Audacious title, but if a life can be saved by philosophical intervention I think James is as plausible a lifesaver as any old dead philosopher. He intervened successfully on his own behalf, in one of the great shifts of vision in the annals of self-recovery.
Young William James felt "pulled in too many directions" and worried that we might be nothing but cogs in the machine of natural necessity. He wanted to find a single direction he could commit to, and a resolute will with which to do it.
His age, like ours, was distinctively obsessed with the quest for meaning and beset by anxiety, depression, and fear. He found a new way, Renouvier's, to think about things, decided to try it, and the rest is the historical founding myth of pragmatism I like to purvey.
In his late 20s he "just about touched bottom." He'd lost his dearest friend, possibly the love of his life. He couldn't commit to anything. He couldn't envision his own future. He needed something solid and reliable to hold onto, something to embolden his will and get him up and doing.
On the last day of April, 1870, he recorded a new diary entry: " I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. [He'd been having a lot of those!] I finished the first part of Renouvier's 2nd Essay and saw no reason why his definition of free will-- the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts-- need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present-- until next year-- that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."
And: "Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative... needful for the acquisition of habits."
We are what we repeatedly do, as Artistotle had long since noted. Funny how we have to keep rediscovering the most basic things, we humans. And sad how we don't learn the hardest lessons by attending to the hard-earned wisdom of those who've gone before us.
On Feb. 6, 2014 John Kaag, a young post-doc scholar at Harvard who'd been languishing in his own sea of despond, happened on the scene of a horrific tragedy. A young man named Steven Rose, about the age James had been when he confided his own crisis in that diary entry, leapt to his death from the observation deck of William James Hall.
I've been there, in 2010, for the William James Society's centenary celebration of WJ's life and thought. The view is bracing. In a glance you take in Harvard, James's home at Irving Street, and everything else for miles around. It's vivifying, if you're in a mind to receive an infusion of liveliness. Tragically, Mr. Rose was not.
He may have been one of those given to "too much questioning and too little active responsibility," resulting in deep pessimism and a hopeless view of life. Who knows?
We do know, though, that identifying and fighting actual problems and challenges to lives worth living is itself a source of "cheerfulness" and self-strengthening resolve.
And we know there's reason to suspect far more in heaven and earth than is typically dreamt in our normal waking consciousness. The dog on my lap hasn't a clue about such things, and yet we share a life-world. Of what wonders may we be similarly clueless?
James doesn't know, nor do we. The point is to remain in touch with the "deepest thing in our nature," which deals with possibilities rather than finished facts. That "dumb region of the heart" is smarter than we know.
So we'll discuss that feeling of being "pulled in too many directions" and why, for those who feel that way, philosophy can't just be a "detached intellectual exercise." Philosophical arguments (such as free will vs. determinism) must "vivify" and point away from darkness and stasis, to matter at all.
Can belief that life is worth living become self-fulfilling? James said it could. But as Tim McGraw's dad Tug's old rallying slogan said, you gotta believe. You gotta believe.
"Is life worth living?" Maybe. But that implies maybe not. Can we, should we ever say that? Ask your doctor, the cartoon on my door advises, if a longer life is right for you. But no: ask yourself.
Ask yourself what your hypothetical future self, after you've made an irreversibly-terminal decision, would wish to tell you. In a word, I think it would be: 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.” ― Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It
Staying alive is not just a matter of personal fortitude, it's the challenge of civilization. That's why a ministry for the future can't come too soon. In today's Environmental Ethics assignment, that so-far-fictional institution's leader confronts a direct threat both to her person and to her charge. Are we doing all we can to keep the human project alive?
If life is worth living, the threat of mass extinction human civilization has brought upon so many life-forms (not least our own) is a mass abomination. Kim Stanley Robinson's "utopian hope [is] "to dodge a mass extinction event" and (like Wendell Berry, remember him?) reinvigorate our love for this place, this planet where we must make our stand. Maybe it's not yet too late to learn that living "at adequacy" is healthier, happier, and more sustainable than the perpetual pursuit of endless growth. That's worth staying and trying for. Just maybe.
No comments:
Post a Comment