Is there a greater use of life than to spend it on something that will outlast it? Surely that depends on what the lasting legacy turns out to be. James spent himself defending experience, sometimes "against philosophy" but always against resignation and despair.
The problem I have set myself is a hard one: first, to defend (against all the prejudices of my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone of the world s religious life I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immedi ately and privately felt, as against high and noble general views of our destiny and the world s meaning; and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theo ries), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind s most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt it is my religious act. Letters, April 1900
He may in youth have "dallied" with the thought of suicide but his mature philosophy counsels vigorously against it. [Happy birthday to another who's waged that battle, Jennifer Michael Hecht.] In this light, his "maybe" in response to the question of life's worth is less equivocation than honest acknowledgement that it all depends, indeed, on the liver. Or more specifically on the liver's choices, and on the chances the liver is prepared to brook.
He wants us to feel that dependency, and to respond with appropriately energetic responses. If we couldn't feel we'd be lost. We'd like nothing, dislike nothing, value nothing. Life would be insipid, and insignificant.
He wants us to feel that dependency, and to respond with appropriately energetic responses. If we couldn't feel we'd be lost. We'd like nothing, dislike nothing, value nothing. Life would be insipid, and insignificant.
Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is 'importance' in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.Zest, tingle, excitement, joy: by any other name, that's the prize that makes life worth living. Emerson crossing his common, Wordsworth tramping his mountains and lakes, Whitman on the ferry and omnibus all had it. They defied their "highly educated" class status for it.
B.P. Blood may not have had it, but he had a mystics's sense of ineffable reality. James thought he also had a pluralist's sense of variable reality. He somehow had James's ear, in any case, and gave him his "last word... “There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.–Farewell!” *
The first bit of that last word is surely right, "there is no [final] conclusion." But there's plenty of advice to be given, beginning with WJ's own: "Hands off" others ways of pursuing happiness, trust your spontaneity, allow yourself to feel, be receptive to joy... and as he says in "What Makes a Life Significant," persevere on behalf of your "unhabitual ideals."
The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,— the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man 2 s or woman 's pains.—And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.
Also, take a cue from your best canine friend. "With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension." But he loves you anyway.
If only we could learn to be so accepting of one another.
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* Postscript. It occurs to me that the real "last words" for James, and for all philosophers, should be those he wrote in a letter in 1903 reproaching himself for thinking he (or we) could ever really "settle the Universe's hash... as if formulas about the Universe could ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were not eternally the really real!"
I think a good example of defending experience against philosophy, while using the medium of philosophy itself to defend experience is like using venom to make an anti venom. Sure you are using venom but only after its been transmuted.
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