocaine, and other substanceshad been used

extensively or both recreational and medical purposes, and they

had been studied or their medically advantageous properties. Ni-

trous oxide gas, rst isolated by Joseph Priestley in 1793, was sub-

jected to some experimentation or anesthetic purposes in the early

1800s by Humphrey Davy (who dubbed it laughing gas ater ob-

serving its eects on unsuspecting volunteers). Although nitrous ox-ide enjoyed a long vogue as a recreational drug in carnivals and pub-

lic shows during the rst hal o the century, ater 1863 it was used

primarily as a dental anesthetic, made popular when medical school

dropout Gardner Quincy Colton and a partner opened a series o

dental institutes that used nitrous oxide as an anesthetic.

James rst became alerted to the psychedelic properties o ni-

trous oxide in the early 1870s when he received a small pamphlet

titled The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist o Philosophyrom Benja-

min Paul Blood, an amateur philosopher rom Amsterdam, NewYork, who painted himsel in a later letter to James as an idle, indi-

erent, and amateur raud.16 Dmitri Tymoczko (perhaps a bit un-

kindly) characterizes Blood as the very picture o the hal-baked

American eccentric, a snake-oil salesman with philosophical preten-

sions. Born in the wrong place and at the wrong time, he knew too

little to put his talents to good use, and too much to let them atro-

phy graceully.17 Nonetheless, James (who was amous or adopting

what F. C. S. Schiller later teasingly described as pet cranks) was

intrigued enough by Bloods pamphlet to write a review o it orAt-lantic Monthlyin 1874, thereby cementing Bloods position as a mi-

nor though signicant infuence on the course o American philoso-

phy. In the process, James and Blood struck up an epistolary riend-

ship that spanned the length o Jamess career. Amateur though it

was, Bloods work had a strange power over James, who later wrote

oThe Anaesthetic Revelation: I orget how it ell into my hands, but

it ascinated me so weirdly that I am conscious o it having been

206 Confgurations

16. William James, The Correspondence o William James, vol. 8, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis

and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press o Virginia, 1992), p. 44.

17. Tymoczko, Nitrous Oxide Philosopher (above, n. 3), p. 95.


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one o the stepping-stones o my thinking ever since.18 Indeed,

Jamess last publication beore his death in 1910 was an encomium

to Blood called A Pluralistic Mystic in which he said, Let mylast

word, then, speaking in the name o intellectual philosophy be hisword, thus ending his nal piece o published writing with a quota-

tion rom Blood.19

In his review oThe Anaesthetic Revelation, however, James ini-

tially seems rather skeptical o Bloods claims:

More indeed than visionary,crack brained, will be the verdict o most read-

ers when they hear that he has ound a mystical substitute or the answer

which philosophy seeks; and that this substitute is the sort o ontological in-

tuition, beyond the power o words to tell o, which one experiences while

taking nitrous oxide gas and other anaesthetics.20

One can hear a but in Jamess disclaimer, however; even in the

early years o his career, he revealed his openness to a plurality o

views and ways o knowing. While he maintained that we are more

than skeptical o the importance o Mr. Bloods discovery, he also

cautioned readers not to dismiss it too quickly: we shall not howl

with the wolves or join the multitude in jeering at it. . . . [W]hen a

man comes orward with a mystical experience o his own, the duty

o the intellect towards it is not suppression but interpretation.21Indeed, Jamess experiments with nitrous oxide and other drugs (in-

cluding ether, amyl nitrate, chloral, and mescaline) subsequent to

reading Bloods pamphlet belied his apparent dismissal.

That James treated taking drugs scientically can be seen both in

the way he approached the event and in what he did with the results.

Ater inhaling the gas, James, ever the patient philosopher-scientist,

sat with a pen and notepad to record the results. Not surprisingly

given the circumstances o the experiment, he was unable to pro-

duce a coherent discourse about what he experienced; instead, whathe recorded was a torrential character o the identication o oppo-

sites as it streams through the mind, the phrases that resulted being

not a discursive production o knowledge aboutthe experience, but


18. William James, A Pluralistic Mystic, in Essays in Philosophy, ed. Frederick Bur-

khardt et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 173.

19. Ibid., p. 190. The quotation rom Blood is: There is no conclusion. What has con-

cluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no ortunes to be told, and

there is no advice to be givenFarewell!20. William James, Review oThe Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist o Philosophy,

Atlantic Monthly, November 1874, p. 628.

21. Ibid.


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essentially the products othe experience: Reconciliation o oppo-

sites; sober, drunk, all the same!; Good and evil reconciled in a

laugh!; It escapes, it escapes!; But; What escapes, WHAT es-

capes?; Emphasis, EMphasis; there must be some emphasis in or-der or there to be a phasis; No verbiage can give it, because the

verbiage is other; Incoherent, coherentsame; And it ades! And

its innite! AND its innite! I it wasnt going, why should you

hold onto it?22 The results o Jamess sel-experiment, the material

record o his work, thus appear to be not much more than nonsensi-

cal scribblings that nonetheless hint at some proundity, the impos-

sibility o adequately representing the experience captured especially

by the phrase, It escapes, it escapes! and a later one, It ades or-

ever and ever as we move. So i Jamess sel-experiment were to bejudged by traditional scientic standards o reproducibility and rep-

licabilitythe economy through which reliable scientic knowl-

edge circulatesit would have to be counted as a ailure.

But i we take into consideration the kind o knowledge that

was produced, repeated, and distributed among Jamess colleagues,

we might have a dierent idea o the success o the experiment.

While traditional scientic norms o knowledge production might

count Jamess sel-experiments as a ailure, owing to the very nature

o what the experiment is being perormed on (i.e., the sel), i onetakes as a measure o success the experiments rate o repetition by

other scientists, then Jamess was a success indeed. Through his re-

peated injunctions or others to multiply the experiments/

experiences with nitrous oxide in his publications on the subject,

James amalgamated a small collection o reports on nitrous oxide

(rom both deliberate sel-experiments and recollections o startling

revelations that came during tooth extractions and other dental

procedures), other scientists, philosophers, and spiritualists, among

them Edmund Gurney, Xenos Clark, William Ramsay, andJ. A. Symonds, seduced by the idea o a transormation or revelation

o ordinary consciousness, also experimented with nitrous oxide

and other drugs and published their own accounts (or sent them to

James, who published them).

Radically dierent rom traditional orms o experiment, testing

psychedelics meant submitting onesel to sel-experimentsto the ab-

solutely unknown, the limit experience o othernessin order to study

the sel. As with any scientic experiment worthy o the name, one

cannot know in advance what the results will be. But sel-experiments,

208 Confgurations

22. William James, On Some Hegelisms, in Will to Believe (above, n. 8), pp. 296

297.


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as Jamess experience proves, are particularly vexed enterprises rom

the point o view o orthodox science, because the very subject that

is supposed to be objectively observing and recording the data is the

same subject that is being altered by the experiment.Richard Doyle discusses this rhetorical quandary as it was expe-

rienced by Albert Homann, the inventor, in 1938, o LSD-25. Doyle

makes a prepositional distinction between modes o sel-experiment:

experiments with the sel, and experiments on the sel. Experiments

with the sel, Doyle says, provide an outcome that traditional scien-

tic standards would hold as meaningless, because the sel under an

altered consciousness cannot be trusted to gather reliable data and

generate a report: As an assay, the sel is ound wanting [under the

aegis o orthodox science]. I the experiment is an occasion at which,strangely, the sel is to be present as the very apparatus through

which the inquiry is to be made visible and replicable, then the ap-

paratus has altered and the experiment is nothing but artiact.23 In

other words, since the sel (or ordinary consciousness) is typically

expected to be the thing that objectively gathers data in a tradi-

tional or orthodox scientic experiment, to experiment with it is to

automatically lose that objectivity; hence the data cannot be recog-

nized or counted as accurate or sound.

Experiments on the sel, though, use this same ordinary or ev-eryday consciousness as the very thing that is being tested. Hence

the erasure or alteration o the sel indicates that the experiment

was not a ailure, but a success. In reerence to Homanns sel-exper-

iments with LSD, or example, Doyle writes:

It is as an experiment on the sel that Homanns discoveries are replicated by

the community. Only by encountering a veritable undoing o the sela sub-

mission to the possible transormation that one is in act testing orcan in-

teresting data rom this novel pharmacological agent be gathered, evaluated,

and transmitted.24

The beauty o the experiment on the sel in terms o scientic in-

quiry (and one that meshed well with Jamess philosophy o plural-

ism) is the impossibility o knowing in advance what any given ex-

periment would produce: it could be a transormation o the Sel, an

opening o one or another o the many elds o consciousness that

James claimed remained outside the purview o ordinary or habitual

perception, or it could produce a much more prosaic bodily reaction,


23. Richard Doyle, LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence o

Biotechnology,Philosophy and Rhetoric35:2 (2002): 163.

24. Ibid., pp. 164165.


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as James discovered when he experimented with peyote, a drug that

was perhaps a bit too strong or Jamess nineteenth-century-Harvard

constitution. I have just been having an amusing experiment in

seeking truth by intoxication, James wrote to Blood:Weir Mitchell wrote me he had rom the U.S. Gov. a supply o mescal or ex-

perimental purposes. M. is a cactus used by some o our South Western indians

or narcotic purposes in certain religious ceremonies. Mitchell and others had

taken it and ound the most gorgeous stimulation o the visual centres, mag-

nicently colored hallucinations, pure airyland pictures such as earth cannot

aord, etc. I took a small dose at 6:30 a.m. and had nothing but nausea & diar-

rhea till 4 the ollowing a.m., when I remember I vomited or the last time.25

Jamess experience with mescal colorully demonstrates the itiner-ant nature o sel-experiment. Since it is impossible to know or even

guess ahead o time what a particular dosage o a particular drug in-

teracting with ones bodily chemistry and mental state on a given

day will produce, the only thing that one can do is to go through

the experiment and remain open to its eects.

But also, the experiment on the sel, because it essentially erases

or alters habitual consciousness, creates the problem o reportage.

How is it possible to adequately represent the eelings or experience

when the very organ o representation (i.e., ordinary consciousness)has been erased? Indeed, the most common characteristic o ac-

counts o nitrous oxide experiments (and mystical experience o all

kinds) is their description o ineability, or the inability to ade-

quately represent the experience so that others might understand it

intellectually. Account ater account begs pardon or the impossibility

o adequately describing the insights that came to the nitrous oxide

inhaler. In a note to James about an experience at the dentists, or

instance, Edmund Gurney (a member o the Society or Psychical

Research) describes the diculty he had in summoning up enoughwill to write down the experience, in which he said was revealed an

observation o great psychological interest as to the way one reck-

ons time.26 Such vagueness characterizes most descriptions o expe-

riences with nitrous oxide; the only thing the reader grasps ade-

quately is that somethingvery interesting and powerul happened.

Gurneys and other reports hint at a rhetorical economy dierent

rom that o ordinary scientic production, one characterized by the

ineability or rhetorical ailure o the actual experimentit cannot

be described! But ironically, it is this very ineability, along with the

210 Confgurations

25. James, Correspondence, vol. 6 (above, n. 16), pp. 157158.

26. Ibid., p. 134.


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implied alteration o the sel that appears in the text produced by

these sel-experiments, that stimulates curiosity, enticing others to

repeat the experiments, even without knowing what the experiment

itsel will produce. In essence, James helped to create a community oscientists, all working separately to repeat the subjective experiments

in an attempt to undo or gain a better understanding o the nature o

the sel. Rather than the dictates o recordability and repeatability

that characterize normal scientic production, the scientic rhet-

oric o the sel-experiment works here through an economy o con-

tagion: others are persuaded to replicate sel-experiments with ni-

trous oxide not despite the apparent gibberish that James produced

under its infuence, but because o it. Ironically, it was the very ine-

ability o the experience with the drugthe rhetorical ailure othe experimentthat created the desire or more experimentation.

Ecology Maniesting: The Accidental Fences o Sel

I the anesthetic revelation lives up to its name, then what ex-

actly does it reveal? Blood and James continued to mull over this

question or decades ater Jamess initial review o Bloods pamphlet

appeared. Despite the apparent ineability o this mystic experience,

Jamess sel-experiments had proound eects on him and served to

deamiliarize the very object o the experimentnamely, the sel.These sel-experiments not only perormed the type o open-ended

inquiry that Jamess philosophy o pluralism called or, but they also

provided striking insights into consciousness and the nature o the

sel as a habit, a limiting o the eld o consciousness that hides or

eaces its inextricable enmeshment with all other things.

In The Varieties o Religious Experience, James recalls the knowledge

that was produced through the inhalation o nitrous oxide:

One conclusion was orced upon my mind at that time, and my impression o

its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking con-

sciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type o con-

sciousness, whilst all about it, parted rom it by the lmiest o screens, there

lie potential orms o consciousness entirely dierent.27

That is, what we call the I or the sel is not something that repre-

sents the actual truth o our being; rather, it more accurately can be

described as a habitual set o responses to the world.

In a letter to James responding some time ater the act to Jamess

review, Blood continues his attempts to capture or describe the mysteryo sel in the anesthetic revelation, which, ater all, is the mystery:


27. James, Varieties o Religious Experience (above, n. 11), p. 378.


15/16

We cannot get behind ourselvescannot see ourselves because we become the

sel in the eort to see and a new view is necessary and ever too late. Hundreds

o such whims haunt my eorts to tell what is the Anestheticrevelation? Is

it revelation? A secret? Or lack o onewe being used to mystery as our daylylie? . . . All we know just prevents us knowing this mystery. Sanity saves us

rom it perhaps.28

From Bloods struggle to convey the meaning o the experience in

the rational language o narrative, it seems clear that the anesthetic

revelation trumps rational understanding and easy narrative expla-

nation. Indeed, as holds true or other experiences that James desig-

nates as mystical in The Varieties o Religious Experience, what seems

to be the dening characteristic o the anesthetic revelation is the

impossibility o conveying it to anothers understanding throughordinary discursive modes o communication. The revelation is

something that can be seen or experienced corporeally, hence Bloods

conusion about what to call his experience; a revelation implies

through its language that something is revealed through sight, and

yet eludes sight at the same time. We . . . cannot see ourselves be-

cause we become the sel in the eort to see and a new view is neces-

sary, Blood says. As Bloods language in attempting to assess his

experience brings to attention, it becomes dicult to even say what

the sel is, where it resides: We cannot get behind ourselves. His

interesting prepositional use here reveals a strange sel-doubling:

who is the we here, and what is the sel that it is trying to get be-

hind? Bloods utile attempts to indicate even a locus o agency or

the experience reveals the impossibility o ormulating a sel to rec-

ognize the experience; that is, it is impossible to ascertain or grasp or

athom or understand the anesthetic revelation (or secret or lack

thereo), because to do so would involve an attempt to dredge up a

sel that the anesthetic revelation itsel has obliterated. The revela-

tion o the mystery is itsel a orm o sel-obliteration, an opening

up o the consciousness and the sel to the irrevocably other orce

o liewhat Blood calls the oldmystery, the hairy primogene

and as such cannot be grasped by the sel, because what the anes-

thetic revelation does is precisely to get rid o the sel. Thus the mys-

tery that Blood perceives necessarily eludes any attempts to ormu-

late a representation o it in rational or waking consciousness: A

new view is necessary and ever too late. Sanity, or what one might

think o as the normal waking consciousnessMaine de Birans

description o the habitual sentiment du moi, or eeling o Iis a

212 Confgurations

28. James, Correspondence, vol. 5 (above, n. 16), p. 231.


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protection rom the sense o no sel, which ater all constitutes

what is revelatory about the anesthetic revelation.

The amiliar, habitual sense o being an I thus both limits our

view and shields us rom a massive dispersion, a double movementthat can be glimpsed or intuited most purely through psychical and

mystical experience. In one o his last essays as a psychical re-

searcher, James muses on what is hidden by the sel:

Out o my experience . . . one xed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that

is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the or-

est. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and

Conanicut and Newport hear each others og-horns. But the trees also com-

mingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang

together through the oceans bottom. Just so there is a continuum o cosmic

consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental ences,

and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir. Our

normal consciousness is circumscribed or adaptation to our external earthly

environment, but the ence is weak in spots, and tul infuences rom beyond

leak in, showing the otherwise unveriable common connexion.29

As the above passage suggests, what we think o as the autonomous,

individuated sel is only created by a barrier or a old in the massive

continuum o consciousness, protected rom overwhelming distribu-tion and interconnectedness by little more than the fimsy ence o

the ego, or I. What seems most striking here is Jamess prooundly

ecological sense o sel: while we may be accustomed to considering

our individual selves as separated or removed rom their surround-

ings, James argues that this eeling o separation can be attributed

mainly to habit, the type o consciousness to which we are accus-

tomed. James calls here not only or an investigation o how ordinary

or habitual consciousness limits our relationship to this cosmic con-

tinuum, but also or the development o practices to block or, as heputs it, to jam this habitual sel in order to teach or persuade it to

remain more openly in the ecology in which it is entangled and im-

mersed. Ater all, the etymology o the term mystic, rom the Latin

mystes, means to close the lips or eyes. What is required, as James

suggests through his investigations into paranormal experience such

as nitrous oxide and mysticism, is the blockage or closing o o the

habitual sel in order to make way or dierence or transormation

that is, or a more open, responsive, and ethical relation to the world.


29. William James, Condences o a Psychical Researcher, inEssays in Psychical Re-

search (above, n. 2), p. 374.

William James in the Borderlands: Psychedelic Science and the "Accidental Fences" of Self

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