THRILLED by the @TheTLS Review of SICK SOULS, HEALTHY MINDS (@PrincetonUPress) today! "Unfailingly honest...lucid...absorbing." So honored by these words of reviewer Andrew Stark. https://t.co/X3gJMDIgPX— John Kaag (@JohnKaag) September 10, 2020
One day during her years at Radcliffe in the 1890s, Gertrude Stein sat down to write a philosophy exam. She just wasn’t in the mood, though, so instead of answering its questions she penned a short note to her professor, William James: “Dear Professor James, I am so sorry, but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today”. In due course Stein received a response from James: “Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself”. He gave her an excellent grade.
When William James was born, in 1842, his father had begun moving the family away from Calvinism, with its belief that life’s moments are mere instruments to serve an end wholly external to humankind, God’s inscrutable will. When James died, in 1910, he had come to embrace the idea that life’s moments are instead to be savoured for their intrinsic worth, and that a person should rely ultimately on their own inner ends to endow them with meaning. That may explain why he rewarded Stein for her philosophical insight: she took her own feelings in the moment as the paramount value.
James’s quest – for meaning that is internally derived and intrinsic, not externally given and instrumental – took decades of writing to work out. And, as John Kaag shows in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James can save your life, it was rife with doubt. Replacing the rock of God with the frail reed of oneself as a source of meaning, and accepting each ephemeral moment as a font of value instead of relying on a grander scheme, is an anxiety-making exercise. Yet once traditional religion had ceased to be an option for him, James was writing, Kaag says, to “save his own life”... (continues)
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And speaking of Wm James...
Enjoyed this exchange with the other Wm James, @billjamesonline. I admire them both. pic.twitter.com/6M5S4ucG6U— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 10, 2020
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