Review: Laura J. Snyder on William James
“That adorable genius,” as the logician and philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead admiringly called William James, was one of the most important thinkers of his day, who not only helped develop a radically new philosophy but also brought the study of psychology to America.
James, whose working life straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is best known as a founder of the quintessentially American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, the view that, as he put it, “‘the true’ … is only what is expedient in our way of thinking.” He and his fellow pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, rejected the “pretense of finality in truth,” or objective truth, in favor of a more practical notion, one that captured the zeitgeist of a nation in its “Gilded Age,” a period of economic prosperity brought about by steel magnates, railway tycoons, and other industrialists who demanded results.
In her new book, William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician, Emma K. Sutton invites us to consider James’s corpus in the light of “the mundane machinations of his body.” He was “as capable of starting a metaphysical discussion of his own constipation as he was about [the philosopher Immanuel] Kant.” James, who earned a medical degree at Harvard at the urging of his father, never practiced medicine partly due to his ill-health. Emma Sutton reveals that he remained obsessed with his physical and mental ailments throughout his life, writing constant updates about them in letters to his friends and family as well as in personal journals. (Infirmity ran in the family. William’s brother Henry, the novelist, and his sister Alice, the well-known diarist, each suffered physical and psychological disorders. Another brother, Garth Wilkinson, died at thirty-eight as a result of damage to his kidney he had sustained two decades earlier while fighting with the Union Army during the Civil War. The youngest son, Robertson, who enlisted with Garth Wilkinson, struggled with an alcohol addiction after the war and for the remainder of his life.)
According to Sutton, his own ailments motivated William’s philosophical positions: his depression shaped his view of the relation between the mind and brain; his excruciating back pain caused him to reevaluate ethics, because he was often physically incapable of “being useful to others” as the precepts of utilitarian morality required; and his view of religion was fashioned intentionally to enable the infirm—including himself—to find meaning in their lives.
When his unrelenting physical pain caused James to fall into a deep depression, he was troubled—to the point of considering suicide—by the prevailing medical and philosophical view that all mental disorders have a physical origin in the brain, a position suggesting, in the days before neurosurgery and antidepressants, that such ailments were incurable. In a series of lectures, “The Mind and the Brain,” James rejected this deterministic stance, instead claiming that the mind is not solely governed by the brain; we have free will to think and feel apart from it. His shrugging off of determinism gave James hope that mental illnesses could be cured, that they could “be dealt with at first hand,” as he told his father.
“My first act of free will,” he wrote in his journal, “shall be to believe in free will.” The philosophy that gave the practical result he desperately sought was the one he held to be true. James’s pragmatism took root here.
His pragmatic philosophy bloomed during his lifelong search for good health, a quest that led him to seek out one European spa after another, to “galvanize” his back by directing the output of thirty “Bunsen” batteries—totaling sixty volts—to the base of his spine, and to follow his fellow physician Arthur Conan Doyle to the door of spiritualists, exponents of “automatic writing,” and faith healers. Since medical science offered him no relief, why not give “mystical” approaches a try? As he explained in his book Pragmatism, if one method of gaining knowledge opposes another, for instance if medical and mystical ideas of healing each claim success, both should both be put to the test. “On pragmatic purposes,” James wrote, “we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it.”
When put to the test, mystical methods also failed James. Since he could find no relief he pragmatically transformed the terms of his quest to one he—and other infirm people—could achieve, by changing the definition of “health” from an objective diagnosis to a subjective stance, the “stubborn metaphysical refusal to submit to misery,” as Sutton puts it.
In The Principles of Psychology James portrayed a “heroic mind” as one that, instead of being tormented by a universe that allows it to suffer, can come to accept the world as it is, agony and all, even “find a zest in it.” In his late masterwork The Varieties of Religious Experience, James claimed that the underlying moral and religious dimension of the universe warrants that everyone can live a life full of meaning, even if they cannot do good for others or have a “purpose” other than survival. James’s own physical and mental disorders—and his concern for fellow sufferers—led him to a produce a body of work that remains powerful today even for readers not studying philosophy.
By examining the “sick” William James, Sutton reveals an intriguing relation between pain and philosophical outlook in his work. Her analysis not only gives us new understanding of the “adorable genius”; it reminds us that philosophy itself often springs from lived experience, and enduring ideas can find their beginnings even in the most inhospitable human circumstances.
Laura J. Snyder is the author of Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and the Reinvention of Seeing and The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World. She is at work on a biography of Oliver Sacks.
Read Atul Gawande on Oliver Sacks
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