Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: Chapter 3

 Psychology and the Healthy Mind

Chapter three of Sick, Souls, Healthy Minds begins in 1879, Williams James is in a good spot, as mentioned in the book he had “conquered” determinism for now, and had begun settling down in life. Everything seemed to be perfect, he had a perfect wife, he had more money and fame than he could need. But the problem with money and fame is that it's one of those things you can never have enough of. James also had an incessant need to be extraordinary, and to be seen as that by the masses, so he set out to conquer one of philosophies toughest questions “How does life give rise to human consciousness?” along with the question “ what is the relationship between being and thinking?”. To answer such complex questions James goes on to talk about adult life and the habits that come with it, and what that does to the human psyche. He says that habits are necessary parts of a human life,  but he makes it a point to differentiate between good and bad habits. His definition of good and bad habits is a little contradictory, he expresses the need for the boring and mundane habits, but says they can be limiting, but he also says that sometimes you have to break out of a habit, and use your free will to be truly happy. John Kaag goes into detail about different habits, and how most of the time habits are learned throughout a person's life, especially in early years, whether it be from parents or teachers. One of the examples Kaag gave that made me laugh, simply because it's so true, the example he gave was how students, on the first day of class assigned themselves a seat, and stuck with it, even though they were given no instruction to do so. We all came into class the first day and we chose a seat, we were not assigned one. Yet, every class after that first day we usually sit in the exact same seats, and I'm sure we all do the exact same thing in our other classes as well. Kaag also mentioned how when someone does take “our” seat it throws us off for a second. So that's just an example of a habit that we all share . James admits the importance of habit but also recognises its flaws. 

“ [Habit] alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the minor in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us to all fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.” (SSHM pg. 77)
As I mentioned briefly before, habits; however (according to James) can and should sometimes be broken, and that breaking these habits is kind of a way to put our free will to good use. Or more accurately how you can keep habit from controlling you and your life, by first recognizing them, and then resisting them from time to time. For example let's say you have a set time that you go to bed every night and wake up at the same time every morning, but one night you have to opportunity to go do something that would be fun. It might be better to break that habit just for a night, to use your free will and enrich your life in a way. Habit isn't always a prison, the bedtime analogy represents a very good habit, but no matter how good the habit, it can be a restriction in a sense. James also goes on to talk about how everyone is born with a reckless side, it's just that we have to utilize that recklessness from time to time, so as to not remain stagnant. We can't just have habits that are boring, we also need habits that excite us. The way he explained this confused me a little, just because he referred to an exciting habit as a habit, and that seemed to defeat the purpose. The way I view habits is a system that prevents us from falling lower than the progress we've made in life. But every once and a while when you want to raise your game or add onto your life, you need to spice up some preexisting habit or add in some new ones, along with using your free will, and do something you may never do again, just for fun. That way you don't ever just stay exactly where you are, you improve and you grow. James also touches briefly on the importance of exercise and how it can lead to a heartier existence, which I agree with. Same way the outdoors and reading and board games can lead to a heartier existence. However, I'm not completely against the idea that video games and TV can't enrich a person's life, they can still bring joy, but just like everything in our life we need regulation. James believes in balance, so while he believes in being positive he's also a realist, he believes that the boring habits are important, and that they are often needed, but he believes in balance and the importance of also using your free will every once and a while. There's a thing people say on social media and stuff, like “I remembered I had free will so I….” and just do things that make them happy (Most of the time). And I thought that was a pretty cool connection to James’s philosophy.

Good question, Tyler

NYTimes: I'm a Professor. A.I. Has Changed My Classroom, but Not for the Worse.

At the end of a class in mid-September, as everyone was gathering their things, a student named Tyler approached me. "Can we talk sometime about how we can ask the questions on our own?" he said. "We always have you to ask the questions and set up how we're going to discuss and analyze, but I'd like to know how to do that for myself, for when we don't have someone else to do it for us."

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/magazine/ai-higher-education-students-teachers.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Happy Thanksgiving

 Try to enjoy it.

Three Roads Back — A Summary and Reflection

 Three Roads Back — A Summary and Reflection 

Three Roads Back by Robert D. Richardson is a book that explores the tragedies in the lives of American philosophers Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James, and how each responded to these losses in turn. The book also explores how these losses influenced their respective philosophies. The book is broken into three sections, each dedicated to its own philosopher's story, and throughout this blog post, I will summarize each section and give my personal thoughts on each “road back”. 

 

Building His Own World (Emerson) 

“A man must do the work with the faculties he has now, but that faculty is the accumulation of past days. That which you have done long ago, helps you now. What you have learned and done is safe and fruitful. Work and learn in evil days, in barren days, in days of debt and depression and calamity. Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows.” 

—Emerson 

Part one of the book opens with the death of young Emerson's wife in February of 1831, and immediately, we are plunged into the depths of sorrow that Emerson currently inhabits. Emerson is described as “Somber and preoccupied with his loss,” by Richardson and is portrayed to us, the reader, as a man lost in grief. (Richardson pg. 3) Richardson then depicts Emerson's crisis of identity, which leads him to retire from being a Unitarian minister in Boston, MA, and travel across Europe. While In France and England, Emerson was transformed from a broken man cast adrift in the dregs of grief to a man reborn with a new perspective and outlook on life. One of his greatest and most prevalent revelations is regeneration through nature, or in more familiar terms, resilience. Richardson outlines how the Emerson who left Boston in the winter of 1832 was not the same Emerson who returned in the Fall of 1833, due to his revelations in Europe that would later become a philosophy known as Transcendentalism. 

After reading this chapter several times, I continue to be in awe of Emerson's remarkable resilience. Not to spoil other parts of the book, but this is not the last tragedy that Emerson experiences before the decade is over, and even still, he is able to manage his grief through his transcendentalist ideas. I was first introduced to this philosophy briefly through the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer in the Summer of 2022. At the time, I had found the philosophy to be a more amiable version of the painfully popular Stoicism that had taken root in society at the time. Revisiting transcendentalism through the lens of this book has both affirmed my former ideas and opened my eyes to new facets I had not previously considered. Emerson had not dealt with the loss of his young wife by closing himself off to the world and steeling himself against his emotions, as the pseudo-Stoicism that plagues pop culture might suggest, but by opening himself up to the world, mind, body, and soul. In return, he learned through nature that everything came to its natural end and that the loss of something did not destroy its meaning. 

 Jardin Des Plantes, Paris 

Where Emerson comes to his "regeneration through nature" conclusion

The Cup My Father Gives Me (Thoreau) 

"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," 

—Thoreau 

Part two of the book introduces us to a young Henry David Thoreau, who at this point in his life had experienced moderate success being a Harvard graduate and running a grammar school with his older brother John in Concord, MA. As quickly as we are introduced to Thoreau and his world, we are told of how it collapses around the death of his older brother and closest companion, John Thoreau Jr. We are told how John Jr suffers a sudden and traumatic death that is caused by tetanus. Compounding this tragedy, Thoreau’s mentor’s (Emerson) young son had contracted scarlet fever and died less than a month later. In a matter of a month, Thoreau had endured more loss than he had even thought possible, leaving him pensive and displaced in his own life. Richardson quotes Thoreau's own journal in which he writes, “I feel like a feather floating in the atmosphere, on every side is depth unfathomable.” (Richardson p. 37) 

In response to this calamity in his life, Thoreau turned inward and, in a sense, withdrew from his normal life into nature. At this point in his life, Thoreau is noted as switching from a talented young thinker to a more serious, introspective thinker who valued the idea of simplicity and nature. By the end of the chapter, we find Thoreau not absolved of his pain but rather coexisting with it. Through John and Waldo Jr’s death, Thoreau is able to recognize the importance of the simplicity in life that nature itself shows us. Richardson shows us Thoreau’s transformation through a final quote near the end of the chapter, where Thoreau asserts, “We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features... We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.” (Richardson p.62) 

I was personally introduced to Thoreau’s work in high school through multiple excerpts from his most famous piece, Walden, which outlines the two years he spent in a cabin that he built himself. I always found Thoreau an interesting character because of his willingness to put his ideas to the test, even if it required extreme measures. After I had actually read through Walden in its entirety, I had procured an image in my head of Thoreau being an old sage who had gained his wisdom through years and years of study and lived experience, but after reading Three Roads Back, I now know that Thoreau was only 27 when he journaled Walden. While Thoreau's age doesn’t really affect my evaluation of his philosophical work, I do find it rather incredible that he was able to contribute so heavily to philosophy and especially the first American philosophical movement of Transcendentalism. 

 

Thoreau's Cabin at Walden Pond

The Death of Minny Temple (James) 

“If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.” 

—William James 

The third and final chapter is dedicated to the tragedy that propelled William James into the titan-like role William James played in the world of Philosophy and Psychology. Or at least that's what we as the reader would expect - you see, the beginning of the chapter talks about the death of a bright young woman named Minny Temple, who just so happened to be James’s second cousin, who died of tuberculosis, and instead of focusing on how this loss affects James Richardson instead spend the first half of the chapter talking about James’s brother Henry. Richardson then reveals to us, the reader, that James had been suffering a sort of disillusionment with life in his mid-to-late twenties. We find that instead of having to lose significantly to learn, James had to suffer, in a mental sense, greatly to find himself in the right mindset to learn and grow. Richardson describes how James, at his lowest, makes the decision to act, and James himself states in his journal, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” (Richardson p. 88) 

I must admit that out of all three parts of this book, this was my personal favorite. Having never heard of William James, I was expecting him to be outshone by two philosophers that I had already known and already held in high esteem. Much to my pleasant surprise, however, I find myself understanding and relating more to James. That being said, I do not value Thoreau and Emerson any less after reading into James, but rather I feel that William James was able to take lessons he learned from Thoreau/Emerson (they all knew each other), and multiple other sources, and create new ideas with them. I also feel that I align with James’s ideas of self-worth, constructive habits, and how (simply put) we are the captains of our own lives. 

Mount Chocorua in the fall

 

The Philosopher Queens: Iris Marion Young

Iris Marion Young

Her Life

Iris Young was born on January 2, 1949, in New York City. Shortly after her birth Her father was seeking to establish the family in a middle-class environment for their family, so he moved them to suburban New Jersey. New Jersey offered stability, schools, and the promise of middle-class advancement. However, Iris’s mother disliked suburban life and resisted typical standards expected of middle-class women in the 1950s. Her father died suddenly in the 1950s, there’s no specific information about how he passed or about his life. Iris’s mother was accused of child neglect by the Authorities, causing Iris and her siblings to spend time in foster care. This experience exposed her to structural injustice and shaped her later sensitivity to oppression and exclusion. By the late 1950s- Iris returned to live with her mother. These experiences in her formative years reinforced how social structures punish women and families and became a central theme in her philosophy.
As a teen Iris aspired to be a poet but was drawn to philosophy through her awareness of social inequality. In 1966 she attended Queens College (City University of New York), to earn a B.A. in Philosophy (1970). Then she attended Pennsylvania State University, earning an M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1974) in Philosophy. After graduation she taught Philosophy courses for a year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Then she moved to Miami, Ohio where she taught Philosophy at Miami University for several years. 
During this time, she began to articulate a feminist perspective that challenged traditional political theory, and developed her early work on phenomenology and embodiment, including her famous essay “Throwing Like a Girl” which analyzed how women’s bodily movements are socially constrained.  Phenomenology is a philosophical movement during the 20^th century that studies reality subjectively experienced. It seeks to investigate the universal features of consciousness. While avoiding assumptions about the external world. Aiming to describe phenomena (described as things as they appear in Emanuel Kant’s theory of Transcendental idealism) as they appear to an individual, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experience. Embodiment is the relationship between the body and experience, challenging the traditional mind-body dualism proposed by Rene Descartes, that separates mental processes from physical existence. It emphasizes that consciousness, perception, thought, and self-identity are not abstract or purely mental phenomena, but are deeply rooted in the physical, lived experience of having a body.
Then in 1980s she transitioned to the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, where she taught Political Theory for nine years. Before joining the University of Chicago in 2000 as Professor of Political Science, affiliated with the Center for Gender studies and Human Rights Program.

The core of her Philosophy:

1. Justice beyond distribution 

In Justice and the politics of difference, Young said, "Justice encompasses issues of rights and power, and these are neither distributed in a straightforward way nor can injustices related to them be redressed simply through redistribution of resources." Young argues that justice must go beyond material distribution, but should include institutional structures, decision-making power, and recognition of differences.

2. Five Face of Oppression

In the 2nd chapter of Justice and the Politics of Difference, Five Faces of Oppression, Young states "Oppression is structural. It is embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following those rules.” Young identifies five systemic forms of oppression: 

1. Exploitation (economic injustice)- Young described it as “The transfer of the results of the labor of one social group to benefit another.” This reveals how capitalism can systematically disadvantage certain groups. She argues that justice requires restructuring economic systems, not just redistributing income. An example is workers in sweatshops producing goods for wealthy consumers, while receiving low wages and no benefits.
2. Marginalization (exclusion from participation)- describes as the expelling “a whole category of people … from useful participation in social life.” This shows how justice must include access to work, education, and public life- not just legal rights. An example is Elderly people, disabled individuals, or racial minorities being excluded from employment or civic life. Young advocated for inclusive hiring, accessible education, and representation in decision-making spaces.
3. Powerlessness (lack of autonomy)- Young stated that “the powerless are situated so that they must take orders and rarely have the right to give them.” This highlights how justice requires empowerment, not just protection. An example is Low-level workers who follow orders without input, or communities with no political voice.
4. Cultural Imperialism (dominance of one group’s norms)- “involves the universalization of a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm.” This shows that justice must include cultural recognition and self-expression. An example is The media portraying white, male, middle-class values as “neutral,” while exoticizing other cultures.
5. Violence (systematic threat or harm)- Young states “members of some groups live with knowledge that they must fear random unprovoked attacks on their person or property.” This demonstrates that she believed justice must include safety and protection from targeted harm.  She advocated from anti-violence polices, community protection, and trauma-informed care. An example is hate crimes, domestic abuse, or police brutality.

3. Embodiment and gender  

In "Throwing like a girl" and other essays Young states “Women’s bodies thus function as a constraint on women’s agency… the body is the site at once of biological and normative constraints on women’s freedom.” Young shows that gender is not just identity, it’s embodied and shaped by cultural expectations. She bridges feminist activism and philosophy, revealing how oppression is lived through the body and not just through laws or institutions.

4. Political responsibility

In Responsibility for Justice, Young argues "Responsibility is not primarily about blame, but about our collective obligations to transform unjust structures." She distinguishes guilt from responsibility, arguing that individuals and institutions share an obligation to change unjust systems. This book develops Young’s theory of a “social connection” model of responsibility, focusing on how individuals are implicated in structural injustices without being personally to blame.

Dive deeper:

Iris Young's Obituary: Key Thinker: Iris Marion Young 

Explore a review of "Dancing with Iris: The Philosophy of Iris Marion Young" by Ann Ferguson, and Mechthild Nagel

Link to buy "Dancing with Iris: The Philosophy of Iris Marion Young" and includes abstract Dancing with Iris: The Philosophy of Iris Marion Young

Preview of Iris Marion Young: Gender, Justice, and the politics of difference

  

Discussion Questions:

1.      Do you believe that oppression is “embodied”?

2.     Which, if any, of the Five Face of Oppression do you see most in your community or in current events?

3.      Can justice exist without recognition of difference? (Can we create justice if we can’t identify the injustice?)

4.      Can individuals be responsible for injustices they did not directly cause?