Lecture Notes, James, p.

PHILOSOPHY 1100: THE MEANING OF LIFE Lecture Notes: James 1. Life of William James (1842-1910) 1842: Born January 11, New York City 1844-58 (ages 2-16): Shuttled between Europe & New York 1859-60 (ages 17-18): Painting in Newport & school in Geneva 1861-62 (ages 19-20): Science & Medicine at Harvard 1863-64 (ages 21-22): Amazon Expedition, completes medical degree. 1865-66 (ages 23-24): Studies in Germany 1867-70 (ages 25-28): Crisis & Depression 1872 (age 30): Teaches psychology at Harvard. 1875 (age 33): Starts Americas first psychology lab. 1878 (age 36): Marries Alice Gibbons Howe. 1879 (age 37): Begins teaching philosophy. 1890 (age 48): Principles of Psychology 1897 (age 55): The Will to Believe (includes his essay Is Life Worth Living?, hereafter ILWL) 1902 (age 60): The Varieties of Religious Experience (hereafter VRE) 1907 (age 65): Pragmatism 1910 (age 68): Dies 2. The Sick Soul William James was, by the time of his death, North America's most prominent philosopher and psychologist, and these two topics were intertwined in his major work of 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience. In his chapter on the "sick soul" James describes a personality type for whom a tough-minded stance like Sartre's is insupportable.

Lecture Notes, James, p.2

In that chapter, James contrast two sorts of temperament. The first belongs to the "healthy minded" sort for whom the world's problems are always, in principle, solvable, and for whom what we need to do to deal with evil is simply role up sleeves and do our best to eradicate it, or (at most) modify our expectations of the world so that what seemed like an evil becomes indifferent to us. For the healthy-minded:
There are people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one's life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least, upon the natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self or the things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again. (VRE p.1)

Epicurus would be a prime example of such an approach. Epicurus recognized that most people's lives involved a lot of suffering, but his philosophy was based around the faith that, if one were to bring one's own desires into line with ones natural needs, a comparatively pain free life of simple (but enduring) pleasures was attainable by everyone. This sort of temperament contrasts with that of the "sick soul" who sees evil as something we can neither eradicate nor learn to live with. For the sick soul:
evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. (VRE p.1)

The sick soul is, according to James, much more sensitive to the problems surrounding them, and are 'sick' not in the sense that their perception of the world is inaccurate, but rather in the sense that it leads them to unhappiness:
just so we might speak of a 'pain-threshold,' a 'fear-threshold,' a 'misery-threshold,' and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be often reached by their consciousness. The sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension. There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over. (VRE p.1)

The healthy minded person keeps his mind 'healthy' by not attending to negative features of our condition which are, nevertheless, real features of it, and possibly features that are crucial to understanding our condition. As a result, James considers the sick soul to have a deeper conception of the world.
morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. (VRE p.7)

Lecture Notes, James, p.3

The sick soul considers the healthy minded approach doomed to failure, since it suggests a course of action which fails to appreciate the depth of the perceived problem. For the sick soul, we need to look to some power outside of ourselves to reconcile ourselves with the world. A power that will embed the world we experience within a larger whole that can be understood as, on the whole, both meaningful and good. 3. Naturalism One of the main sources of such trouble for the sick soul (a source vividly portrayed in Tolstoy's memoir) is the sense that, if the scientific conception of the world is correct, our life in it has no meaning or point. We struggle for a while on this earth, and then fade into oblivion, to be remembered by no one:
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. ... The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. (VRE p.3)

James was something of a sick soul himself (the case of depression discussed on pp. 6-7 of the Varieties, is, in fact, a disguised piece of autobiography), and what he found the most inadequate about the one-storied version of the world was the naturalism implicit in it. James notes that "The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with" (VRE p.3), and it is precisely this luster that disappears on the naturalistic view. Just as you can't take the same pleasure in an evening with someone you love if they've informed you that they will be breaking up with you the next morning, James can't take the same pleasure in any part of life if he thinks that everything will eventually, and permanently, perish. As he puts it:
Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order... let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in; and his days pass by with zest... Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism ... are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling. (VRE p.3)

The sciences of Jamess time already predicted that our sun would eventually die out, leaving Earth lifeless and uninhabited, and James vividly describes the 'human condition' according to such naturalism as follows:
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation. (VRE p.3)

The healthy-minded can try to live with this situation, but if it really bothers one, their recommendation that we should make the best of what little we have will seem inadequate. As James puts it:

Lecture Notes, James, p.4

To a mind ... subject to the joy-destroying chill which such a contemplation engenders, the only relief that healthy-mindedness can give is by saying ... 'Cheer up, old fellow, you'll be all right erelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!' ... Our troubles lie indeed too deep for that cure. The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature. (VRE p.3) 1

The sick soul will view the healthy-minded response to be "unspeakably blind and shallow" (VRE p.7), and need a solution to their problems of an entirely different order. 3. The Twice Born According to James, the healthy minded "need to be born only once" in order to be happy because they can be happy in the world that they initially find themselves in. They may have to change either themselves or the world itself to achieve their happiness, but the changes are not to the essential nature of either. By contrast, the sick souls "must be twice-born in order to be happy" (VRE p.8). That is to say, they must be 'reborn' in the sense of finding themselves in a new world that encompasses the old. When one is 'born again' one finds oneself in a world or a radically different sort than that in which the once-born live. As James puts it:
In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair, ... and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient. (VRE p.8)

For the once born, the world we currently experience is the only one, and happiness, such as it is, can be found there. For the twice born, real happiness can't be found in the world we experience, but comes only by putting it in a larger context (heaven being the most popular of these). James thus concludes that, "The completest religions would ... seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed ... They are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life" (VRE p.8). One might have to go through the sort of misery characteristic of the sick soul to get in touch with the essential features that are part of a 'two-storied' world. Whether what the sick soul needs is ultimately available is one thing, but, fortunately, whether they can come to believe in what
1

James finds slightly more sophisticated version of a healthy mindedness to the evils in the world in Stoicism and Epicureanism. (Though in fairness to the Epicurean, Epicurus doesn't just argue that we shouldn't' fear death because doing so makes us unhappy, but also that our death isn't, in fact, a bad thing.) Indeed, while he finds them ultimately inadequate, they represent some of the best examples of the once-born view. As he puts it in a passage from the Varieties not in our readings:
The Epicurean said: "Seek not to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness... Avoid disappointment by expecting little..." The Stoic said: "The only genuine good that life can yield a man is the free possession of his own soul; all other goods are lies." Each of these philosophies is in its degree a philosophy of despair in nature's boons... Stoicism and Epicureanism ... mark the conclusion of what we call the once-born period, and represent the highest flights of what twice-born religion would call the purely natural man -- Epicureanism ... showing his refinement, and Stoicism exhibiting his moral will.

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they need is another. This is the sort of movement that one sees in Tolstoy's 'confession', and while it was never clear that James was able to really secure his second birth, it was clear that he always hoped for one. Of course, the mere fact that such a second birth is required for the sick soul to return to happiness doesn't entail that the two-storied metaphysics of the twice-born is true (once again, as Nietzsche put it, "life is not an argument"). However, it does provide at least a pragmatic reason for believing in the afterlife (just as the epicurean had pragmatic reasons for not fearing death in addition to the epistemic reasons for not thinking that it was a bad thing.) 5. Faith and the Right to Believe Even if such a belief were required for their mental well being, some people may doubt whether they were entitled to believe in the two-storied universe, and in his Is Life Worth Living? James responds to such worries by sweeping away of certain views that often keep the springs of religious faith compressed; and holding up to the light of day certain considerations calculated to let loose these springs in a normal, natural way. (ILWL p.2) In that paper, James defines religious faith in much the same way as it is discussed in the Varieties, namely:
A mans religious faith means for me essentially his faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a partial order we have a right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again. (ILWL pp.5-6)

James also thinks that a trust in the existence of some such greater order is the only thing that makes life in this world bearable to some:
The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, the external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal this bare assurance is to such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural plane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life the suicidal mood will then set in. (ILWL p.7)

James admits that many will find such trust in an unseen order to be sadly mystical and execrably unscientific (ILWL p.6), and he thinks that such mistrust reflects an agnostic positivism according to which:
we have no right [to] suppose anything about the unseen part of the universe, merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our highest interests. We must always wait for sensible evidence for our beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no hypotheses whatever. (ILWL p.6)

James has, however, a number of reasons for doubting that the demand for such neutrality is really legitimate.

Lecture Notes, James, p.6

First of all, James argues that Science itself has been founded on our tendency to believe things in advance of our having compelling evidence for them. Just as some have a need to believe that the world is many-storied others (scientists) have a need to believe that the world has a certain underlying order that would allow it to be described in terms of certain lawlike regularities.
Without an imperious inner demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we should never have attained to proving that such harmonies lie hidden between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world. Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need. (ILWL p.7)

If science is allowed to rely on such faith about what lies beyond immediate experience, James argues, why should the religious believer not be allowed this as well? Secondly, James argues that to refuse to believe that the world has a divine superstructure produces a course of action that amounts to believing that it does not have such a superstructure, so neutrality on this subject is, ultimately, unavailable. As he puts it:
belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. And so if I must not believe that the world is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing. (ILWL pp. 6-7)

This connection between belief and action is important for Jamess doubts about the necessity of agnosticism, and his final reason for doubting that necessity comes, as we will see, from his views about the connection between beliefs and the reality that our beliefs are about. 6. Self-fulfilling beliefs One of Jamess main reasons for claiming that agnosticism cant always be the proper response to uncertainty is that often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true (ILWL p.8). James illustrates this self-verifying character of some of our beliefs with his famous discussion of an Alpine climber:
Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by your trust or mistrust both universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act. (ILWL p.8)

James goes on to suggest that the question of whether life is worth living might be a case where the truth of a belief is sensitive in this way. If we refuse to believe that it is worth living, then it certainly wont be, but if we do believe that its worth living, then it may turn out to be after all. As he puts it:

Lecture Notes, James, p.7

Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is subject to conditions logically much like these. It does, indeed, depend on you the liver. If you surrender to the nightmare view and crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a picture totally black. Pessimism completed by your act, is true beyond a doubt, so far as your world goes. Your mistrust of life has removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power. (ILWL p.8)

Indeed, James argues that even the existence of the invisible order that makes up the multistoried conception of the world may be dependent on our faith in this way too:
Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those efforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moral men. Our faith in the seen worlds goodness (goodness now meaning fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by leaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our faith in the unseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows? Once more it is a case of maybe; and once more maybes are the essence of the situation. I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. (ILWL p.8)

This certainly doesnt guarantee that the universe is, in fact, multi-storied, but it suggests, James argues, that we are entitled to believe that it is, and if such a belief makes our life worth living, then the part of wisdom as well as of courage (ILWL p.8) is to believe it.