Why Read about William James
The title is misleading. A “sick soul” can refer to a chronic battle with melancholia or a bout with the blues. It can encompass thoughts of suicide or a reluctance to get out of bed. It can be just having a bad day. For both William James and John Kaag and their own personal lives, however, the “sick soul” refers to serious stuff. William James always thought of suicide as a viable option while Kaag sought James to arrest him from a steady emotional collapse after a divorce. The journey of William James from a brilliant young professor obsessed with the depressingly fatalistic philosophy of determinism to an older mystic who believed in the beauty of free will and our ability to use it to access a connection with something so much bigger than ourselves is what makes this book special. James did save Kaag and Kaag is paying it forward in a literate, at times pretty dense, philosophy as “self-help” tribute to America’s greatest philosopher. It is worth the effort to read this short book - particularly now. James & Kaag argue as a teacher and a student, that one must behave as if there is a future you can access and only by doing just that can you, “maybe”, not only actualize that future, but also enjoy the peace that comes with a “healthy mind”.
A handful of quotations with a bit of narrative context might give you a taste of what lies within. The quotations trace the arc of a book that argues the merit of suicide at the start and ends with the soul’s capacity to access the divine.
“If all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? What would they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease … men would either die of boredom or hang themselves.”
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
This quotation from the grim German philosopher is part of an opening conversation in the book that starts with suicide and ends with free will. James thought suicide was a viable option for a suffering soul. He believed it was the final desperate but not unreasonable gesture of a man’s free will. While the book is all about NOT giving into the slippery slope of the “sick soul’, the early acknowledgement about suicide is both Kaag’s and James’ nod to how hard it is to live a “healthy” life. The Schopenhauer quotation fits in with this baseline starting point by suggesting that even if we were granted all we wish, we would be miserable. Mixed in with all this glass half empty stuff is an interesting discussion about “determinism” or the belief that our fates are pretty much preordained and free will is an illusion. There are many watering holes for this line of thought ranging from Calvinist “predestination” to an extreme embrace of the Freudian unconscious. A young James had to swim through these hope-sapping waters to get to the beginnings of his life embracing philosophy.
“Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.”
William James
This is the beginning of James as philosopher “shrink”. He modifies determinism by trying to define it. He focuses on the “plasticity” of youth. The very unformed nature of the early adolescent combined with his desire to be “free” makes him a fly trap for acquired habits of mind and body. Once acquired, these habits become very hard to modify or break. People are better at sports they learn at a young age and it is immeasurably harder to quit smoking the younger you began. Reading is rarely something acquired in middle age and a youth of violent behavior cannot or will not shed it. The twist is that a youth is very unlikely to be able to manage this process with the clarity that comes with hindsight. This is the deterministic rub. James suggests in the next two quotations that that might not be all bad if one desires stability in an inherently unfair society.
“Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.”
William James
“Habit alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in darkness, and nails the countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from the invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.”
William James
The previous quotation is a good example of how good a writer James was. I wish Kaag had stepped aside more often and let James do the talking. In fact, once James argues that free will can be accessed, instead of quoting the man himself, too often it was Kaag paraphrasing. The following is an example. This is a minor complaint and maybe too much James might have left me adrift.
“In the end, the point of life was to recognize the power of habit, but then to guide it and overcome it.”
John Kaag paraphrasing William James
Not sure James would have worded it that way. Regardless, the point is that James began to believe that you can avoid being entombed within the habits of youth. New habits of mind can be accessed – through mostly faith and love. This is a spiritual book in the end - spiritual in an almost mystical way. James found “health” through stepping bravely into love. Allowing himself to fall in love with Alice was an act of shedding the habits that had begun to restrict and kill him. Whether it is deciding to love, trying to write, building a wall or simply taking a long walk – “health’ begins by taking a chance.
“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
William James
James wrote and taught at Harvard. Ralph Waldo Emerson was still alive and the halls of the university and the intellectual world of the country were still infused with Emerson’s philosophy of Transcendentalism. James brought both a more scientific, disciplined and then, later, mystical approach to Transcendentalism. The central tenet that James took from Emerson was the belief - a very optimistic one – that each of us has within us the “genius” of our individual relationship with the world around us and our habits are what prevent us from seeing it. Replacing “habits” with “conformity”, Emerson argued that our innate desire to conform is what disconnects us from our soul.
“We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh.”
William James
How do we get closer to our “genius”? This is where the rubber hits the road. James argues that one must be predisposed to “laugh” in order to laugh. To wait for laughter is to wait for happiness. The world offers a moment of inspiration hundreds if not thousands of times each day. To walk looking at your shoes is to miss all of it. To be on the phone is to miss the young hawk resting on your water fountain. We are not born with free will. In fact, our life and its habit forming conservatism is designed to frustrate and encase it. Free will must be an act of the mind – a bold act. Kaag quotes Goethe that “boldness is magic” and a bit of “magic” is what is required to be free. The following two quotations address the “boldness”.
“The art of being wise was knowing what to overlook.”
William James
“No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of chance makes the difference … between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life in which the keynote is hope.”
William James
Habit is comforting. Routine is secure. Conformity is safe. All of this is true and contains within it real merit, real ways to manage and navigate life. If, however, something else is required for you to feel healthy in this life and bad habits or resented conformity is the poison in your soul, then begin to “overlook” what is all too familiar. Take a chance and write that letter, make that call, say “yes”. Hope lies within vulnerability and fear.
“The greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will out last it.”
William James
When taking a chance, we not only make a space for free will in our life, we can connect to something larger. This is a central William James subject and is not specifically about God as much about the idea that we live in an interconnected world or, even, universe. We can only glimpse it in the most inchoate way despite James’ efforts later in his life to access the “other” world through mediums. To create something that might outlive you is to commit to something much larger than yourself. James believed that there is all around us “portals” into a greater sense of being. The following two quotations address the older more mystical James. He used Emerson’s “circles” instead of our 20th century “portals”. Clearly, given our fascination with the Internet, Star Wars and Stephen King, James (and the Transcendentalists) were onto something.
“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible,”
Novalis
After a couple less accessible chapters, the book ends on the spiritual notes discussed earlier. It is romantic stuff and nobody went at it more lyrically and bluntly that Walt Whitman. Kaag closes with the Bard. It made for a good ending in an uneven but provocative and helpful book.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from
shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see shipping of Manhattan north and
west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south
and east;
Others will see islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross,
the sun half an hour high.
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years
hence, others will see them.
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring of the flood-tide,
the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
It avails not, neither time or place-distance avails
not.
Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” from
Leaves of Grass.
“When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading a life replete with too much luxury, or tired and careworn, about his personal affairs, crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, his fancy does not thus “soar away into the colors of the sunset” as did Whitman, nor does he inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did anywhere or at any time contain more essential divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied in the fields of vision over which his eyes so carelessly pass.”
- William James’ response to Whitman’s poem
NOTES:
Feel free to skip if it gets a bit “thick” … for me it was the “stream of consciousness” section. Required reading: the Prologue, the first three chapters and the last chapter.
This book is illuminating and reassuring but does not match his truly lovely memoir of 2016, American Philosophy – A Love Story.
Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life
John Kaag
184 pages 2020
