CoPhi: William James Meets Rileytown

Monday, April 21, 2025

William James Meets Rileytown

A report on "Freedom and Life" from Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life by John Kaag.

(Taniya Bryant - 006)

When I was first logged into ChoPhil and assigned myself to present a chapter report on Sick Souls, Healthy Minds by John Kaag, I didn’t expect much from my section “Freedom and Life.” Let me paint the picture, it was two days before I had to present that I started to read the chapter. At first, the words were all jumbling up together, morphing into a written blob of utter rubbish, but somehow, I persevered. And I’m glad I did because twelve pages later I had a revelation. Why did this Harvard professor who died in 1910 seem vaguely familiar, and that’s when it hit me…Disney Channel. Like any other child growing up in the early 2010s, I was an avid watcher of Disney Channel. There were lots of shows I was a fan of: Good Luck Charlie, Hannah Montana, Jessie.

But as I read further through the chapter, a singular show emerged from the darkest cave of my mind. Girl Meets World. Airing from 2014 to 2017, Girl Meets World was a spin-off of the 90s sitcom Boy Meets World that followed Cory and Topanga Matthews’ (two central characters from the original) journey of raising their teenage daughter, Riley, who is navigating her life with her friends.

Now, you may be asking, “Taniya, what does a book about a philosopher from the 19th century have to do with a random show you watched when you were a kid?” Everything! Because there is one character in that show who has a whole episode centered around them finding happiness and questioning themselves. A whole episode that is so uncanny to the portion read about in “Freedom and Life” that John Kaag should sue the Disney company for plagiarism. I am talking about season two, episode seventeen of Girl Meets World, titled “Girl Meets Rileytown”, that focuses on the shows very own main character, Riley Matthews.

(left: Riley Matthews, right: William James)

Like William James who lived in an era of optimism, Riley Matthews' whole mindset is to see the good in the world. Think of the most happy-go-lucky person you know. Now, I want you to take that energy and multiply it ten times. That is Riley Matthews in a nutshell. But what happens when that way of thinking starts to feel like a fabrication? John Kaag suggests that to overcome the perceived horror of existence, a "sick soul" needs a profound transformation, or a "twice born" experience to find the ability to at least tolerate the act of living.

In the episode “Girl Meets Rileytown” Riley starts to resent her optimistic way of life that she calls Rileytown. She describes it as goofy, silly, and weird. As a negative. William James also viewed himself in a negative life believing that he was too sick, too weak, and too unstable for anyone to want to be with him. But then came Alice Gibbens. No matter how many arguments he tried to make to Alice about how useless of a husband he would be, but Alice would be would not back down. Alice reminds me of Maya Hart, Riley’s best friend. No matter how many times Riley yelled at her, screamed at her, and hit her in the face with ice cream, Maya did not back down because she knew that this was not the Riley she knew.

John Kaag comments this phenomenon by saying, “Maybe we are so fixated our own obsessions and drawbacks

that we fail to notice our neighbors, friends, and potential loved ones.

In the Spring of 1870, William James wrote a diary entry about his experience after reading French thinker Charles Renouviers’ second essay. Renouvier wrote that an individual’s will could break the logical continuity of a mechanical series and be the initial causes of another series of phenomena (basically Newton’s First Law of Motion but philosophized). Upon reading James asserted, “My first act of freewill is to believe in free will.”

Our own humiliation and expectations of ourselves cause us to forget just how in control we really are of ourselves. James was infatuated with Alice from the very beginning, and Riley was always proud to have that unique side of herself, yet they both denied themselves that freedom based on the notion that they didn’t deserve them. It was only when the two of them took a leap of faith that the two of them began to feel the stress of doubt peeling off.

For William James it was embracing his vulnerability and marrying Alice.

(Alice Gibbens James with their son Henry James III)

For Riley it was standing up to her off-screen bullying (sidenote: even though it’s a kid show, I’ve always interpreted that “bully” as a kid-friendly way of showing Riley’s struggle with depression).

Of course, the two of them would still occasionally have their ups and downs. Girl Meets World still had one more drama filled season left to air and William James has a whole book dedicated to his struggle of finding happiness throughout his year, but in the words of Cory Matthews, Riley’s father and history teacher, “Whatever it is that makes its way to you is just shadows of an intimidating word. Don’t live in the shadows.”

Questions

Do you agree with Williams James version of free will? Why or why not?
Going back to what Charles Renouvier wrote about in his essay, do you think that free will is more about the choices you make or how you respond to situations?
Of course William James lived in the 19^th century and Riley Matthews is a fictional character, but what advice would you give to someone who wants to discover their freedom in the present day? Are there freedoms that we have that we might be unaware of?

1 comment:

PhilApril 28, 2025 at 3:16 PM
Nice job connecting WJ to present-day pop/youth culture. He'd be pleased (and so would Kaag), I'm sure.

If you want to dig into WJ's relationship with Alice, check out their correspondence...

Vol.1 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/40307/pg40307-images.html
Vol.2 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/38091/pg38091-images.html

People, even married people, used to write long thoughtful letters to one another. In some ways it's easier to grasp the interior lives of 19th century people than it will be for future historians and biographers who'll have nothing more reflective or sophisticated to go on than emails.
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How the World Thinks (HWT) by Julian Baggini - because Western philosophy is not the whole story.
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen (FL) - because the contemporary crisis of American democracy is rooted in our history.
How to Think Like Socrates, by Donald J. Robertson - because he was, as the Monty Python song says, "a lovely little thinker..."
How to Think Like Marcus Aurelius, by Donald J. Robertson - because he was a wise stoic and emperor, as close to a Philosopher-King as we've had or are likely to get.
The Philosopher Queens: the lives and legacies of philosophy's unsung women, by Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting - because women have always philosophized too.
Starry Messenger: cosmic perspectives on civilization, by Neil deGrasse Tyson - because we are cosmopolitans, citizens of the cosmos.
Question Everything: A Stone Reader, eds. Catapano and Critchley - short popular essays by contemporary philosophers published in the New York Times, because philosophy is relevant to contemporary issues.
Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives by Robert Richardson - because we'll all eventually lose someone close.
Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James-companion anthology to Sick Souls Healthy Minds by John Kaag - because William James can save your life, or at least ameliorate it.
Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help by Kieran Setiya - because we'll all eventually be challenged by something hard.
Night Vision: seeing ourselves through dark moods, by Mariana Allesandri - because all is not sunshine and light.

JPO bio

The author of "William James's Springs of Delight: The Return to Life, (VU Press, 2001) " Phil Oliver specializes in the American philosophical tradition with supporting interests in applied ethics (particularly Bioethics and Environmental Ethics), Anglo-American literature, history, humanism, naturalism, science and exploration, peripatetic ("walking & talking") philosophy, baseball, cycling, swimming, the pursuit of happiness, and the perpetual dawn of day. One of his favorite MTSU courses is The Philosophy of Happiness. He is academic advisor for minors in American Culture (American Studies), and a founding board member and current President of the William James Society (wjsociety.org). You can follow him on Bluesky (@osopher.bsky.social), Substack (philoliver.substack.com) and on his blogsite Up@dawn (jposopher.blogspot.com) but of course, as Immanuel Kant and Monty Python's Brian Cohen agreed: You don't have to follow anybody. "Sapere aude," have the courage to think for yourself. But not BY yourself. Good philosophy collaborates and converses.

The View from Above

"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."—Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, quoted in "Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization" by Neil deGrasse Tyson https://a.co/by8i9Dw

Philosophy tutor & Writing Center

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'To learn to philosophise is to learn to die’

What is the balance between suffering and enjoyment in human existence? From the Buddha to Schopenhauer the answer is that the former far outweighs the latter. Reflection and experience together suggest that they have a point. Relationships can bring both suffering and its alleviations, but most relationships must anyway end in suffering – for in any pair of humans, one is likely to die first, or fall out of love and leave – and indeed, with the frailties of age and the decay brought by disease, with the loss of things valued (loved ones and old friends who pass away, capacities such as walking in the country one can no longer do) the typical human life ends in privations that, unless accepted with grace, courage and wisdom, are forms of suffering. To acquire the courage and wisdom needed to face them is to do philosophy, which is why the ancients said, ‘To learn to philosophise is to learn to die’. -A.C. Grayling

Gymnasiums of the Mind

"Followers of the Greek Aristotle were known as peripatetics because they passed their days strolling and mind-wrestling through the groves of the Academe. The Romans’ equally high opinion of walking was summed up pithily in the Latin proverb: “It is solved by walking.” Nearly every philosopher-poet worth his salt has voiced similar sentiments. Erasmus recommended a little walk before supper and “after supper do the same.” Thomas Hobbes had an inkwell built into his walking stick to more easily jot down his brainstorms during his rambles. Jean- Jacques Rousseau claimed he could only meditate when walking: “When I stop, I cease to think,” he said. “My mind only works with my legs.” Søren Kierkegaard believed he’d walked himself into his best thoughts. In his brief life Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles, or ten times the circumference of earth. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” wrote Thoreau, “unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from worldly engagements.” Thoreau’s landlord and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized walking as “gymnastics for the mind...” Christopher Orlet, Philosophy Now https://philosophynow.org/issues/44/The_Gymnasiums_of_the_Mind

Admirable profession

"...Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live..."

"I went to the woods because...

I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion... "

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there...

Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now... I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..."

Where he lived, and what he lived for

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business."

Vote!

"The 2024 election is going to be decided by people under 30, who have the most at stake, and they need to register to vote in order to make a difference. That’s the answer, simple democracy." -GK... Please visit TennVoterLookup if you would like to check your Tennessee registration status or check RockTheVote.org. TN residents can update or change their information on the TN Government's website. If you're currently registered in another county it may be easier for you to vote here. Register in Rutherford County: https://www.mtsu.edu/amerdem/register-to-vote.php

Thinking is a social activity

"We do not (on Justice Holmes's reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought—even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours." — The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand https://a.co/8qI6C9a

A proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

Planting seeds

One thing is certain: if our educational system does not honestly and explicitly promote the central tenet of science—that nothing is sacred—then we encourage myth and prejudice to endure. We need to equip our children with tools to avoid the mistakes of the past while constructing a better, and more sustainable, world for themselves and future generations. We won’t do that by dodging inevitable and important questions about facts and faith. Instead of punting on those questions, we owe it to the next generation to plant the seeds of doubt." Lawrence M. Krauss, "Teaching Doubt"-The New Yorker

Enlightened thoughts

“Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.”

“A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.”

“Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.”

“Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to.”
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

The thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality, because they were haunted by a historical memory of centuries of religious carnage: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion. They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion. It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient—who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish. Whether it is framed as the goal of providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number or as a categorical imperative to treat people as ends rather than means, it was the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish, they said, that called on our moral concern.”

“The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’—thereby heralding a new praxis of personal and social adjustment.”

“The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.”― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“We must cultivate our garden.”

“Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.” Voltaire

“Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company and reflection must finish him.”

“To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.” ― John Locke

“One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.”

“I pretend not to teach, but to inquire; and therefore cannot but confess here again,–that external and internal sensation are the only passages I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this DARK ROOM. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: which, would they but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.”

― John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”

“Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

“It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

Religion. Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object. In the first place, divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty & singularity of opinion... shake off all the fears & servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear... ...Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you... In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it... [Jefferson, Letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, advising him in matters of religion, 1787]”

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”― Albert Einstein

“There is strong shadow where there is much light.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen

“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”
― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

“Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.”
― William Blake

“To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place. One immediately sees how many previously puzzling facts are neatly explained by the new hypothesis. One could kick oneself for not having the idea earlier, it now seems so obvious. Yet before, everything was in a fog.”
― Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit

“I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
==

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American life is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

“If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

==
On the other hand, eastern enlightenment...

“Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.”
― Bodhidharma, The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma

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