Groping for Phantasms

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The New York Sun

“To no one type of mind is it given to discern the totality of truth. Something escapes the best of us — not accidentally, but systematically, and because we have a twist.” This trenchant comment, masterfully sculpted by that final perfect “twist,” was penned by the philosopher and psychologist William James. It comes from an article he defiantly published in the journal Science — defiantly, because James used the piece to argue against what he saw as the pigheaded prejudices of the typical scientific mind, unwilling to cope with, and so given to deny, what James dubbed “wild facts.” “If there is anything which human history demonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary academic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which present themselves as ‘wild facts,’ with no stall or pigeonhole, or as facts which threaten to break up the accepted system,” he wrote.

The subtle and sober insights into the history, philosophy, and psychology of science packed into James’s article are all the more remarkable given the title of the composition, “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished.” Yes, “psychical,” as in communications with the dead.These are the sort of “wild facts” James was pushing on his pigheadedly scientific readers.

William James, whose novelist brother Henry James had an affinity for the gracefully ambiguous ghost story, was actively involved in the investigation of, yes, ghosts. James wasn’t the only serious mind of his day given to such pursuits. He was a founding member of the American branch of the (extant) Society for Psychical Research, which had been initiated in Britain by a handful of scholars — philosophers, scientists, and a couple of classicists.The members of this elite group form the subject of Deborah Blum’s engaging “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death” (Penguin Press, 370 pages, $25.95).

This is rich material, set against the background of the Victorian past, a foreign land that seems creakily remote, even if some of the very same issues that beset it — most notably the uneasy relation between science and religion — live on in our day. Ms. Blum begins her book by placing the Victorian fascination with spiritualism in the context of the 19th century’s struggles to reconcile the spirits of religion and science, an instability between competing values that, she writes, induced “moral uncertainty.” This is all interesting, though Ms. Blum doesn’t want to claim it is too interesting. She doesn’t mean to suggest that her analysis explains how minds of a Jamesian caliber could be deluded into believing in the supernatural, because she is not prepared to say they were deluded.

Otherworldly contact was such a vogue in James’s day that the fashionable hostess often provided a séance as a postprandial entertainment.

Though most scientists took a dim view of these spiritualist shenanigans, believing them to be the sort of vestigial superstition that science, especially newly fortified by Darwinism, would eventually stamp out, James believed otherwise. Science, he argued, is a methodology rather than a set of ontological conclusions. For that reason science ought to be rigorously noncommittal, probing and palpating all experience to see what it will yield.The spirit of science must be open to evidence for spirits.

And open to spirits James and his fellow researchers were, assiduously attending séances, conscientiously attempting to separate out the obviously disingenuous from the not so obviously disingenuous and from the possibly even genuine. It was remarkably dull work. “Few species of literature are more truly dull than reports of phantasms,” James complained in “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished.” “Taken simply by themselves, as separate facts to stare at, they appear so devoid of meaning and sweep, that even were they certainly true, one would be tempted to leave them out of one’s universe for being so idiotic.”

Not only dull, but decidedly tawdry. Most professional mediums were shady performance artists, resorting to such helpful aids to “materializations” as trap doors, wired shoes, and muslin dipped in glow-in-the-dark phosphorus. The psychical researchers had the unpleasant task of probing and palpating not just experience, but the body of the medium, of keeping a firm grip on hands and legs to keep them from levitating tables and messing with the curtains.

And then there was the content of the messages from the dead, which often proved dispiritingly nonexalted. While one might have hoped for insights into the great metaphysical dilemmas that wrack the brains of philosophers, the departed delivered messages that often trailed off into the most inconsequential sort of twaddle.But then sometimes — and this sometimes is what kept the ghost hunters hunting — the mediums were privy to knowledge, no matter how mundane, that they couldn’t possibly have attained through natural means. Was it chicanery, mind reading, or genuine dispatches from the discarnate? This little band of stalwart thinkers waded through the flimflam and the twaddle, trying to get their hands round the slippery answer, which always eluded them, though each did come to believe that there was something or other inexplicable lurking beyond grasp.

James himself was a thinker who thought with such category-smashing, system-eluding exuberance, that category-smashing and system-eluding became part of the very essence of his thought.

There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, discursification, some genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger, that says ‘hands off,’ and claims its privacy, and means to be left to its own life.

This he wrote in “A Pluralistic Mystic,”one of the last articles of his life, from which Ms. Blum does not quote.This is part of the problem: She quotes too sparingly from James, and when she does quote him, she often just misses his intended meaning. His ironic subtlety sometimes eludes her. For example, Ms. Blum writes: “James admired the efficiency of the ‘scientific’ approach. ‘It is far better tactics, if you wish to get rid of mystery, to brand the narratives themselves as unworthy of trust,’ James wrote.”However, James didn’t write those words admiringly but rather reproachfully. From his perspective, the urge to rid one’s view of mystery results in a lie about reality.The distinctive twist of the man she misses.

Ms. Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, so her choice of subject matter here is itself notable. James and his coterie believed themselves to be engaged in science in empirically investigating claims of the occult, and Ms. Blum gives no indication he views them otherwise. But this doesn’t mean that she is in agreement, either.The book is scrupulous in avoiding a point of view on the subject, and this the reader rather misses. After all, this isn’t just any old science reporting. She reports with such objectivity that one wonders what she herself believes the nature of her story to be. Is this a tale of a handful of eccentrics, of folly among the highminded? Or is it, more widely, a picture of an age that was so entangled in the conflict between religion and science that it was susceptible to a metaphysics equally offensive to both sides?

My best guess is that Ms. Blum is telling her story simply as a science journalist, reporting on the empirical results of this particular band of researchers. But given the nature of this story, the usual standards for scientific reporting don’t seem quite right. If Ms. Blum is considering the work of these scholars in the light of evidence for the afterlife, then doesn’t it behoove her to ask, at the very least, why James’s age saw so much more supernatural activity than ours does? Where have all the phantoms gone? Are they still jabbering away, only we are too distracted to give them our ear? Or have they, deciding that we the living are just as idiotic as James had pronounced them, gone off to find better ways of spending their eternity? Despite the rich material that Ms. Blum has gathered, the whole never quite takes shape, something like those intriguing phantoms that sent James and his friends hunting.

Ms. Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. Her latest book, “Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity,” is available from Schocken/Nextbook.


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