James, Heidegger, Sartre, Havel: More Versions of Being

Abstract

After Gurney’s death Myers turned increasingly to William James, who had been particularly attracted by Gurney’s mixture of open-mindedness in the face of new work and his hard-headed scepticism in evaluating its results.¹ Like all three of the Cambridge pioneers in psychical research, James was the son of a clergyman, though in his case the Swedenborgianism of Henry James Senior had meant that he was not intimately involved with the orthodox religious establishment of his country. Indeed, in view of Swedenborg’s claims concerning the supernatural, he must have been more exposed to belief in the paranormal than was common in the Anglican establishment. Any tradition that might have passed to the three from the central Apostles concerning the nature of Being would have reached James mainly through Myers’s idea of the ‘subliminal self’, which he regarded as initiating an exploration until then not seriously undertaken.² The existence of a psychical entity in each person more extensive than that individual knew was the aspect of the concept that most excited him: ‘The Self,’ as Myers had put it, ‘manifests through the organism; but there is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.’³ The idea that the Subconscious Self might therefore be ‘an intermediary between the Self and God’⁴ offered a means of approaching, however tentatively, some of the problems encountered in interpreting religious experience.