I've just finished Matthieu Ricard's Altruism, and am struck by the consanguinity of Ricard's Buddhism with James's pragmatic pluralism. The latter celebrates individuality, subjectivity, and selfhood, sure; but it equally extols empathy and compassion.
Those virtues were on impressive display when young William James advised a friend - and himself - to counter what we'd nowadays call SAD (seasonal affective disorder) with a fictive inner shift of attention:
Today, we turn back to two of his earlier essays: The Sentiment of Rationality (1879) and The Dilemma of Determinism (1884).Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the cosmos. (Letters vol.1)
They convey the themes most central to James's perpetual interest in personal flourishing: enthusiastic acceptance of one's own and others' distinctive individuality as the pre-eminent condition of feeling oneself "at home" in the world, at peace and at liberty to enjoy "the sufficiency of the present moment"; and, a sense of one's own free agency as pragmatically vindicated by those who act on it ("my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will"). For James, to be happy is fully to inhabit the present and confidently anticipate your fitness to meet the future freely. It's to reject the tired notion that the "juice has been pressed out of the free-will controversy," that free will is an illusion without a future. To the contrary, for those whose willing natures require a canvas of real possibility the future must be a free and open country awaiting the brushstrokes of our attention, belief, and action.
Why do we philosophize? James says we seek a more rational "frame of things," marked by "a strong feeling of ease, peace, & rest" affording transition from confusion and perplexity to pleasure in rational comprehension. That's a subjective definition of rationality, concerned not simply with the degree of objective fit between our ideas and the world but with the palpable and personal perception therof.
"Every one knows how when a painful thing has to be undergone in the near future, the vague feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control our attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the given present. The same is true when a great happiness awaits us."
Anticipation is making me wait, is keeping me waiting, sang Carly Simon in a song made silly by association with ketchup. The waiting is the hardest part, sang Tom Petty. But anticipatory waiting can be (or can be reconstructed in memory as) delicious, when (so the speak) the ketchup flows at last. Fluency and sufficiency are hard to have and hold, but when you finally get there it's the greatest deliverance and homecoming. Indeed, "coming to feel at home" is the great prize in life for the human animal.
"It is of the utmost practical importance to an animal that he should have prevision of the qualities of the objects that surround him, and especially that he should not come to rest in presence of circumstances that might be fraught either with peril or advantage." Evolution wants us (so to speak) to feel at home in secure surroundings, and spurs our curiosity to interrogate our surroundings and insure their homeliness.
Must we wait and hope for the fluent feeling of homey sufficiency to descend and grace us? No, we must muster our subjective energies and go after it.
...in every fact into which there enters an element of personal contribution on my part, as soon as this personal contribution demands a certain degree of subjective energy which, in its turn, calls for a certain amount of faith in the result,--so that, after all, the future fact is conditioned by my present faith in it,--how trebly asinine would it be for me to deny myself the use of the subjective method, the method of belief based on desire!
If you're climbing in the Alps and must face either certain death or a death-defying leap, you'd better believe in yourself. "The part of wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its object. There are then cases where faith creates its own verification." That's the view Bertrand Russell derided as the will to make-believe. But Russell was no climber, though like us all he was a chooser and a decider.Are our choices and decisions freely willed? It so, we can't allow ourselves to be compelled to believe. "Our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free." That was James's own decision, when he "just about touched bottom" and then fortuitously discovered Renouvier's definition of free will as the directed control of one's own attentive mind and decided to experiment with it. To attend to one thing and not another is to court a specific range of possibilities. James was forever battling the Rationalist/Idealist Hegelians and Positivist Necessitarians of his day, whose doctrines seemed to deny possibility as a real feature of our world.
"A world with a chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all... the chance that in moral respects the future may be other and better than the past has been" is more rational if it frees us to entertain and experiment with more possibilities, and occasionally to summon our personal energy, to sustain a promising but insecure leap of belief and action towards something better. That's taking a chance, and not surrendering to fate.
As we've noted, some of us are more at home in a personal world of chance and risk. Those who are, studies seem to show, tend to be happier. James was probably one of those. "In utrumque paratits, then. Be ready for anything — that perhaps is wisdom."
The "Stone" essay "How to Live a Lie" proposes that James was a "free will fictionalist" who willfully accepted propositions that defy rational belief. I don't think much of the Times headline-writer's decision to label that a "Lie," fiction at its best is a vehicle of truth. Better to call it living an experiment, in the Millian sense: each of us, insofar as our lives become for us projects in pursuit of well-being, are experimentalists seeking the right personal fit between our beliefs, statements, actions, and experience. James was a life-long free will experimentalist, who found that believing in free will conduced to the best version of himself, made the most "rational" sense of his experience, made him a better philosopher and a better human being, made him happy in the fullest sense of the term. No lie.
==
Today is the birthday of French writer, historian, and philosopher François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (books by this author), born in Paris (1694). Voltaire’s works regularly skewered politics and religion, and he was prolific in nearly every literary way, writing plays, essays, novels, and poetry. He’s best known for his satire Candide (1759), a breezy, trenchant treatise on humanity and philosophy, which blended fiction with real historical events like the Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years War... His prolific output may have been the result of copious cups of caffeine: he’s said to have enjoyed nearly 40 cups of coffee every day, all while in bed, dictating his writing to secretaries. He decided to call himself “Voltaire” after a stint in the Bastille in 1718. It’s an anagram of AROVET LI, the Latinized spelling of his surname, and the first letters of the phrase le jeune, which means “the young”... Voltaire bought a large house in Geneva, where he set about cultivating a beautiful garden... This is where he also wrote Candide... On his deathbed, it is said that he murmured, “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition"... The agreement known as the Dayton Accords was reached on this date in 1995. The presidents of three rival Balkan states — Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia — met at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, to try to hammer out an agreement to end the war in Bosnia. WA
On this day in 1620 the Mayflower Compact was signed by Pilgrims at Cape Cod... 1877 Thomas Edison announces his "talking machine" invention (phonograph), the 1st machine to play and record sound... It's Stan Musial's birthday (1920-2013)... 1963 US President John F. Kennedy flies to Texas (assassinated the next day)
Orig. draft 11.__.15. 5:30/6:15, 66/75
No comments:
Post a Comment