William James for Living

I am on hold with the Social Security office as I write this. Reading The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche had me wondering if anyone besides myself had compared Nietzsche and William James. Google showed they had. I have some downloads to read but I also found the review essay Can William James Save Your Life? Maybe.... The book being reviewed was John Kaag's Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. I read it while on hold; yes, it has been a long time on hold. It does not compare the two philosophers. What the review has to say about James, I hope it will motivate you to read James. He is a philosopher who is most readable by non-philosophers. I find him easier to read than his novelist brother, Henry. I first read William James at age 18, before going to college.

Anyway, back to the essay:

In defence of James, however, the truth-value of his belief in free will was warranted by the fact that it changed his life; he would be the first to acknowledge that if a belief doesn’t work for you, then drop it and find one that does.” Looking more broadly at the contemporary legacy of Jamesian pragmatism, Kaag notes that: “Pragmatism is about life and its amelioration. That’s it. And that is enough. What could matter more than this? Other than this? James was interested in ‘the truth’ only to the extent that the modest certainties that we live by might lead to the improvement of our not-so-easy-to-endure condition.” The term “amelioration” brings to mind Sally Haslanger and her “ameliorative metaphysics.” James, in fact, considered free will to be “a MELIORISTIC doctrine” insofar as it “holds up improvement as at least possible.”

I turned away from James to nihilism. I reread James while in prison, while trying to figure out how to live what remained of my existence. Unlike Mr. Kaag, I cannot say William James saved my life. I can only say, he sure helped keep me alive. 

These are free books by William James at Project Gutenberg.

sch 6/24/22