Eugene Fontinell selectively appropriates William James’ terminology and thought in the service of speculative metaphysics in an almost purely subjunctive mode. The principle topic is immortality or survival of bodily death. Fontinell does not aim to ‘prove’ that we can survive bodily death, but rather simply to show that a belief in post-mortem survival is ‘reasonable’ by pragmatist standards, that it is, on the one hand, neither incoherent nor inconsistent with the rest of what we take ourselves to know, and on the other, positively conducive to our’ living more productively and meaningfully in the present. Innovative to his approach is the outlining of a field metaphysics incorporating a (admittedly loosely drawn) field-model of the self. Also, Fontinell devotes the better part of his last two chapters to the issue of the desirability of immortality and how belief in immortality ought to impact the values one manifests in the present life.

While James himself only sparsely employed the metaphor of fields (one instance being in his Psychological Seminary of 1895–1896), Fontinell argues that much of James’s later thought would have been better served if he had stayed with this metaphor. The metaphysics thus explicated is not James’s, but rather Jamesian. Explicating ontology in terms of fields instead of substances, James argued, trades off stability for greater fidelity to concrete experience (Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality, 27). Substances are to be thought of as metaphysically discrete and independent entities, whereas fields, although still perhaps amenable to being individuated from each other, are overlapping and mutually constitutive of one another. The self is a field comprised of and overlapping with many other fields, of which the physical body is a sub-set. Hope for immortality rests in supposing that God also is a field comprised of and in part constituted by other fields in the universe, including ourselves. Fontinell tells us, ‘The human self emerges from fields designated as “physical,” but this self is neither identical with nor reducible to the physical fields from which it emerges…’ (Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality, 155). That the personal self is a field that also participates in and is partially constitutive of larger fields is vital. If it is correctly extrapolated from religious experience that one of the largest such fields is a personal god who relates to and cares for individual persons, and that this relation is the most significant of those constitutive of our personal identity, then it is not unreasonable to hope that such a god would will to preserve us beyond the termination of the physical field from which we first emerged.

Fontinell is careful to remind us the field is a metaphor (Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality, 29), but also implies that explication of reality in terms of this metaphor promises to be more ‘experientially fruitful’ than either substance dualism or (reductive) materialism. It is here that one of the worries with his account arises. The principle criticism of mind-body dualism offered by James had to do with its alleged explanatory inefficacy. But when one substitutes the functions of a substantive field for the powers of an immaterial substance, most of the same problems reappear with slightly altered descriptions. This is why Spinoza’s dual-aspect theory did not constitute a real advance over Cartesian interactionism in the understanding of the mind-body problem. Fontinell follows Randall in likening dualism’s explaining thought in terms of a thinking substance to Moliere’s critique of ‘trying to “explain” the observed action of opium upon the human organism as due to its “dormative powers”’ (Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality, 50), but speaking in terms of the functions of substantive fields instead of the powers of substances is only to trade one vacuous vocabulary for another.

It is when Fontinell turns to the (often under-considered) desirability and efficacy of immortality that he makes perhaps his most interesting contributions. Fontinell distinguishes two separate questions that can be posed when considering whether immortality is desirable: first, whether immortality itself would be a state of affairs to be wished for, and second, whether the belief in immortality is ‘worthy of the best in human beings,’ or is ‘life-enhancing’ (Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality, 169-171). Bernard Williams’s charge that eternal life would inevitably lead to unmitigated eternal boredom is met by supposing that eternal life could mean eternal growth and change, rather that endless more-of-the-same. On the second question, Fontinell considers a number of existentialist and Nietzschean claims that belief in immortality reflects a failure of nerve or is ‘anti-life’ in its general effects on the human psyche. Various attempts (by McDermott, Hartshorne, Jonas, and Whitehead) to formulate a Christian theology sans immortality are also given significant attention. Fontinell’s criticisms here are conciliatory, and his claims for the traditional emphasis on immortality seem modest, but the emphasis on Christian doctrine betrays the one aspect of his work where he most fails to emulate the Jamesian spirit. James drew, in an eclectic and thoroughly pluralistic way, on both Western and non-Western traditions in supporting the chief claims found in such works as the Varieties. There are points at which Fontinell seems parochially Christian by comparison. Thus, he misses an opportunity for making a cross-cultural connection when he seemingly offers the field model of the self as a reason to eschew a ‘Buddhist-like no-self doctrine’ (Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality, 44). In truth, however, Fontinell’s all-encompassing field metaphysics bears a striking resemblance to Mahayana explications of the anatta doctrine in terms of universal dependent origination. [1] First in the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, and then more forcefully by Nargarjuna in his Madhyamaka Karika, it is insisted that the ‘self’ of the Buddha’s no-self pronouncement refers not only to the essence of subjects of consciousness, but generically to the essences of all things. To say that all dhamma (knowable forms) are anatta (without self-essence) is really to proclaim the absolute contingency and interdependence of all knowable things; which is to say, things are fields, not substances.