Sick Souls, Healthy Minds

Dramatically subtitled 'how William James can save your life', this book is a blend of personal experience and formal philosophical thought in considering and relating James's philosophy with his life (and that of the author), showing the intimate connection between the two exemplified, for instance, in James's 1895 lecture "Is Life Worth Living?" - a question that James himself had wrestled with. The chapters consider a range of themes: determinism and despair, freedom and life, psychology and the healthy mind, consciousness and transcendence, truth and consequences, wonder and hope. James himself was what he called a sick soul, but he sought to express himself as a healthy mind and was tortured by the conundrum of free will, drawing on his own experience on the one hand and his growing knowledge of causation in psychology on the other, especially while he was writing his seminal Principles of Psychology published in 1890. A key moment came with his reading of Charles Renouvier's essay on liberty, as a result of which James proclaimed that his first act of free will would be to believe in it – here one can see an expression of his later pragmatism, also articulated in his 1896 lecture on The Will to Believe.

One sees the same agonising - paralysis by analysis – in his initial approach to his future wife Alice and the author remarks that his relationship with money and fame bordered on the dysfunctional: 'there was always a lot of both, but never enough of either.' He has interesting reflections on habit and what we now call biofeedback as well as on the mind-body problem and the limitations of a purely objective, analytical approach to the study of human consciousness. Interestingly, when re-reading is a work on the stream of consciousness, James scrawls in the margin the phrase 'The Witness', bringing to mind parable in the Upanishads about the two birds in one tree. James always felt that action was more important than verbal formulation and that 'we should not divorce philosophy from the realities of life' - hence his many highly readable general lectures which I have on my shelves. For him, free will enables us to improve life, and this can be done all the more vigorously with zest. There is a nice story about Gertrude Stein, one of his philosophy students, who found herself entirely uninterested in taking the exam. She wrote: "Dear Professor James, I'm so sorry, really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today", so she got up and walked out. James nevertheless gave her a good mark, writing, "Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself." An engaging book, especially for William James fans like myself.