Philosophy

The official William James website houses a host of information about the man, including offering electronic versions of many of his written works, which are now part of the public domain. I suggest that as a better resource than my own words. Even so, I'd like to say just a bit about the man.

William James, along with John Dewey, was one of the true founding figures of Pragmatism, the philosophic system that holds, in brief, that beliefs of any kind are only as good as the real-world consequences to which they lead. In other words, if my belief in X causes me to do Y but not Z, then belief X is worth Y and not Z. He then goes on to expound the way in which truth is determined by this criterion. Namely, "true" ideas are those that play well with real-world experience (remember, though, that thinking a thought is also an experience). As such, truth is nothing more nor less than the happy union of an idea with one's continued experience.

The main problem that this causes with other schools of thought is that a lot of people like to think of truth as something inherent in the world, that a concept is true or false in and of itself -- in other words, without any relation to other things. 2 plus 2 is 4. End of story. It doesn't matter what experience I have of 2's and 4's.

James, though, (and pragmatists in general) understood truth differently. Truth is defined as certain relations that exist between a concept and the thing that it purports to conceptualize. And so 2 + 2 = 4. I could not conceive of it any other way. (I told you to remember that thinking a thought was an experience as well.) There's plenty more I could say, but I did not mean for this to be a systematic exposition of just this.

Even aside from pragmatism and its many many wooing factors, William James proved himself to be a unique and intense spirit. His style of writing is of the highest quality available in the field, for example. He writes of highly abstract things in such a way as to make them accessible and -- dare I say? -- entertaining. I seem to recall reading somewhere that "Henry James wrote novels as though they were philosophical treatises, and William James wrote philosophical treatises as though they were novels." (Incidentally, Henry James the novelist was William's brother.) I regret that I cannot remember where I got that from. You might think of William as the Kurt Vonnegut of the philosophical world. Deceptively easy to read.

William James bases his entire style on lectures. In fact, all of his philosophical works bear that hallmark; they are divided into lectures that he had, in all cases that come to mind, presented at some point to a live audience. Oh, to have been there! ;-) As such, some of his books are disjointed to a certain extent. Sort of like a book of short stories, but with just a bit more coherence than what that usually implies. The Will to Believe, which I have acknowledged as the book that: saved my life, gave me a soul, and made me fall in love with William, is a case in point. Of all that I have read of the man, I cannot think of a more disjoint book. The title essay seems to have been the most popular, doing a sort of dissection of concepts and options and the like and defending a person's right to believe "at one's own risk" of being wrong, which was radical and is still important. But I was more interested in the introduction and "The Sentiment of Rationality," the latter being the second lecture/essay of the book. The interesting thing about the intro is where he gives what he thinks to be his purpose in writing the book -- or, rather, the reason that he thinks it's important, which is ... goodness I wish I had the book here with me ... which is that normal people, yes, they lack reason more than faith. That is, they would be a lot better off if they did less emoting and more thorough thinking.

A small subset of the world, however, usually considered "very smart" people have just the opposite deficiency. Namely, that we (yes, me too, which is why it impacted me) think too much and don't emote enough. We have too much reason and not enough faith. And I promise that I'll upload a quote just as soon as I can get my mitts on it.

"The Sentiment of Rationality," on the other hand, emphasizes an overarching principle, which is that one of the great secrets to happiness and satisfaction in the world is to see behind it a rational something. For Judeo-Christians, this is God. For Buddhists, it is bliss or nothingness or something. Everybody who has ever been or will ever be happy with the world has made some decision as to what the world is about, at its deepest and most important level. And, although they do not understand it completely, they do somewhat, and they are capable of and excited to learn as much more as they possibly can. Hence "sentiment." The world itself is not just this way or that. It is a flux of experience, and you need to come to grips with that if you expect to maintain sanity and any level of happiness. That coming to grips is the waxing of your sentiment of rationality.

William James proclaimed himself a philosopher, psychologist, pragmatist, and radical empiricist. I would add theologian, although he did not claim to be such. Theologian in its most denotative sense: one who studies religion. Hence The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is my next Jamesian destination.

William James The official William James website houses a host of information about the man, including offering electronic versions of many of his written works, which are now part of the public domain. I suggest that as a better resource than my own words. Even so, I'd like to say just a bit about the man. William James, along with John Dewey, was one of the true founding figures of Pragmatism, the philosophic system that holds, in brief, that beliefs of any kind are only as good as the real-world consequences to which they lead. In other words, if my belief in X causes me to do Y but not Z, then belief X is worth Y and not Z. He then goes on to expound the way in which truth is determined by this criterion. Namely, "true" ideas are those that play well with real-world experience (remember, though, that thinking a thought is also an experience). As such, truth is nothing more nor less than the happy union of an idea with one's continued experience. The main problem that this causes with other schools of thought is that a lot of people like to think of truth as something inherent in the world, that a concept is true or false in and of itself -- in other words, without any relation to other things. 2 plus 2 is 4. End of story. It doesn't matter what experience I have of 2's and 4's. James, though, (and pragmatists in general) understood truth differently. Truth is defined as certain relations that exist between a concept and the thing that it purports to conceptualize. And so 2 + 2 = 4. I could not conceive of it any other way. (I told you to remember that thinking a thought was an experience as well.) There's plenty more I could say, but I did not mean for this to be a systematic exposition of just this. Even aside from pragmatism and its many many wooing factors, William James proved himself to be a unique and intense spirit. His style of writing is of the highest quality available in the field, for example. He writes of highly abstract things in such a way as to make them accessible and -- dare I say? -- entertaining. I seem to recall reading somewhere that "Henry James wrote novels as though they were philosophical treatises, and William James wrote philosophical treatises as though they were novels." (Incidentally, Henry James the novelist was William's brother.) I regret that I cannot remember where I got that from. You might think of William as the Kurt Vonnegut of the philosophical world. Deceptively easy to read. William James bases his entire style on lectures. In fact, all of his philosophical works bear that hallmark; they are divided into lectures that he had, in all cases that come to mind, presented at some point to a live audience. Oh, to have been there! ;-) As such, some of his books are disjointed to a certain extent. Sort of like a book of short stories, but with just a bit more coherence than what that usually implies. The Will to Believe, which I have acknowledged as the book that: saved my life, gave me a soul, and made me fall in love with William, is a case in point. Of all that I have read of the man, I cannot think of a more disjoint book. The title essay seems to have been the most popular, doing a sort of dissection of concepts and options and the like and defending a person's right to believe "at one's own risk" of being wrong, which was radical and is still important. But I was more interested in the introduction and "The Sentiment of Rationality," the latter being the second lecture/essay of the book. The interesting thing about the intro is where he gives what he thinks to be his purpose in writing the book -- or, rather, the reason that he thinks it's important, which is ... goodness I wish I had the book here with me ... which is that normal people, yes, they lack reason more than faith. That is, they would be a lot better off if they did less emoting and more thorough thinking. A small subset of the world, however, usually considered "very smart" people have just the opposite deficiency. Namely, that we (yes, me too, which is why it impacted me) think too much and don't emote enough. We have too much reason and not enough faith. And I promise that I'll upload a quote just as soon as I can get my mitts on it. "The Sentiment of Rationality," on the other hand, emphasizes an overarching principle, which is that one of the great secrets to happiness and satisfaction in the world is to see behind it a rational something. For Judeo-Christians, this is God. For Buddhists, it is bliss or nothingness or something. Everybody who has ever been or will ever be happy with the world has made some decision as to what the world is about, at its deepest and most important level. And, although they do not understand it completely, they do somewhat, and they are capable of and excited to learn as much more as they possibly can. Hence "sentiment." The world itself is not just this way or that. It is a flux of experience, and you need to come to grips with that if you expect to maintain sanity and any level of happiness. That coming to grips is the waxing of your sentiment of rationality. William James proclaimed himself a philosopher, psychologist, pragmatist, and radical empiricist. I would add theologian, although he did not claim to be such. Theologian in its most denotative sense: one who studies religion. Hence The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is my next Jamesian destination.
Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche is another person who has a firm grasp on my ear and mind. Stylistically, in some ways, I find him quite similar to William. For example, his books are apt to seem disjointed as well. He is deceptively fun to read (but not as deceptively in the sense that his importance stays somewhat closer to the surface). He also sometimes referred to himself as a psychologist. Nietzsche is a difficult character to pigeonhole, mainly due to his writing style, which is not just disjoint within a book, but within the chapters of a book ... and within the subsections of that chapter. The best description I have ever been able to give of him, the best summing-up of a man who was very many things, was in Spanish: "era un pensador revolucionario." He was a revolutionary thinker. Most famous for "God is dead," perhaps, his recognition as an original came about in the traditional way: via thorough vilification. As he was dying and a raving lunatic, his books finally started selling in significant numbers. As far as I'm concerned, his best book was The Genealogy of Morality (the translator presented a convincing argument for translating it as "Morality" instead of "Morals"; but I do not have the book to give him/her credit). My professor herself was surprised, but somehow I managed to squeeze a positive message out of it. I really wish I could pull this one quote that I'm thinking of, but whatever. Basically, the message that I got was, "Just because there is unhappiness in the world and there are miserable people, doesn't mean that you have to make yourself miserable as well." My friend Rebekah once showed me a short story that I failed to understand until she explained it to me. The setting was a sort of afterlife-place where the only souls there were of people who had killed themselves out of empathy for other people. I took this to mean that they had committed suicide because they were simply unable to confront the horrors that some other people had to live through. This is not exactly where I was in my life. But it was certainly close. A quote from The Genealogy rings on in my head to this day, which I will paraphrase, "But what greater triumph could misery have than that all the happy people in the world who have no reason to be sad should say to themselves, 'Oh, I simply cannot be happy. There is too much misery in the world.'" Nietzsche's second-most-known saying (after "God is dead") is übermensch, literally "overman", but usually translated as "superman." The superman steps outside of slave moralities (esp. Christianity), which define themselves in relation to their suffering (as opposed to master moralities, which define themselves in terms of their status/possessions) to become a revolutionary and a leader of men away from the slave morality to a more life-affirming one. This life-affirming aspect is something that runs through a lot of Nietzsche's thought. From the übermensch to the master/slave morality dichotomy to the will to power, it seems that through-and-through Nietzsche is taken aback by the passivity with which people often accept misery and pain because that's the way they perceive that the world must be. So what did Nietzsche teach me, briefly? That the world is very much what you make of it. It can be beautiful and pleasant or horrid and painful. The choice is very much up to the individual, and there is simply so much better reason to recognize inherent awesomeness in the world. That is, more or less, what he did for me.
Aristotle Aristotle, student of Plato, student of Socrates. Three men right in an educational row who, it is currently considered, completely revolutionalized thought in a way that is still felt to be current and important and meaningful. What was that change, pray tell? Why, it was nothing more nor less than consistence. All three of these founding fathers of modern thought believed that no belief structure was worth anything if it didn't jive with itself and with all other (however seemingly unrelated) beliefs that the person holds. This is not, by any means, a universal interpretation. This is, more or less, my own generalization. But I think it a good one. More popularly, Plato is thought of as the father of idealism, Aristotle as that of empiricism, and Socrates as the granddaddy of both of them. But this seems a little glib to me. Or that may also be a result of the distaste I have for those who simply repeat back what has already been told to them. At any rate, I think of Plato as the father of the process that we might call interlocution, which consists primarily in beginning with a current belief and exposing its flaws and responding to them until no more flaws are to be found. Luckily, he was already an Idealist, so he didn't have to worry about whether or not he was excluding real-world possibilities by simply ironing out a prefab theory. I do not wish to go further into this. Aristotle, on the other hand, is the father (for me) of unpacking. That is, instead of beginning with a pre-established definition of something and exposing its flaws, he began with a term and unpacked it (that is still the word we use), basically unfolding it like a city map until he got to something intelligible. Would you like an example? Well, how about asking, "What do I mean when I say 'love'? What is love?" Well, first off, we know that love is an emotion, therefore love = some type of emotion. Moreover, we know that all emotions are mental events that occur in a thinker and have something or someone as their object (heavy simplification, I know), therefore love = some type of mental event occurring in someone's mind and having something as its object. Well, let's unpack one of those "something's". We know that the event is, in general, pleasurable, so love = a pleasurable mental event occurring in someone's mind and having something as its object. ... etc ... until we get to something that we really like and feel is better understood than a word that is thrown around without much care for its meaning. That is unpacking. And Aristotle was an absolute expert in it. He would spend a hundred pages going down a path, then find a complication, and have no qualms about throwing away (metaphorically) that entire 100 pages of work and starting from there again. This is, one should think, a characteristic of good philosophy: that the philosopher has no vested interest in arriving at a certain truth or conclusion, but is truly looking without knowing what he is looking for. Because, as is often the case, if you are looking for something, you will almost always encounter some way of finding it. Disinterested unpacking is just one of the reasons that I love Aristotle. There is also the simple fact that his matter/form dichotomy is, to me personally, much more pleasing than Plato's theory of Forms, but that's really nothing but a personal preference. Indefensible without reference to emotion.
Stay Tuned! More to come!!

I have, to the best of my meager abilities, arranged these wisdom-lovers by propensity. Of course, as in all things, William James comes first.

I have, to the best of my meager abilities, arranged these wisdom-lovers by propensity. Of course, as in all things, William James comes first.

William James

Friedrich Nietzsche

Aristotle

Stay Tuned! More to come!!