Aidin Card- Freedom And Life

Freedom And Life

SSHM Chapter 2

    In SSHM chapter 2 we pick up with William James at a time when many intellectuals felt disillusioned with their purpose in life, James included. There was this idea that their generation was one of enlightenment and optimism when in reality the opposite was more likely true. They had lost faith in the optimism that they were supposed to embody and found themselves in a state referred to as anhedonia; a state in which previously enjoyable things end up making you feel melancholy or disgust. It makes feeling happy an almost impossible feeling. Their minds focus on the negative and they overlook the nice things in life because they realize that everything is already predetermined.

    It is in this mindset that we see William James, struggling to find purpose to his life and his genius. He came to realize that in order to escape this vicious state of being was to reach rock bottom and be born again. John Kaag relates this rebirth out of despair as a second wind, something that you can only reach after you have gone through the hardest parts of the journey. The story of John Muir stuck on the cliff face and believing that he was for sure going to fall to his death and somehow being saved as he said by an angel it points to how when you're in the darkest places you can find things you didn't know you had. Kaag says, "when you survive dying, living doesn't seem so bad," and relates this to suicidal ideation. Many people who have survived suicide attempts say that as soon as they committed to the act they regretted it and instinctively fight to live.

    James found his second wind with an essay written by Charles Renouvier about the meaning of free will and Renouvier claimed that the ability to sustain an idea or thought in your mind when other ideas try to force their way to the surface is having free will. James took this idea and tried it and said, "my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will," and it saved his life. After this epiphany he determined to himself he was going to work as an instructor and over 4 decades he worked at Harvard in the fields of anatomy, psychology, and philosophy. This doesn't mean that everything was sunshine and rainbows for William James because as John Kaag put it, "just because your are born again doesn't mean you don't feel like dying again," and James being the nervous wreck that he was needed a break so he took it and went to Europe for a year and it worked.

    James' belief in free will could be seen as not logically backed because you can't just believe something because you think it's correct, right. James would argue that if a belief in something you can't prove does good in your life then you should believe it because practically speaking it is better that it is than isn't. Going out on a limb to believe something is important because as fallible beings we can't know everything and we most likely never will, so instead of stewing in our not knowing it is important that we do not become frozen by indecision.

    That indecision is what had William James is such a chokehold he was nervous about what would happen if he chose wrong, but because he decided to believe in free will and commit to things he was not sure about he became one of the fathers of psychology and has a building named after him at Harvard.

   James came to the conclusion that by believing in something you change your entire being your thoughts are never 100 percent rational because humans have an embodied mind capable of emotion.

James would once again go out on a limb by falling in love with his future wife Alice Gibbens. John Kaag related falling in love and the belief in free will as very similar saying, "Both are radical, life-altering, working hypotheses verified or disproved by experience," he continued, " both involve the type of belief that one must assent to in an initial act of blind faith." It was a perfect match as James who had been more focused with individual liberties when referencing freedom; Alice was more of a proponent of political change to provide more liberty to those walked over by the powers that be.

    His path to marriage was not so easy though because James did not really like himself. He thought that he was unmarriable and would self-sabotage himself to prove that his marriage was freely chosen. This thought of our own inadequacy is rampant in today's world as sick souls all across the world are filled with self-loathing and the belief that they are not good enough for someone to love them. It leads to inaction whether it be out of not wanting to be rejected or a fixation on one self or a number of other things that would keep people lonely.

    James talked about this idea as a way to show the idea behind his practical philosophy. Not everybody cares if free will is real or not but a large majority of people care about whether or not the person their interested in likes them or not. James isn't giving pointers to people in dark places , but instead explaining that beliefs aren't fully formed ideas that suddenly appear or exist inside of you. They are grown over time and experience to be unique to you.

    Kaag comes to the realization that people are required to make judgements on how to act before certainty is found and that this can lead to failure but it is a required part of life. Our lives are not things we passively observe but things we act in and upon, so do not be passive in your life because it is when chances do work out for the better it means so much more.