In Praise of William James
I’ve devoted a significant chunk of this one life I have to reading, though I really don’t believe that books offer any greater chance of salvation than, say, windsurfing. Yet I can’t help feeling that I was saved, for a while, by William James.
About 10 years ago I was hurting; not from a broken heart so much as an exhausted one, having spent several of the previous years caring about people whose own hearts and minds were in states of distress. When I picked up “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” an edited version of 20 lectures that James delivered in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, I wasn’t expecting it to be a profound balm, but that’s what it was.
I immediately read more work by and about James. I began to verbally annotate everyday life to friends by referring to things he had done or said, with the same frequency with which I had once (no less annoyingly, I’m sure) called on scenes from “The Simpsons.” He was a Swiss Army knife of psychological and emotional insight.
It’s a cliché for people unswayed by religion to still believe in William James, to allow him access to their souls because of the way he sneaks in through their brains. A psychologist and philosopher (and oldest brother of the novelist Henry), James was not a follower of any church, and had little academic interest in institutional religion, but he was obsessively curious about the inner experiences of believers.
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“Varieties” in the book’s title is a bit misleading. James cataloged one type of experience: the personal; the intimate. The subtitle, “A Study in Human Nature,” is perhaps a more accurate reflection of its contents. James’s subject was not theories of heaven nor different types of congregations; it was each congregant at 3 a.m., staring at the ceiling, alone. His sensitivity was to the reasons we feel compelled to believe — among them our “conscience,” “helplessness” and “incompleteness” — and how belief might reward those reasons.
A substantial percentage of the book is given over to personal testimonies, sometimes quoted at length, taken from memoirs, pamphlets and other researchers’ work. These testimonies cover sudden conversion (“I only felt myself changed and believed myself another me”) and despair (“O God! What a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless between an evening and a morning”) and mysticism (“I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence”).
Four of the most memorable lectures in the book — two each on the subjects of “healthy-mindedness” and the “sick soul” — consider these two categories of people at length: those whose disposition is “organically weighted on the side of cheer” and those who are depressive or congenitally pessimistic, to be brief. These chapters are my personal D.S.M. I consult them to find beautifully articulated reasons to go easier on myself and other people, and to expect more from all of us at the same time; to feel the fullness and complexity of both our vulnerabilities and our capabilities.
Sick souls range from the easily irritated (think Larry David) to the self-loathing (Charlie Brown) to the pathologically melancholic (Tolstoy, who wrote: “Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?”). It feels safe to say that most of this book’s devoted fans — and it has many of them, as one learns — are sick souls. In creating a taxonomy of them and sympathetically describing their needs, James makes them feel, to use modern psychological parlance, seen.
To James, the very broad category of religious experience was inextricably human, and to attempt to argue people out of it would have struck him as similar to trying to argue someone out of right-handedness. “Taking creeds and faith-states together, as forming ‘religions,’ ” he wrote, “and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their ‘truth,’ we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind.”
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James compared trendier systems of religious thought (ideas that resemble what we call New Age) to the gospels because of “the adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind.” His pragmatism led him to not care whether it was natural constitution or willful decision, systems age-old or newfangled, that led someone to a life filled with meaning and consolation. He even freely admitted that “reducing inner discord is a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form.” Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote: “Some of the enchantment of ‘The Varieties’ comes from its being a kind of race with James running on both teams — here he is the cleverest skeptic and there the wildest man in a state of religious enthusiasm.”
In the space allotted here, I can’t begin to enumerate all of the book’s delights, the wisdom it conveys on every page. Not to mention the warmth of James’s voice. The introductions to most important works from more than a century ago serve as sense-makers, maps to consult before diving into the thicket. With James’s work, there is the opposite effect — no matter how illuminating the introduction, you can barely wait (and sometimes can’t, skipping ahead) to get to James. He is the rare historical figure who, across eras, can speak clearly for himself.
The British philosopher A. J. Ayer once wrote that James “was in frequent, if friendly, dispute” with certain peers. The notion of friendly dispute is increasingly alien to us, and this might be the thing that feels most poignantly lost about James’s temperament. Even as he quarreled with someone on the page, including himself, he exuded generosity. His voice is instructive but not didactic; opinionated but not at all polemical — in fact, anti-polemical. James originated a brand of American thinking that can feel on the verge of extinction, but it lives and thrives in the preserve of his books.
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