Taking chances

LISTEN. The World Series may be over, but "radical evil gets its innings" still (wrote William James in the "Sick Soul" chapter of Varieties of Religious Experience). That's what's really at stake in the free will-determinism debate: whether we'll get ours, and have a shot at amelioration. 

William's philosophy was, among other things, the working-out of a strategy to prolong the game and not surrender to fated failure. Determinism as he understood it is the functional equivalent of a rainout that cancels the game and gives the win to the evil visitors. The home team doesn't even get another chance to score and maybe walk off with winged victory.

And, William's philosophy was a quest for real success in living, not the squalid, fake, morally-flabby cash-value form he diagnosed as our national disease in a 1906 letter to H.G.Wells ("the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success is our national disease").

Our text reveals young James as a Stoic, not quite yet a Stoic Pragmatist, buoying his despondent friend Tom Ward in 1866 (WJ was 24) with classic advice about seeking harmony with nature and accepting what could not be altered. Two years later he had more and better advice for his friend:

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 Kosmos. Letters, vol.1

 

That's still Stoicism, but it's also humanism and a hint of what he would soon come to regard as the essence of freedom. Control your attention, entertain the specific and more constructive thoughts you choose when you might have other lesser thoughts. Be free in your mind, attend to what you will. Don't surrender to incursive and debilitating thoughts and moods. Don't concede determinism, which for James meant a pre-determined "future with no ambiguous possibilities," a block universe fixed and unalterable "from eternity" as (according to some) an implacable consequence of Darwinian evolution. 

James was a Darwinian, declaring himself opposed to "the Christian scheme of vicarious salvation" and "wedded to a continuously evolutionary" view but not a believer in implacable consequences. He thought Darwin's bulldog Huxley went too far towards embracing causal determinism and abandoning free will. James wanted a pluralistic universe of alternative possibilities and meaningful chances. In Varieties  he would also write:

“No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference… between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.”

And that's the difference between sick souls and healthy minds: the difference between resignation and hope. James understood both attitudes, had lived them both alternately and repeatedly. His life was a long series of vacillations between those antipodal poles, but he always managed to swing back to the sunny side. He returned to life and restored its music, reversing the "falling dead of the delight" and restoring the spirits of the "melancholy metaphysician" again and again. We who were not blessed to be happily "once-born" (and thus delivered to lives of uninterrupted bliss) can relate to his swings and returns. Possibly, they can teach us something valuable about happiness.

One of our discussion questions in Happiness today: Does life lose zest and excitement, if things were foredoomed and settled long ago?

A student responds: 

"I would definitely say so. What’s the point of caring if nothing I do changes the outcome? Well, I suppose I’m just destined to care, then? Really, this whole debate becomes muddied with these types of infinite back-and-forths.

Now, I don’t think a radical determinism necessarily removes all excitement (Well, unless if it’s destined to). My point is that one can think of it as a book. The ending of the book doesn’t change as you read it. No, it remains the same at every twist and turn of the plot. However, the reader remains engaged and on the edge of their seat the entire time. So, could a predestined life not be just as excitable?"

Interesting analogy. When reading a story whose ending we don't want to "spoil" we pretend, page by page, that the outcome is still really unresolved and that what happens in the subsequent unfolding of the tale will "determine" what ultimately happens. Don't we? We pretend, in other words, that the story has not already been entirely writ. We try to block out any awareness of an AUTHOR, whose existence would imply a PLOT and a PLAN (or SCHEME) which the characters in the story have no power to influence. We want those characters' actions to contribute to the determination of events. That's what makes a story compelling to us. James would say that's what makes life compelling too. We're all authors here, in a pluralistic and unfated world. Turn the page.