A world of maybes

 LISTEN. John Kaag's workshop on his latest book yesterday, and ours in CoPhi--Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life--was a delight. 

It was also the sort of marvel of the Internet Age we've already begun to take for granted: the author was in Massachusetts, the organizer in Potsdam Germany, and we participants were scattered around the globe... and yet here we all were in our little Zoom rectangles. James would be astonished and filled with "zest," that life-affirming vivacious quality John spoke of that makes life worth living. I must keep reminding myself, every time I log on for class, that we're doing something our ancestors would have regarded with awe and envy.

Envy, of an appreciative and not resentful sort, is part of what I feel about the books John has written that I wish I had. And gratitude that someone has.  These ideas really can help save lives, in the extreme instances, and ameliorate them in many others. How sad and self-indicting that some academics resent and criticize John's successful efforts, so much in the spirit of William James (like a good stroll) to reach a broad audience of non-academics. 

Sadder still, that this book didn't arrive in time to help one Steven Rose. He jumped to his death from atop William James Hall in February 2014. He was not the first to do so, the Harvard Crimson reported...

Interim chair of the Sociology Department Mary C. Waters wrote in an email to The Crimson Thursday night that she had not been notified of the incident by the University. Waters, whose office and department is housed within William James Hall, wrote later in the email that students and staff in her department knew that someone had fallen and that “we found it hard to go about our daily routines.”

So did John. "I did not go about my daily routine that day; instead I decided to write a book that James might have written for men and women like Steven Rose... We all spin off this mortal coil soon enough. The task is to find a way to live, truly live, in the interim. William James can help people find their way." 

They can, maybe, if they find humane and saving ideas like William James's in time ("maybes are the essence of the situation," he writes in "Is Life Worth Living?"). 

Thanks to scholars like John, maybe they will. "These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact." 

Jennifer Michael Hecht writes in the spirit of William James, too, when she implores us all to Stay.

“None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience. History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at friends, family, humanity, at the surprises life brings — the endless possibilities that living offers — and to persevere. There is love and insight to live for, bright moments to cherish, and even the possibility of happiness, and the chance of helping someone else through his or her own troubles. Know that people, through history and today, understand how much courage it takes to stay. Bear witness to the night side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun. If we meditate on the record of human wisdom we may find there reason enough to persist and find our way back to happiness. The first step is to consider the arguments and evidence and choose to stay. After that, anything may happen. First, choose to stay.” Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It by Jennifer Michael Hecht

"The endless possibilities that living offers..." are what William James's philosophy is all about. His last published words say it all, in a rhetorical question every next breath answers: "There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it?" 

That's another really vital question for us all, prompted by one Benjamin Paul Blood--one of the many eccentric autodidacts James always made a point of engaging with. His was truly a democracy of "radically empirical" ideas... which is why I resist John's suggestion that (at least as Harvard Yankee intellectuals go) James was an elite patrician. He thought every voice and every perspective has its place in the CoPhilosophical world. "The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'."