PART I
Personal Immortality: Possibility and Credibility
CHAPTER 1
World or Reality as âFieldsâ
Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.
I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
I hear all sound running together, combined, fused or following,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,
Steepâd amid honeyâd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, and that we call Being.
âWalt Whitman
âSong of Myselfâ
We know existence by participating in existence.⊠Existence then is the primary datum. But this existence is not my own existence as an isolated self. If it were, then the existence of any Other would have to be proved, and it could not be proved. What is given is the existence of a world in which we participate.
âJohn Macmurray
Persons in Relation
Some years ago John J. McDermott suggested that it was âunfortunate that James did not stay with the language he utilized in preparing for his Psychological Seminary of 1895â1896. At that time, he resorted to the metaphor of âfieldsâ in order to account descriptively for the primal activity of the process of experience.â1 While I share McDermottâs view, my concern here is not primarily to explicate Jamesâs metaphysics in terms of fields but to utilize his language as well as that of others to construct a âfieldâ model, for which my primary purpose is to employ it in the development of a âselfâ open to the possibility of personal immortality. Since a key feature of both the self and the mode of immortality I wish to suggest is their continuity with the experienced world or reality, it will be necessary first to present the distinguishing characteristics of this world, beginning with âfieldsâ as the primary metaphor, in an effort to understand all reality. It must be stressed that there is no pretense of giving a mirror image of some outer âreality in itselfâ when reality or the world is described as a plurality of fields. A pragmatic approach consciously employs its primary terms metaphorically, having as its chief aim the development of a metaphysical language that will serve to expand, deepen, and enrich human life through varied and diverse modes of participation in reality, rather than claiming that such language gives us a conceptual âpictureâ of a reality essentially independent of human experience.
Let me begin with a consideration of Jamesâs notes for the Psychological Seminary, in which âfieldsâ is employed as the central category.2 James considers three suppositions necessary âif ⊠one wants to describe the process of experience in its simplest terms with the fewest assumptions.â Before looking at these suppositions, we should focus on the sentence just cited. As so often happens with James, his graceful style and felicitous expression mask the profound and complex question with which he is struggling. In this instance, of course, it is nothing less than the perennially simple and recurring question: âWhat is reality?â For James, this question, like all questions, must be answered in terms of experience, but that attempt immediately gives rise to the allied question, âWhat is experience?â
Now one might concede that such ponderous questions are the stock-in-trade of those usually genial but often peculiar beings called philosophers, but for those who live by âcommon sense,â they are of little concern. As I have already indicated, though few of usâeven those involved in the philosophical gameâare metaphysicians in the full sense of that term, we are all metaphysicians in the sense of thinking and acting within a set of ideas, principles, and assumptions. When James and other pragmatists suggest a language shift, then, they are not trying to refute âcommon senseâ so much as they are trying to make us aware of ways of looking at reality that are obstacles to richer ways of living. While the concern of this essay is not with the technical specifics and the historical polemics in which the pragmatists were engaged, it is still important to note that they were attempting to bring forth ways of thinking that were in sharp conflict with many deeply ingrained perspectives and intellectual customs.
This is best illustrated, perhaps, by presenting Jamesâs three âfieldâ suppositions and indicating some of the notions to which they are opposed.
(1) âFieldsâ that âdevelop,â under the categories of continuity with each otherâ[categories such as]: sameness and otherness [of] things [or of] thought streams, fulfillment of one fieldâs meaning in another fieldâs content, âpostulationâ of one field by another, cognition of one field by another, etc.
From the first part of this supposition we learn that reality is pluralistic (âfieldsâ), processive (âdevelopâ), and continuous (âcontinuityâ). If we add ârelationality,â which is implied in the categories described, we have four distinctive features of the world within which I will develop my views on the self and immortality. For the moment it is sufficient to note that what is implicitly rejected by this field, or processive-relational, view is any reality that is unchanging or unrelated.
(2) But nothing postulated whose whatness is not of some nature given in fieldsâthat is, not of field-stuff, datum-stuff, experience-stuff, content. No pure ego, for example, and no material substance.
In this supposition we have Jamesâs radical rejection of all modes of essentialism, whether materialistic, idealistic, or dualistic. The fuller implications of this supposition will emerge as the character and role of fields is described, but it is already evident that to view reality as âfieldsâ excludes any underlying substance having universal and unchanging essential characteristics.
(3) All the fields commonly supposed are incomplete, and point to a complement beyond their own content. The final content ⊠is that of a plurality of fields, more or less ejective to each other, but still continuous in various ways.3
The importance of this supposition for my purposes cannot be exaggerated. It provides the ground for the recognition of individuals while avoiding any atomistic individualism or isolating egotism. While all fields are âincompleteâ and continuous with others, they are not so continuous that reality is reduced to an undifferentiated monistic flux. âPluralityâ is just as real as âcontinuity,â and when we add to these three suppositions Jamesâs later notes that there is âaround every field a wider field that supercedes it ⊠(the truth of every moment thus lying beyond itself),â we are presented with a world that can be most succinctly described as âfields within fields within fields.âŠâ4
âWhat have we gained,â James asks, by substituting fields âfor stable things and changing âthoughtsâ?â
We certainly have gained no stability. The result is an almost maddening restlessness.⊠But we have gained concreteness. That is, when asked what we mean by knowing, ego, physical thing, memory, etc., we can point to a definite portion of content with a nature definitely realized, and nothing is postulated whose nature is not fully given in experience-terms.
The goal of âconcretenessââfidelity to concrete experienceâwould appear to be simple and easy of realization, but it is deceptively so, as a diverse group of late modern and contemporary philosophers have attested. John Herman Randall, Jr., maintains that metaphysics can best be described as âthe criticism of abstractions.â He further claims that this is
the metaphysical method of Bradley, Dewey, Whitehead; of the Hegel upon whom they all draw; of the continental post-Hegelians, criticizing the âintellectualismâ of the Hegelian tradition in the light of âlifeâ (the Lebensphilosophie of Nietzsche and Dilthey) or Existenz (Kierkegaard); of the phenomenologists, criticizing the formalism of the Neo-Kantians (Husserl), and of the existentialists (Heidegger, Jaspers, Tillich); of Bergson, opposing experienced durĂ©e to âThe âtâ of physics,â and of William James opposing âimmediate experienceâ to the empiricism of Mill; and of many other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophies of experience.5
Randall is not suggesting that the specific features of the views of such a variety of thinkers are identical or even always compatible. Whatever the differences, however, the importance of their converging emphasis upon the primacy of concrete experience and the rigorous reflection demanded for its apprehension should not be minimized. Throughout this essay, therefore, I will repeatedly stress the necessity of relating any speculations, extrapolations, or models to the experienced world within which we live, think, and act. What attracts me to James is his passionately relentless effort to be as faithful as possible to the range and varieties of experience. Something of this effort is expressed by Ralph Barton Perry:
Thus by the inclusion of experiences of tendency, meaning, and relatedness, by a recognition of the more elusive fringes, margins, and transitions that escape a coarser sensibility, or a naive practicality, or an unconsciously artificial analysisâby such inclusion, the field of immediately apprehended particularity becomes a continuum which is qualified to stand as the metaphysical reality. (TC, I:460)
Another important aspect of Jamesâs emphasis upon and quest for concreteness is its strongly personalistic character. Many years ago, Robert Pollock stressed this relation between Jamesâs concern for concrete reality and his celebration of personal activity:
Evidently, for James, pragmatism is an âattitude of orientationâ by which man can achieve a vital contact with concrete reality and along innumerable paths, by aiming not simply at the abstract relation of the mere onlooker but at a relation that is personal, direct and immediate, and involving participation with oneâs whole heart and being.⊠James was endeavoring to take seriously the fact that reality does not address itself to abstract minds but to living persons inhabiting a real world, to whom it makes known something of its essential quality only as they go out to meet it through action. It is this concrete relation of man and his world, realized in action, which accounts for the fact that our power of affirmation outruns our knowledge, as when we feel or sense the truth before we know it. To James, therefore, pragmatism was a doctrine designed to enlighten the whole of human action and to give meaning to manâs irrepressible need to act.6
One final point concerning the centrality of concrete experience in the thought of James has to do with differentiating his view from narrow and excluding modes of empiricism. A text from Perry will suffice to underline the openness of Jamesâs world: âThis fluid, interpenetrating field of given existence, as James depicts it, embracing the insight of religious mysticism and of Bergsonian intuition, is far removed from the sensationalistic atomism of the discredited empiricistsâ (TC, I:461).
CHARACTERISTICS OF âFIELDSâ
There is an inevitable circularity involved in discussing or analyzing any alleged âultimateâ category of reality. For example, if reality is best described in terms of âfields,â as is being suggested here, then it would seem that we must describe fields themselves in terms of âfields.â Since pragmatism does not aim at or believe possible any definitive conceptual description of reality, however, this circularity is neither vicious nor particularly unsettling. The aim of pragmatism is participation in, rather than abstract representation of, reality. Any circularity involved in the analysis of fields, therefore, must be judged on its ability to expand and enrich experience in both its explanatory and lived dimensions.
Bearing in mind that âfieldâ is a metaphor and that images or concepts are employed in its analysis for the purposes of insight and utilization rather than definitive description, let me touch briefly upon the chief characteristics of a âfield.â A field can be described as a processive-relational complex, but this term would be grossly misleading if we imagined that âthingsâ called processes and âthingsâ called relations have combined to make a field. Nor is it adequate to posit a plurality of processes that subsequently enter into relations such that fields result. Given the limitation of language and its inevitable tendency to reify and detemporalize reality, perhaps the best we can do is to express the constitution of fields dialectically. Hence, we must insist that processes are relational and relations are processive. There are no unrelated processes and no nonprocessive relations. The concrete reality (actually realities) is always a unity involving an ever-changing multiplicity. Depending on the specific field, these multiple âelementsâ will be variously named: for example, electrons, neutrons, and protons in the atomic field; molecules, cells, and genes in the organic field; planets in the solar field.
Now negatively speaking, this field view rejects any âultimateâ elements or atoms or particles understood as indivisible, impenetrable, unchangeable units. This does not, however, exclude all modes of metaphysical atomism. Whitehead, for example, maintains that âthe ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism.⊠But atomism does not exclude complexity and universal relativity. Each atom is a system of all things.â7 Whiteheadâs label for these ultimate atoms is âactual entities,â which he describes as âdrops of experience, complex and interdependentâ (PR, 28).
The field metaphor that I am constructing must acknowledge a character of interdependence both âwithinâ and among fields (I use quotation marks to call attention to the relative character of âwithinnessâ). An adequate field theory, from my perspective, must allow for a multiplicity of distinct individuals while avoiding any enclosure or isolation of these individuals. As the James text with which we began indicates, fields are continuous with other fields; hence there are no absolute, definitive beginnings and endings of any individual field. Whitehead expresses something of this continuity: âWhen we consider the question with microscopic accuracy, there is no definite boundary to determine where the body begins and external nature ends.⊠The body requires the environment in order to exist.â8 Of course, it must be quickly added that discreteness is just as real and fundamental as continuity. We cannot...