As a nascent philosopher (or, let’s be honest, an amateur) I find William James’ essay On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings to be somewhat difficult to parse. Paragraphs go by and there are quotes and anecdotes and detailed descriptions and footnotes and I think I’m getting the gist of what he means...maybe? But then James moves on to another point and I’m lost again. This is slightly funny considering that William James is not exactly the hardest philosopher to comprehend. Mid-1800s English, sure, but it’s no ancient text by any stretch of the imagination. My confusion is initially frustrating for me but also intriguing. Laid out plainly is this wall of text that I know contains fascinating insights waiting to be understood, I just don’t quite get it yet. However, through study, I can extract that knowledge a little bit at a time.
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| Picture of a young William James on a trip in Brazil. |
On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings is an essay mainly about how we unfairly prioritize our own experience over others, how our empathy has a blind spot for the inner lives of strangers we don’t see. People don’t become people until they’ve gone out of their way to change our experience. But one aspect of the work that I’m interested in that I think gets overlooked is James’ attempts to describe and suggest ways to deal with an intensely powerful feeling that can hardly be studied. A realization of the truly massive scale of human joy and suffering and every experience in between.
The dictionary of obscure sorrows calls it "occhiolism", and it is, in some regards, an idea only approachable through intense abstraction bordering on poetry. Clinical definition doesn’t really do justice to the grandness of the thought. James himself takes a crack at it a couple of different times, calling it, “this sense of limitless significance in natural things,” and, quoting William Wordsworth, “’authentic tidings of invisible things.’"
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| Definition of "occhiolism" from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. |
We live in an impossibly complex world, where every second there are millions in the deepest pit of despair and millions more having the best day of their life. Where exploitation, destruction, cruelty, and death brush alongside hope, kindness, selflessness, and genuine compassion. Amongst this chaos, are ourselves, individuals trying to live a ‘normal’ life.
I think where James can help those who may feel overwhelmed or even depressed at this idea is through re-framing this grandness not as sorrowful, but instead as exciting and joyful. In reference to a quote from his colleague Josiah Royce, he says:
“This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history. As Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. The passion of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one's later day.”
While James is more so referencing the inner lives of those around us that we don’t see, I enjoy his point that an aspect that makes that emotion so deep is a great love for our neighbors. He also, evoking Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, mentions the intensity that this revelation carries. It seems so significant that it can almost seem to pause the mundane and routine stresses of life.
James spends a substantial portion of his essay trying to describe ways to induce ‘occhiolistic’ feelings rather than avoid them. Indeed, James’ development of the philosophy of pragmatism is focused on centralizing our own and others’ experiences to reach conclusions relevant to everyday life. James believes in making sense of the chaos of the world through interpreting what it may mean to us and then sharing it with others. Joy emerges not from the absence of sorrow, but through our ability to dig through it to find those diamonds in the rough.
I think this is why (or a reason why) James advocates so strongly for spending time in nature and consciously considering our place. The world may be unimaginably vast and full of sadness, but that just means that we have more opportunities to connect with and improve the experiences of those around us.
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| Picture of mountains in North Carolina, perhaps like the ones William James frequented. |
Instead of becoming overwhelmed by despair, James argues that we should be excited for all the encounters life may bring. Facing the entire spectrum of emotion that existence offers and finding your own meaning within it is what makes life worth living.
I thought On a Certain Blindness was quite lucid myself. The large point: we're mostly bad at grasping the inner or subjective dimension of other people's lives, and should try harder to imagine how things are from their points of view... not always exclusively from our own. He writes like a man of the 19th century, but that's not so different (compared, say, to Shakespeare or Plato). I think you basically grasp the center of his vision, which is that we should be more humble about judging other lives. Take others' experience seriously, as we take our own.
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