William James on living life as if it mattered

There’s an anecdote about William James, visiting his brother Henry James, in Rye in Sussex. The village was something of a writers’ retreat — HG Wells, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, and Rebecca West would all spend time there. That weekend, GK Chesterton was staying in the inn next to Henry’s house. William, in his 60s, is overwhelmed by curiosity to catch a sight of this young writer, so he puts a ladder up to peer over the wall. His brother is appalled — ‘such things simply aren’t done here!’ he wails. That image captures something of the restless curiosity of William, peering over the wall to catch a glimpse of the other side.

I read the anecdote in a biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, by Robert D. Richardson. James has long been my favourite philosopher and psychologist. But after reading this biography, I love James for his personality and life-philosophy.

Despite a life-long tendency to depression, insomnia and bad nerves, James embraced a philosophy of optimism, hope, faith and energy. He insisted we are not helpless spectators in a meaningless universe. We are co-creators of reality, possessed of powers and energies we don’t fully grasp or use. And the universe, somehow, cares what we each of us do with our lives.

That is such a useful life-philosophy to keep in mind in one’s mid-40s, when one could easily ossify into a middle-aged grump.

William with younger brother Henry

He was born into a remarkable family. His father, Henry James Senior, was an eccentric religious visionary, who rejected institutional religion in favour of his own explorations. His brother Henry started out early on a very successful career as a novelist, while William was mercurial and unsettled. He trained as an artist, then as a doctor, then switched to studying physiology, before deciding to follow the new discipline of psychology.

For much of his 20s and early 30s, James was suicidally depressed. One reason was his life-philosophy — he had embraced a Darwinian, materialist view of reality in which our minds are the helpless slaves of mechanical determined processes. Nothing we do ultimately matters to the universe. We are ‘paralytic spectators’.

But he managed to recover his will-to-live thanks to two things.

First, he rejected materialist determinism, and chose to believe in free will. He declared: ‘My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.’ Why, he decided, would evolution bother to select something as energy-intensive as consciousness if it didn’t actually do anything?

He started to form his own theory of the function of consciousness. He decided that we have a ‘stream of consciousness’, which we choose to direct through our attention. Consciousness is selective — out of all the noisy information flooding at us, it selects what to bring into focus. This selection is guided by what we care about, what we think is important. Our attention then guides our emotions and our actions. Through our repeated choices and actions, we create habits, and out of our habits, we carve our worlds.

He wrote:

the world we feel and live in, will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, as the sculptor extracts his statue by simply rejecting the other portions of the stone. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same chaos!

The second thing that transformed his life was that he got married. He vacillated, prevaricated, and gave his fiancée all kinds of reasons why she probably shouldn’t marry an erratic depressive bachelor philosopher. But they ultimately both made a choice, a leap of faith, and decided by their choice and actions to create the kind of world they wanted to live in. Marriage and family life, plus his long career at Harvard, gave him a harbour from which the restless soul could go off on adventures.

He spent over a decade working on his Principles of Psychology¸ which became the most successful text book on the new discipline, and helped to define it. Among its interesting ideas are James’ response to the question ‘what is an emotion?’

The Stoic / CBT answer is that emotions are cognitive judgements. For example, we see someone frowning at us (A), we interpret it through an opinion like ‘she doesn’t like me’ (B), and that opinion leads to the physical feeling of emotion ( C). As Epictetus said ‘it’s not events, but our opinion about events, that cause us suffering’.

James turned this on its head. He suggested that emotions aren’t cognitive judgements, but rather somatic reactions. We see a bear (A), our body leaps into action, activating our fight or flight response ( C ) and then as we run away screaming our reason catches up and notices ‘I am frightened’ (B).

Which one is true? They both are. And they both give us useful ways of changing our emotions and healing emotional disturbance. Sometimes changing our beliefs can heal us — like James changing his beliefs about free will. And sometimes we can change our emotions and mental state through our body. James was fascinated by physical techniques for emotional healing, and wrote a book called The Gospel of Relaxation.

As he grew older, he became more and more interested in religion, spirituality, alternative healing, and psychical research. He was interested in how religious beliefs and techniques can be healing and life-enhancing. For example, he was fascinated by the 19th century Mind Cure and New Thought movement (which today we call Law of Attraction), which he saw sweeping across the US. It helped people to relax their body, expand their mind, and welcome in an uprush of faith and hope from…from where? It could be from their ‘subconscious’, or it could be from God.

Perhaps it doesn’t ultimately matter where the energy came from, the point was that it seemed to work: ‘The mind-cure movement spreads as it does, not by proclamation and assertion simply, but by palpable experiential results.’

This spurred James to define his pragmatic defence of religious and spiritual belief: act as if the universe cares about you, and your faith becomes a self-fulfilling, life-enhancing prophecy.

At times this sounds perilously close to The Secret or Think and Grow Rich, and James did give his intellectual support to the early New Thought movement (which, it should be said, was less crassly materialistic than later New Thought).

But there are important differences between James’ life-philosophy and The Secret. First, James emphasized the importance of actions. You can’t just sit in your room, think positive thoughts and expect success to magically #manifest. We co-create our reality by our thoughts and deeds. Second, he was no prophet of toxic positivity. He had a deep sense of the reality of evil, suffering and mental despair.

In his most famous book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, he approached religious experience like a zoologist, amassing accounts of many different experiences like a mystic menagerie, then trying to classify them into types.

One type he defines is ‘healthy-minded religion’, which is people like Walt Whitman or Napoleon Hill, who always seem upbeat and chipper, and never see anything negative in the world. This reminds me of The Sunday Assembly — my friend Sanderson Jones is the embodiment of this sort of ‘healthy-minded religion’.

Sanderson Jones at Sunday Assembly, the church for the non-religious. ‘Life is good, let’s celebrate it.’

Then there is the ‘sick soul’, who has the deep sense, ‘something is wrong with me, and with the universe’. James sums up this religious attitude in the words ‘Help! Help!’ Finally, when the sick soul hits rock bottom, they give up their effort and surrender to the mercy of some higher power. And then, mysteriously, ‘saving grace’ seems to flow. It may flow from God, or from the subconscious. We can’t tell, but we can assess the ‘fruits’, and say that, often, religious experiences make people healthier, more energized, more alive.

This theory helped to inspire Bill Wilson to set up Alcoholics Anonymous. Wilson was given a copy of Varieties in the days following his own saving religious experience, and it persuaded him that he could set up a programme for addicts which encouraged them to ‘surrender to a higher power’, even if they weren’t Christian or didn’t believe in God. It’s hard to say how many people have been helped by 12-step programmes — hundreds of millions?

James’ comparative method in Varieties — comparing individual accounts from several different religious traditions, and from people outside of any tradition, then pointing out the similarities — helped to inspire the ‘spiritual but not religious’ demographic, which often insists that all these different beliefs and experiences point to One Ultimate Reality.

James debating with his friend and fellow Harvard philosopher, Josiah Royce. Apparently James was snapped just as he exclaimed ‘damn the Absolute!’

James is more pluralist than perennialist. Every time you try to fit human experience (including mystical experience) into one system, something is left out. Even his system has its biases — he ignores all collective religious experiences. It is hard, then, for psychology or philosophy to arrive at settled conclusions. Do religious experiences point to One God, one core mystical experience? Maybe not. Why should reality be ‘One’? Maybe there are multiple gods, multiple universes (he coined the word ‘multiverse’). Maybe religious experiences are not connections to the Supreme Ruler but simply to intelligences higher than our own. He wrote:

I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling…So we are tangent to the wider life of things.

Of course…if that’s the case, then maybe we don’t ultimately matter to the universe. But then, a dog does matter to the house in which it lives!

Anyway, we should not be too quick to close our accounts on reality. We should be epistemically humble. James was always sympathetic to the exception, the misfit, the outsider, the under-dog. Perhaps that was why he didn’t support eugenics, when many of his friends did. He was suspicious of medical bullies who use pseudo-scientific terms like ‘degenerate’ as clubs to beat others down.

James, who suffered from depression and panic attacks, realized there is no firm line between the mad and the well, and this gave him sympathy for the unwell. In fact, he gave 20% of his income to charitable causes including a patient-led initiative to reform mental healthcare, led by his friend Clifford Beers. Beers had been sectioned and wrote an account of the abuse he experienced.

What did James finally believe? He had no final beliefs. Life is a process, a journey, a search, and he never closed his accounts or settled on one answer for long. He was always open to new influences and ideas, and wary of ossification into old-fogeyism (which he thought often began around the age of 25).

He was open, for example, to the extraordinary ideas of his friend Benjamin Blood, who wrote a book on nitrous oxide called The Anaesthetic Revelation, claiming he’d had genuine religious experiences through laughing gas. James tried the gas himself, and subsequently wrote his famous passage:

Our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different

These other states of consciousness — trance, reverie, dreams, ecstasy — have their adaptive functions too. James declared this while most psychologists and psychiatrists were insisting mystical experiences were proof you were mentally ill. He met Freud and Jung the year before he died, in 1909, and thought Freud a bit rigid in his thinking, but he found his young disciple more congenial, especially on the value of religious experience. Jung would, of course, go on to break from Freud over just this topic.

Perhaps we could define James’ ‘over-belief’ as a faith that there is some sort of ‘cosmic consciousness’ to which our minds are connected. Our conscious selves are like archipelago islands, with submerged connections to each other and to some higher benevolent power. Perhaps our souls survive death, we can’t be sure. But here on Earth, we can strive to give of our best, to live at the fullest pitch of our untapped energies and powers, and act as if what we do matters to the universe.

While reading this, I went for a walk in Hyde Park, and I remembered, suddenly, what it had felt like to be a Christian (I tried to be a Christian for about a year in 2013). I remembered how it felt to believe that there was a God, a benevolent higher power who cared about me and cared what I did with my life. It was incredibly energising. And in fact, some of my life-experiences have affirmed me in that belief. I need to remind myself of that, when I feel myself hardening into weariness and cynicism.

James’ philosophy is not perfect — it’s far too individualist and a bit too close to The Secret for comfort. But it says something very important, and energising, about trying to live to our full potential, as if what we did mattered to the universe (or God). We can’t know if it really does, for sure. But we can act in that faith.

Richardson clearly ended his biography adoring James. ‘The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!’, he writes. He tells us that, when James gave the last of his Varieties lectures, the audience at Edinburgh burst into a spontaneous rendition of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. And so say all of us.