William James was an American philosopher and psychologist. He was one of the founders of American pragmatism: which is the philosophy that held the truth should be judged by its practical consequences; it is a philosophy that is supposed to make your life more live able. He is also a founder of the psychology movement of functionalism. Is life worth living was an essay of William James given as a speech at Harvard in 1895. In this essay he is convincing his listener or readers that maybe life is in fact worth living. William James had suffered from depression and chronic illnesses and was suicidal. He felt as if his life had no meaning and that freewill was as illusion. He was able to leave this state of mind with the help of Charles Renouvier. He began to believe that freewill was perhaps not an illusion and that he could change his life by believing in free will.
Here is a pretty cool picture of William James :) |
He starts off his speech by saying that there are some people who are optimistic. They find happiness in the little things life has to offer. Some examples James listed of those with an optimistic temperament and view on life were the poet Walt Whitman and the philosopher John Jacque Rousseau. Unfortunately, this optimistic temperament cannot be made universal. If it were then there would be no reason for William to give reasons as to why life is worth living.
Then are those who are inclined to have a pessimistic view of life and happiness seems to be impossible in their lives. William James asks us to imagine reasoning with someone who is on such terms with life that their only comfort lies in knowing that they may end it when they please. What would you say to that person? What could you possibly say that will convince them to not take their own life? William offers solutions for those driven to suicide by reflection. He is aware that his advice would be unhelpful to the vast majority. "Most of you are devoted, for good or ill, to the reflective life. Many of you are students of philosophy and have already felt in your own persons the skepticism and unreality that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed. Constant questioning and little to no responsibility lead to pessimism and a suicidal view of life. Pessimism is essentially a religious disease. In the form of it to which you are most liable, it consists in nothing but a religious demand to which there comes no normal religious reply."
Two Paths to "Happiness"
The first path to recovery from the disease of pessimism is for those who come from a religious background. For those who believe in divinity of nature the first step to making life more bearable is to abandon religion. William James says that we were taught through religious books and sacred texts that god made heaven and earth and decided that they were good. "Yet, on more intimate acquaintance, the visible surfaces of heaven and earth refuse to be brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every phenomenon that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious effect upon the mind. Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom." How are you to come to terms with the fact that evil and good can reside in this world if there is supposed to be a human living god. William James answers that question that plagues many minds by telling us to rid ourselves of the idea that such god exists. By getting rid of this divine nature element, you are free to act as you please. You may even commit suicide without feeling religious guilt. Whatever turmoil you may have had before on why there was so much evil in the world if there was a human loving god is gone. You are now free to act. You are now able to face these issues and injustices on your own since you have taken out the element of a higher being. Life is now worth living now that you have a purpose, now that you are able to act as you wish, and now that you are living for yourself.
The second path to recovery is for the science minded people who only look at the hard facts in the material world. There are those who only believe in things that there is hard evidence to support. William James says that science is helping us to better understand the world around us, but it seems that there is so much that we do not know. “Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.” So, for those who are suicidal and do not believe in religion; the cure from pessimism William James says is to believe in religion. maybe this life is worth is it, and there will be a reward for us in the end. ".......What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic "thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence" is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind."
This view may be hard for the science minded people to believe. This is wishful thinking and there is no hard evidence to prove the existence of an unseen world. However, it is better to have this view than to have a nihilistic one.The mere action of believing despite not knowing of its truth can have the biggest effect on your life. So many of the greatest accomplishments in science have been on maybes, they have been on a whim that perhaps it could be true. So why are we to doubt that one’s life can be saved by a maybe. Maybe there is meaning to our lives and maybe we will be rewarded for sticking around for the battle."Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by your trust or mistrust,—both universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act." It is what YOU believe in that makes all the difference in your life. So why waste your time and force yourself to live a miserable life when there are far better perspectives out there.
"This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view; and we are determined to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
So I hope I've given you some answers on the question is life worth living. I'll leave you with one more; as some would joke, it depends on the liver.
This video sums up the essay "Is Life Worth Living" in a brief and easily digestible manner.
- Sabirin Elmi #11
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