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

Abstract

While William James's investigations into paranormal phenomena, mysticism, and the effects of 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 of science. James's self-experiments with nitrous oxide and other drugs challenged the limits of scientific practice, implemented an alternative rhetorical economy for scientific experiment, and revealed normal waking consciousness to be a habit that conceals the self's nature as something thoroughly enmeshed with and inseparable from the world. James argues for the implementation of practices that might effect the blockage or closing off of this habitual self in order to make way for difference or transformation—that is, for a more open, responsive, and ethical relation to the world.

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“…Like James, and in keeping with his value of experience as radical empiricism, they also believed that the core of authentic religion was religious experience rather than dogma. What's more, Jodie Nicotra links James’ psychedelic drug use with his attempt to reconcile dualisms, as well as with his desire to block “the habitual self in order to make way for difference or transformation—that is, for a more open, responsive, and ethical relation to the world”(213).…”

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“…-psychedelic frenzies. Even William James' experiments with nitrous oxide inhalation are scorned as childish pranks and amateurish curiosity by 'spiritually correct' clerics and psychologists, as if his Varieties of Religious Experience, which they should have studied in college as a classic, could have been born through some immaculate conception, without James's having had those very experiences (Nicotra, 2008). One of the only current international exceptions to the prohibition on self-experimentation is the use of ayahuasca in indigenous surroundings.…”