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‘Tis the season of William James’s birth, in 1842.
By an odd twist of coincidence, January 11 happens also to be my wife’s birthday. So it’s a date I cannot and dare not ever forget.
The late great biographer Robert Richardson, noting the legendary James “family tradition” according to which Emerson blessed infant William, cautioned against attaching either too much or too little import to that mythic connection. It does seem too right to be true, but also too good not to be.
But isn’t it also a nice (and documented) twist, whether coincidental or fated, that WJ ended up delivering the keynote commemorative address at Emerson’s centenary in 1903? “Emerson's revelation,” suitably naturalized, was also his: “the point of any pen can be an epitome of reality; the commonest person's act, if genuinely actuated, can lay hold on eternity.” That is to say: Emerson and James both defended the actual experience of everyday people (as against the esoteric metaphysical daydreams of system-building philosophers, themselves not excluded) as reality’s surest sign.
It’s no coincidence that a devout philosopher of experience would take particular delight in sharing his own and others’ experience via the now-sadly-disappearing art of literary correspondence. WJ definitely did. His letters, like so much of his colloquially rendered and public-facing philosophy, shine and sparkle with wit, wordplay, and (above all) a profound humanity. So much of the message he meant to give the world in published form was even better conveyed in intimate missives to friends and family.
And so it was a particular delight for me personally when a perceptive student in my Philosophy of Happiness course gifted me, at semester’s end this past December, with the two-volume 1925 edition of James’s letters (edited in 1911 by his son Henry).
What a delicious trove! (And just a tip of the iceberg, compared to the unabridged edition that runs to over a dozen thick volumes and three feet on the shelf.) I often find myself consulting, for quick convenience, Project Gutenberg’s online version (II). But the books–the book books–are very special. (Rhys had already nailed down his A, by the way, but this gift sealed his happy Happiness legacy.)
Richardson notes that “by his mid-twenties William James already had a remarkable capacity to convert misery and unhappiness into intellectual and emotional openness and growth. It is almost as though trouble was for him a precondition for insight, and accepting trouble was the first step in overcoming it.” What a useful skill for us to emulate, in these times of trouble!
“In January 1868, as his twenty-sixth birthday rolled past and he did his annual stocktaking, he wrote [his friend Oliver Wendell] Holmes [Jr.] that he was in the dismalest of dumps, unable to understand ‘how it is I am able to take so little interest in reading this winter.’ He could not have known that it would be a little over two years before he really hit bottom” (as he would confide in the famous diary entry of February 1, 1870: “I about touched bottom, and perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard . . . or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it?”
The “moral business” for WJ was the active and proactive will he’d not quite believed in before. But now, as RIchardson aptly summarizes, he began to reject any fate as a fait accompli. “It is not what fate does to us that matters; what matters is what we do with what fate does to us.”
In a charming letter decades later in 1896, to his salvific hero Renouvier, he complained (as we academics are perennially wont to do) about his extra-academic workload: “Our University inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort, so that during term-time one can do no continuous reading at all—reading of books, I mean. When vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month.”
Yes indeed, we can relate. What was on your holiday reading list?
But then he said: “During the past month I have only read Tolstoy's two great novels…”
‘Nothing serious’!! Was he joking? He went on to say of Tolstoy:“I don’t like his fatalism and semi-pessimism, but…”
In any event, here we are on the cusp of a new year and a fresh semester, as light expands and “light reading” gives way to something supposedly more continuously serious. I think WJ would enjoy the course I get to teach for the first time, Philosophy in Recent American Fiction. We’re reading Richard Ford, Richard Powers, Rebecca Goldstein, and more. He’d like their anti-fatalism and semi-optimistic meliorism, as I know you Jamesians do too.
One more thing: many thanks to Professor Kevin Decker for his stellar service as secretary to WJS; and a hearty welcome to his incoming successor, Professor Alexis Dianda! Their transition has been smooth, and the state of our society is strong.
Happy 2026, everyone. Let’s see if we can make it better.
Phil Oliver
Nashville, TN
December 2025
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