The Heart of William James
Edited and with an introduction by Robert Richardson
Harvard, 337 pages

At the very core of American identity is the conviction that the United States has never been a place or a people so much as an idea. This has always been America’s greatest strength—ideas can be easily exported, but they can’t be invaded, plundered, bombed, or occupied. And it has been its enduring weakness. America the great abstraction is inherently vague. What, exactly, is this American idea? Where does it come from? If we can’t define it, we risk losing our sense of self and everything that springs from it—our political architecture and raison d’être.

It was the great mission of William James to give meaning, shape, and color to the national essence. Born in 1842 in New York City, James was imbued with a sense of purpose from the beginning: Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the first voices to call for a distinctly American intellectual tradition, was his godfather. He came from a remarkable family. His brilliant and charming father, Henry James Sr., was a theologian who had befriended some of the most influential minds of his day, including Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Carlyle, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Henry Jr., of course, ascended to the literary pantheon. Their sister, Alice, achieved renown as a diarist and proto-feminist.

William, the eldest, studied medicine at Harvard in the 1860s and taught physiology, anatomy, and then physiological psychology there in the 1870s. But it wasn’t until 1890 that he published his first major work, The Principles of Psychology. Over the course of the next two decades, he churned out a slew of books and papers on psychology, religion, and philosophy. He lectured on topics as various as the “gospel of relaxation,” habit formation, hypnosis, and the ABC’s of pedagogy. He met with the likes of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, Charles Peirce, and Josiah Royce. He taught Theodore Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, and George Santayana. And he went a very long way toward achieving the goal first set forth by his godfather—the articulation of a way of thinking about the world that built on, but was separate from, the traditions and categories of the Old World.

The Heart of William James, a collection of James’s papers and lectures edited by Robert Richardson, traces the fomentation and coalescing of all these many thoughts into a coherent worldview. Its publication corresponds with the 100th anniversary of James’s death, in 1910.

Central to James’s philosophy is the connection between idea and experience. An idea, he argues, is important to the extent that it shapes our experience in the world. Endless rumination about, say, whether the universe is composed of one substance (à la Spinoza) or many substances (Leibniz) has little or nothing to do with how we live. Nor do idealistic investigations into the nature of how we understand things—hence James’s wholesale rejection of Immanuel Kant. “I believe that Kant bequeaths to us not one single conception which is both indispensable to philosophy and which philosophy either did not possess before him, or was not destined inevitably to acquire after him through the growth of men’s reflection upon the hypotheses by which science interprets nature,” James said in an 1899 talk. “The true line of philosophic progress lies, in short, it seems to me, not so much through Kant as round him to the point where now we stand.”

This was a truly stunning declaration, a Declaration of Philosophic Independence from the Old World. Eight years later, James’s “declaration” would evolve into his groundbreaking book Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, in which he lays out his philosophy of “practicalism.”

Practicalism, or pragmatism, argues for a philosophy that is in essence a plan for action and centers on a conception of the universe anchored not to abstractions but to individuals: to the independent citizen-thinker. It’s worth emphasizing that “pragmatism,” philosophically speaking, does not mean “practical” or “functional.” It does not refer to that which “works” or is devoid of pretense. To say that one thinks “pragmatically” means instead that one thinks about ideas and the ways in which those ideas alter or color our experience in the world. James, unlike so many of his European predecessors, does not offer a grand, overarching metaphysics or cosmogony that is meant to explain the totality of things. That would be ridiculous and dishonest, as far as James is concerned. Instead, he draws on his earlier study of chemistry, physiology, natural history, and evolutionary biology to forge a carefully thought-through psychology that undergirds all his philosophizing. The titles of the chapters in The Heart of William James underscore this profound shift: “What Is an Emotion?,” “The Hidden Self,” “The Will,” “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” “What Makes a Life Significant,” “The Energies of Men,” and the like. The timeless questions—Is there a God? What is the nature of reality? What is the nature of the good?—are the wrong questions. The right questions are those that spring from the daily hurts, joys, fears, and yearnings of individual experience: What does it mean “to believe”? How can I be a better person? What is the relation between my actions and emotions? What must I do to lead a more meaningful life?

And, as always with James, there is the question of religion. This collection includes just one chapter that deals squarely and exclusively with religion, “The Sick Soul,” but it is the longest and among the most important in the book. Once again, it is the individual who serves as the fulcrum on which James builds his argument. He is utterly unconcerned with abstractions or impersonal institutions such as God or the Church. What James cares about, as the title of his lectures indicates, is the soul—not the soul in some general sense but in a deeply personal way. There are, he argues broadly, two categories of souls: the happiness-minded and the morbid-minded. The first is committed to blocking out, or imagining away, all the evil in the world, while the other is painfully aware that evil is a necessary and even logical component of this life. James sympathizes, to an extent, with those who seek to wish away their melancholy by insisting that it doesn’t exist. But ultimately he comes down on the side of the morbid-minded, who do not wish away or pretend or hide, because they know that the human condition cannot be otherwise.

These poor souls, who constitute the great mass of humanity, are like ice skaters gliding atop a beautiful and frozen lake that is surrounded by cliffs that are too high to scale. They know that the lake is melting—they know that death is imminent—and they are trapped, alternately happy and terrified. “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,” James says.

The only way that the “sick soul” can hoist itself out of the darkness, James says, is to accept the “rationality” (and, to some degree, the inescapability) of all the bad in this world. Once the sick soul has done this, it can be “delivered” and “born into the real life.” Such deliverance is never prompted or accomplished by any external authority. It takes place within the confines of the individual soul, and once it has been achieved, once the soul has confronted itself, a new beginning dawns, and the soul is liberated from its fears and confusions. (Bill Wilson, who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, is said to have been deeply influenced by James’s discussion of deliverance and rebirth.)

This is a philosophy that doesn’t simply define a camp or a school but rather a type—a person. This person is an American, which means a captain of his own destiny, and he is infused with a freedom and toughness that his European compatriots are not. James seeks to instruct his readers in how they can achieve their best selves, how they can retain and expand and nourish their individuality. As this collection makes clear, he has good reason to fear that that individuality is being squandered. In fact, the subtext of all the essays in this collection might very well be: Americans are in perennial danger of surrendering their Americanness, and I will do my best to stop them.

Chief among his concerns is America’s propensity to bow down before false gods. Whether we are talking about the strictures and narrow-mindedness of the graduate-school “machine” (see chapter 13, “The Ph.D. Octopus”) or the country’s growing military-industrial complex, James is supremely concerned that the United States not lose sight of its unique, spiritual bearings. This was, and is, a not-so-thinly veiled warning to all those who would impose “change” on a nation that, in James’s view, has a moral obligation to stay loyal to itself. No doubt, America all too frequently fails to live up to its own ideals—James’s denunciation of the U.S. intervention in the Philippines and his discussion of the “moral equivalent of war,” toward the end of the collection, illustrate this very well—but what’s most important to bear in mind here is that this is a failure to adhere to, not jettison or transcend, the values we already have. America has no need for new beliefs or ideologies. It requires no re-engineering. It requires only its best and mostly deeply cherished traditions. Our political leaders, taken in by fanciful trends and short-term advantage, are quick to forget or sidestep or trample on this history. It was, and is, the role of William James, the articulator if not the keeper of the faith, to remind us of who we are and who we were meant to be.

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