Up@dawn 2.0

Saturday, January 25, 2020

How William James encourages us to believe in the possible

by Temma Ehrenfeld (Thanks for the link, Ed!) (WJ on secular faith)


‘He was joyful, an eccentric dresser, great conversationalist, 
and a spontaneous teacher.’ William James in Brazil in 1865.

In college, I developed a mysterious illness. I experienced myself as happy, yet in the afternoons I would cry for two hours. Although the obvious interpretation was depression, to me it was all about lunch. Food exhausted me and made me sad. I tried skipping breakfast and lunch, and snacking on cottage cheese and milk chocolate bars. Then carrots.

After many afternoons like this, what philosophical 18-year-old would believe in free will? I was a digestive system, molecules. The next thought was that I would die, dissolve into molecules… while young.

Around this time, I discovered William James (1842-1910), the father of American psychology as a formal discipline. Was my problem ‘psychological’ or ‘physical’? James let me understand that it could be both. Mental phenomena, he explained, had physical roots. He created the first biology-based psychology lab at Harvard University, yet he trusted subjective experience and honoured our capacity for clear thought. I was my digestion and I had choices, too... (Aeon, continues)

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