A PROCESS PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE
In concluding A Pluralistic Universe—based on his series of lectures given during the early years of this century (and the final years of his life)—William James throws down the gauntlet, challenging his philosophic audience to consider seriously the evidence and theories belonging to realms of experience largely ignored by philosophers and scientists alike:
It is high time for the basis of discussion in these questions to be broadened and thickened up. It is for that that I have brought in Fechner and Bergson, and descriptive psychology and religious experiences, and have ventured even to hint at psychical research and other wild beasts of the philosophical desert (PU 149).
These areas of study—parapsychology (James's “psychical research”), consciousness studies, mystical experiences, and, more generally, all those nonordinary experiences transcending our culturally-defined boundaries on the limits of individual experience—constitute the regions explored by transpersonal psychology, as it has emerged over the second half of the twentieth century. Because it labors at the edge of human possibilities, transpersonal psychology shows a peculiar interest in metaphysics and cosmology: that is, the underlying nature of reality and the universe. In this regard, also, James anticipated many of the philosophical questions that are central to contemporary transpersonal theory.
Although James considered his ruminations in A Pluralistic Universe as mere tentative explorations into certain basic problems concerning the nature of reality and the structure of the universe, James's genius is such that he precisely isolates the critical philosophic questions and offers suggestions that border upon the solutions themselves. Following up on his lead in these matters, Alfred North Whitehead has developed a systematic philosophy that addresses James's philosophical concerns and provides a solid foundation for including and interpreting the wide range of psychological phenomena James believes must be added to our worldview in order to provide a rich and full account of the universe.
At the heart of James's lectures lies his struggle to forge a new metaphysical understanding of experience, one that can serve as a basis for his radical empiricism and what might be described somewhat paradoxically as his “pluralistic pantheism” (see especially PU 20). (To avoid confusion concerning James’s use of the term “pantheism” in this context, I will instead use the phrase pluralistic spiritualism to refer to James’s notion of an essential intimacy and connectedness between all beings, including God.) The philosophical conundrum for James is that, while believing strongly in the deep interconnectedness of all things in the universe, he feels compelled to argue just as strongly for a real sense of individuality or separateness within reality’s manifold. Thus Hegel’s vision, and absolute idealism more generally, are ultimately unsatisfying in James's view. While he is drawn to Hegel’s description of the universe as alive, and finds value in the Absolute’s “peace-conferring power and its formal grandeur” (PU 62), any notion of an Absolute who subsumes all other beings in a totalizing fashion strikes James as irrational on several accounts. Central among these are its failure to account for our actual experience of the imperfect finite actualities that we encounter in this world, and that it must place responsibility for any imperfections and evil on God’s (the Absolute’s) doorstep (PU 57, 60).1 On the other hand, James is even more critical of the materialist and empirical theories that find no place at all for inner connectedness among events and thus leave us “out in the cold,” as it were, fundamentally disconnected from God, and everything else, for that matter.
Thus the pressing question becomes: Can we understand experience in such a way that the universe can be seen to contain events that are individuals, yet also have inner interconnections; something like James's understanding of Fechner’s assumption “that states of consciousness, so called, can separate and combine themselves freely, and keep their own identity unchanged while forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope “ (PU 83). This question is as relevant for psychologists as it is for cosmologists: the same principle of “overlapping” experience can just as well apply to how a moment of human experience unifies a matrix of neural events as it can to how all the events in the universe can be synthesized into a new moment of God’s experience. In both cases, the focal point is a coherent articulation of how events—“states of consciousness”—can be real in and of themselves, yet can also be unified within another event or entity. (For example, if God is made up of all of the events in the universe, how can that synthesis occur and what does that imply for the reality of the other finite, individual events.) The problem becomes two-fold, when generalized to the entire universe: how to describe all entities or events in a manner congruent with our notions of consciousness or experience, and how to understand interaction between these events.
In James's earlier grapplings with this problem, the notion of “pure experience” was put forward as a possible solution—here he attempts to interpret everything in the universe as somehow fundamentally experiential in nature. More precisely, in Essays in Radical Empiricism, according to Ford, James “suggests the possibility that the ultimate units of reality are ‘pure experiences’ that are neither mental nor physical but potentially either or both” (Ford 3). A tree and our consciousness of it are not different kinds of realities; both arise out of ‘pure experience.’
Unfortunately, this particular formulation is unclear as to how the things in physical reality and in human experience arise out of a single kind of “stuff,” leaving an unfortunate and unwanted dualistic flavor to his thinking. James addresses this weakness in A Pluralistic Universe by drawing on Bergson’s philosophy. The key is to think of experience as arising in drops or pulses:
If all change went thus drop-wise, so to speak, if real time sprouted, or grew by units of duration of determinate amount, just as our perceptions of it grow by pulses, there would be no zenonian paradoxes or kantian antimonies to trouble us. All our sensible experiences, as we get them immediately, do thus change by discrete pulses of perception . . . . Fechner’s term of the ‘threshold,’ which has played such a part in the psychology of perception, is only one way of naming the quantitative discreteness in the change of all our sensible experiences. They come to us in drops. Time itself comes in drops” (PU 104).
We are now hovering on the brink of a major metaphysical breakthrough, one that places experience at the center of reality, yet can account for “physical reality” without diminishment. All that needs to be added to this mix is that these “drops of time” are actually momentary pulses of experience. James comes oh so close to this view while describing their manner of interaction and composition: “The concrete pulses of experience appear pent in by no such definite limits as our conceptual substitutes for them are confined by. They run into one another continuously and seem to interpenetrate” (PU 127). By envisioning all of reality as composed of individual pulses of experiences that interpenetrate in such a way as to generate the enduring individuals and larger organic structures that populate our universe, James, and Whitehead, have created a philosophy exceptionally rich in psychological implications. The remainder of the paper examines how Whitehead’s philosophy can fulfill James's challenge of nearly a century ago by addressing his philosophical questions and concerns and at the same time opening the door to the transpersonal field.
