"Delightful pessimism"

He found delight in earthquakes too.

"Perry recalled William bringing home a volume of Schopenhauer and reading “amusing specimens of his delightful pessimism.” It is perfectly characteristic of the volatile William James that he later came to loathe Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which he took as equivalent to determinism, and that he came rather delightedly to abuse the author of The World as Will and Idea. Schopenhauer’s pessimism, James wrote twenty-five years later, is “that of a dog who would rather see the world ten times worse than it is, than lose his chance of barking at it.”

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson :

Sound stoic advice

Especially "8. Own the morning"…

The Jamesian take on life

WJ wrote candidly to his dying sister of the tissue-thin line between life and death. She was grateful, and funny, in reply. They both valued honesty about experience above all. With such mutual transparency they found delight even  in mortality's final chapter. They would emphatically "have it so."

"...the scorching directness, the emotional candor, the acceptance and validation of the worst as well as the best of life, the sheer intensity toward life in all its forms, the avidity for experience, the honesty of mind and perfect pitch of heart that has become, in this case more than most, transpersonal but family-fixed. This is the Jamesian take on life."

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson: 

Three Roads Back

Richardson's posthumous survey of how hdt, rwe, and WJ rebounded from the worst darkness humans can know is another afterthought for my address that probably should've been in the foreground. Better late than never. Footnotes are a good backstop.

"In dark times, from the personal to the global, one way I have found to fight back against what is going wrong is to re-examine the lives and works of figures from the past. I have spent many decades with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James. All faced disaster, loss, and defeat, and their examples of resilience count among their lasting contributions to modern life.

Emerson taught his readers self-reliance, which he understood to mean self-trust, not self-sufficiency. Thoreau taught his readers to look to Nature—to the green world—rather than to political party, country, family, or religion for guidance on how to live.

William James taught us to look to actual human experience, case by case, rather than to dogma or theory, and showed us how truth is not an abstract or absolute quality, but a process. Experience—testing—either validates or invalidates our assumptions. Further, James says, attention and belief are the same thing. What you give your attention to is the key to what you believe. Whoever or whatever commands your attention also controls what you believe…"

— Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives by Robert D. Richardson
https://a.co/5dphVYG

The delight drug

 Less than two weeks 'til my James Society Prez Address in DC, where I'm supposed to find "delight in dark times"-a topic more daunting now than I could have imagined back in September when I proposed it. Looking for one last ray to lead us from the cave, I turn again to the always-reliably-illuminating Bob Richardson.

WJ famously decried the inadequacy of words to capture the brilliant immediacy of experience. “What an awful trade that of professor is,” he complained at term’s end in 1892, “paid to talk talk talk!… It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words.”

But it's finally his fluently original way with them that consistently delivers delight. The gaslighting authoritarian apologists and bullies who've presently hijacked our institutions can't take that away. Kipling was right, at least about this: words are our most potent drug. Better even than nitrous.

"He was the first to use “hegelism,” “time-line,” and “pluralism.” He had a gift for phrases that stick in the mind: “the bitch-goddess success,” “stream of consciousness,” “one great blooming, buzzing confusion,” “the moral equivalent of war,” “healthy-minded,” and “live option.” He used examples, anecdotes, jokes, anything to impart narrative dash and energy to the page. And there are many places where, standing on the arid plain of experimental data, James turns to face the reader, reaching outward through his own experience to us, in prose that can stand comparison to anyone’s."

--William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson

We should not underrate the power of words, the right words in the right measure at the right time, to delight the shadowed soul and lead it back to daylight. WJ might have been the last to say so, but among the best at showing it.

==

It was my pleasure to exchange a few good words with Richardson in Chocorua NH in August 2010 (at about the 26-minute mark here), at the best academic gathering I’ve ever been privileged to participate in-“In the Footsteps of William James” (kudos to then-prez Paul Croce for bringing it to fruition). It was split between Chocorua and Harvard, marking the centenary observation of James’s exit from material existence in August 1910. The sufficiency of matter to sustain all life’s purposes happened to be the topic of our brief exchange. 

Troubled, but resolved

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.” John Stuart Mill

Audio recording (& links) on substack...

My default response to Trump and Trumpism, these past years, has been to wake up every morning and try to pretend they don't exist, at least until after I've had an opportunity to read, reflect on, and write about something that actually ennobles and does not degrade life.

I like to greet the dawn in a spirit of renewal and hopefulness, two of the countless words clearly not in the MAGA vocabulary. I like to check in with those guys in the U.K. who go with their dogs to the ocean and "drink in" the glory of the start of another day on earth. 

Then I like to go for a dogwalk.

Only then do I ever want to allow myself be sullied with news of the latest desecrating disgrace from DC. 

It's getting harder and harder to keep my mornings clean.

The shameful scene in the Oval Office yesterday contaminated this morning. A despicable pair of spineless Russian assets, somehow occupying the highest elected positions in the land, ambushed and tried to bully the courageous leader of a beleaguered nation committed to the democratic values our country once symbolized. On waking, I couldn't get the ugly scene of betrayal out of my head.

I'm going to work to reclaim my mornings. Dogwalks will be my lifeline. 

But I'm also going to look for more ways to discomfit the imposters who've confiscated the executive branch of our government, as well as their enablers in the congress and the judiciary. I'm going to use my modest platform and voice, including my classroom. I'm not going to be one of those the next generation will pity for remaining silent in the face of calumny and treason.

I'm going to trouble myself to use my mind and voice and pen. I will not look on and do nothing. 

But right now we're going for a walk.