William James and Addiction

"Heaven only knows," William James muses in Pragmatism, "profusion, not economy, may after all be reality's keynote."

“Some years ago, I made some observations on nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“If this life be not a real fight in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which we may withdraw at will. It feels like a fight.”

—William James, "The Will to Believe"

For many years, I took little interest in Alcoholics Anonymous. It struck me as yet another absolutism, and I found the disease conception of addiction an oversimplification of a vastly variegated thing. Then I remember hearing the Harvard psychiatrist George Valliant at a lecture somewhere in Cambridge saying that, statistically speaking, nothing else had the track record of AA when it came to offering a very real set of responses to what has become a menacing phenomenon reflective, perhaps, of a larger world gone considerably wrong. I did not look further into things at the time but never forgot what Valliant, an intelligent man whose work does not shy away from empirical inquiry, had said.

When I moved from Boston's South End to its South Shore with my wife and soon-to-emerge daughter 14 years ago, I ended up running into a couple of people in recovery — tough Irish-American South Boston types who had clearly been through the school of hard knocks and were in varying stages of getting respective acts together. The passion with which several of these individuals had become invested in helping others impressed me. There was a reciprocal intuition, I think, of our being broadly on somewhat parallel spiritual and ethical planes. These individuals were not intellectual sophisticates, but William James, his genius notwithstanding, prided himself on speaking to the common person and was pervasively skeptical, to say the least, about effeteness and those falsely esoteric realms that seduce many avowed “thinkers” precipitously far from home. I found these twice-born South Shore zealots to be colorful, appealing, and more than this, psychologically resurrected souls trying to do some genuine good in an arguably darkening world.

Alcoholics Anonymous and the so-called “12 Steps” constitute a system of sorts. And it is true that a majority of individuals in recovery accomplish this through means other than AA. The narrative of theology itself, however, is one of systematization of the insights of founding parents, prophets, and first principles. Would Jesus, were he to return to earth anytime soon, easily recognize what has been done in his name? Newcomers to the discipline of psychology will find a kind of "groupthink" that adheres even among avowed humanists as the profundities of forebears like James, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Rollo May devolve into neatly packaged platitudes over time. (“Language,” Emerson lamented, “is fossil poetry.”) Even someone with the largesse of Abraham Maslow became significantly less sanguine, quantitatively-speaking, about the prospects for self-actualization as he aged. In the end, there are few who are up to the challenge of genuinely creative work. Others are copyists to one degree or another—not exactly what exemplars like James, Fromm-Reichmann, or May had in mind. Still, almost everyone seems obliged to play the accomplishment game, making a name for oneself in some manner. It has been my observation that the most inspired work in psychology is least likely to be taken in at all.

Personally, I am moved far more by Karl Jaspers's talk of "ciphers of transcendence" (those dimly perceived, ultimately ineffable intimations of the beyond) or Camus's evocative "imagining” of “religion without God" rather than wholesale abdication of a personal will to a “Higher Power” (a Jamesean coinage that, in lesser minds, may sound discomfitingly close to those partisan deities to whom so many of us are introduced in childhood). For James, this sort of prettification (a preoccupation with unifying, “conjunctive” aspects of existence to the near-exclusion of all that is problematic, jagged, and “disjunctive”) was tantamount to belief in what he referred to as a “block universe”—one of abstract neatness taking little of the intensity and richness of things into account. The opposite tactic, pointing only to disjunction and a nihilistic void, was, for James, unsustainable and ultimately “inhuman”—and, hence, misguided as well. Still, one has to start somewhere and conventional religion, as Nietzsche once observed, may serve as a first set of teeth. I have become respectful of this God-talk among addiction's converted, finding here—at least at times—a visceral depth and integrity that is regularly moving. Here one encounters spirits of experience and enactment too seldom found in the conventional scene.

James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience so moved AA co-founder Bill Wilson insofar as it explained Wilson's own life-altering experience of spiritual epiphany, approached all things with a seemingly native feeling for irresolution. Concerning the possibility of chemically-induced openings of the multifarious doors of perception, James observes with an inimitable penchant for wit and paradox:

“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes.”

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

The Harvard psychologist and philosopher (whose personal drug experience centered, conspicuously, around a single experiment with nitrous oxide as a young professor (and included, according to Eugene Taylor, peyote when he was already in his fifties and whose life was spent pondering, among so many other things, realms of consciousness accessible to the thinking mind no less than those that, decidedly, were not) pointed to the experience of intoxication as “the great exciter of the YES function in man.” Intoxication, as he saw it, constituted a common thread underwriting the quests both for inebriation and religious experience.

Speaking to this perceived interrelationship, James mused:

“It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.”

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

James writes of a “hot spot” in consciousness—“the habitual center of one's personal energy.” It is precisely this energy that must segue from chemical inducement to an ethically-tinged embrace of a greater All if conversion is to effectively take hold and subsequently thrive. It is in this sense that James proposes: “The only radical remedy I know for dipsomania” (i.e., alcoholism) “is religiomania.” It’s easy to understand why James so thoroughly impressed a younger, also brilliant, C.G. Jung.

What would James have to say if he also were to return to earth just about now, specifically, about AA and the 12 Steps? James believed in no final encapsulations about anything (not psychology, philosophy, religion or, indeed, anything else) yet was fascinated by the profound spiritual epiphanies and subsequent “conversion experiences” (those fundamentally personal transformations of consciousness and character) documented in his lectures and book with such sensitivity and grace. To the extent that AA works so effectively for so many, the pragmatist in James would enthusiastically endorse its "cash value"—its striking efficacy—the more so when done rightly; therein lies truth. To the extent that adherents proclaim that one size fits all and that they alone have seized upon the one true means of post-chemical salvation, James would have politely, yet frankly, demurred. His subtle mind was given to a contemplation of "pluralistic" understandings of all things that defied, emphatically, seamless conclusions and pinning things down. "Heaven only knows," he muses in Pragmatism, "profusion, not economy, may after all be reality's keynote."

One thing I will tell you is that the metaphysical reach and moral imperative (“Shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes,” muses James, “or shall I follow it and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it?”) of Alcoholics Anonymous, with its emphases upon Melvillian shipwreck and what religious writers refer to as a sort of existential “turning” from former ways of being, are compelling. Also noteworthy is the emphasis upon fellowship (“handing one another along,” as Robert Coles puts it) and the ongoing work referred to in certain mystical traditions as repair of a broken world. God knows, there is a hell of a lot of work to be done, and the world appears to be running precipitously out of time.

I recall my involvement some years ago in overseeing clinical services for a newly established addictions treatment center on the outskirts of Boston as uniquely rewarding and very much in accord with what I had come to be through many years of laboring, often quite uneasily, within the vineyards of the so-called “third force” in psychology. I found so many things that psychologists are fond of talking about there authentically embodied and lived. The roughness around the edges (do not think for a moment that this doesn't exist within the genteel corridors of the professions: even existential psychology succumbs increasingly to systematization to a disconcerting degree) is part of the charm, grit, and complexity of it all.

It should be noted that Bill Wilson briefly experimented with LSD in his later years, hoping thereby to bring those not otherwise reachable into closer proximity with shifts in consciousness and decorum that we find so poignantly documented in James's book. A dubious methodology, to be sure, yet instructive nonetheless. Wilson wanted to reach as many souls as he could and was, like James, restlessly open-minded concerning means for doing so. It is a little known fact that Wilson, who suffered (likely like James) with manic-depressive illness through the course of his life, called out on his deathbed for “three shots of whiskey.” James, I have little doubt, would have delighted in this anecdote. Alas, Wilson's request was not granted. The pluralist in James would have delighted in this aspect of the story as well.

James's last publication before his death in 1910 was entitled “A Pluralistic Mystic.” It was a piece about Benjamin Paul Blood—eccentric farmer, philosopher, mystic and self-described idler and “fraud” from upstate New York whom James so ardently admired. It was Blood's fascination with and “anaesthetic revelation” through nitrous oxide that had once turned James on as well. “Philosophy is past,” Blood wrote the ever-curious James; “It was the long endeavor to logicize what we can only realize practically or in immediate experience.” More to the point, it is precisely the irreducible tension and ongoing repartee between the logical mind and those “metaphysical insights” attendant upon “pure experience” upon which both men meditated and toward which each was ineluctably drawn.

In the preface to his book, Pluralist, Blood writes with apt ontological perspective:

“It was the year 1860 that there came to me, through the necessary [medical] use of anaesthetics, a Revelation or insight of the immemorial Mystery which among enlightened peoples still persists as the philosophical secret or problem of the world . . . After fourteen years of this experience at varying intervals, I published in 1874 ‘The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy,’ not assuming to define there the purport of the illumination, but rather to signalize the experience, and in a resume of philosophy to show wherein that had come short of it.”

—Benjamin Paul Blood, Pluralist

We can see why James was both enamored and influenced by Blood, an individual for whom mystical experience has its numinous aspect yet without over-attachment or overreaching into “-isms” of any sort. Here, as in James, the transcendent coexists with and informs (at times more easily, at others emphatically less so) the more rational realms. Blood, we may note parenthetically, was not the only brilliant ne'er-do-well to whom James looked for inspiration and guidance, even reaching into his own pockets, at times anonymously, to monetarily support. The story of Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, and American pragmatism is another one also well worth taking up at some other moment in time.

James never forgot that early experience with nitrous oxide. He implies its lasting personal significance even in that final essay. And it seems he never forgot its import in opening up those mysterious realms that, put theologically, we may call, in sympathy with May’s friend and mentor Paul Tillich, that “God above the God of theism.” James quotes Blood approvingly in his final essay:

“There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given—Farewell.”

—William James, “A Pluralistic Mystic”

And this, perhaps, is a good place for us, too, for the time being, to wind down . . .