He was tone-deaf, got motion sickness easily, suffered from depression and was suicidal for long intervals, had chronic back pain, recurring digestive ailments, and problems with vision. He told people he had “soul-sickness.”
He got an M.D. at Harvard but never practiced medicine; instead, he spent his life in academia at Harvard. There he taught physiology, then anatomy, and then, for many years, psychology and philosophy. Over the years he lectured to many future famous Americans, including Teddy Roosevelt, W.E.B. DuBois, and Gertrude Stein, a favorite of his. On an in-class exam he gave, Gertrude wrote, “Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but I do not feel a bit like writing an examination paper on philosophy today.” He wrote back, “Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly. I often feel like that myself.”
He was an enormously prolific writer. Scholar John McDermott put together a bibliography of William James’ writings that was 47 pages long. His most well-known work is probably the 1,200-page Principles of Psychology, published in 1890 after more than a decade of research and writing. While working on the book he did first-person research on the psychology of mystical experience, and to aid in this he sometimes used narcotics. He said that he could only really understand the German idealist philosopher Hegel when he was under the influence of laughing gas.
He wrote a lot about the psychology of pragmatism. He argued that a person’s beliefs were true if they were useful to that person [no, not quite] and he said, “Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
He also wrote, “Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
He hung out with Freud, Jung, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell, and many other intellectuals. He once said, “Wherever you are, it is your own friends who make your world” and he said, “Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”
Happy 180th birthday, WJ. Happy 65th, SCR.
The dance of common sense is more supple than most commentators, in and out of academia, trying to grasp what James meant when he said truth is what it is better for us to believe. But I've come to think it best to overlook the flat-footedness of some neo-pragmatists' glibness on this topic. There's far more depth and import in WJ's philosophy than is dreamt in most interpretations of his delineation of what it means for a philosophical view to "work" and successfully guide our experience.
Some of my favorite WJ quotes:
"Keep your health, your splendid health. It's worth all the truths in the firmament."--Letter to Schiller
"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf." --Will to Believe
"The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights." Pragmatism III
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