"The Sentiment of Rationality" etc.

Following up yesterday's discussion in class...

WHAT is the task which philosophers set them- selves to perform ; and why do they philosophize at all? Almost every one will immediately reply: They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which every one by nature carries about with him under his hat. But suppose this rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognize it for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance ? The only answer can be that he will recognize its rationality as he recognizes everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him. , When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality. What, then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is one of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure. But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a positive character. Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality is constituted merely by the absence 1 This essay as far as page 75 consists of extracts from an article printed in Mind for July, 1879. Thereafter it is a reprint of an address to the Harvard Philosophical Club, delivered in 1880, and published in the Princeton Review, July, 1882. Digitized by Google i 64 Essays in Popular Philosophy. of any feeling of irrationality? I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view. All feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological speculations, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simple discharge of nerve currents, but on their discharge under arrest, impediment, or resistance. Just as we feel no particular pleasure when we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when the respiratory motions are prevented, — so any unobstructed tendency to action discharges itself without the production of much /cogitative accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent ( course of thought awakens but little feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought s meets with difficulties, we experience distress. It is only when the distress is upon us that we can be said [to strive, to crave, or to aspire. When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such times, "I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness, — this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it, — is what I call the. Sentiment of Rationality... (continues)

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"The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mump- ing mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble that occasioned it and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others and never show it tolerance."

This does not sound like the attitude of someone temperamentally disposed by nature to tolerate or extend sympathy or compassion toward public sadness in himself or others, and it is clearly not in support of the fixed-temper theory. James arrived at his hard and heroic bootstrapping view of happiness only by passing through and besting the worst assaults of his own nature's "pining, puling, mumping" tendencies: he conquered happiness. When he says that life feels like a fight, this is no small part of his meaning. James was an emotional man who did not avoid confrontations with the melancholy side of his nature. Not uncommonly for a thoughtful and sensitive person of his time, he recognized tendencies in himself toward what then was called "neurasthenia" (what we are more likely to diagnose as depression). An early diary entry is frequently cited to show that his attempt to reconcile this rogue element of his personality was pivotally important in the subsequent development of his thought:

"Today I about touched bottom, and perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes, or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it?"

The "moral business" is the possibility of self- determination through the application of will. At this time (1870; he was 28) James genuinely doubted this possibility, in the absence of a firm conviction of the will's metaphysical autonomy. James's apparent capacity to be laid low by the perceived want of appropriate philosophical arguments, to the extent that this was an actual and objective cause of his discontent, is surprising in retrospect. In later life he almost always conveyed the impression of a man whose interest in ratiocination was dictated by professional considerations but whose personal temper was gloriously untouched by any putative gap between, on the one hand, what he could not help believing and, on the other, "proof" (or conclusive philosophical reasoning). Indeed, it is almost a tenet of James's mature thought that proof is not appropriately sought in those large questions (like that of free will and determinism, in his own case) which serve as fundamental orienting markers of life itself. He approvingly insisted that "the whole man is at work when we form our philosophical opinions," not just the self-styled dispassion of some insouciant philosophizing faculty. What is lacking is not an argument, then, but a passional decision and commitment to a belief neither proved nor refuted but whose ultimate vindication could well hang in the balance between risk and caution, action and hesitation. This anticipates "Will to Believe" (1897), but the thinking that guided James's notoriously misunderstood position in that essay can already be detected in the much earlier "crisis" texts. The youthful James credits the French philosopher Renouvier with providing a persuasive argument for free will, but he insists that his favorable response is (in the spirit of the issue) a free act. He does not bend to the argument (as to a "coercive demonstration"); he chooses to accept it because it satisfies his "moral demand" for a hospitable (if not comfortable) universe in which the will is not superfluous:

"I see no reason why his definition of Free Will - "the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts" - need be the definition of an illusion. . . . My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. . . . I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. . . . I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self governing resistance of the ego to the world."

The "resistance" in which James lodges so much confidence as the ground of his life-affirming "posit" is not itself a posit, or hypothesis; it functions instead as a perceptual datum that the free will theory (in contrast with determinism) is supposed to render coherent. The basic experience of agency that he says is implicit in all conscious activity includes the feeling of "resistances which [the ego] overcomes or succumbs to." The feeling of resistance is a datum, but the resolution to believe in resistance as something more than mere feeling, as evidence of our capacity to engage the world in deliberate interaction, and willfully to initiate events that depend upon our exertions, is a hypothesis. James displays an early, instinctual anchorage in the felt experience of living, and this lighted the way out of suicidal despair. He did not feel himself in any way cut off from the world but, rather, was at a loss for an appropriate response to the feeling of pressure and the summons to personal responsibility and vital engagement it posed. The fear that he might not possess a strength commensurate with the world's undeniable push and pull was finally overmatched by a greater fear: that his hesitancy would render him entirely impotent, ineffectual, and truly cut off from active participation in life. This was the nightmare vision of an all too imaginable version of himself, thinly veiled, which he related years later in Varieties of Religious Experience: @EXT:Suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum . . . moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. . . . It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since.25 @TEXT:This experience must indeed have been revelatory for James. I believe it convinced him that the human situation is fundamentally precarious, that the line between robust sanity and pitiful invalidism is thin, and that the only way to conquer these feelings of helpless vulnerability is by taking life strivingly, aggressively, with combative high spirits and alert senses, and a gambler's sense of risk. The melancholy side of James, and his "moral" resistance to it (which is not to be sharply distinguished from his decision to "posit life in the self-governing resistance of the ego" to the world's felt demands), has much to do with the substance and tenor of his philosophy. His nightmare vision of physical invalidism became the model for a kind of philosophical invalidism which, in one form or another, was his constant polemical bete noire. "Intellectualism" and "rationalism" were not merely names for philosophical alternatives he found uncongenial, but theoretical embodiments of isolation and disconnectedness, of exile from the world. James was the most good humored of intellectual adversaries, always prepared to brook any philosophical dispute with personal charm and friendliness. All the more striking, then, is his scathing attack on "Bertie Russell trying to excogitate what true knowledge means, in the absence of any concrete universe surrounding the knower and the known. Ass!"26 Nothing appalled James like the casual willingness of some philosophers to dismiss or do without a concrete, surrounding universe of real events and real resistances. This is philosophizing that diminishes and eviscerates, and in so doing it repels the "entire man" who "will take nothing as an equivalent for life but the fullness of living itself." He may retain visiting rights with philosophy, but "he will never carry the philosophic yoke upon his shoulders, and when tired of the gray monotony of her problems and insipid spaciousness of her results, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic richness of the concrete world..."

..."I fully believe in the legitimacy of taking moral holidays," James wrote, meaning those marvelous respites from care and concern and struggle, typically coincident with the aggressively pursued leisure we call "vacation" (and the English call "holiday"). A moral holiday, then, is a vacating, an emptying, a withdrawal from the daily grind and the daily hand wringing, when we tell ourselves that it is truly morally acceptable just to relax, not only our bodies but especially our consciences, with regard to the world's (and our own) panoply of worrisome and regrettable facts; to accept ourselves and the world for awhile, despite our flaws and its corruptions and depredations; and so, to renew ourselves for return to the fray. "Moral" may seem misapplied in description of a deliberate period of neglect toward issues of the greatest moral gravity, but James denies any contradiction here. Our world is the scene of every kind of event, from joyous and ennobling to perverse and profane. In such a world, moral holidays are not merely tonic; they are probably essential to our sanity and, viewed in evolutionary terms, to our survival. Most of us find at least a week or two out of the year for this kind of renewal, but we allow ourselves to believe that time for renewal year-round is unthinkable. Apparently, we prefer to collapse into our vacations than to take them more nearly as needed, tonically and often. In a still-timely 1873 essay James contrasted our busy-ness with the artful approach to life practiced elsewhere, inviting us to consider "the shopkeeper in Germany, who for five or six months of the year spends a good part of every Sunday in the open air, sitting with his family for hours under green trees over coffee or beer and Pumpernickel, and who breaks into Achs and Wunderschons all the week as he recalls it." His "contentment in the fine weather, and the leaves, and the air, and himself as a part of it all" is a springboard of renewal that propels him cheerfully back to work, back, as we say, to "reality." But he knows that his recreation is at least as real as his work (which would suffer as surely as he would without his springboard). Perhaps the shopkeeper knows something we do not, or have forgotten. James may be a melioristic optimist, but an optimist he surely is. Yet, he remains wary, even of optimism that he credits with avoiding the snares of self-inflicted metaphysical necessity. Among his ideological betes noires in the camp of the self-proclaimed optimists are some whom he calls "healthy minded" (including the self-anointed "mind cure" practitioners and others whose vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in some ways anticipated the so-called New Age movement and "spiritual healers" of our own time). We shall see, however, that James's opposition to "healthy mindedness" and the "mind curists" was by no means entire or unequivocal. In fact, he typically defends the unorthodoxy of beliefs and practices that prescind from the genuinely motivated subjectivity of individuals, not because they are unorthodox - although given James's penchant for collecting eccentric characters, it sometimes seems that way - but because they reflect a genuine piece of experience laid hold of and tenaciously held onto, against all merely theoretical objections. James always presents himself as the friend of experience and of those who seek to possess and honor their own experience, the foe of abstract and exalted sacred cows - especially philosophy's sacred cows. And so we will have to be very cautious about how we characterize the nature and intent of James's opposition to "healthy-minded optimism."

"Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word "yes" forever. But for others (indeed for most ), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable. Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some "no! No!" must be mixed in to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power."

This is why James had such ambivalent reactions, and some revulsion, toward the Chautauqua movement of "spiritual uplift," which achieved its zenith during his lifetime. He despised its insipidity, its mediocrity, and its overall atmosphere of preening priggishness. He was put off by the walls of psychological sanctimony it erected to keep any risk or danger at bay. The author of "The Moral Equivalent of War" was not inspired by this model of life as never ending adult education in a scoured, antiseptic, and safe environment that to someone of his temperament was assuredly toxic to the spirit. "Healthy mindedness" in essence is the belief that we ought not concede the independent and real existence of negativity in any form, lest we in some way incur the handicap of negative thinking and thereby predispose ourselves to failure. Agreeing substantially with what he calls the "ascetic" attitude toward extreme optimism, James insists on our clear-eyed admission that the world sometimes disappoints, wounds, or destroys the lives it harbors. He means not simply that lives are, in fact, damaged and destroyed as a matter of course and, as it were, as a "normal" feature of human reality. This is a self-evident and even banal observation (to recall Hannah Arendt's insightful limning of the ubiquity and plain-faced commonness of evil). Nor does he intend to argue that bad things happen for reasons beyond our ken, but that they happen for no "reason" at all, in any ultimately rational sense. It is sophistry or worse to contrive explanations for a dimension of experience none of us can fathom... William James's "Springs of Delight": The Return to Life

And see "The Feeling of Effort" ... James-Lange Theory of Emotion...