Public philosophers rarely become associated with psychical research, but CEM Joad (1891–1953) was an exception. Joad moved effortlessly between broadcasting, ethics and the paranormal. His career traces a broader mid-twentieth-century effort to discuss survival, mediumship and religion in a language accessible to educated general readers and listeners.
- Joad combined a public life in philosophy and broadcasting with a serious, if selective, interest in psychical research.
- Working with Harry Price, he argued that stringent controls reduced fraud but did not eliminate all apparently genuine mediumistic phenomena.
- His later move from atheism towards Christian theism formed part of a wider shift away from strict materialism.
Life
Cyril Edwin Michenson Joad was born on 12 August 1891 in Durham, England. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he became a socialist and a pacifist. He was a conscientious objector in World War I. After retiring from a government job in 1930, he joined the faculty of Birkbeck College, University of London, as a philosopher and served as head of the Philosophy and Psychology Department for twenty-three years.
A prolific writer, he wrote over one hundred books and was published widely in academic journals and in the popular press. He was well known as a radio and television personality on BBC Brains Trust from 1941 to 1947. He suffered loss of reputation, and the termination of his position on the programme, when he was caught in his routine practice of not paying for train tickets.
Joad collaborated with the psychical investigator Harry Price on some of his paranormal investigations. He was a friend of the literary scholar and popular Christian writer CS Lewis, who was an important influence on him and helped bring about Joad’s conversion from atheism to Christianity late in life.
Joad died in London on 9 April 1953.
Philosophical Thought
In his youth, Joad was a radical who supported pacifism and atheism. Even then, however, he had some affinity for dualism, and this may have influenced his interest in psychical research. As a philosopher, he was eclectic, widely read, and a clear writer whose books were popular with the general public. He was a socialist and strong supporter of both the Fabian Society and the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals, becoming became president of the latter organization in 1933. After 1941, he focused on popularizing philosophy through the Brain Trust radio broadcasts. Audiences were impressed by his clarity, although his political radicalism alienated some, especially his strong support for the Soviet Union in 1941 in the face of Stalin’s show trials and purges of the 1930s.1Symonds (2015).
Despite the atheism of his early period, Joad was not a materialist. In his middle period his thought tended towards the Platonic – he believed in the existence of objectively real moral values, for example. They function for Joad in a similar way to the Platonic Forms, and he accepts the full reality and mind-independence of the old medieval transcendentals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.2Joad (1938). He was also more open to the possibility of God’s existence during this period of his career. In his final period of work he became a theist, a viewpoint he defended in his book, The Recovery of Belief: A Restatement of Christian Philosophy.3Joad (1951).
Work in Psychical Research
Joad’s work in psychical research was in the context of his association with Harry Price, who founded the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, later called the University of London Council for Psychical Investigation. In his article ‘Adventures in Psychical Research’, Joad argued for the careful nature of the team’s investigations, noting both the diversity of the staff (which included illusionists as well as psychologists and physicists) and the equipment used to help detect fraud, especially in mediumship research. The team would go so far as to dress mediums in silk sacks up to their heads or in a full coat-of-arms.4Joad (1938), 36. He noted that under stringent conditions very few mediums produced phenomena. However, he stated that he witnessed some instances in which genuine phenomena occurred.
Joad believed that the evidence for the phenomena of physical mediumship and for poltergeist phenomena was stronger than the evidence for telepathy, clairvoyance, or precognition. He argued that the ‘triviality’ of the phenomena in séances (‘tambourines rattle, wastepaper baskets fly through the air, handkerchiefs tie themselves into knots’, et cetera) ‘constitute one of the strongest reasons for regarding such phenomena as genuine’.5Joad (1938), 37. Joad believed that a skilled medium would make up more sophisticated phenomena. He denied that such phenomena were caused by any form of ‘collective unconscious’ and held that the view that physical phenomena were caused by spirits was ‘probably false’.6Joad (1938), 38. He concluded that physical phenomena result from multiple types of currently unknown causes.
Joad had mixed views about ‘ectoplasm’; while he had seen instances of it forming into shapes of human heads, one medium, Helen Duncan, was charged with faking the phenomenon by regurgitating cheesecloth she had swallowed earlier. He was more convinced regarding the genuineness of poltergeist phenomena.
Regarding putative evidence of post-mortem survival, the triviality of putative messages from the dead made Joad sceptical of most mediumship. Convincing proof, in his view, would come if someone left a code to be deciphered after death, and a medium then received a veridical message containing the code.
Joad was aware of JB Rhine’s experiments but noted that attempts to replicate the experiments in Britain to that date had failed. He believed that Rhine’s results were more likely produced by ‘hyperaesthesia’ rather than by ‘telepathy or clairvoyance’.7Joad (1938), 206. He accepted the existence of telepathy and clairvoyance but thought they occurred rarely.
Joad suggested that psi might largely be due to what he labelled as ‘the psychic factor’, which he believed was – along with the body – a constituent of the mind. However, he denied that the psychic factor was ‘mental’; rather, he thought, it wass similar to a ‘vital force’.8Joad (1938), 207. He suggested it might briefly survive the death of the body and during that time, be open to union with another body. A medium’s ‘psychic factor’ might depart the medium’s body during a séance, leaving it open to combine with a deceased person’s psychic factor. In the case of poltergeist and some apparitional phenomena, Joad suggested that a deceased person’s psychic factor might combine with matter other than a human body and use that matter to manifest itself to the senses.
Joad mentioned what today would be called near-death experiences, including ‘fear-death experiences’ in which a person threatened by imminent death sees his whole life ‘pass in front of him in a flash’.9Joad (1938), 209. He believed this to be caused by the ‘psychic factor’ sensing the onset of the event and using expanded powers that it did not ordinarily need to employ in everyday life.
Michael Potts
Works Cited
Joad, C.E.M. (1938). Adventures in psychical research. Harper’s Monthly Magazine 177 (June-November), 35-41, 204-49.
Joad, C.E.M. (1951). The Recovery of Belief: A Restatement of Christian Philosophy. London: Faber and Faber.
Symonds, R. (2015). C.E.M. Joad: Philosophical treasure or third-class Socrates. The Philosopher 103/1.