On February 2, Harvard Divinity School hosted the annual William James Lectures on Religious Experience. This years lecture, "William James and the Sick Soul," was delivered by Professor John Kaag presented. This lecture discussed William James's 1895 lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide during an existential crisis as a young man a quarter-century earlier. This lecture showed why the founder of pragmatism and empirical psychology can still speak so directly and profoundly to anyone struggling to make a life worth living.
Full transcript:
IVR: Harvard Divinity School.
IVR: William James and the Sick Soul, February 2nd, 2023.
DAVID HEMPTON: So it's my pleasure first of all, to introduce you to the William James lecture series. And then I will call on my colleague Professor David Lamberth to introduce this evening to sing with speaker. Professor John Kaag from University of Massachusetts Lowell, who will speak to us on the subject of William James and the Sick Soul. And the lecture will discuss William James's 1895, lecture is life worth living.
I also just want to note that if you, or a loved one are having emotional distress, or thoughts of suicide, please do call the 988 number to connect with a lifeline specialist for support. So Professor Kaag has written extensively on American philosophy from Jonathan Edwards to the present. His most recent books are Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, how William James Can Save Your Life, and Be Not Afraid Of Life, and the Words of William James.
And I mention these now because our friends from the Harvard bookshop are here tonight. And those publications are on sale in the lobby just outside this room. So you can go, and help our visitors Royalty account straight after.
So the root of the William James lecture series go back to 1968 when the John Lindsley fund gave the sum of $50,000 to establish a Harvard Divinity School fund turned down the lecture series. And to bring an outstanding scholar here each year to speak about James and religious experience, Professor Cushing Strout, Professor of English and American Studies at Cornell University presented the inaugural lecture on October 14, 1970.
And many distinguished scholars have followed, including Martha Nussbaum, Clifford Geertz, Charles Taylor, Richard Niebuhr, Arthur Kleinman, Tanya Luhrmann, and most recently, Anthony Pinn, Judith Butler, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. So it's really quite a lineup of accomplished scholars.
And this evening, we're delighted to add Professor Kaag to that very distinguished list. And I'll call upon David Lamberth to introduce this evening speaker.
David joined the faculty in 1997, is now professor of philosophy and theology in the faculty of Divinity, where he teaches a range of courses, just finished teaching range of courses in Western theology, and philosophy of religion that emphasize modern liberal thought, and probe the interconnections between theological and philosophical reflection in American and continental thought.
His 1999 publication entitled William James and the metaphysics of experience exhibits his interest in the revival of pragmatism, and demonstrates the inherent engagement with religion in James's philosophical system, as well as James's pluralism. This is my own introduction to William James actually reading that book.
David is currently preparing two books, Religion a Pragmatic Approach, which analyzes both historical and contemporary treatments of religion and the pragmatic tradition, and the volume on William James for the Routledge philosopher series. So it's now my great pleasure to call on Professor David Lamberth to introduce our speaker this evening. David, Thank you.
DAVID LAMBERTH: It's a pleasure to introduce a speaker for the William James lecture, who is so particularly appropriate to the aims of this annual event. Our guest this evening, John Kaag, is a philosopher in the style of James himself with a wide-ranging intellectual ambit, an accessible insightful, and intellectually engaging writing, and speaking style, and most importantly, a deep concern with what it is given all our complexities to live a meaningful human life.
William James' varieties of religious experience, which stimulated our donor for this series, and led to the establishment of it is subtitled a study in human nature, and fittingly, it is to human nature most widely considered that our speaker tonight is constantly attentive.
John J. Kaag graduated with highest honors in philosophy in 2002 from the Pennsylvania State University. He completed an MA in philosophy at Penn State before also taking an MPhil in International Relations at Cambridge University on a donor scholarship in 2005.
He earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Oregon in 2007 specializing in American philosophy, and philosophical psychology. John is no stranger to Harvard having been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Humanities Center, a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences just across the way behind us, and a preceptor in Harvard College's expository writing program all before beginning his professorial career at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He's now the Donahue Professor of philosophy, and chair of the department as well as an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
John is a prolific and broadly engaged author with articles ranging from Kant's aesthetics, to the philosophy of Ella Lyman Cabot, the neurological dynamics of imagination, and the ethics of current day warfare. Professor Kaag is best-known for his marvelously written, personal yet philosophically, publicly addressed philosophical works. His American philosophy, a love story published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2016, and his follow up book two years later hiking with Nietzsche were both named New York Times editors choices, as well as national Public Radio best books of the year.
In these works, John crafted what The Times Literary Supplement and the LA Review of Books have called a new genre of phyllo memoir much like pragmatism, which James called a new name for an old way of thinking. John's approach to philosophy nonetheless hearkens to a long standing tradition focusing as he does on philosophy as a practice of living in, which the love of wisdom informs our responses to the challenges life brings our way.
Pierre Hadot is known for developing a similar view in relation to Greek antiquity. John's work centers instead on modern thinkers, such as Nietzsche and James, taking seriously their views on philosophy changing the way we live, and elegantly, and sometimes riveting relating his own life experiments.
John's most recent books are include an insightfully annotated anthology of William James writings just published called Be Not Afraid of Life in the words of William James, as well as his 2020 monograph, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, how William James can change your life. Both of these delved deeply into James' thought and inform this evening's lecture titled William James and the Sick Soul.
We are I am sure in for an intellectual treat. Please join me in welcoming Professor John Kaag.
JOHN KAAG: Thank you, David, for that very generous introduction. I'd like to thank Dean Hempton, and the organizers of HDS for this invitation to speak to you tonight about William James the Sick Soul, and the question of life's worth.
And for many of us, it is a question. And for some of us, it is a very, very difficult one. Is life worth living?
I broach the question with my students today-- I'm teaching a small 16-person American philosophy seminar, and it's a small, tight knit group of students, and we get to know each other pretty well. And when I broach the question, is life worth living, at the end of the conversation, several of my students and their instructor were either in tears or on the verge of tears.
This is a little bit of a warning. The issues and topics discussed today are difficult ones. Sometimes to do justice to.
And I want to say that just as a bit of a warning. But I also want to say this. I want to make something like a promise.
That when you look into the dark, the dark of depression, or anxiety, of evil, of suicidality, and you do so with William James, you often get a chance to see little flecks of light. And these little flecks of light what we'll describe as the maybes of life's journey make looking into the dark not only bearable, but deeply worthwhile.
I'll say just one last thing before I begin. I'm reminded of my friend and mentor, John McDermott, a philosopher from Texas A&M. And John would address these difficult existential questions often.
And I was a grad student, and I was giving a paper about these types of issues. And he came up to me after, and he goes, "Kaag." He called me over. "Kaag, if you talk about these issues, you have to be there for your students. You have to be there for your audience. You have an obligation.
And so I'll try to do that tonight. But I'm also going to say that William James is a hero in this regard. He wants to give us something like hope in the dark. And I hope we get to see that today.
So some of my most meaningful moments as a teacher have taken place just a stone's throw from here, there is a very small classroom at the top of the tower at Memorial Hall overlooking Sanders theater. And for about a decade, I taught a small seminar on writing called 'Madness and Genius.' It was an exposed course with a particular self-selecting population.
And I came to love those students. But as I gave those classes, whenever it got too intense, or too extreme, or too just too much, I would look out these little windows in that classroom, and I'd look across the street, to across Kirkland, to William James Hall, which many of you probably know, is a skyscraper of a building.
And I would imagine William James, that adorable genius as he's called, that founder of American pragmatism, and empirical psychology in the United States, and I'd imagine him 215 feet up sitting on top of the building looking down smiling on us when things got too extreme. During those years, I rode my bike from Charlestown to Cambridge.
And I'd go in all sorts of weather. I'd go in sleet, and snow, and rain. Except on one February morning in 2014, I couldn't get through because Kirkland was closed.
And there was yellow tape around William James Hall. Because that is the day that Stephen Rose, a soft-spoken alumnus just took his life by leaping from the top. And this was the day that I began to consider very seriously a description that I had oftentimes pointedly avoided in the varieties of religious experience. The description of the sick soul.
According to William James, our lives are set against what he describes as a background of possibilities, and these possibilities frame every moment. They contextualize our present, and they also set the stage for our future.
But the sick soul as is described in the varieties, experiences the possibilities of life as in a word evil. Either the possibilities of life are illusory, as in the determinist mindset, or the possibilities are curdled, flat, slow, dead.
The lovelier the goods of life, the more bitter and evil that background into which they dissolve. Those with a sick soul cannot, in James' words, so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil. Theirs is what James describes as a world sickness, that isn't helped by open air, or good meals, or vacations, or parties, or any natural good. For these individuals, James writes, riches take wing, fame as a breath, and love is a cheat.
Now some six souls are sick, James thinks, from the observation of life and the reflection on death. And this is probably the case with a number of philosophical pessimists. I'm thinking of Arthur Schopenhauer working in the 19th century.
But some six souls are James says, pray of a pathological melancholy. Something like what we might describe as a clinical disorder, a more is in a more contemporary medical setting. This is extreme sensitivity, extreme susceptibility, extreme aversion, and exactly, this is the problem of the sick soul, or to use an idiom common to philosophers, or philosophers of mind. We might call it the hard problem of the sicl soul.
And this problem gnaws at the heart of James's varieties of religious experience. So difficult it is, and so necessary to resolve that James gives explicit warning when he broaches the subject. And he's going to broach the subject with his own clinical descriptions, descriptions of cases that he encounters.
And before he does this, he writes painful indeed they will be to listen to, and there is almost an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie right in the middle of our path. And if we are to touch the psychology of religion at all seriously, we must be willing to forget conventionalities, and dive below the sumoud, and lying official conversational surface.
Under the surface, deep down, dark and deep, even the stoics hope of self-possession lapses. My friend and co-author Jonathan Van Belle says, the epicureans calm is broken. I would say that any optimist has to close his mouth, or her mouth, or their mouth.
The threat becomes clear, and James articulates it. He says it may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute is possible. It may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system, whatsoever.
The shadow of this thought, the thought that there are forms of evil that defy all reason, this thought haunted the months after my February morning at William James Hall. 10 months later, I was in Manhattan. It was late afternoon in November. And I decided to walk seven miles from my hotel to Brooklyn's community bookstore.
And it was that 4:00 o'clock magic hour where everything, even grimy things, glow from within. And I was so busy looking around, and walking that I almost didn't notice, as I came up to the Brooklyn Bridge, I almost didn't notice this little white sign. And at the bottom, it says, in green lettering, it says, life is worth living.
Now, this sign gives me real pause. For many people, life's worth is never in question. It never becomes a topic of conversation, or debate like it might tonight.
Life is simply lived until it's not. But something bothered me then as it bothers me now. If life's worth is so patently obvious, why was the sign put up in the first place?
I think I know now. Because there are some of us who occasionally find themselves on top of the bridge considering a very precipitous fall.
Decades after battling depression in the 1870s, James wrote to the philosopher and poet, Benjamin Paul Blood, a man who I now think is one of James' closest and most enduring friends. He writes to Blood and he says, "No man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide."
And we might think of Spinoza's much earlier comment that truly wise people think only of life and not of death. But James, I think is suspicious of this, and he thinks that we only truly begin to live when we consider the possibility of life's end.
In the 1770s, David Hume, one of James' intellectual heroes had argued that self murder should not be regarded as illegal or immoral since it hurt no one other than the perpetrator, and in many cases, might alleviate great suffering.
The romantics working in a generation after Hume followed on his heels only deepening the sense that life and death should be determined freely by passionate individuals. If you want to exit life abruptly by one final choice, that is up to you.
One of James's favorite books as a young man, one which probably only deepened his sense of existential insecurity was the Sorrows of Young Werther published in 1774. This is the story of a character who kills himself on the sharp end of a love triangle.
Perhaps life cut so deeply that it is understandable, even respectable to escape. More likely, I think this is the case, the romantics and James occasionally regarded suicide as a way of taking hold of life controlling its machinations by bringing them to an end. We are all slipping to the grave, perhaps it's better to simply jump.
James would write echoing young Werther. And I have to be very sincere with you, just talking to you as I do with my classes, and my friends. And James writes here a very, very important passage echoing young Werther.
He says, that life is not worth living. The whole army of suicides declare, an army whose roll call like the famous evening gun of the British army follows the sun around the world and never terminates. We too sit-in our comfort, and we must ponder these things also for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life is the life we share. We share.
So on my way to Brooklyn that afternoon, the walkways on the bridge were basically empty. I had the view to myself. And with the maximum height of 276 feet, at one point, the Brooklyn Bridge was regarded as one of the seven made wonders, right?
So when it was built in 1883, it had already claimed 27 workers. Two years after it was built, Robert Odom became the first man to jump off the bridge. He was a swimming instructor, who wanted to prove that descending through air at high speeds was not necessarily fatal, which it is not. But Robert died nonetheless.
Since then, 1,500 individuals have followed Robert for various reasons. And I oftentimes think, what role, what precaution did that little white and green sign provide?
So on that afternoon at the brink of winter, it was very chilly at the top. And I looked across to the Statue of Liberty in the harbor, and then back into Manhattan, where James had grown up. And then I looked down.
And there was, and I have to admit, sometimes still is a terrible liberty in this. The choice to live, and die in a particular moment as time stretches out endlessly in either direction.
So we look at William James. And we oftentimes think, this is the Promethean self, the ebullient, the happy, the victorious. And in the first decade of the 20th century, James developed American pragmatism, a philosophy held that truths should be judged on the basis of its practical consequences.
And in some ways, it's a type of world ready, ebullient, positive, forward looking, feet on the ground type of philosophy. It is supposed to make life more vibrant, meaningful, and livable. This is what pragmatism is supposed to do. And it does for the most part.
But if James's pragmatism saves your life, it is never once and for all in any definitive and universal absolute sense. And for a long time, I was really, really disappointed, right? I felt like James was letting me down.
But I now think that the ever not quite of James' pragmatism is affirming exactly to the extent that it is brutally honest. This is a philosophy that remains attuned to experiences, attitudes, things, and events even when they are the tragic sort.
While James occasionally disparaged Schopenhauer's pessimism, and there's this story about James not giving a single cent to a memorializing Schopenhauer, he admired Schopenhauer's willingness to look into the dark of human experiences. There is something like courage according to James in this brutal confrontation with quickly impending darkness.
James' task, if I understand it correctly, at least after the publication of the principles of psychology published in 1890, was to provide the sick sole with a bit of as Solnit would say hope in the dark. According to James, the sign at the bottom of Brooklyn Bridge should be repainted, or at least amended. Life is worth living maybe. I know.
If you look out the windows on the 15th floor of William James Hall, you're so high that you can almost see into the yard, and you can almost see the roof of Holden Chapel. Holden Chapel is this small relatively ancient building that's dwarfed by the other structures.
It is this place, a place which was at first a place of worship turned into an anatomy laboratory, then and now, a music conservatory, or a place of music, where James was invited to give what I regard now as his most important lecture. Is life worth living?
Unfortunately, or fortunately, it's not a straight answer. As he said to a crowd at Holden on a hot and humid evening in 1895, is life worth living? James responds, maybe. It depends on you. The liver. It's up to each of us literally to make life what we will.
So James had come to Holden at the request of the Cambridge YMCA. They had invited him there to address a spate of suicides in town, nine of them in the previous year. And James was really asked to provide some real security for students of the time.
What he gives, however, is something I think which is better than a certain type of security. And we'll get to that in just a second.
James knew very well that the question is life worth living is typically answered in two mutually exclusive ways. Yes or no. If you believe no, and you believe it ardently enough, passionately enough, practically enough, eventually, you will not be here, or anywhere else.
Now, in the course of the history of philosophy, we find a whole troop of what James I think might regard as yes men. In other words, individuals who basically craft their philosophy in such a way that it provides constant reassurance, constant protection against the threat of nihilism, the threat that life is not worth living.
And these yes men say, yes, life is worth living every day of the week, every hour of the day, for every single person. Yes. Yes. Yes. We can think about, Augustine, that this is God's realm and heaven forbid if I leave prematurely.
We can think about liveness, this is the best of all possible worlds. What are you doing leaving this determinist system early?
We can think about Kant saying, there's something deeply paradoxical in killing myself, and using my rationality to end my rationality. Yes. Yes. Yes. But there's this thing about yes men. You're typically not supposed to believe them.
So maybe life is worth living, James. I know. Perhaps this strikes you as a complete and utter cop out. For a long time me, too, I was like, James, I'm upset. Just tell me that everything's going to be OK. Just say yes.
But I've come to think that perhaps maybe James' way of thinking can still save a sick soul at least, in part, by the suggestion that he, she, or they are still in charge of his, her, or their life, that the decision to end it all might be reasonable even respectable, but so too is the possibility of continuing to live.
And the possibility is right there, still and always, even in the depths and rancor of it for a sick soul to explore. Perhaps maybe this thought could have kept Steven Rose from jumping just a little bit longer. There might be other options.
So for a majority of people, freewill can be exercised in any number of ways, which don't have to include committing suicide. And in many of these cases, one can choose to embody new habits of thought, and action. If meaningful freedom seems evasive, or unrealistic, most of us still have a choice about what to see, and what to look past. This, too, can be worthwhile.
According to James, the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook, and maybe these possibilities could have kept any number of suicides alive for a little bit longer. Maybe not. I and I don't think James would presume to be sure.
But I think, and this I think is important, one surefire way to send a sick soul off the edges to pretend that you know something they don't. That life has unconditional value, and that they're missing something that is so patently obvious, that it's rarely worth even discussing.
I suspect that one on the edge might detect some deep insecurity or hubris in this assertion, and they might jump just to prove that person wrong. Because that person would, in fact, be wrong. In James' conclusion to on a Certain Blindness in Human Beings published in 1899, James writes that we have absolutely no clue about what other people's subjective inner lives are alike, about where they tap meaning, about where they tap significance. So maybe it's best to keep it as a maybe.
Now, let me put this as simply as I can. Why do I come back to the maybe of life's worth time, and again as opposed to a strict no or yes? It is I have no doubt because it has kept me alive when more definitive answers would not. The maybe says that I am not crazy to think that human meaning is precarious, or that the darkness seems to be occasionally unbearable.
The Navy says that life is various, and that things might be so hard that one's existence is indeed not only seemingly, but, in reality, unbearable. And I know that this is a dangerous thought. I grant this. But at least this calls a halt to the overbearing notion that all human life is worth living, no matter what.
The Navy says that it is up to me to make life living or not, that no matter how out of control, or completely under control, that is to say, no matter how unfree I feel, it is still up to me. As Victor Frankel describes, in man's search for meaning, in what seemed to be the impossible situation of a concentration camp between stimulus and reaction, there is a space in which to choose our response to the universe at large. I think James is after this when he says maybe life is worth living.
James maybe says that I am to ask seriously time and time again about where to tap meaning, and what to revere, and what to worship, and to notice that meaning entails uncertainty that the very actions that I find most meaningful in life are the ones with the greatest risk, but also the greatest reward. I remember this afternoon, when one of my students was having a hard time in class, I slowed things down and I said, think about where you find meaning in life. Think about it. Can you tell me?
Yes, climbing a mountain. Yes, falling in love. Yes, talking to a friend. Yes, painting a picture. Yes, playing a piece of music. They had answers.
And I said, if you're upset about James maybe, then please notice the following, that in every one of those meaningful experiences, those experiences that seem to keep life going, in those experiences, there is at the core of them a maybe. What do I mean by that?
I asked them I said, folks, would you fall in love and find it meaningful if you knew how it was going to be in advance? If everything was sorted out perfectly well beforehand, would you find that meaningful? No.
And then I said, how about that piece of music? Would you find something in that piece of music that you find meaningful if everything was determined in what might be called a block universe fashion? Would you find that meaningful? No.
And then I said, how about climbing that mountain? Isn't there some risk involved? You actually get to make the steps up that mountain? Isn't that risky? Isn't there a certain maybe in that? Yeah.
James is directing us I think rather subtly to the way that we create meaning in life. And it's through negotiating uncertainty. And so universal and absolute ways of sorting out life's worth beforehand might be the wrong way of going about answering the question.
In the day-to-day trenches of life, there is no such thing, I think and James I think would agree, as a full unbeliever. Full unbelievers are no longer here. We believe that there are experiences that we can explore both at our own risk, but also at our own reward.
It's just a matter of choosing what we make sacred and what we believe. And this choice is not easy, but it is irreparably ours according to James.
Finally, and I find this most confusing, but I also find it most important. James maybe beckons me into a world shot through with possibility, even and most especially when I can't immediately recognize it, and to believe that it is there even when it remains unseen.
It is this last point that I have struggled with in recent years as the pandemic surged, as I recovered from cardiac arrest, and bypass surgery, as I've watched friends and loved ones struggle through life, as I've watched my mother deteriorate. It's hard to believe that we live in such a world that is actually teeming with possibilities, and that those possibilities are ours to explore, that metaphysical chance that the chances of the universe are, in fact, our chance, our opportunities. It's tough to feel that way.
And I would like for the remaining time that we have together tonight to talk about this last point. Because I think it bears directly not only on James' understanding of deep existential meaning, but also about religious experience.
So on that day, on the edge of Brooklyn, I looked across the water as the sun skimmed the cityscape. Night would fall and a million stars would once again compete with a million electric lights. In the short-term, the electric lights would win.
But in the indefinite long-term, the stars most surely would. But between these poles, it remained anybody's guess. And it struck me at that moment that James' maybe the open question of life's worth is right, or at least right for me because it maps my existential situation of one who is not always sold on life's worth.
It is also right I think because his maybe is roughly fitted to the open question of the cosmos. Now, you might think, oh, gosh. Here comes the philosopher. He's going to do some metaphysics, and it's going to get real boring real quick. Be patient, forbearance.
Because I think that James' metaphysical position is like peas and carrots with his existential tendencies, with his existentialism. So everything from the smallest eukaryotic being, to the most complex organic system is in the process of making its own guesses. And these are the protological steps in what we humans call inferences.
Without good guesswork, there would be nothing like adaptation or growth. And for us, there would be nothing like meaning.
James followed his friend and fellow American philosopher [? C.S. Pierson ?] believing that the world is teeming with hypotheses, with the maybes that make life in all of its many forms possible, and make our lives worthwhile. For James, stars don't burn much less appear in perfect order, and human lives are not settled in advance.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in circles published in 1841, one of James's favorites I might add, Emerson writes, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter, only an experimenter. The maybe remains constant, or as constant as it maybe can. And this is for the best. It gives us something to watch, and expect, and experience.
So for James, especially the later James, post 1900, persistent variation gives rise to persistent wonder. And this sense of mystery of chance was often enough to see James through when other practical measures failed him. He writes, "No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance."
This is important. He goes on to say, "The existence of the chance makes the difference between a life of which the keynote is resignation, and a life of which the keynote is hope."
So let's talk about hope and the difficulties in maintaining it. If you throw something off a bridge into the water below, it breaks the surface, and it immediately goes down. It's just gone, just gone. A four letter word like dead, or fate, or lost, right? Just gone.
And there is no chance of getting it back or preserving it no matter how you might desperately try. Over the years, I've often imagined what it would be like to lose something precious in deep water, far more precious than one's keys or phone.
For small material objects, I suspect that there is little hope of preserving anything. And I have entertained the possibility that this is the case with everything. Keys, phones, wallets, and lives. Maybe everything just departs without a trace.
Some philosophers would be perfectly happy with this explanation that everything is in the process of passing away, that at the end of the cosmic day, nothing will be left. I'm just not one of these philosophers, and neither I believe was James.
The certainty of this type of fatalism that everything simply just passes away without a trace is counter to his maybe, and counter to a hope that is for me hard to live without. So take a small object like this. Maybe your iPhone, right?
Take a small rock of pan a phone to a shallow river. And you throw it in. On a still evening, the ripples are still moving, still growing when the object comes to rest on the bottom.
The disruption at the point of entry is the first to vanish, but the consequences of the event radiate concentric even as they dissipate. In a narrow river with steep banks, the waves strike the shore, recoil to the center, and then make for the opposite side. The small perturbations are real regardless of our ability to feel them something is, in fact, left.
Emerson writes in circles, he writes, "Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn." 50 years after Emerson wrote this essay, William James completed the principles of psychology published in 1890. And in the principles of psychology, he presents a model of self-hood that resembles Emerson's radiating spheres.
At the center was the material self, our bodies and material fortunes. This is frequently regarded as the most concrete, and immediate aspect of our lives, but it is also, according to James, the most superficial. I think about this often with philosophy that it's to point out that what is most obvious, and immediate, and pressing in life is not the most important.
Now, we typically would be willing to give up these material fortunes for what might be called the subsequent ring, what James terms the social self. That is the recognition of one's get one gets from friends, family, and loved ones.
Finally, James explains there is the spiritual self. One that is sought or experienced in what he describes as intellectual moral, and religious aspiration. This is the most expansive aspect of the self, the farthest reaching, but also for most of us, for many of us, the most subtle, and the most easy to overlook. This is the wave that matters even when it's not fully detected or articulated.
So in the final decade of his life, James continued to defend the position that man could be the measure of all things. But he simultaneously wrote he said, "I firmly believe myself that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe."
The waves ripple out, strike the opposite shore, and make their way back more and more gently. Occasionally, we feel them on rare occasions. They are all we feel.
It is a remarkable person according to James, who can sense them deeply, and with any regularity. This is the birth of religious experience for James. It is this type of unique individual one who can sense since McDermott used to call it, that Emerson was aware of every sensorial nuance, every little perturbation.
It is this type of individual who occupied much of James's attention when he developed his Gifford lectures in natural theology at the University of Edinburgh in 1901. A series of talks that became the varieties published in the following year.
Now, James was not ever a churchgoing man. For the most part, he wasn't interested in institutional religion, or the doctrinal aspects of the spiritual self. He was, as always, interested in experience and life. And in his final years, he began to turn explicitly to thinking through the religious possibilities of both.
And he refused to limit these possibilities insisting in the varieties he writes, where one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible. One might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our Supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves there too.
Let me look up and just take a break with you and remind you that we're talking about the sick soul and its preservation. Maybe it's twice born nature as James describes it in the varieties. And the most difficult times for a sick soul are times when they can see no way ahead. It just looks black, and bleak, and monotonous, and controlled, right?
And so one of the tricks that I think James is on to in the latter part of his life is to say, look harder. There are chances out there. Look harder, right? Don't give up.
Look, they're there. Just little perturbations, little sensorial nuances of experience that might make you stay, right? Look harder.
So the adjustment to the unseen order that James describes in the varieties could take many forms. And it was never restricted to a particular church, temple, or mosque. Indeed, James looked for it everywhere leading up to the writing of the varieties.
His exploration into the unseen carried him into experiments with psychotropic drugs, thank you, Benjamin Blood, but also into the spiritual realm that modernity often dismisses as mere quackery.
Today, if something can't be seen with perfect clarity, it seems often easiest to assert that it simply can't be seen at all. James was not of this position.
When his aged father and newborn son died within a few years of each other, James and his wife Alice tried to contact them. In September of 1885, James visited Leonora Piper, a medium who had become a Boston sensation for supposedly channeling spirits.
James had his doubts about Piper, but concluded that the woman might have what he called supernormal powers. James was still, and always the consummate empiricist. And he wanted to test these powers out more carefully.
Well, luckily, there was a fledgling organization dedicated to precisely this study because James co-founded it in 1885. And it's the mission of the American Society for Psychical Research to investigate all things super normal. This was not some fringe organization, I'll say, but it wasn't completely normal either.
One of its co-founders G. Stanley Hall had come to Harvard to do his doctoral work with James in the late 1870s, and was awarded the first psychology doctorate here in the United States. With James' support, Hall organized a group of researchers to explore the possibility of all things supernormal such as spirit contact, divining rods, and telepathy.
And they spent thousands, and I don't exaggerate, thousands of hours interviewing mystics and Saints sitters. By 1890 Hall had resigned from the organization concluding that parapsychology amounted only to pseudoscience. But others like James and his close friend, Henry P. Bowditch marshaled on into the turn of the century.
And in 1909, just a year before James died, this is still on his mind. He's thinking, what is the order of the unseen? When everything looks blocked out, and I can see nothing forward, what is the order of the unseen?
He reflects on 25 years of ghost busting. He says, I confess that at times, I have been tempted to believe that the creator has eternally intended, this Department of Nature to remain utterly baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure, so that although ghosts and clairvoyance is in wraps and messages from spirits are always seeming to exist, and can never fully be explained away. They also can never be susceptible to full corroboration, end quote.
Nature loves to hide. Humans like James love to seek. Despite the bafflement or perhaps because of it, James and his fellow researchers remain pointedly cautiously hopeful.
Unlike most psychics of the time, the members of the Psychical Research Society documented and published their findings. None of those were anywhere near conclusive, but they did help push the boundaries of science exploring an area of science that science itself couldn't really sort out. And this record became the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research for the members and close associates, and then the proceedings intended for the general public.
I'm always surprised by the sheer magnitude of the volumes, a little more than 17,000 pages in total. Between curiosity and suspicion, there was a lot of abiding hope in there.
When James began his psychical research, he was well ensconced in the field of physiology. However, the anatomist factual objective method missed something in its understanding of human nature. For James, something important was lost.
It was I think the sense that a human being is more than just a bundle of perceptions, and nervous reactions, and more than just a body that could disappear without a trace. He hoped that there was something ethereal, transcendent, something even ghostly that was free from the constraints of our physical lives, and at many times throughout his life, he suggested that one can occasionally feel this something haunting the fringes of our experience.
As late as 1901, James remarked he writes, "I seriously believe that the general problem of the subliminal promises to be one of the great problems, possibly even the greatest problem of psychology." Subliminal is often used interchangeably with unconscious but it really shouldn't be. It refers instead to the mental processes just below the threshold of consciousness. They can often be felt without fully emerging.
Just a hint, just a fleeting maybe, just a maybe is all we get. But it is often enough to qualify as something that we know that matters to us, that we feel that changes our lives that keeps us here, at least, for a moment.
These glancing blows of experience stand at the center of James' varieties. And they come in many different forms. Indeed, so many that their existence cannot be pushed aside.
The American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of James' closest friends once joked, that James would turn down the lights in a room so that the miracles can happen. I think that there's some truth in this. When you turn the lights down very low, what happens? Your pupils dilate, so more light can get in.
You can't blame James for turning the lights down. Maybe we surprise ourselves with what we can see in the dark. And maybe this is miracle enough.
I'm thinking a little bit about the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh saying, the miracle is not to walk on water the miracles to walk on the green Earth in the present moment to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now. It seems so simple, but it is very so difficult.
Or we can think of Thoreau, that man who lived one world at a time, right? Heaven is not above our heads, but beneath our feet at least for the time being.
For secular skeptics, this might be as far as they're willing to go when it comes to religious experience, to dwell deeply, to live a little in the present. And for them, this might be enough.
James, however, goes just a little farther, just a little deeper in the varieties. Sometimes when you turn the lights very low, very, very low, you can see things more clearly.
James describes such a phenomenon. And it sounds so familiar. It sounds like that station, the vast station that was experienced by his father, a type of emptying out of the self, and somehow a connection to the divine.
He describes such a phenomenon. The only one he claimed that could be called genuinely mystical, recounting the hour of rapture of a clergyman in the varieties James writes. The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence.
The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not anymore have doubted that he was there, He with a capital H, He was there then I was.
Indeed, I felt myself to be if possible the less two of the real. The He according to the clergyman was undoubtedly for the clergyman, the Judeo-Christian God, but what we call this presence scarcely mattered to James. He capital, HE, it's a very, very old word older than sex, and gender.
It simply means originally this here. This here was present. All the more felt because it wasn't seen.
For James, for his fellow mystics, such as dear old Benjamin Blood, there was a sustained comfort in this story. As the German mystic novelist wrote, "We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible." This too is a possibility. And James-ian pragmatism is happy to entertain it.
Before the Brooklyn Bridge was built, a ferry carrying passengers from one side to another shuttled folks every few minutes. Walt Whitman was often among the crowd. The American poet was one of James's long-standing heroes, and embodied a capacious healthy mindedness. If there are six oldness, Whitman was the healthy minded.
James occasionally sensed the sublime, or the religious on his hikes up in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks. But Whitman had a knack, right? Whitman could tap into the sublime or the divine on a routine basis, even on a dirty ferry ride, which most people would regard as a rather annoying commute, but not Whitman.
In his poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry published in 1855, he described the spectacle, the experience of nature, and the experience of the human thrown for a Whitman, both were inexplicable, and hopeful, and shared.
Whitman writes, others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore. Others will watch the run of the flood tide. Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east. Others will see the islands large and small.
50 years, hence, others will see them as they cross the sun half an hour high. 100 years hence or even many hundreds years hence, others will see them we'll enjoy the sunset. The pouring in of the flood tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb tide. It avails not, neither time, nor place, distance avails not.
William James read and reread and reread this poem. This was wondering, and there was enough of it to go around. It turns out that one can probably set aside the quirkier aspects of the Society for Psychical Research, and still retain a Whitman esque experience of the world.
The numinous, imminence of an all too human fairy ride. At least that was James' hope.
Whitman's vision in James's words was sufficient, in his words, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions. The world is not always or ever-- I'm sorry. Excuse me.
Whitman's vision in James' words was sufficient in his, quote, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions, unquote. The world is not always or ever exactly as it seems. A dirty ferry ride might be more than just a dirty ferry ride. There is something more at least it is possible.
Whitman's was a type of religious experience. And so very different from the way that most people experience the world. Reflecting on crossing Brooklyn ferry James explained, he writes, when you're ordinary Brooklynite or New York, or I will add Bostonian, leading a life replete with too much luxury, or tired, or careworn about his personal affairs, crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, or I'll add Mass Ave.
His fancy does not soar away into the colors of the sunset as did Whitman's, nor does he inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did anywhere, or any time contain more essential divinity, or of eternal meaning that is embodied in the fields of vision over which his eyes so carelessly pass.
However, one does not have to be careless. Thankfully, there are other ways to pass the time, and there are other times to pass away.
The flood and the ebb continue to go out and come in, and James suggests that it is possible even for a pragmatist, a pragmatist, even for a philosopher, even for a businessman, even for a teacher, even for a doctor, a surgeon like my brother. It's possible to occasionally feel the reassuring cycle of this flow.
At these moments, one has the chance to be religious in James's sense of the word to enter as James writes, a state of mind known to religious people, but to know others in which the will to assert ourselves, and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths, and be as nothing in the floods, and water spouts of God.
In this state of mind, what was most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, unquote. What has become, what was most dreaded the darkness, the places. There's no chinks in. It's just all dark. No flecks of light has somehow become the place of the habitation of our safety.
I remember being at the top of that bridge. And again, I looked out to the Statue of Liberty, and back into the water below. The sun was indeed setting.
And I tried to let myself watch it as Whitman and James hoped we all would for what seemed like many, many, many minutes. Just long enough to be glad that I still had the chance. Thank you very much.
I would absolutely love to take questions or Q&A. I don't know what the procedure is though. But I would absolutely love it.
I think there's a mic coming. Just give us a second.
AUDIENCE: I love that. So thank you so much. Awesome to have Whitman involved in this. And I was curious what your views of reincarnation are.
JOHN KAAG: My views of reincarnation I think are rather limited. I think the best we can probably do is ripple out. And we touch those who are still there.
And I don't think necessarily we go anywhere. I don't think we live again other than in the perhaps metaphorical sense of living through those who continue. But we're not gone.
So it's also the sense that I said to one of my students today she goes, I just have these memories that are so powerful, that change my life from within. And I think, for me, if you're asking just me, that's the direction I go.
The most compelling description of reincarnation or karma, I think you'll find an Emerson's compensation though. And I think that that's a really interesting way of thinking about karma and reincarnation.
AUDIENCE: Is that back. I'm sorry.
JOHN KAAG: Yes.
AUDIENCE: One thing I really loved about your talk is that you really underscored the thing that I love about William James is that he's for the freaks. And there's a great affinity between most freaks and William James. And he has a great affinity for a lot of freaks too.
One thing that I found wild is with the discourse of healthy minds and sick souls. There's a bit of an implied norm that he always is holding things like experiences against. The priest happened to have an abnormal experience, right? Or what he was calling super normal.
Where do you think William James is? What is his position of the norm that these ruptures in the norm? I'm trying to say like, where do you think he starts to build his sense of what the normal is?
Is it what he's calling the Healthy Mind? Because I'm also suspecting that there's that these freaks are the norm for him as well. So how do you think he draws norms for emphasizing the freaks?
JOHN KAAG: Sure. This is a nice question. So James wants to say that there's a type of unleveling variety, and particularity in human experience, and in human life, and in the universe. So I mean, he's a pluralist, a deep pluralist.
So he's not going to say, one's normal or good and the other's bad. He's just saying this is what we find. I'm diagnosing human nature, right? A study in human nature.
So I'd say that what seems like his patience with what you call the freaks is really just his patience with understanding the singularity of what it is to live as a human. I mean, we're all freaks in that sense.
We all live alone. We are not live alone necessarily. But there's enough particularity and subjective experience to say that James on a certain blindness in human beings says, don't step on someone else's subjective experience. You really don't understand where they tap meaning.
And that's a type of reserve, a holding off, and saying, let's not compromise your particularity, or your uniqueness. But I think that that's where I'd come in on the freak. The affiliation with freaks. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I have a comment and a question. The comment is responding to your beautiful image of the rippling waters, and remembering him saying that all experience takes place on the near shore of a river whose far shore. We don't know.
So there is no bouncing back off the edge of the pool. There's for him also the incoming tides. Come on. Comment on either that beautiful image of his or this question, which is, when you talk about being in touch with, that beautiful moment you describe it, by being on the bridge, whether it's the bridge of desperation, or the bridge of awe and wonder the same moment.
Could you say a few words about his somatic theory of emotion? And not so much looking out to think, but the feeling. Remembering his own nervous breakdown, and description of that. Say whatever you want to talk about.
JOHN KAAG: No. It's great. No. I mean, those are lovely comments. So when it comes to the somatic, his understanding of the emotions, James, we are embodied, our embodied minds.
And there's no sort of strict break between body and mind for James. And that matter both creates serious problems for some conception of salvation. A quick understanding of the soul, or a traditional understanding of the soul in the 1830s doesn't fit with James, the anatomist or the physiologist, in the 1890s.
I think when it comes to his experience of saving himself, there's this sketch that he gives of basically a person in a asylum, catatonic. And he, she, or it is all curled up and screaming the demonic, right?
And James wants us to move. And this is why he's such a fan of yoga. He's like open up. Because just be try to move your body in such a way that your spirit and your mind are affected.
So I don't know if that helps at all. But I'm on the same move as you're making here. So thank you very much for that.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for your talk. Oh, my goodness. Why do you think James wants to give an account for why life is worth living if he holds that the decision to commit suicide is a radically subjective decision?
JOHN KAAG: Great. Great question. He, I think surreptitiously thinks that the maybe is keeping people from going off the edge. Because in the same lecture, he says, be not afraid of life. It's a direction. Don't be afraid of life.
And I said this to a student, a very bright student this morning, Sean Caulfield. Sean said to me, he said, Dr. Kaag, I think the maybe's really dangerous because you have all of these possibilities. And somebody who's already suffering from too many possibilities, this maybe is just one more. And it might actually create more psychic trauma.
And I said, Sean, you're so right. Maybe you're right. And then I said, but think about James' comment be not afraid of life.
James is saying, you can do this. Look for the possibilities of life. Life is going to be hard. It's going to be strenuous.
Sometimes you'll feel like you want to or be able to do it. But don't be afraid. So I think the maybe is a surreptitious way of answering yes, or a reasonable way of answering yes.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. OK. I'm better now. So in your book, you present James. And in this talk also is with a deep need to relieve suffering in the world, and relieve suffering in himself.
And there were some allusions to him as a healing practitioner or a practitioner of psychotherapy. And I was wondering where we might see the legacy of James in healing practices today.
JOHN KAAG: I mean, I think so when Jung and Freud came to the United States, and they met James, he spent the entire dinner with Jung, and not very much with Freud.
So you might want to think like, what's the relationship between Jungian psychoanalysis and James, it's quite significant. So I think that's there. For me, I mean I think logo therapy and existential psychotherapy alum's work, and Frankl's work resonates very closely with the James Ian message.
I also think that it's not absurd to read the principles of psychology, and then the varieties of religious experience as a diagnostic manual for who we are as human beings, and also how it is possible to read it as a way to live more flourishing lives. Live more active lives. Live more psychically. Maybe not balanced, but lively lives.
So I think those three ways. So Jungian psychoanalysis, existential psychotherapy, and then just returning to James as a therapeutic practitioner.
AUDIENCE: Hey.
JOHN KAAG: Hey.
AUDIENCE: Hey, there. Back here.
JOHN KAAG: Oh. Hi.
AUDIENCE: Hey. So I love this concept of maybe. I actually work with folks who struggle with OCD at McLean Hospital. And one of our components of treatment is acceptance of uncertainty. So this concept of may be really resonated with me in my work.
And my question for you is piggybacking on that concept. And thinking about some of the religious concepts like the concept of [INAUDIBLE] in Buddhism of suffering being inherent. Jesus carrying his cross, the struggle of life.
And then Sisyphus rolling up the Boulder and finding meaning in that struggle. What do you think William James would have said to someone with a sick soul about finding meaning through the struggle of life?
JOHN KAAG: I think he would say that is one very, very good reading of a lot of James' later philosophy basically from 1890 straight through to the end of his life. So you think about the moral equivalent of war, the energies of men, certain blindness in human beings, what makes life significant, is life worth living. All of these essays speak directly to that move.
I think when you think about philosophers of the maybe, I think Camus is right there, I think that James is right there, I think Nietzsche is right there. And while we typically don't think of Nietzsche and James together, I will tell you that one of the last books that James purchases and reads is the Birth of Tragedy.
And he marks the passage from the wisdom of [? Sylines ?] or [? Sylines, ?] where [? Sylines ?] says the best thing that a person can do is to pass away quickly, right? But Nietzsche says, the best thing that a person can do is to persist, figure out how to succor through, to suffer in the right way.
And James reading it in the last month of his life. How to persist, how to struggle in the right way seems to be a James-ian undercurrent at least from 1890 on. It's a great question though. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for that wonderful talk. So you spoke a lot about William James' wish to connect with the divine, and also with those who have passed on like his son and his father. So I'm wondering, how practical is this advice for this life?
I mean, if he's talking about wanting to connect with the divine, how does that translate to this life? I mean, this wish to connect with the divine, and also this understanding that his hiding places in darkness, of course, is quite well-known?
Once we do that, we do get that connection. What would stop us from wanting more of that. So I guess the question is, how sick do you have to be to give up? How sick a soul do you have to be to give up this life? Because there's something more in the afterlife
I don't know if I'm making sense to you. I'm just speaking out loud.
There seem to be two. I hear two questions. The first one is, what's the relationship between this desire to connect with the reality of the unseen, and how might that impact our lives here?
That I think I was trying to suggest, and maybe it didn't come out clearly, that James' interest in the order of the unseen is his interest in exploring the maybes of the universe that might keep us here. In other words, these faint, when you can see no way forward, when the world seems flat, when there's nothing, there's no perturbation perturbations to even notice, James I think is encouraging us to look closer.
And the unseen is the unseen yet, or the unseen not quite, or ever not quietness of experience. And I think James is saying for individuals who don't have recourse to great actions, or don't have recourse to reforming their lives in practical matters, sometimes it's just enough to experience something, which seems like a movement to resignation.
But I don't think it is. I think it's to say the universe meets you halfway. In other words, he talks about not experiencing the universe as a block universe, but as a pervasive, and accommodating vow.
And I think that can keep one going in their practical affairs. When it comes to the second issue, I don't know how sick you have to get in order to bail out of life. And I'm sorry. I mean, I don't have a satisfying answer to that.
AUDIENCE: Is there a fundamental difference between the healthy mind and the sick soul?
JOHN KAAG: James thinks that there is in the varieties. The possibilities for the sick soul is that he or she or they can be twice born. In other words, there are ways where the sick soul can repair itself or reorient itself to a world that he, she, or they like feels as antagonistic toward.
And James says, yes, there is a fundamental distinction between the two or at least that says as I read it in the varieties.
AUDIENCE: I was wondering if you could expound a bit more on the connections you see between James and Nietzsche.
JOHN KAAG: Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. I mean, what's curious-- so one of the very few references, and this is in reference to Benjamin Blood, Benjamin Paul Blood. And I've been working on a book about that Blood.
And one of the curious things about Nietzsche's references, or rather James' references to Nietzsche is that they don't show up very much. And one of the telling things for me is that he was reading Nietzsche very, very late in life, his life. And the last thing that he writes ever is called the pluralistic mystic, which is a description of Benjamin Paul Blood's lifework.
And in that little-- it's a 20-page review, this is the last thing James ever wrote professionally, there is a reference to the amor fati, the love of fate. And he says that Blood's life represents this love of fate very well.
And so I think at the end of Nietzsche, or at the end of James' life, I see him at least coming around on Nietzsche, and thinking more closely about the will to power, but also the sense that one can love what is not only best about one's life, but also what is most problematic, difficult, or despicable.
And I think that that's what at least I see James getting out of Nietzsche at the end. There are not huge textual references. But I thought that was a significant one.
AUDIENCE: Yes. There's a play by Arthur Miller called, After the Fall, which is entirely about suicide. And it has a memorable line, a suicide never kills just one person. In other words, a suicide reverberates and poisons the lives of your loved ones, your family. Does James ever deal with that aspect of suicide?
JOHN KAAG: It's a good question, David. I'm coming up blank to be frank. I'm coming up blank. I'm sorry.
The answer is I think not. Because in the references to suicide that James makes, it's oftentimes thinking about it as a very personal, very individual affair. And I think he forgets even with his description of the social self, and the principles of psychology.
That would be one of the necessary implications that when you kill yourself, it reverberates through the lives of others. But I don't think James ever says that. It's interesting.
AUDIENCE: Hi. The way James breaks it down, it seems he'd be really perplexed about art and artists. What do you think James thought about artists, and the flow of creativity, and the block of the flow as well?
JOHN KAAG: I see. I don't know if he would be perplexed by artists as much as saying that they were having a type of religious experience. I mean, I'm thinking a little bit about John Dewey, a pragmatist from the American pragmatic canon.
And art is experience is description about art seems very similar to the varieties in a particular way. It's that when we're connected to the canvas, and to the world, it seems very James, and it seems like you're in it. And you lose yourself, and find yourself at precisely the same moment.
It seems James' notions about being embodied, and being embodied in a world seem very similar to those that I think describe art very nicely. So I think while he doesn't take up art, explicitly, I think that the experiences that he describes in the varieties resonate closely with artistic practice.
DAVID LAMBERTH: John, it's really been a terrific pleasure. Let me ask everyone here tonight to join me, and thanking you for such a tremendous [INAUDIBLE].
JOHN KAAG: Thank you.
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