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HUMANITAS
For many years, I took little interest in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). It struck me as
yet another absolutism, and I found the whole disease conception of addiction an
oversimplification of quite likely a vastly variegated thing. Then I remember hearing
the prominent Harvard psychiatrist George Valliant at a lecture saying that
statistically speaking, nothing had the track record of AA when it came to offering a
very real set of responses to what has become increasingly a menacing
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When I moved from Boston's South End to Boston's South Shore with my wife and
soon-to-emerge daughter several years ago, I ended up running into a couple of
guys in recovery — tough Irish-American South Boston/Shore types who had clearly
been through the school of hard knocks and were in varying stages of getting their
respective acts together. The passion with which a few of these individuals were
now invested in helping others impressed me. There was a reciprocal intuition, I
think, of our being broadly on parallel spiritual and ethical planes. These individuals
were not intellectual sophisticates, but William James, his breathtaking genius
notwithstanding, prided himself on speaking to the common woman and man and
was pervasively skeptical, to say the very least, about effeteness and those falsely
esoteric realms that seduce many avowed “thinkers” precipitously away from
home. I found these twice-born South Shore zealots to be colorful, appealing and
more than this, eminently turned-on and trustworthy individuals, legitimately
resurrected souls trying to do some genuine good in an arguably darkening world.
Personally, I am moved more by Karl Jaspers's talk, at once humble and hallowed, of
"ciphers of transcendence," those dimly perceived, ultimately ineffable intimations of
the beyond, or even Camus's evocatively heartfelt "imagining religion without God,"
than by a wholesale turning over of individual will to a Higher Power that sounds at
times to be discomfiting close to the circumscribed deity about which many of us
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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 of 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.
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What would James have to say if he too 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 —
and yet was fascinated by the profound spiritual epiphanies and subsequent
"conversions,” those fundamentally personal “transformations” of consciousness
and character documented in his book with such sensitivity and grace. To the extent
that AA works so effectively for so many, the pragmatist in James would
enthusiastically endorse it for its "cash value," its striking efficacy, the more so when
done rightly; therein lies truth. To the extent that overenthusiastic 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 turbulently brilliant mind was given to a protracted contemplation of "pluralistic"
understandings 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 compass (“Shall I
frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate
aptitudes,” wonders James, “or shall I follow it and it alone, making everything else
merely stuff for it?”) of Alcoholics Anonymous, with its attendant emphases upon
Melvillian shipwreck and what religious writers refer to as “turning,” are compelling
indeed and wholly of a piece with the very best of what we encounter in humanistic
psychology. Also noteworthy is the thoroughgoing emphasis upon fellowship —
“handing one another along,” as child psychiatrist Robert Coles has put it — and the
ongoing work referred to in Jewish mystical tradition as tikkun — repair of a broken
world. To this extent, I find my involvement in overseeing clinical services for a new
addictions treatment center here on the outskirts of Boston as uniquely rewarding
and very much in accord with what I have come to be through many years of
laboring, often uneasily, in the vineyards of the third force. I find so many things that
we psychologists are fond of writing and talking about here movingly embodied and
lived. The roughness around the edges — do not think for a moment that this
doesn't exist within the genteel and pervasively civilized corridors of the third force;
increasingly existential-humanistic psychology itself risks systematization to a
concerning degree — is part of the charm, grit and challenge of it all.
It ought to be noted that Bill Wilson briefly experimented with LSD in his later years,
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hoping thereby to bring those not hitherto reachable into closer proximity with those
shifts in consciousness and decorum that we find so poignantly documented in
James's lectures. A dubious methodology, to be sure, and yet instructive
nonetheless. Wilson wanted to save as many souls as he could and was, like James,
restlessly open-minded concerning means for so doing. It is a little known fact that
Wilson, who suffered like James with manic-depressive illness through the course of
his life, called out on his deathbed for “three shots of whiskey.” James, I am quite
sure, would have delighted in this little anecdote. Alas, Wilson's request was not
granted. The pluralist in James would have delighted in this one as well.
James's last publication before his death in 1910 was titled “A Pluralistic Mystic.” It
was a piece about Benjamin Paul Blood, the 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 to it. “Philosophy is past,”
Blood wrote to 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 pervasively meditated and to which each was ineluctably drawn.
In the preface to his book, "Pluralist," Blood had written with admirable ontological
humility:
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.
We can see why James was both so enamored and influenced by Blood, an
individual for whom mystical experience has its numinous moment and import yet
without over-attachment or overreaching into “-isms” of any sort. Here, as in James,
the transcendent coexists with and informs (now more easily, now decidedly less so)
the more rational realms. Blood, we should note parenthetically, was not the only
brilliant ne'er-do-well who James looked to for inspiration and guidance, even at
times reaching into his own pockets, often 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.
It seems that James never forgot that early experience with nitrous oxide. Indeed,
he implied its lasting personal significance even in that final essay. And it seems he
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never forgot its import in opening up those mysterious realms, which put
theologically we might call, in sympathy with Tillich, that “God above the God of
theism.” James quotes Blood approvingly in that final piece: “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.”
Perhaps this is a good place for us, too, for the time being, to wind down.
References
Bormuth, M. (2006). Life conduct in modern times: Karl Jaspers and psychoanalysis.
Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.
Coles, R. (2010). Handing one another along: Literature and social reflection. New York:
Random House.
Gavin, W.J. (2013). William James in focus. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
James, W. (1908) The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. New York:
Longmans, Green, and Co.
James, W. (1956), The will to believe and other essays in popular philosophy. New York:
Dover. (Original work published 1897)
Taylor, E. (1993). Our roots: The American visionary tradition. Noetic Sciences Review, 27, 6-17.
Taylor, E. (1996). William James on consciousness beyond the margin. Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press.
Tillich, P. (1975) Systematic theology, Vol. 2. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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